The Ferris Files

Dubsie holds a sign we found at the site of yesterday’s rally.

I wish this blog post was another meditation my adorable three-year-old daughter and the things she says and does. But I have to turn my attention instead to Donald Trump, who represents a very real danger to Dubsie’s future.

Dubsie is big and boisterous and smart — she just wrote her name for the first time — and I want to spend every spare moment soaking in her instead of in politics. She’s growing so fast that when I carry her up the stairs now, she can rest her feet comfortably on my thighs, like we’re two gym rats doing Stairmasters in tandem. Growing so fast that, this morning when she slept between me and my wife, her foot poked out and I mistook it for her mother’s.

You see, the problem I’m dealing with is that Dubsie’s skin is brown, or caramel anyway. Her mother is of Indian descent. We are card-carrying, flag-flying members the multicultural brigade. We celebrate Christmas alongside Diwali, and I speak exclusively Spanish to Dubsie, even though it’s not my native language, because language is a window into another world, and I want her to experience a diversity of worlds.

Yesterday president-elect Trump made his very first senior-level appointments and it became clear that diversity is not among his values. He has appointed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counselor. Bannon was the executive chairman of Breitbart, a right-wing news site that during the election fanned the flames of Trump more than anybody. Breitbart tells Black Lives Matter protesters that they should sit down and shut up, and says that if women don’t like being harassed online, they should just log off.

Yesterday we attended Dubsie’s first protest rally.

We live near Cal Anderson Park, right in the middle of Capitol Hill in Seattle, and on a wet and cloudy Sunday afternoon a lot of people had gathered there. The park was crowded but a strangely silent. Some were carrying signs but there was no cheering, no one yelling into a microphone, no one chanting. The central pond has been drained for maintenance, and in and around it stood about a thousand people. They were black and white and brown, gay and straight, men and women, some holding signs and some talking in small groups. A thousand people had taken time out of their busy Sunday afternoons to stand in a park in the rain.

The rally was leaderless. Occasionally someone would try to lead a song. A few people mumbled along with ‘We Shall Overcome’ and  ‘This Land is Your Land’  but it was clear that this is a generation that isn’t used to raising its voice. One lead singer, an older guy in horn-rimmed glasses and a scarf, stumbled through a verse of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ before singing and I don’t know the words… which made everyone laugh.

After going home we caught Trump’s interview on 60 Minutes, which was his first real sit-down since the election. It teased some clarity from his usual muddle of contradictory statements. He really does intend to round up and deport 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants from Latin America, and he actually intends to build a wall with Mexico. Turns out he wasn’t kidding; he wasn’t saying some outrageous thing in order to curry votes. He has made it clear that his top priority is building a giant, multibillion-dollar wall to keep brown people out. Dubsie and her mother aren’t Mexican, but it’s nonetheless feeling like a dangerous time to be brown.

Dubsie and I will be attending  protest rallies in the coming weeks, and I hope you will be as well. I created this blog to document Dubie’s life so when she’s older she can look back at these posts and know her childhood. Right now it’s most important that we ensure that the United States of America remains a country where she feels welcome.

Dubsie doesn’t like to talk about her day. Ask her what she did at preschool and she says “Nothing!” or ignores the question and goes back to her Legos, a miniature teenager who hasn’t yet learned to sulk.

At night when it’s time for dental hygiene, I float a toothbrush in her direction and get the same thing as always: a closed mouth. She purses her lips and for good measure claps a palm over them. I ponder whether forced toothbrushing leaves scars on the gums, or the psyche. I take a breath and necessity is the mother of invention I adopt a high and feminine voice. I become a toothbrush ventriloquist. This is a girl toothbrush, apparently, and it speaks Spanish. (As do I, badly.)

¡Hola Dubsie! ¿Como estas? ¿Te puedo cepillar los dientes?  (“Hi Dubsie, how are you? May I brush your teeth?”)

Dubsie’s keeps her hand clamped over her jaws, but she eyes the toothbrush curiously. The toothbrush calls her name again. Dubsie. I cock the head of the toothbrush to one side like an adorable Disney character. Dubsie? I touch its bristles ever so gently against the back of her hand and make a loud kissing sound. Dubsie’s hand drops. She opens her mouth and asks a question.

“What is your name?” she demands of the toothbrush.

Uhhhh…

¡Cepillo! says the toothbrush. (That is the word for ‘brush’ in Spanish.)

Dubsie opens her mouth and lets Cepillo in for a few strokes, which makes Cepillo practically swoon with excitement, which persuades Dubsie to allow a few more strokes, at which point we’re done, at which point Cepillo, in her lilting voice, thanks Dubsie profusely for the privilege of brushing her teeth, and says she can’t wait to see her again tomorrow.

The next day it is Cepillo, not Daddy, who starts the toothbrushing in her chipmunk Spanish, and Cepillo — not looking for an actual answer, just hoping for an open mouth — asks Dubsie what she did at school that day.

“Cepillo!” Dubsie says, seizing the toothbrush with both hands and looking it right in the bristles. “Today I played with Gabby and with Hazel. We played with MagnaTiles!”

¿De veras? ¡Dime mas! (“Really? Tell me more!”)

“And then we goed out on the playground and we played with jump ropes!”

¡Wow! Cepillo replied.

So this is how toothbrushing goes now. Dubsie and her Cepillo are confidantes. It takes only a few strokes for Dubsie to grab the toothbrush from my hand and say “Cepillo!” and then sigh because she doesn’t even know how to start, there’s so much to tell about her day. We’ve traded one problem for another; now a simple bedtime ritual can take all night.

The email said that parents ought to send their kids to school with Valentines. Twenty valentines, to be exact, so no one’s heart is broken. At least that’s what Mummy told me the email said. I never saw the email, ok maybe I saw it and didn’t read it, or maybe there was something about Valentines, I can’t remember, busy day. Which prompts Mummy to turn to Daddy and say YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING.

You want to be the parent who sends your kid to school with Valentines and at the same time you are thinking Oh Lord here’s another frigging thing. It is late in the week and we have exactly one more night to fulfill our Valentine’s obligation, and Mummy says OK here’s what we’ll do. Goldfish crackers.

Goldfish crackers on Valentine’s Day? I said.

Goldfish crackers. We’ll put them in little bags with a heart on it with Dubsie’s name.

So fine. Like I have a better idea. This morning I wake up at 5:45 a.m. to make a digital document of 20 little heart shapes with “From Dubsie” in the middle. No time for decorating; that we outsource to Dubsie and her nanny. But we’re still don’t have twist ties to close the bags, or the goldfish.

Near the end of the workday and I am still empty-handed. Where to find goldfish and twist ties in my neighborhood is not exactly straightforward. Does Office Depot carry twist ties? No. But it turns out the Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply store across the street) does. One down.

The only viable outlet for goldfish crackers is Trader Joe’s, which is chock full of reasonably priced and delightful foodstuffs but might or might not have the exact thing you’re looking for. And they don’t have goldfish crackers. They have a wide assortment of candies, but the email (which I hadn’t read) apparently said that you can’t bring those. They have crackers in the shape of rockets. That’s sort of like a goldfish cracker, in that it is orange and bland and has nothing whatsoever to do with Valentine’s Day. But they also don’t look very much like rockets. So I take tour through the flavored popcorn, like cheddar and cracker jacks, but the labels says This Product Was Made in a Factory Where a Lineworker Once Thought About A Nut.

We had learned the hard way about nuts in school when we sent an entire Kringle (a Swedish pastry that resembles a Danish but is the size of a dinner plate) to school for the children to enjoy and maybe learn about Sweden. But because it was garnished with some sliced almonds, and because one kid had a nut allergy, they couldn’t feed it to anybody. We heard it wound up in the teacher’s lounge.

So finally I buy a bag of cheese puffs, because who doesn’t like cheese puffs, and assume that everything is cool until Mummy gets home and surveys my purchases and informs me that YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING. What, one bag of fake Cheetos? To feed twenty children?

It’s a snack, I argue. A notion. A gesture of fondness for a gaggle of children whose names Dubsie can’t recall no many how times we ask her. So we are short on Cheetos but more than make up for it in twist ties, because when you buy twist ties from a restaurant supply store you get a lot of them. We drop perhaps nine Cheetos into every bag and then tie the bag with one of our roughly six thousand twist ties.

Which holds some important lesson about love and life. Because Cheetos are fleeting (especially when you only have nine of them), and love may be fleeting, but these damn twist ties, we’ll never get rid of them.

When I heard that two reindeer would make an appearance at Swansons, our local garden store, I knew this was an opportunity not to be missed. “Reindeer!” I told Dubsie, who looked at me blankly, owing to her never having heard the word before. “You’ll get to feed reindeer! Aren’t you excited?”

We parked in the lot and followed the stream of children and parents entering into the nursery. To the left past the thickets of Christmas trees for sale was the reindeer pen, strewn with hay. The duo of reindeer had matching red bridles, and a sign outside that said their names were Dasher and Blitzen. This morning they appeared to be neither dashing nor prancing, but rather sulking, on the extreme far end of their pen away from the children.

We arrived just in time for the orientation talk from a Swansons employee, a cheerful blonde a red beret cap, who told the children some surprising facts about reindeer, such as that their horns fall off at the end of every year. She let the kids stroke the reindeer pelt that draped her podium. It fell to her to break the bad news that there would be no feeding of the reindeer today. Dasher and Blitzen had been fed by a few too many children in the last few days, she said, and too much food had made them grumpy. And that’s why, she added, the reindeers’ poops had been prodigious and spectacular of late.

As a consolation prize, she said, today’s visitors could feed the Curley, the Christmas camel. I had been so excited at the sight of the reindeer that I hadn’t noticed the enormous beast loitering in the next manger. Our blonde master of ceremonies grabbed a loaf of bread and the children lined up to feed Curley.

I let the other kids have their go at Curley and carried Dubsie over to have a closer look at the reindeer. Just as I plonked Dubsie down on the ground, one of them broke from the huddle on the far side of the pen and cruised right by us. Dubsie shrieked and ran into my arms.

Now, to be fair, reindeer are a little strange looking. Their horns are long and baroque, bristling with sharp tips like a thorn bush, and their eyes have a wild staring quality. Dasher, or maybe it was Blitzen, cocked his head and ogled Dubsie from the far corner of his eye, with the white showing, which made him look over-caffeinated or maybe terrified, which perhaps he was, being obliged to snatch food from so many small grubby hands. Or perhaps pulling an overburdened sleigh piloted by a hollering old fat man carries a psychological toll about which carols are not written.

So my daughter is terrified of reindeer. Merry Christmas. Maybe she’ll do better with the camel. Camels, as it happens, make excellent feeding-zoo creatures, because they have extremely long lips that can pluck bread crust out of a child’s hand with great gentleness and dexterity.

The children had all fed their strips of bread to the camel. Now it was Dubsie’s turn. The woman handed the bread to Dubsie, who looked for a long moment at the gentle beast above her, and determined there was a wiser course of action. She politely handed the bread back to the professional camel-handler, who gave it to the camel on Dubsie’s behalf.

At the Washington State Fair I gave Dubsie her first-ever sip of Coca-Cola. She raised her eyebrows. “Spicy!” she exclaimed. “Could I have some more?”

If the straw wandered anywhere near her mouth, it was sucked upon until forcefully withdrawn. I also fed her French fries and the breaded crust of a corn dog. This was a wild departure from her usual healthy regimen of oatmeal, veggies, and sensible low-fat meats like chicken and turkey. “My stomach feels so yummy!” she yelled as we hurried toward the Ferris wheel.

Yes, the Ferris wheel. “Your namesake!” I told Dubsie. (Though no genealogical research has yet linked us to George Washington Ferris, the man who invented the Ferris wheel for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Since it was a fair, however, we can be sure there was junk food.) Dubsie had been reading a book from the library called Mr. Ferris and His Wheel, so when I pointed at the steel circle looming overhead and told her what it was, she was thrilled.

She and I were the first people to board, so we got to spend the most time in the air, jolting higher, higher, a little higher, after every subsequent car boarded. Dubsie grasped the back of her bench and stared at the lights of the mechanical octopus and of the roller coaster and at the barns where earlier in the day she had met her first piglet, her first downy yellow chicks and her first Angora rabbit.