Those of you who know Doug might remember that he had a brother, Rob, who passed away in a motorcycle accident in 1987. We surprised him with this drawing to help him memorialize the one person who–although on our planet for only twenty-four years–influenced him more than anyone else could in a full lifetime.
The artistic genius behind this drawing is Elizabeth Newton, who charges a very reasonable fee for custom made portraits. Somehow she took two blurry 30-plus-year-old photographs and brought a piece of the brother-in-law I never met back to life.
If anyone out there recognizes Rob and has a memory to share, even if it seems meaningless 34 years later, it would mean so much. As the years go by, it’s the memories that carry his family through.
I’ve barely had a chance to log into Facebook since school started, but yesterday I was driving along with my 10-year-old, Anna, when “Jessie’s Girl” came on the radio. It ignited a memory that I had to share.
The year was 1981, and my second-grade bestieBecky Christian and I decided we were going to craft a love letter to Rick Springfield. I don’t remember which one of us penned the letter, but we both contributed each line of amorous prose over hushed giggles. When it was finished, we stuffed it in an envelope, sealed it, and set about to the task of finding his mailing address.
Somewhere during that process, I stopped dead in my tracks and said, “Wait a minute. We can’t send this letter. What if he reads it and thinks we LIKE him?”
Becky blinked at me for a second, rolled her eyes and said, “We DO, dummy!”
This memory made me laugh so hard I nearly veered off the road while recounting it to Anna.
My next thought was, “Damn, I wish it were October 8. This would have made the best birthday post ever.” (Because every grown woman can recall her elementary bestie’s birthday.)
I was going to stick this on Becky’s wall, but then I thought, I should take the opportunity to wish all my friends whose birthdays I miss year after year a happy one. Because of all the things I suck at in this lifetime, that is in the Top 10 of things I suck at it the most.
I’ve deleted my birthday information from my Facebook account because I decided I’m unworthy of your birthday wishes. Not to mention, my birthday doesn’t spark the same excitement it did that year Becky and I professed our love to Rick Springfield.
As an epilogue to my story, I don’t remember if or how we unearthed his address, but I’d like to think it somehow made its way to Rick, and that he still reads it from time to time through wistful tears, sighing over what could have been before tucking it beneath his pillow.
Happy belated birthdays, all, and happiness for all your birthdays to come.
I used to mock my dad for telling me stories about he’d be able to fill up in ’65 Mustang with gas for $0.31 per gallon. He can tell you how much he paid for hamburger back in 1972, along with how much he’d pay for milk ounce for ounce. (Sixty-two cents per gallon, by the way, compared to the $8 I spend today. That’s because I’m convinced grass-fed cows are treated more nicely than factory farm cows, but I digress.)
When I was a cashier at the A&P, a family-sized six-pack of paper towels used to be under $3. I remember, because there were no scanners, and I had to punch in the prices manually.
(Please hold. The five-minute timer just went off on my Polident.)
Today, as the shelves on every grocery store I’d visited have been empty with the exception of some straggling individual rolls of Sparkle, I had to place this order.
I can still remember my worst day at work. It was my birthday. I had to stay in the building until 7:30 that night trying to appease an irate parent during parent-teacher conferences. Right before I went home on that cold March night, I realized I’d locked my keys in the car, along with my phone. I had to walk, sidewalks coated with ice, to the nearest place of business to call home.
My husband still remembers his worst day at work, too. On that day, he was stabbed in the neck with an eight-inch carving knife.
In June 2002, the Hartford Police Department received a 911 hang-up, which is usually routine. Unbeknownst to them, this particular call was disconnected by a nineteen-year-old man after stabbing his girlfriend, Rosa, and their two-year-old daughter, Ajah, in the kidney, liver, and spleen.
When Doug arrived at the call, there was no backup. Rather than wasting valuable minutes waiting, he decided to head in alone.
When the man opened the door, it was very dark. Doug never saw the knife, but he felt it.
By the time his backup arrived, he was still fighting for his life, despite having been stabbed in the neck with six pints of blood on the floor.
By some miracle, everyone lived. Ajah is now 20, and Rosa is doing fine. The man is receiving mental healthcare. Doug has trouble breathing at night, he can’t turn his neck, and he still isn’t ready to tell our children why he has two long scars down both sides of his neck. But each day, he’s grateful that when the priest came to read him his last rites that day, he didn’t need them after all.
A few years back, Rosa and Ajah reached out to give Doug this police Build-A-Bear, which Ajah designed herself. They thanked him one more time and acknowledged that had he intervened seconds later than he did, neither of them would be here today. The bear is one of his prized possessions.
Each time you hear about a horrific incident of police brutality, please remember that on that same day, more than 800,000 other U.S. police officers also reported for duty. They got up and put on their uniforms, knowing full well what a bad day at work could potentially entail.
When soldiers go out to battle and die for our freedom, you don’t hear anyone say “They signed up for that,” “That’s their job,” or “That’s what they get paid for.” Yet as the wife of a retired police officer, I hear it all the time.
We’ve all felt unappreciated at times, and many of us think our jobs are thankless. We don’t expect that all our good deeds will be reported. But there are some out there who willingly signed up to risk their own lives for complete strangers every time they go to work. Think about that for just a minute. There are some who need to be appreciated just a little bit more.
It’s easy to watch YouTube clips from the safety of our homes and critique how the situation was handled. It’s easy to speculate how we might handle things differently when forced to make a life-or-death decision in a matter of seconds.
It’s easy, after watching a monstrous act from someone who never deserved a badge in the first place, to hate everyone in a police uniform—which ironically, is an example of prejudice and discrimination in itself.
If you’re under the opinion that police are detrimental to the public good or that we should defund them–or, to say it more gently, redistribute their workload to social workers–maybe at the very least, you’ll consider there are heroes among them.
You can support both our law enforcement and social justice at the same time.
Let’s start rebuilding the morale of our police officers. Someday, you just might need one.
