Adventures in Dixie

31 May 2006
"Memorial Day Adventures"
To all of our readers who waited in anxious anticipation--and waited in vain--for our customary Sunday post, we humbly beg your pardon. The constancy of our pen could be interrupted only by the fickleness of our geography, and the Sunday just past found us one and all in the heart of Utah's Dixie, and we have learned by sad experience--rather a lot of it--that few places on earth have so unsalubrious an effect on the intellect, and so dulling an effect on one's prose, as the city named for the dragon-slayer. The shining example of Charles L. Walker's pioneer doggerel excepted, the Muses have not often deigned to travel further south than Nephi. We declined, therefore, to run the risk of sullying the reputation of this blog by composing an installment of our Review in a land better known for sizzling cacti than for periodic prose. The passage of time and the dimming of memory prevent us from providing a tardy edition of the Review. Instead, we invite you, friend Reader, to feast upon a tinier but no less delectable morsel, which we shall call "Memorial Day Weekend Adventures":
Friday (5/26): Upon Justin's return from work the entire family piled into the Big Blue Bull for a trip to that erstwhile pioneer haven, now bustling megalopolis-to-be, St. George, where we paid a visit to Lia's adolescent home and to the Suttner family who still reside in it. Our visit was occasioned by a dual escape effected by two of Lia's sisters: Kinsi from the shackles of American public education and Jini from the inanities of teenagerdom. Our congratulations to Kinsi on her graduation from high school and our salutation to Jini on her twentieth birthday. The trip marked Eli's first foray outside the protective precincts of Utah Valley; she bravely faced this new adventure, dauntlessly sleeping for most of the drive. Julia babbled rather incessantly before mercifully dropping off to sleep somewhere near Cedar City. She awakened, however, upon our arrival in Little Valley at around 10 o'clock. When Julia realized where we were she went gleefully a-bounding through the house, saluting one and all in a hearty roll call of her maternal aunts, uncles, and grandparents: "Hi Nin! Hi Opa! Hi Uncle Gabe! Hi Uncle Boe! Hi Aunt Davy! Chari! Kinsi! Jini!" She then romped bumptiously in a ceremonial wild rumpus with her uncles Boe and Gabe. When bedtime had passed by several hours we at length corralled her into bed.
Saturday (5/27): A highlight of this day was an intrafamilial contest of Compatibility. Justin and Lia's team lost miserably and repeatedly, leaving us much confused on the point of how to react at this late date to the notice that we are incompatible. When Justin gently reproved Lia for continually giving wrong answers to the prompts, Lia pointed out that the other contestants put those same wrong answers with astonishing regularity. Justin could only shake his head and point out in his turn that consensus has, from time immemorial, been the domain of mediocre minds. Quite early in the morning Julia emerged from our makeshift bedroom and cried, "Let the wild rumpus continue!" But she then had to wait impatiently until Boe and Gabe woke up again, a process in which she assisted materially. Justin spent much of the day in philosophical discourse with his father-in-law, concluding as usual that the world would be much better off if the management of its day-to-day and long term affairs were placed in our able hands; Lia spent much of it chasing two small children and wishing her husband would rouse himself and direct his energies to some practical benefit.
Sunday (5/28): It is our custom to compose on the Sabbath, not to narrate the events of any particular Sabbath. We shall therefore limit ourselves here to recording that, in addition to attending our church meetings in the morning--meetings which included a masterful Sunday School lesson presented by our very own Melinda Marcelle Reynolds Suttner--we made a valiant stab at taking in a viewing of the 7-hour BBC production of Middlemarch, a film adaptation of the supreme novel in the English language. The intricacies and subtleties of an Eliot plot proved magnificently inscrutable to Father David, who responded by stammering for a time in teenage mockery of the show before retiring, annoyed, to the backyard. When he returned his eyes flashed with moral indignation, and when he had ensconced himself in an adjacent room we overheard his eruption into a thunderous harangue about the inappropriateness of a Sabbath activity of such Richardsonian duration, or indeed of any activity on any day whose center of attention he could not be. We meekly surrendered after three hours, thereafter forming a circle around Father David and uniting in a collective encomium to the business acumen and hearty good looks of our revered patriarch and passing along tidbits of gossip about his growing reputation as a commentator of blogs and about the possibility of his making an imminent appearance on the prime-time television series, "American Blogger." Peace was restored around the Suttner hearth and we all went to bed smiling--all except Julia, who protested vehemently the injustice of having to go to bed at all and who arose several times during the night to climb rather unwelcomedly into her parents' bed.
Monday (5/29): Having decided to stay in Dixie an extra day--and this day being Memorial Day itself--we resolved to make the most of it. The Suttner's having recently purchased a batting cage and pitching machine--and the cage itself not having been assembled--we employed the pitching machine to host something of a home run derby in the field adjacent to the Suttner home. Lia acquitted herself quite respectably at the plate, driving a steady series of line drives into the outfield. Jini nearly killed Julia with a stray fly ball that caught Lia and Mindy unawares. Davy simply could not get in front of a 55-mph pitch and drove a series of pop-ups into right field and, consequently, smack into the side of a neighboring house. Father David then thoroughly showed-up his first born son, driving a respectable number of pitches over the fence and into the street. Finally, Justin upstaged one and all by smashing a host of magisterial shots over the fence, across the street, over the ditch, over a barbed-wire fence, and into a distant famer's field. He made Albert Pujols look tame. Upstaged, David wildly accused Justin of steroid abuse and angrily called for a congressional investigation. When that failed, he commissioned two scandal-mongering Dixie journalists on the sly to write a tell-all expose of the dirty secret behind Justin's power at the plate. They did so, and the product of their researches, entitled Juice in the Desert, is now a national bestseller.
Having threatened violence to the neighbor's house and to their toddler niece, Davy and Jini enthusiastically embraced a suggestion that we engage as a family in a competition of a more distinctly "motorhead" character. We accordingly rose as one man and made our way to a nearby cynosure of motorism where we were to race go-carts at breakneck pace around a ludicrously labyrynthine track with some half-dozen hairpin turns. Justin wore his Switzerland shirt to identify himself as a pacifist, non-interventionist. This was not his bag and any excuse that could have gotten him out of it would have been seized with alacrity. But lacking such an excuse he roused himself by asking, "How would Theodore Roosevelt act under the circumstances?" At length, finding himself behind the wheel, Justin's competitive juices quickly had the better of the better part of valor. Davy and Jini, our token motorheads, raced out to an early lead and never looked back, finishing first and second respectively. Justin soon found himself once more in heated competition with his father-in-law for the third place position. They bumped and vied for position through fifteen laps of blood and thunder and, in David's case, near hyperventilation. Round and round the track they zoomed, periodically lapping dear Mindy who courteously moved to the side and came to a halt whenever competition accosted her. Justin began to feel secure in his lead when, upon slowing for one of the track's sharpest turns, he was maliciously rammed from behind. When he turned to sneer disdainfully at David, he was stunned to see the cheerful grin of his loving wife. Neither David nor Justin was about to lose to Lia, and they quickly conspired to relegate her to fifth place for good. In the end, Justin was too much for his father-in-law, and held on to scoot across the finish where he was greeted by a chorus of frantic cheers from Eli and a quizzical, "Where's Opa?" from Julia. Reluctantly, Justin admitted to all that he enjoyed himself immensely.
After a late lunch and the tedium of packing we again piled into the Big Blue Bull for our return trip. With respect for the keen sensibilities of our dear readers, we must touch only lightly upon this unfortunate journey. Those with weak stomachs may wish to avoid it altogether.
Things began peacefully enough, but we had not made it past the high citadel of Kanarraville before Eli began fussing uncontrollably that she was in danger of perishing with hunger. We pulled onto the picturesque road running through New Harmony and after a mile or two pulled onto the shoulder for Eli's evening meal. While Eli ate, Justin and Julia took a walk where Julia delightedly picked up rocks and eagerly tried to insert them into her mouth while Justin just as eagerly contravened her efforts. So delighted was Eli with this repast that she thanked us by blowing out her diaper with the same ferocity with which Athena once burst forth from the cranium of Zeus. Her adorable sleeper, not to mention Lia's jeans and polo shirt, were graciously permeated with infantile offal. Justin trotted across the street and tossed the hapless sleeper into a rubbish bin that stood sentinel at the gate of a long lane bearing the endearing caption: "PRIVATE LANE: NO HUNTING" (not "No Trespassing"; only in Southern Utah...). We then made our way to the nearest gas stations where Lia changed clothes. Another hour or two passed--during the whole of which Julia whined, volubly and interminably, just for practice--before Mount St. Eli erupted again, this time from on high, and we pulled onto the shoulder to clean the vomit off the poor child and give her yet another change of clothes. Julia whined on. Eli, distraught, screamed and screamed and our sympathy for her plight was mitigated only by our irritation at Julia's impudence. After the passage of much time, the two yahoos mercifully fell asleep, and we finally made it home more than five hours after departure. We had a quick dinner of raisin bran before making our best efforts to get everyone to bed. Julia resisted mildly, Eli vociferously. It was a miserable trip, but in any case we have survived to write this post.