A Thing Enskied and Sainted

16 July 2006

Perhaps the reader is unaware of the lengths to which we go in order to render this blog interesting and educational. Aye, Reader, we even make some cautious efforts to live a “fun” life for the sake of your diversion. But alas, it has been the common lot of writers and bards since the day Orpheus first tuned his lyre that the strain and scope of their exertions go largely unrecognized. A writer’s only real recompense is the prospect of a satisfied and diverted readership. Still, even a writer of great personal modesty may not be displeased to receive some more substantive token of appreciation. For the historian whose medium, like ours, is a blog of some artistic sophistication, such tokens come most often in the form of duly registered electronic comments. A blog eliciting a dozen comments, for instance, may be looked on by its composer as a mild success; a blog, like our last Review, eliciting only two comments—and those two from the same family—may be lamented as an unqualified failure. Keenly conscious of the pleasure we derive from comments of all shapes and sizes, we have determined to make some acknowledgement on a regular basis of our most loyal readers. In accordance with this determination, our international team of quantitative experts has concocted a fool-proof system for assessing the loyalty of our readers and ranking them accordingly. The results for the last six months are as follows (for reasons of space, only the top ten and other notables are included):

1. Caci Chapman
2. James Gerald (Boe) Suttner
3. Jenilyn Collings Tolley
4. J. Trevor Chapman
5. Melinda Marcelle Reynolds Suttner
6. Alison Lowe Johnsen
6. Jordan Wyler Johnsen
8. Ginger Bloomfield
9. Kinsi Suttner
10. Kate Ballard
4,196. Rosalyn Collings Eves
51,964. Jini Dawn Suttner
9,674,321. David Wayne Suttner Sr.

Congratulations to Caci and Boe; best of luck to the rest of you for improving your ranking before our next assessment on 13 August. Now, on to the latest installment of our illustrious Review.

Monday (10 July 2006):
Laundry! Laundry! Laundry! At today’s seminar, Justin reported on his researches to this point and was pointedly told that his prospectus lacks “dynamism” and has no fundamental driving “tension.” He resolved somehow to make his paper more controversial. In the evening we taught Julia an ineffectual FHE lesson about Brigham Young; she can, at least, now identify portraits of our second prophet (provided the photos were taken post-beard). After FHE we trekked to the Provo Public Library where Lia ambitiously checked out works by Goethe and William James. Julia came home with several Caldecott winners and Eli with half-dozen volumes each of the works of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey; poor Justin returned empty-handed.

Tuesday (11 July 2006):
The ladies excitedly made their way to Ward Playgroup and dejectedly returned home when they found that no one else had come (it turns out Playgroup has been transferred to Thursday). Justin returned home from a heady day of listening to Terryl Givens hold forth about Mikhail Bakhtin and the dialogic imagination and tried to slip unobserved into a secluded corner with one of Eli’s Zane Grey volumes; Eli would have none of it and Justin consoled himself by plopping into a rocking chair and rocking himself into a contented stupor. With Justin thus engaged in philosophic pursuits, Lia lay on the floor reading Goethe with Eli and Louis L’Amour snuggled next to her. Julia, in impish defiance of a family proscription on extra-kitchen food, sneaked furtively into the living room with a chunk of homemade pretzel in her hand. With a wolfish grin she informed us that she had a pretzel. Not receiving the anticipated rebuff, she reminded herself of the rule and banished herself, cackling, back into the kitchen.

Wednesday (12 July 2006):
The struggle was epic. Our capaciously-thighed and macrocephalic heroine lay prostrate upon her stomach, the natural cushion of her hefty paunch joining forces with a crib mattress to blunt, at least partially, the great lady’s discomfort. In an irruption of wild exertion the heroine flailed her lipid-rich legs, first one direction and then the other, slicing mercilessly through the unfortunate air. With all the power of paunch and forearm the lady pushed and, by degrees, created a distance of some two inches between the left side of her body and the mattress below. These exertions were repeated, with mounting intensity, until the precise laws of physics landed the lady upon her back, smiling triumphantly. For the first time in her short life, Eli had rolled over. “One smack in the eye for the ghost of Sam Walton and his evil empire!” she thundered.

Thursday (13 July 2006):
Justin once again spent the day in Salt Lake with his fellow seminarians, surviving the crushing intellectual torpor of the bureaucratic offices of the church with only a mild headache. In the evening we made a welcome trip to our old stomping grounds at Wymount where Lia attended the outdoor baby shower of Heather Pinheiro. Justin came along, nominally to watch Julia, but ended up shooting the proverbial breeze with his old comrades, Shawn Ballard and David Pinegar. Julia occasionally joined her father at the playground, but largely hovered around the party proper, clinging to the skirts of the several mothers there. Justin’s paternal neglect, however, was kept in low relief by the more striking neglect of Mr. Pinegar who, against the stern admonitions of his wife, allowed his fifteen-month-old son and namesake to run barefoot and bare-chested into a multitude of perils throughout the course of the happy evening. The girls comported themselves admirably, with a minor blip on the part of Julia who gauchely identified the present Lia brought, for all to hear, as “Eli’s diapers!!” Lia blushed, but the party-goers collectively roared.

Friday (14 July 2006):
This day marked the two-hundred and seventeenth anniversary of that notorious Parisian soiree at the Bastille—a soiree which inaugurated a prolonged rumpus over which Louis XVI and his fair consort entirely lost their heads. “Marchons, citoyens! Formez le battallion!” We celebrated by constructing a to-scale guillotine, sixteen inches in height, and using it to apportion a festive cake. “Let them eat cake!” Eli repeatedly quoted the unfortunate queen. [This particular anecdote, it should be noted, is only allegorically true.]
This morbid ceremony concluded, Julia hosted a Wymount reunion in the form of a pool party. Alas, after a mistaken and premature wetting at the hands of her fond but careless mother, Julia refused to enter the pool, chumming with the mothers rather than flirting with the boys. The guest list included such notables as Isaac and Sydney Sparks, Sammy and Ezra Bloomfield, and Margaret Diehl. Poor Eli burned inwardly upon Ezra’s arrival, and her little heart turned a quick somersault when Ezra flashed her a timorous smile.
In the evening, Jini and Kinsi, who really can’t seem to keep away from our household of wonders, appeared once more for a pretzel-making party. As is somewhat customary at such parties, this one quickly devolved into a competition. Justin, who gave the ladies each a significant head start while he philosophically consumed a bowl of popcorn, crushed all opposition. Jini chimed in in a hardly respectable second place; Kinsi lost heart after seven or eight minutes and spent the duration indulging in what she deigned to call a “well-earned rest.” The pretzels were delicious—those crafted by Justin most of all—and Jini’s homemade, broccoli-based sauce concoction was eminently edible. The dinnertime conversation was marked by wit and verve such as the Occident has hardly known since Voltaire. “Why can’t I find a man like Justin?” Jini wondered—out loud, to her great embarrassment.
For date night, we watched an atrocious cinematographic interpretation of Tom Jones, which inexplicably won an academy award as 1963’s best picture and has the dubious distinction of being the last film ever screened by our late president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The film vulgarly accentuated all of Jones’s amorous misadventures to the neglect of everything else in Henry Fielding’s masterful plot. The figure of Squire Western was the film’s only redeeming feature.

Saturday (15 July 2006):
This day we were blessed by a most welcome visit from Jordan, Alison, and Isaac Johnsen. After an abundance of highly pleasant conversation, Jordan and Alison introduced us to a game called “Time’s Up,” a game at which Alison and Lia, through a nefarious concatenation of chicanery and bald good luck, narrowly defeated their heroic husbands. After the game, the Johnsens’ native generosity and ebullience at Jordan’s lately-increased salary combined to burst forth in a Niagara of Christian charity as they treated the Collings family to dinner at the Pizza Factory.
In the evening, after seventeen years of grueling labor, Lia finally (and we could well put this adverb in boldface and capitals) finished Julia’s quilt. All projects, it turns out, do come to an end for the persevering laborer—just as all blogs come to a close for the persevering, and this case the dormant, reader.