Sweet M has immensely thick brown hair that she shampoos each evening when she takes her bath. As part of our evening ritual, she'll holler, "M____, come here, I wanna get out of the bath." And then I'll holler back, "Gimme a second." Or "I'm coming in a minute." Or sometimes, "Okay, okay, I'm on my way."And then I'll go into the bathroom and I'll take a paper towel and fold it over once so that she can put it over her forehead and eyes, but so it will stop short of her nose. We do this so that water from the shower spray doesn't splash in her eyes while I rinse out all the shampoo from her so-very-thick hair. With so much hair she needs a little help getting all the shampoo out. We call this folded paper towel "the eye protector." The eye protector always gets soaking wet, but it succeeds in keeping water from splashing into her eyes.
Last night as I was rinsing out her hair, looking at this drenched paper towel draped over her precious forehead, the image of someone being waterboarded flashed through my mind. In that case a wet towel would be draped over someone's face with a very different set of intentions. The image of someone being forced into feelings of drowning by having a wet towel held over their face as water is poured over them again and again just wouldn't leave me. Perhaps this bleakest of images had something to do with the decision of President George W. Bush to veto the bill banning waterboarding and other forms of detainee abuse. In fact I'm sure that is why I thought of it.
I have been so underwater myself with my workload that only the most egregious of news headlines make it into my consciousness. Waterboarding veto. Thickest, oldest Arctic ice is melting. 14,000 employees of Bear Stearns lose their life savings as the Feds subsidize JPMorgan to bail out a company with assets valued at many billions of dollars for the bargain basement price of $236 million dollars, or $2 per share.
These days it seems that everywhere people are underwater, and there is nothing so sweet and simple as a paper towel folded over our eyes that can spare us from the backwash of this regime.
I find it hard to think about this. Hard to think about living in a world where some of us are fashioning eye protectors to shield our loved ones from the smallest discomfort of shampoo and water spray while others among us are devising techniques with the same simple household elements for quite the opposite purpose.
9 comments:
But the point it, you know what to use that we towel for....
Nice to see you back. For some reason, every time I poor tea for my family, I always think of what life is like for an Iraqi who is, at the same moment, pouring tea for their family. It's odd what will set us off.
Have you considered getting one of those extensions that give you a dismountable hand-held shower nozzle?
i know. it sickens me. this president. his legacy: being the worst president ever.
sickening. ugh.i can't even watch him on the news. when i see his face, i gasp and quickly turn the channel.
and yet, there is sweet M! with her thick luscious hair and her mother leaning over the tub to help her get the soap out. so dear. so gentle. so full of love.
missed you.
"These days it seems that everywhere people are underwater, and there is nothing so sweet and simple as a paper towel folded over our eyes that can spare us from the backwash of this regime."
I like your blog a lot, but I think this betrays a pretty simplistic attempt at financial analysis which is disturbingly unsophisticated for all its attempts at worldliness.
BCC, Glad you enjoy the blog in the main. Am puzzled that you'd think of this as economic analysis . . . it's personal commentary on raising a child on the autism spectrum, includng my free association while helping her with a bath, which happened, that day, to go toward thoughts on waterboarding and Bear Stearns (back very early in the economic crisis of 2008). If I thought this blog was economic analysis, I would also be disturbed!
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