Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? - The Best of the Replacements
The Judybats: Down in the Shacks Where the Satellite Dishes Grow
So I casually mention some foodstuff, and Top Management's eyes grow misty. "Oh, Marge and I used to get that all the time," she says, referring to her college roommate and eventual maid of honor. "It was her absolute favorite."
"Really? I thought her favorite was your leftover mashed potatoes," I say, showing off my encyclopedic knowledge of her culinary history by referring to the one and only tiff they'd ever had, when Top Management had returned to their dorm room, famished, only to discover the Thanksgiving leftovers she'd brought back to school had been finished while she was in her Men's Images in Literature class. (Yes, really.)
Eyes which had been misty only milliseconds before grow suddenly hard as diamond at the mention of that tuberous betrayal from [does some quick math] literally 32 years ago. "Too soon," she whispers menacingly. "Too soon."
So I'm drinking my first morning cuppa, chatting with the Bean and the Golden Weasel, the morning playlist brightening up another rainy winter day here in the Pacific Northwest.
"For Once in My Life," by the impossibly great Stevie Wonder comes on, and I realize that whenever someone asks me what my favorite song is—something that, I recently realized, doesn't happen nearly as often once you're out of school—this masterpiece never occurs to me, and yet when it's playing, it just may be my all-time fave.
(I mean. Right?)
A few minutes later, I mention this revelation to Top Management. She gets a look on her face. I mean, she's always got a look on her face, but this one...this one's different.
"What?" I ask. "I've told you that before? I've told you that before, probably, haven't I?"
She starts laughing. "Since 1989," she says slowly, "That's the song I've been planning to play at your memorial."
It's a slightly unusual day. The Boy is home on a weekday, on account of a school holiday, which alters the day's rhythm for his two younger siblings, as well as his parents. I was up until after 3 a.m., finishing up a script, and since I didn't need to get up before dawn to make The Boy's lunch, I slept in. A bit after 9:30 I pinged Top Management, who's been up for hours, to let her know I was awake.
She comes in and flops down next to me. "Ah, bed," she sighs. "Bed is so good. My back likes bed."
She looks at her phone. "All right. I have so much I have to get done today. I'm going to be so productive. Let's see: it's 9:45. I'm going to play Minecraft until 10."
There's a pause. Then she adds, through gritted teeth, "Thirty."
File this one under: an old story I'd never heard before.
Some years back, Top Management and a young Rose were washing dishes together. This is because for at least a few years, our dishwasher was broken, so the two of them would wash the breakfast and lunch dishes (and then, if I remember correctly, I'd wash the dinner dishes). On the particular night in question, apparently Top Management filled a cup all the way up with soapy water and, deep in conversation and without thinking about it, plunged her hand, holding a sponge, into said cup in order to scrub it. Naturally, soapy water squirted out everywhere.
Conversation stopped.
The Rose stared at Top Management.
Top Management stared at the water which had gone everywhere.
Then she looked at the Rose and said, "and that's called displacement."
Even when the glass is almost entirely empty, it's half-full with her.
So Top Management is telling me this story about a guy who bought a spite cow. That's right: a spite cow. Which, in addition to being the name of my new Donny and Marie cover band, is a great tale of why it's rarely a good idea to get really petty with your next-door neighbor. That it would almost never turn out well for the initial instigator, and almost certainly worse.
"I would be so good at that," Top Management says softly.
A pause, and then she repeats. "I would be so good at that."
A longer pause, and then a whispered, "I would."
I suspect up and down our block, our (very nice!) neighbors felt a chill run up their spines.
It's New Year's Eve, and the Bean has to work.
Top Management sends me this incredible twitter thread, which includes such fantastic images as
and
so naturally I text the Bean and request that, if possible, the necessary fruit be brought home for our good luck in the coming decade.
An hour later, I receive the following text in return:
I Have Acquired the Lemon
and any issues I might ever have had with her entire generation's dependence upon screens vanish when weighed against the majesty of that one sentence.
May your new year be filled with equally noble and loving gestures.
So it's early on Christmas morn. And while the "early" part might go without saying, given the "Christmas morn" part, the youngest is now old enough—10.9 years old, in fact—that he's able to wait until 7am to rush downstairs and start the brouhaha. He's not happy about waiting that long, but he can.
(Actually, the biggest change this year is that Max has to get up by 6:30am for her job, which means it's exponentially easier to wake her up at such an inhumane time, whereas in previous years, sandblasting was required. The Rose, meanwhile—also far from an earlier riser by nature—nobly claims she's willing to get up early on this one day for her baby brother because she's so selfless. It's true that she's quite the excellent big sister...but I vividly remember many years past when she was the one waking up her younger siblings on Christmas and suspect there's still more than a little of that lurking in her makeup. To which I can only silent cheer, and with far less of my sarcasm than at almost any other time.)
Anyhoo. After the first round of presents have been torn into, Top Management issues her standard instructions about the wrapping paper.
(Sidenote: by the end of my teenage years, what had occasionally been an amusing Christmas sideline—how neatly my dad could unwrap presents—had become A Thing, so that the opening of presents began to take hours, as people would ever so gently lift of each piece of tape, and try to keep the wrapping paper as pristine as possible, to the point where some pieces of paper were used, I exaggerate not, a half dozen years in a row. We may have had issues, now that I think back on it.)
But back to Portland 2019. Top Management's orders are, as usual, that wrapping paper which isn't to be saved—and in our case, that depends upon the state of the paper post-opening and/or how pretty/special it is—is to be balled up and tossed into the corner by the front door, where it'll be out of the way, and actual gifts are less likely to be lost amidst the clutter and accidentally thrown away with the discarded wrapping paper. She advises them that it should be done in a satisfactory manner and that uncrumpled paper shouldn't just be thrown in the general vicinity of the door, where it might simply end up cover the sofa. It's vaguely possible there's a distinct reason she has to issue this proclamation.
Naturally, this turns into a secondary but still important part of the event. The paper is wadded up and tossed over the back of the couch and, generally, towards the door. Except that I'm located in the very general area, so certain members of the family find it more enjoyable to try to hit dad. I do not find this entirely objectionable. I do, however, take the opportunity rate their efforts: "Nice throw!" "Ooh, perfect!" "Not even close." "Seriously?" Like that. [I am the nurturing parent.]
Top Management opens a gift from her husband, a present which is staggeringly thoughtful and remarkably imaginative (I have no idea what it was, but I'm sure those descriptions are accurate). She wads up the wrapping paper in a shockingly haphazard manner and sorta kinda lets it fall in what could perhaps, if one squinted, be thought of as the roughest of efforts at going in a Wrapping Paper Corner direction.
I look at her, stunned.
"That was not an adequate shot."
She picks up her mug, sips her hot cocoa, and gazing at me through the steam, says evenly, "It doesn’t have to be. It’s me."
It's a lazy Sunday morning. I'm out in the dining room, drinking coffee, while the Golden Weasel and the Brawn eat breakfast, and the Boy makes sure everything is just so: plants waters, silverware put away, the absolute necessities of proper living.
I pour another cup of coffee and am about to head downstairs when I make a brief stop in what the kids refer to as "Mom's Bedroom" — yes, for the record, it's also where I sleep, but that's just a detail. They know what's what.
Naturally, the Brawn shadows me, because at age almost 11, he still hasn't come close to growing out of his mother worship yet. (For that matter, neither have any of his older siblings.) As we stand at the foot of the bed, Top Management looks up from her reading, an eyebrow raised in a way that's simultaneously imperious and fetching, with just a soupçon of amusement.
"Only one of us can be in here," I say, glancing down at the enormous head of tousled yellow hair next to me. "Which one of us do you choose?"
Top Management and the Brawn both laugh.
She then smiles and snuggles down into the covers just a tiny bit more. "Me," she says.
So Top Management found out a few of her favorite creators are in town for a thing. Naturally, she got in touch to see if they wanted to recreate a mini-version of their annual SDCC tradition of Kid Lit Drinks Night and naturally they did. Since I'm friendly with two of the people, and a few of the others are comic book peeps, she very kindly asked if I'd like to join them, knowing I would, in fact, not. Still, she made the effort, and it's appreciated.
We discussed whether she'd take a Lyft home or if I'd come pick her up, and decided it was open-ended; we'd see where the night went. "Maybe," she suggested, "you could come in and hang out for just a bit if you come pick me up?" I laughed and said, sure, maybe. We'd see.
She pinged me just now:
So much fun!
So loud.
You'd hate it.
I walk into Top Management's studio just as she's singing, "Romeo and Juliet..." She stops when she sees me.
I'm gobsmacked that she'd leave hanging like that. "Well?! What's the next line? Is it 'they never felt this way' or 'Samson and Delilah'?"
She smiles and hugs me. "They never felt this way, I bet," she croons in my favorite voice in the world.
I melt, overwhelmed by love.
Then she sneers, "because they took the easy way out."
And people think I'm the cynic.
So Top Management sent me this just now:
I laughed.
She added, "I would have uttered some choice profanities at the screen but the kids were in the kitchen."
As anyone who's glanced at Top Management's Instagram account knows, one of her favorite things to do is to take excellent photos of gorgeous flora.
One of my favorite things to do is to take terrible photos of gorgeous Top Management...especially when she's taking excellent photos of gorgeous flora.
She continues to tolerate me.
So I'm putting stuff in the recycling. "I know," Top Management grumbles, as I pick up a Coke can. "I just wanted one, okay? I hadn't had one in a while."
She gets a look on her face, as we both think more or less the same thing.
"I mean, except for the one I had yesterday."
I bury my face in her neck, overcome with adoration. "What are the odds?" I murmur.
She doesn't have to ask "of what," because we both know I mean what are the odds that her first college would be sold to the Japanese and that we would meet half a continent away shortly after our 20th birthdays in a play in which she was amazing and I mostly knew my lines and what are the odds we'd still be together 30 years later and more in love than ever?
"Slim," she replies matter-of-factly, then recalculates using her characteristic method of estimating something, anything. "Seven or eight miles, maybe."
Top Management comes up to me, smiling sweetly. "Hey," she whispers. "I love you."
After the dozens of times she's said it, I'm still touched. "Aw, thanks. What brought that on?"
She pauses, pondering, then laughs. "I think it was the sound of you opening a Coke for me."
Warning: I'm about to Godwin like you cannot believe.
My good lady wife is rocking a thorough and well-documented discussion of the atrocities being committed in our names over here, and I highly recommend checking it out. But one thing that should be always kept in mind when thinking about this situation, whichever side you're on, is her first bullet point:
1. Seeking asylum is LEGAL.
So all those facile memes you've seen about "of course we separate children from their criminal parents!" are simply wrong.
And ask yourself this: what would you think of these asylum seekers if they didn't try to get their children to safety? Is that how you'd roll if the lives of those you loved most were in serious danger? You'd just stay put? Or would you do everything in your power to keep your children alive? So why on earth would you look down upon others for doing the exact same thing you would do? For trying to be good parents?
Which is to say that, putting aside #1 for a moment:
I mean, we all grew up knowing that, didn't we? We all grew up learning about Anne Frank and the heroic Dutch family who broke the law in trying to keep her alive.
And yet, while that's all true, it's also not entirely germane, since—again:
1. Seeking asylum is LEGAL.
Okay.
So I read this powerful and concise explanation of where we are and why. It's very much worth clicking through and reading the entire (relatively brief) thing, but here's the nutshell:
The suffering of these children isn't a byproduct, it's the point.
Or as has been said in other, much more benign contexts—since almost all other contexts are more benign—it's a feature, not a bug.
This was a solution in search of a problem. Illegal immigration has gone down since 2009. The president himself crowed about that just over a year ago. So this isn't some crisis of hordes of people pouring over the border. Things are less drastic than they were years ago and, frankly, as someone who lived there at the time, it wasn't that huge a deal then, either. (For those of us not trying to cross deadly deserts, that is.) It was certainly nothing like the crime-ridden hellscape a certain network would have had you believe.
Then I read this comment:
The scariest moment I can recall from when I was young was losing my parents on vacation. I was probably 4 years old and got distracted by something. When I turned to where I thought my parents were, they weren't there. I was looking around frantically, surrounded by people, just overwhelmed with terror. There wasn't really thought, just panic. Fortunately I saw them, ran over to them and at that point I probably began to cry.
I was probably lost for 30 seconds. We were in Disney World, the "happiest place on earth". Looking back on it, it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal. And yet out of everything from when I was little, that's probably the most scared I've ever been. To intentionally force that feeling on others is absolutely horrifying to me. For these kids to suffer and endure everything they've been through to get to the US, without any real understanding of why, to then be taken from the only thing that they actually know, there's just no way this should be allowed to happen. The fact that anyone feels the need to argue where to assign blame for it happening instead of doing everything they can to stop it immediately is deplorable. Stop terrorizing helpless children.
and I realized I had a few memories like that myself. Even less dramatic but, yeah, I remember being four or five and lost for just a few seconds and how utterly terrifying and traumatic it was. And I can't remember what I had for breakfast the day before yesterday but I vividly remember spinning and spinning around at my brother's soccer game, trying desperately to catch a glimpse of my mother. And that lasted a few seconds, not days, not weeks, not maybe forever.
And we have people in this administration—the president, his (literal) Nazi-sympathizing advisor Stephen Miller, his Department of Homeland Security's asylum chief—who planned this horrific scenario over a year ago. This isn't an accident. This is what they wanted. They actively wanted to terrorize children. They planned to terrorize children.
The Trump Administration are literal terrorists. They are deliberately terrorizing innocent civilians in order to achieve their political goals. That is the very definition of terrorist.
I find it hard to believe that almost any of them don't have a similar memory of being separated when they were young. Or, even worse, that gut-wrenching, horrific feeling of not being able to find your own child. Maybe it was in a grocery store for a few seconds, or at a park, or a mall, or the beach, or in the house. It's terrifying and it gives any parent nightmares for the rest of their lives.
And yet this is actively what they decided to do. They planned this for over a year. They want to terrify children. That was the idea from the very beginning.
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome
But...how is that possible? How is it possible someone like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who herself has children, can not only stand by and let this happen, but actively aids and abets this horror show? How can she help terrorize children?
Because, of course, those terrified children are not fully human.
These theoretically pro-life advocates do not see these helpless, terrified babies as fully human.
It's the only explanation I can come up with. It's the only thing that makes sense. The people in this administration and their supporters do not see—for obvious reasons—these poor screaming, terrified, traumatized children as fully human.
Again: Donald Trump does not see these terrified, innocent little children as human.
And we all know how that turned out last time.
I'd like to remind you all of the president defending the white nationalist/neo-Nazis just a year ago. Those of us who paid attention during the campaign—or who had paid attention to him for decades—warned about his clear racism. We were ignored or told we were overreacting. But this is who he is. And as the great Maya Angelou once said,
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
This is who Donald Trump is. One of his closest advisors is a white nationalist. He himself has a long history of racism. He has spoken of Hispanic and Latino immigrants in dehumanizing terms. And now he has ordered babies to be treated in utterly inhumane ways.
Let's repeat that again: he has ordered babies to be treated in utterly inhumane ways.
This is not a coincidence. This is not an accident. This is who he is.
It is not a legal requirement. This was a choice. This was his preference. This was his desire.
Donald Trump and his administration wanted to treat babies in a cruel and inhumane manner.
So. That leads to the obvious next question:
Who are you? Because whether you continue to support him and his party—and that's key, since if you support his party, which has written him a blank check for a year and a half now, you are supporting him, whether you like it or not, whether you care to admit it, even to yourself, or not—will determine that.
Are you one of the good Germans? Are you going to pretend you didn't know? Are you going to tell yourself that torturing babies is okay because of tax breaks? Or abortion? Or her emails?
Are you?
I'm heading downstairs when Top Management says, "you're going to be so mad at me when you get to your computer."
I am, obviously, highly dubious. We've been together for [quickly does math and comes up with either 21 or 37 years and either seems plausible] some time now and I've not once been less than overjoyed with every single aspect of her (with the obvious exception of her bank account which is not nearly as overflowing with doubloons as I'd anticipated one belonging to a poetry major would be).
And then I get downstairs. And she was right, as usual.
I'd sorta kinda expected to see some delicious yet terrible for me treat to be awaiting me.
Instead, I saw these photos in my inbox.
I remember when I once loved my wife, five minutes ago, before she reached into my chest, ripped out my heart and slapped it onto the floor, cackling madly as she danced in its gory remains.
(It's possible I do not care for the passage of time, in general.)
I walk into Top Management's studio just as she's singing, "Romeo and Juliet..." She stops when she sees me.
I'm gobsmacked that she'd leave hanging like that. "Well?! What's the next line? Is it 'they never felt this way' or 'Samson and Delilah'?"
She smiles and hugs me. "They never felt this way, I bet," she croons in my favorite voice in the world.
I melt, overwhelmed by love.
Then she sneers, "because they took the easy way out."
And people think I'm the cynic.
TOP MANAGEMENT: Hmm...what should I watch while I eat? Current affairs are just depressing me.
ME: Ooh, there's a new video on how to play double stroke rolls on the snare more cleanly!
TOP MANAGEMENT: Oh, planner videos! Yes! Great idea!
Cleaning up the work area just now, I found these, from back on Valentine's Day:
Aw...sweet!
And then one opens it...and finds:
Let's see if we can't get a better view there...
Ah.
I had taken them that day to get their flu shots, you see. On Valentine's Day. As one does.
Major props to me for cultivating children (or at least a child) with such an excellent sense of humor...but major demerits for raising children who actually think Bon Jovi capable of producing a decent song.
For the guy who made the whole damn thing possible.
I think that's what makes Top Management so very special: she knows who should really be celebrated today (and every day).
I'm in love.
(She'd just been taking a picture of that amazing tree—since she hadn't photographed anything blooming in nearly two and a half minutes—and caught me taking a photo of her taking a photo. You can see how irate she immediately was.)
(I am the world's worst damn photographer. But when she's the subject, even I can take a good one once in a while. Or a series of good ones.)
I have no idea why she's still with me. But I'm approaching the point where I also don't care why. I'm just so glad she is.
Top Management posted this photo on her Facebook page today. And looking at it, I was struck not so much by how goddamn thin and attractively hirsute I was, as by the fact that I was insane about her then, I positively adored her, and I am easily a thousand times more head over heels in love with her today, and I'll be even more so tomorrow.
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