the mandalorian and grogu

The Mandalorian was first pushed at us in November of 2019, but as usual I was late to the party. You couldn't miss the fawning over "Baby Yoda," as everyone said before we learned the child's name, the same as I couldn't miss my classmates poring over schematics of X-Wing fighters in 1977, while I told myself I wasn't missing anything.

In a different timeline, I might never have gotten around to seeing the exploits of the Mandalorian and his charge, scooting around the galaxy in his retro rocket. In this timeline, though, we were told to stay at home, and then I developed a run of heart palpitations that might have been stress, or might have been an early and mild case of Covid. Refrigerated trucks were parked across Fourth Avenue, and a with the slightest provocation my heart might keep me awake all night. Escapism was the order of the day.

And then, a couple weeks later, Pink told me she wanted a divorce. All of this ought to be reason to avoid thinking about Mando and his green waif. They ought to be triggering.

I was talking with someone the other day about moments so infused with happiness - I could say joy, I could say friendship, I could say delight, choose the name you want to give to the feeling - that even as they're happening you become aware, this one is different. A friend, after one of those occasions, said, "This one was a keeper." It struck me, my much younger self, at the time, because as much as you want to, you can't keep it. You can't even really keep the memories, which time will fade and distort. What you can keep is the memory of that joy, friendship, delight, the way that felt, and every now and then remember it and feel it in your chest.

I packed up everything belonging to Pink that still remained in my New York apartment, which filled the back of the Element, and drove it to Detroit. I had intended to stay the weekend, but something told me it wouldn't work out that way. I left the apartment door unlocked in case I needed to ask my neighbor to water the plants. I drove with the dog to Michigan, afraid even to enter public restrooms along the way. How little we knew, and how fear replaced knowledge.

I ended up staying four or five weeks. My neighbor watered my plants. Pink and I mostly lived parallel lives in that big house, seeing each other at meals or on the stairs or maybe getting out for walks. None of that matters. In the evening, despite the shadow of divorce, and why divorce, and everything neither of us could talk about, and whether any of us were going to live until July, despite all that we would sit on her shaggy sofa and watch something. Whatever we could find, I don't remember any of the titles. Except The Mandalorian.

It was an island - that room, that sofa, that series of silly adventures in outer space - in oceans without any apparent end.

Besides delight, you can hold on to the feeling of comfort, or reassurance, or safety, choose the word you want to use. It arrives accompanied by sadness, and the sadness itself by the memories of what had come before. "All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change," says the Fourth Remembrance. It helps to remember that truth. It lets me focus on what was dear, on who I loved.

So from the first note of the theme music, that haunting bass recorder, I found myself safe at home again, both sad and grateful. The Mandalorian and Grogu is what you're expecting, if you have any knowledge of Star Wars. It's fun to think of Grogu as a kind of infant Jesus, wise beyond his years, able to work miracles, but equally mischievous and eating everything he can get his three-fingered hands on. And finally repaying the care he is given, carrying out love's austere and lonely offices.