"I am but mad north-northwest"

The fabled Augustan (the month, not the imperial epoch) “dog days” are upon us. Summer’s lease, it seems, hath indeed all too short a date; our days in Utah are numbered—eight of them, to be exact. A week from today we shall be engaged, no doubt, in frantic final preparations for our exodus to the East. What follows, dear Reader, may then be the final installment of our illustrious Review to be composed here in the shadow of the everlasting hills—here in the land of Justin’s youth; here where the clear blue sky (mildly tinged by residual corruptions, courtesy of Geneva Steel and her epigones) arches over the vale of the free; here where ice cream and green jell-o are consumed at per capita levels unknown elsewhere in this or adjacent galaxy clusters; here where, as nowhere else, the seeds of love are planted, cultivated, and reach the full blossom of matrimony (the whole process taking, on the average, about seventeen days) and where the birthrate casts defiance in the teeth of Malthusian nay-sayers; here in the land called “Happy Valley” or, in our more modest moments, Zion. It is, therefore, with no small sense of nostalgia—with no little awareness of the precarious transience of this mortal clay—that we compose this our final Utah-based blog. Indeed, animated by such reflections, Eli recently broke forth quite appropriately in the language of the Immortal:

Our [Provonian] revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest 4.1.148-158)

Upon hearing this, Julia snapped peevishly at her little sister, “I’ve had enough of your spasmodic Elizabethan nihilism.” But we know that this momentary dyspepsia was but a cover for Julia’s own painful perception of l’attimo fuggente. But to proceed with this valedictory (sort of) post.

Monday (31 July): Lia determined to air out the house by opening the patio doors for much of the day. Julia thought this innovation eminently liberating, and spent much of the day racing, garbed in a diaper only, onto the patio and sounding, Whitman-like, her barbaric “Yawp!” from the porches of the world. Eli who, in the words of one disinterested observer, “gets prettier and prettier every day,” spent much of the day engaged in the strenuous exercise of lying on her stomach and raising her imposing macrocephalus several inches off the ground, holding it there for some seconds, lowering slowly, and resting briefly before repeating the process. Justin returned, temporarily, to work for the Joseph Smith Papers. On his way to campus he was hailed at a distance of twenty yards or so from our house by Julia, who conquered her father’s ill-defensed heart by waving vigorously and sweetly blowing a kiss.

Tuesday (1 August): Julia went to lunch today with her paternal grandparents and her cousin, Jacob. While they were in the restaurant, a “severe thunderstorm”—as the chicken-little national meteorologists chose to term it—swept through our happy valley, hurling down torrents of rain and hail and even, with the help of formidable winds, uprooting a handful of telephone poles. Julia watched all this from the security of the restaurant and, to the amusement of her grandparents, commented gravely and repeatedly, “O my goodness. O my goodness,” etc. Eli struggled today, enjoying only one substantial nap; one possible explanation for this irruption of insomnia was that whenever Eli would lie down on her blanket in the living room, Lia would lie down next to her and, unable to keep her hands off Eli’s adorable little corpus, kept her daughter awake by stroking her soft cheeks or squeezing her voluminous thighs.

Wednesday (2 August): During the day the ladies trekked to Wymount and, in the best entrepreneurial spirit of the girls’ maternal grandfather, posted for sale our bookcases and our jogging stroller. In the evening, a buyer for the bookshelves showed up on our doorstep, accompanied by an ardent brother-in-law. The brother-in-law, as emerged within less than two minutes of conversation with Justin, was a Mormon convert of eight years standing and a ferocious bibliomaniac. What’s more, all the zeal of his conversion and all the virulence of his passion for books were directed to the acquisition and perusal of works in Latter-day Saint history and theology. Thinking he found in Justin a kindred spirit—or at least the closest thing to a kindred spirit such a soul is likely to find—the brother-in-law gave vent to his ardor, and a confused Justin soon found himself in the gentleman’s own apartment, immersed in a sea of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. The brother-in-law, serving as cicerone, proudly treated Justin to a view of a several-centuries-old family Bible and a Liverpool first edition of Parley Pratt’s Key to the Science of Theology, among other relics. The effect of all this on Justin’s mind was not unlike that of a man caught in a whirlwind who, after being carried up to a height of a hundred meters and spun around at speeds of several hundred miles per hour, lands softly on the turf of his front yard and finds himself pondering the mysterious occurrence that has befallen him in the silence of a now-still night. Justin soon found himself sitting in the living room with a volume of Civil War history in hand, wondering just how it came to pass that he had been given two unsolicited articles to peruse and invited to the possibility of future co-authorship. And this at the hands of a man whose name he could not remember! Was it all a dream? Apparently not, for here was Lia, partial witness to the event, who could only comment enigmatically, “Guys are so weird.”

Thursday (3 August): This morning the ladies went to ward play group. Julia coyly allowed herself to be courted by Kayden Erikson, much to the disgust of the sober-minded Eli, who finds in such proto-romantic interchanges only so much puerility. Even so, try as she might, Eli could not preempt the acceleration of her heartbeat when she herself was the object of a shy wink from the quietly gallant Ezra Bloomfield. Eli’s internal unease was soon displaced by the pitch and gall of a mighty wrath, for after playgroup the gang stopped by the local outpost of Sam Walton’s evil empire, where Lia bought supplies with which to finish Julia’s dresser and diapers with which to cover Eli’s nakedness (Eli’s outrage was somewhat softened by this last kind gesture). In the afternoon, Kinsi came by and initiated Julia into the wonders of tossing Pente stones hither and thither about the house, to Julia’s great delight and her parents’ everlasting gratitude. In the evening Justin and the girls went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where Eli charmed Grandma to distraction with an outburst of wild giggling (Eli thought this mightily immature, but Grandma was so responsive…). Lia, meanwhile, went to aerobics—ostensibly to exercise, but more likely to get her fill of Babylonian music, which her puritanical husband has proscribed around the house.

Friday (4 August): Today the ladies joined with their old friends Annie, Emily, Dillon, Sawyer, Kate, and Payton Ballard for a picnic in the park followed by some proverbial fun in the literal sun at Veteran’s Memorial Water Park. Julia had a grand time indeed, though she suffered from a bit of postlapsarian awkwardness and confusion upon seeing Dillon, naked, changing into clothes after the swimfest was over. In the evening, we dropped Julia off with Grandma and Grandpa where she played while we, with Eli in tow, attended a wedding reception at Thanksgiving Point. Returned home, we put the girls to bed, after which Lia proved herself the equal of the handiest of handymen by finishing, in broad yet elegant brushstrokes, Julia’s wood dresser. Justin, implacable foe of all species of handiness, contributed to the enterprise by reading aloud to his industrious wife from Akhil Amar’s American-Bar-Association-Silver-Gavel-Award-Winning treatise, America’s Constitution: A Biography. Fun as all this was, the evening mysteriously ended with the dresser finished and Lia waking Justin up from the couch and bidding him come to bed.

Saturday (5 August): We went to breakfast this morning at that cosmopolitan cynosure, the International House of Pancakes (IHOP), with Justin’s mom; her sisters, Dahnelle, Tera, and Jeanie; Justin’s cousins, Nolan and Loriann; and Justin’s sister, Rosalyn, with her son, Andrew. Julia and Eli conspired to target Dahnelle and, in the words of one observer, “Julia warmed Dahnelle’s heart and Eli stole it.” In the afternoon, Justin and Julia went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, ostensibly to lift weights. However, finding Grandma and Grandpa absent and on their way to the airport, the mischievous pair took advantage of the occasion by racing wildly around the basement, jumping gleefully on the guest bed, and singing rumpus chanteys. When they came home, the whole family snuggled in on Mommy and Daddy’s bed to watch The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on Justin’s laptop. Julia liked the movie but loved the popcorn; Eli exhibited a wanton misunderstanding of the universally-accepted morè that one is to keep quiet during the screening of a film. We took an intermission during the film for a special dinner that Justin made (a Red Baron pizza). A good time was had by all.

And so, Reader, we bid you farewell from the shadow of the everlasting hills. Next blog in New Haven!



[These are our best imitations of Trevor and Caci Chapman, respectively.]