EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: After the hearing, something beautiful

We almost miss it, in our haste to get out the door for lunch, but then right at 1 p.m. on Tuesday we remember the surprise hearing from the Jan. 6 House Committee. And so we sit back down.

The kid needs to get out of the house, is the thing. It’s been another under-programmed summer break for D, who got left alone in the house last week which is like torture for someone who doesn’t drive, and D doesn’t drive. Adamantly so, truth be told. But the kid is too old for me to be their personal free Uber — part of being an adult is the ability to move freely and independently about town.

But I can get the kid out of the house in the middle of the day or the late afternoon. Least I can do.

We watch the first session silently, glancing at each other when we learn how Trump, when he was mad, liked to pull out the tablecloth at dinner and dump everything on the floor, or how he tried to choke out a Secret Service agent when no one would drive him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, or how he tried to wave off the metal detectors for the growing crowd at his rally.

“I’m the fucking president,” he said.

“They’re not here to hurt me,” he said.

The kid is 19, will be 20 by the end of the summer. How do I explain to someone so very young just how fucked up all this is?

We prop my phone on the restaurant table and eat ramen during the second half of Tuesday’s session. I’ve already paid the check by the time we learn that both Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani asked for presidential pardons after the events of Jan. 6 unfolded. And we shake our heads all the way to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, to see something beautiful and pure after so much filth.

In the second-floor gallery, we walk through an exhibit of sculptures made to be deliberately dysfunctional: A hammer made of mirrored glass, a dress cut from burrito wrappers, buttons stacked into stalagmites, like that. Nothing is what it seems. Unlike on Capitol Hill, where there are no more illusions about Jan. 6.