I could almost hear the urgency behind the ringing of the phone yesterday evening before I picked it up. It was Doug, who had gone to the package store and said he’d be back by five.
“Don’t bother making dinner,” he announced with the triumph of a native who just took down a buffalo.
I checked the clock as the kids dangled their spaghetti over each other heads. It was well past 5:30.
“Where are you?” I asked.
He was standing in line at Chipotles, as they were opening in the Kohl’s plaza in Canton. The staff was in training for opening night, and as a one-time deal, they were giving away all the food you could eat.
“I just ordered five burritos bigger than my arm,” he announced. “And they’re free!”
I can’t think of a single occasion in our eight years of marriage that I saw him this excited.
“That’s great…but I didn’t know you were such a fan of Mexican.”
“I’m not,” he said. “But I wanted to know what if felt like to stand in the welfare line, and I tell you, it feels damn good.”
To get the full effect, he was pondering complaining about his free burritos to management on his way out. Thankfully, I was able to talk him out of it.
Suddenly I recalled there was one other time he was that excited. It was September of this year, when Michigan passed its radical new welfare reform act, which placed a four-year limit on cash assistance benefits for welfare recipients. Since then, he has been giddy at the thought of welfare laws tightening all the way across the country.
I’m not sure why this is such good news. At the rate we’ve been going all through 2011, I assumed we’d soon become recipients rather than contributors. America, the time has come to stop sucking the system…just as long as I get a crack at it first.