The Noticing Is the Love
It’s a quality of attention sustained across years.
My step-daughter has lost something. Her garage door opener, a notebook, or a permission slip that’s due tomorrow. She doesn’t ask me. She asks her mother.
She’s on a work call and texting another work colleague before she heads into the office. However, two minutes later, she walks into the kitchen and tells her where it is. She’s right. She’s always right.
I’m clueless. By my own admission, I’m the sitcom dad in sweatpants who can’t find the milk in the fridge without help. My wife runs the operating system. I run a few applications.
This is the part of motherhood I’ve been thinking about all week, with Mother’s Day on Sunday.
This isn’t about cooking dinner or handling the kids. It’s the thing underneath all of it. The noticing.
She knows which account is used to pay certain bills. She knows when everyone needs to go to the doctor. She knows when her daughter is going through a rough patch and how to ask about it without making it weird. She knows the woman at her office who’s carrying the team and never gets credit for it. She knows because she pays attention. That’s the whole trick, and it’s not a trick.
We talk a lot about what mothers do. We talk less about what they see. The seeing is the work. The doing flows from it.
A mother’s attention is so reliable that the whole household gets to relax into not having to pay any of their own. I don’t have to remember when the laundry gets done or when the dog is due for shots, because someone else is remembering for me. That’s not a small grace. That’s the thing that makes a home function. To be fair, I need to be much better at paying attention and keeping up with what’s actually happening around my house.
Her absence makes the labor visible. Her presence makes it invisible. That’s how good she is at it.
Every household has someone like this, and in most of them, it’s still a mother. She’s the one the kids go to, the one her colleagues lean on, the one her husband needs when he’s having a bad day. She’s the one her siblings call at 10 p.m. when they need advice. The receiver of everything.
It’s labor. It’s just unwaged.
What I want to say on Sunday, and what I usually fail to say well, is that the noticing is the love. The remembering is the love. You can buy flowers, cook breakfast, and write a card, and those things are nice. But they don’t quite reach the work itself, because the work isn’t an event. It’s a quality of attention sustained across years.
So this Sunday, if you’re like me, try saying the specific thing. Not “thanks for everything,” because everything is where the meaning goes to hide. Try “thank you for remembering to pay the water bill, because if it was up to me, I’d surely forget.” Try “thank you for helping me be a better husband, step-father, and son.” Try the actual thing she did that you didn’t have to do, because she was already doing it for you.
The mothers in our lives have been paying attention this whole time.
The least we can do is return the favor.
Be seeing you.
The Illini at the NBA Combine
The NBA Draft Combine runs May 10-17 at Wintrust Arena. Three names from this year’s Final Four team are on the invite list: Keaton Wagler, Kylan Boswell, and Andrej Stojakovic.
Wagler’s the lock. The consensus All-American and Jerry West Shooting Guard of the Year is a top-10 projection. He won’t have to scrimmage. The interview rooms are basically a formality, but I’m not savvy enough about the NBA to know which teams need what Wagler provides. In the draft, he’ll go something like 4-8, which is great.
Boswell is the one I’m watching. He averaged a double-double at the Portsmouth Invitational a few weeks back and made the all-tournament team. He’s projected late second round right now. A strong week in Chicago could only help his stock.
Stojakovic has until May 27 to make up his mind, and the smart bet is that he comes back. The three-ball still has to come around (please shoot 500 threes all summer), and another year with Underwood is worth more than a contested 50th pick. He’ll get valuable feedback and then work on his game all summer.
“Sweet Transvestite” on the Tonight Show
The first time I heard the Rocky Horror soundtrack, I was at a neighbor’s house. He had the LP from the movie and we played it like it was a normal album. We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.
A year or two later, the old show Night Flight ran the “Time Warp” section of the movie. Just dropped it on the screen with no setup. I had no idea exactly what I was seeing. I still hadn’t seen a single frame of the actual film, but I knew the song.
I was transfixed.
Here’s the confession. I have never been to a midnight showing. Not once. No rice, no toast, no shouting at the screen. For somebody who loved those songs that long, that’s an embarrassing gap. I should fix my “virgin” status.
The revival opened last month at Studio 54, which is the perfect address for this kind of show. Luke Evans is Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Stephanie Hsu is Janet. Rachel Dratch is the narrator. Juliette Lewis is Magenta. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is Columbia. The production picked up nine Tony nominations, including Best Musical Revival.
Last Monday, they took it to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. They did “Sweet Transvestite.”
I have to admit that’s my favorite song from the show. Has been forever. It’s also the song most likely to make somebody clutch their pearls, and that’s part of why I love it. Written in 1973, it still has teeth.
Luke Evans walked it out on The Tonight Show stage in full regalia and pulled no punches. They put it all out there. It was glorious.
Rocky Horror dared you to be weird in public. It still does. The people who showed up at midnight in 1976 weren’t trying to be respectable, and the ones lining up at Studio 54 right now aren’t either.
Forty-some years of knowing every word without seeing it is long enough, though.
WKRP Comes Home
Baby, if you’ve ever wondered.
A radio station in Cincinnati just changed its call letters to WKRP this week. Yes, that WKRP. The one where the turkeys couldn’t fly.
Here’s what I love about it. The show was set in Cincinnati, but was never broadcast or filmed there. The call letters bounced around. Most recently, a low-power nonprofit in Raleigh put them up for auction this spring.
Grant County Broadcasters won the bidding. They took 97.7 FM and started playing the same kind of music the show used to spin. They ran the theme song on a six-hour loop before flipping the switch Monday morning.
Most of the time, nostalgia is just something we feel sorry for ourselves about. Every once in a while, though, a fictional place gets to become real, and a station that should have existed all along finally does.
That’s pretty cool.
May the Fourth
Two things stuck this Star Wars Day.
The first one I’m still thinking about. Chris Preksta posted on Threads about a trick. Turn down the saturation. Bump the contrast. Switch the audio to Japanese with English subs. The Phantom Menace becomes the best “Space Kurosawa” movie ever made. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think he’s right. Strip out the color and Liam Neeson’s accent, and what’s left should look a lot closer to Hidden Fortress. Lucas always said he was riffing on Kurosawa. Turns out the riff was buried under the color grade.
The other thing is a quieter trend. Nielsen released Q1 viewership data for Disney+, and the sequel trilogy is just... not there. No Force Awakens. No Last Jedi. No Rise of Skywalker. Fans watched 637 million minutes of Star Wars content on May 4 alone, and the most-streamed films were A New Hope, Phantom Menace, and Rogue One.
I’m not sure what any of this means. My guess is that a lot of Disney execs are banking on The Mandalorian and Grogu in a couple of weeks.
