Our sources tell us that the British parliament has seriously considered passing a resolution mandating that the calendar year just commenced be referred to as ‘007 (rather than the more traditional ’07) in honor of everyone’s favorite icon of elegant promiscuity and unruffled violence. We, of course, have written an impassioned letter of protest to our local MP and hope that you have too.
But in addition to following anxiously the merry-go-round of lords and commons you have been wondering, in anguish, what we have been up to during the fortnight and more since the most recent installment of our illustrious Review. And, O dear Reader, had we but world enough and time we could a tale unfold which would dazzle all the senses and startle your incredulity into a stupor of bewildered awe. Alas, we have all the time in the world but not quite world enough in time, so you’ll have to settle for a brief (which for us is, of course, a term to be read relatively with Tolstoi and Richardson in mind) summary of our recent holiday vacation back to the great American West, back to the land of our respective adolescences, back to the mountains high where the clear blue sky arches over the vale of the free, back to the rolling hills of Deseret, back to the erstwhile uncivilized wilderness where our progenitors mistakenly thought the federal government of our mighty Republic would let them very well alone—in short, back home.
On Wednesday, 20 December 2006, Justin attended the final lecture of his first semester of study at the Yale Law School, where the great Guido Calabresi gave the class his infallible opinions of the merits and demerits of every other member of the faculty before revealing the grand secrets of torts, life, law, and the universe in a ringing peroration of the sort only a vigorous, elderly Italian gentleman can give. Something about Guido’s final sermon awakened in Justin the nostalgic memory of his own final days in Italy as a missionary, and he exited the classroom quickly lest it become apparent to any of his classmates that this was an emotional thing for him.
Thursday (21 December): We awoke early in the morning and loaded into the Bull and headed north to the Bradley airport in Hartford, shaken with trepidation and fear that the Bull might not make it that far. But the Bull came through in the end, perpetual threats of overheating notwithstanding. Airport security was less painful than anticipated, and we made it in plenty of time for our early flight to Philadelphia and from there to Dis—we mean, Las Vegas. We were in Philly around noon, and Justin suggested that they grab a bite to eat, but Lia assured him that there would be a meal on our next flight. Since Lia had booked the tickets, Justin trustingly, but nigh fatally, assumed she knew what she was talking about. The flight from the city of brotherly love to the cesspool of carnality, lasciviousness, and baseness of every shade and hue was a painful one, highlighted by a complimentary bag containing three peanuts and one check (which we assume is the singular for the cereal Chex ©) and hours of strikingly inane travel footage, thunderously inane Christmas music videos (including an utterly blasphemous rendition of “What Child is This?” by a Vanessa Williams bearing frightfully horrid bangs—though this was compensated by a crazy symphonic piece called “Christmas in Sarajevo” that reached toward the soaring heights of nutty, Eastern European techno-razzle), and the holiday anti-classic, A Christmas Story. And, pace Lia, there was no meal. We arrived in Vegas hungry as a thousand grizzlies in an aquarium, but quite happy to see Dad Suttner and Lia’s ebullient sister, Jini. Lia informed her father that we were famished and asked that we stop somewhere for a bite, the special meal awaiting us at home notwithstanding. We ended up stopping at a Petro station, whose portentous etymology promised either stones or gasoline; we ended up devouring a pair of plastic burritos that made the meal at home shine by comparison. At length, we wound our way back to Little Valley Road, where Lia’s mother and grandmother feted us with a feast fit for a king.
But as happy as we were about finally securing a hearty meal, this otherwise happy day was blackened by deep tragedy, as the Philly-Vegas flight claimed two victims: our worn but cherished copy of Will Durant’s The Renaissance and Julia’s nine-inch, much-toted and yogurt-encrusted Cookie Monster doll. We can purchase another copy of The Renaissance for a pittance on-line; Cookie is irreplaceable. Justin suggested to Lia that we simply tell Julia that Cookie had “gone on vacation” (not, technically, a lie), but Lia suggested the more pragmatic approach of praising her Elmo doll to the skies.
Friday (22 December): In the evening we joined in a family concert for “Nanni,” Lia’s maternal grandmother, whose flight back to her native Kentucky left late that night. Justin made the house rumble with his tenorial Italian bravado, while Lia soothed even so excitable a creature as her father with her mellifluous sonority. Trevor and Kinsi took turns on the guitar, and Caci chipped in a song or two. Julia, amazingly, slept through it all on the floor in the middle of it all. With a nod to Nanni, Lia then jumped on the piano bench and accompanied us all in singing, “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Way Down South in Dixie,” before moving on to a number of Christmas carols and hymns.
The days get a bit muddled in our generally impeccable memory at this point, so we shall proceed in generalities. We stayed in St. George until December 27th. The Suttners’ neighbors, the Somervilles, were kind enough to let us stay in their home while they headed toward the sands of the desert where they could, uninterrupted, wreak havoc and cacophony with their mutli-wheeled machines of mayhem (Dad Suttner once told an elders quorum that “English is Jay Somerville’s second language; motorhead is his first”). We split the household chores—Justin fed the Gila-monster (which required the handling of live worms) while Lia fed and played with the dogs and set them up in the garage each night. One evening early in the week, Lia planned to lead the dogs from the backyard, around the house, and into the garage from the outside. In preparation for this journey, she asked Justin to make certain the garage door was “open.” Justin peeked into the garage and, sure enough, the side door stood wide open, so Justin informed Lia of this and headed back to the bedroom where we slept and the Gila-monster whom he fed. Advised by her brothers—who religiously played X-box at the Somerville’s place some sixteen hours a day—that the Somervilles usually bring the dogs through the house, Lia did so, gently leading them into the garage and closing the house door behind them. Thirty minutes later, as we lay in bed, Lia turned to me and asked, “When you said the door to the garage was open, did you mean it was open?” “Uh, yes. Why?” “Oh no!” We don’t know how long the dogs stayed in the garage, but they certainly left through the open door before Lia got up to check on them. She asked her brothers where to look for them and they, eyes fixed steadfast and immovable to the X-box screen, muttered, “They’ll come back in the morning.” Thankfully, they came back much sooner than that. Lia heard them bounding around outside and, with Davy’s help, corralled them back into the garage, shutting both doors this time before retiring for the night.
On the day after Christmas, Justin went golfing with Dad Suttner and Davy, both of whom received shiny new golf clubs for Christmas. They all golfed miserably enough but all had a fine time nevertheless. Justin thought often of Mr. Churchill’s definition of golf as the vain attempt to place a confounded sphere into an undersized hole with an instrument entirely unsuited to the task. They rented two golf carts and Justin initially was foolhardy enough to ride in the cart driven by Davy. After two or three holes of automotive terror, he switched to ride with Dad Suttner, who was not himself an altogether reassuring driver, but it was nonetheless an improvement.
But while Justin’s first trip to the links after an absence of many years was lackluster, he dominated the two family football games of the trip: in the first he returned an interception for a touchdown and caught the game-winning touchdown after Davy’s misguided attempt at an interception; in the second he scored all five of his team’s touchdowns, overcoming the double-team of both Davy and Trevor for the final and victory-sealing score. When he awoke the next morning, he could hardly move but was gratified beyond degree. Trevor and Davy bested him, however, in an improvise game of kickball home run derby they invented at a local schoolyard (Davy won that one; Trevor came in second). The triumvirate’s insatiable thirst for competition even overcame Justin’s fierce electronic gamophobia and he teamed up with Trevor in a couple of desperate, but alas unsuccessful, bids to trump Davy at “Madden ’06.” (We must here note two things: (1) Davy is an incorrigible cheater; and (2) Although Justin relented and did, in fact, play a video game, it was a harmless sports game and not one of those unholy rampages of virtual slaughter that are unweaving apace the very fabric of our civilization.)
Julia loved life in the desert, though she managed to forget that she is potty-trained, a mental lapse that persists to this writing and has proved sorely vexing to her hapless parents. Her favorite Christmas present was a Dora-the-Explorer version of Candy Land, and her love for the game paved the way for one of the tenderest scenes of the trip: one day, after Dad Suttner had spent the morning stomping frantically through the house and hurling imprecations in every direction in a vain effort to rouse his backsliding progeny to some vigilance in keeping the place clean, muttering all the while that he simply must get on his way to work, Julia scampered up to him, game in hand, and sweetly asked, “Opa, you want to play Dora’s Candy-Land with me?” Opa looked down in anguish at this toddler temptress; his heart melted, but his lips said no.
Lia loved being back home as well, though she spent most of the week amazed at the growth of her youngest sister. “Can you believe that Chari’s 5’8”?!!?!?” she thundered incredulously to anyone who would listen. We all could, for she is, but this didn’t stop Lia from digressing into a broken record of perpetual disbelief.
On Wednesday the 27th we rented a car (a flashy Toyota Corolla—Lia had ordered the cheapest rental Hertz had, the Kia Microscopia, but Justin upgraded slightly when he discovered that Kia would not hold our children, much less our luggage) and left Utah’s Dixie for Narnia and the North! (well, Provo at least). While in Provo Julia generally ran wild with her cousins Jacob and Joshua as cohorts; Andrew, newly turned one, would have loved to join in the fun, but when he walks he holds his arms in a position of rigid extension and looks rather like a zombie—so Julia was terrified of him. This wild rumpus proved quite a strain on the serenity and repose of Justin’s good father, whose customary companions consist of cerebral statisticians and compliant rocks—hence the society of two-year-olds wreaked comparative chaos, but he loves his grandkids and was glad in his heart for the disruption.
In a nod to scholastic decorum, Justin went twice to the Harold B. Lee Library and pretended to study for his post-festal examinations, an iniquitous holdover from bygone days to which the senior faculty of the Yale Law School still doggedly clings. During one of these naps amid the stacks, Lia, the girls, and the rest of Justin’s family (his father, of course, excepted) went to Salt Lake to visit the famed “Discovery Museum.” Lia’s favorite exhibit was a complex system of levers and pulleys and cranks and whatnot which, ala Mousetrap, transferred balls from point A to point B via the most circuitous rout imaginable. Julia was enamored with the grocery store in a sort of mini-village that capitalized on the affinity of all small children for feeling big. Eli was most pleased when they broke for lunch.
We also capitalized on being in Provo to reunite with some old friends from mission and Wymount days. On Friday the 29th we had a lovely visit with Shawn and Kate Ballard, their sister-in-law, Annie, and two of her three kids. Kate, Lia, and Annie discussed their plans to reform American education and transform the future; Shawn and Justin talked BYU football. On Sunday the 31st, when all the world arose as one man person to hail Justin on his 25th birthday, we drove north to the pleasant enclave of Kaysville, Utah where we crashed the family party of Jordan and Alison Johnsen. While there, we learned to our great delight that two members of Jordan’s family have for some time been assiduous readers of our illustrious blog. One of them even had the goodness to compliment us on what she deemed our delightful prose—we blushed with modest pride, suffused with inward happiness. We loved our time with the Johnsens, during which we were feted with a fantastic meal and included a series of family games, including one, now out of print but called Oodles, which we loved but were catastrophically bad at (at least, Jordan’s cousin-in-law, Michael, was bewilderingly good at it, which amounted to the same thing). The only down side to the evening was the Jordan’s aunt brought with her a menacingly fearsome Doberman pincer, nearly eight feet tall with foaming fangs and angry eyes . . . .Well, actually it was a five-pound pooch, about eleven inches high and as benignly docile a creature as ever lived, but Julia, timorous as a desert pansy, shrieked with terror and clung fervently to one or the other of us any time the beast was in the room. We’re both brave and hardy souls, so Julia’s cowardice must be either a genetic accident or some atavistic effeminacy—the miserable dowry of Lia’s French line. On the morn of New Year’s Day, Justin, together with his BYU 34th-ward cronies, broke into a random church house in Orem and engaged in some of the best amateur basketball East of Westwood and West of Durham and Chapel Hill (though in an effort to save the church’s backboards, Justin dunked only softly). That evening we joined the Ballards and Dave and Mary Pinegar for a New Year’s edition of Family Home Evening. It was a rich experience, and we greatly value all of these renewals of old friendships (though Lia kept reminding Justin that we’ve only been gone four months; it seems like years).
Together with his dad, Justin watched some thirty-seven bowl games in their entirety—a pernicious waste of time but totally redeemed by the glory and splendor of Boise State’s magnificent 43-42 overtime win against Oklahoma. Lia was decidedly more industrious, spearheading a gingerbread house construction project that delighted young and old—all were glad at the chance to work with their hands while pilfering the “construction materials.” Lia’s own gingerbread house was actually a house of worship—a gothic cathedral to make St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s look like child’s play. Samuel and Jacob Tolley built a mighty fortress with a frosting moat. Julia built a boxcar with a getaway slide in the back, just in case.
One day Justin took Julia and Jacob into the basement where they played “Hide the School Bus,” an imaginative improvisation of Justin’s where two people hide in the closet while the third hides a toy school bus somewhere in the room. Jacob caught the spirit of the thing immediately and had a riotous time. Julia loved it too, but she kept hiding the school bus, as she put it, “on [my] hands”—i.e. not at all. We’re afraid she’ll never amount to anything in capture the flag when that special time in her life comes.
On the 2nd of January, a Tuesday, we piled into our rental ride and made our way back to St. George, but we didn’t leave Provo before Julia and Eli both borrowed chest colds from their cousins to take back to Connecticut with them. Careful not to forget anything, Justin managed to forget his backpack, which included the laptop that carries all of his law school lecture notes. But his redoubtable mother caught his error immediately and dashed on behind us, heading us off just before Nephi, restoring the backpack, and winning our everlasting gratitude.
Trevor had left for Europe while we were in Provo, and we found things in Dixie run amok in his absence. Caci, Trevor’s loyal spouse, avenged her irritation at being left behind by incrementally eroding the masculinity of their two-month-old son, Jace—by the time we arrived she had taken to calling the lad, “Jacey-pooh” and dressing him in nineteenth-century frills. Her vengeance still not sated, Caci undertook to sabotage the very purpose for which Trevor had gone to Europe. As part of his commercial documentary about traveling in Europe, Trevor decided to insert a spot demonstrating the ease with which the European traveler may video conference with one’s beloved-back-at-home at one of Europe’s innumerable internet cafes. Caci pretended to play along, but had the temerity to disfigure her hair with a blazing streak of immaculately white hair dye. She looked like a veritable sorceress, leading the viewers of Trevor’s documentary to wonder, “Who wouldn’t flee to Europe from a wife like that?” and wholly undermining the publicitary value of Trevor’s work. Feeling Trevor’s pain, we played “Ticket to Ride: Europe,” one of Caci’s favorite games, without her. Twice.
The saddest part about our vacation (Cookie Monster’s demise excepted) was that it ended. Early—and we mean iniquitously early—on the morning of Thursday, January 4th, Mom and Dad Suttner drove us all back to Lucifer’s home town where we hopped on another airplane and flew first to Minneapolis, then to Hartford and home. The flights back were miserable, but their misery included an unhealthy dose of the scatological—and as this is our blog and not Rosalyn’s, we shall not plunge into details. “Never fly cross country with two little ones,” as Isocrates was wont to say in his latter years. At least we made it home in one piece.
But in addition to following anxiously the merry-go-round of lords and commons you have been wondering, in anguish, what we have been up to during the fortnight and more since the most recent installment of our illustrious Review. And, O dear Reader, had we but world enough and time we could a tale unfold which would dazzle all the senses and startle your incredulity into a stupor of bewildered awe. Alas, we have all the time in the world but not quite world enough in time, so you’ll have to settle for a brief (which for us is, of course, a term to be read relatively with Tolstoi and Richardson in mind) summary of our recent holiday vacation back to the great American West, back to the land of our respective adolescences, back to the mountains high where the clear blue sky arches over the vale of the free, back to the rolling hills of Deseret, back to the erstwhile uncivilized wilderness where our progenitors mistakenly thought the federal government of our mighty Republic would let them very well alone—in short, back home.
On Wednesday, 20 December 2006, Justin attended the final lecture of his first semester of study at the Yale Law School, where the great Guido Calabresi gave the class his infallible opinions of the merits and demerits of every other member of the faculty before revealing the grand secrets of torts, life, law, and the universe in a ringing peroration of the sort only a vigorous, elderly Italian gentleman can give. Something about Guido’s final sermon awakened in Justin the nostalgic memory of his own final days in Italy as a missionary, and he exited the classroom quickly lest it become apparent to any of his classmates that this was an emotional thing for him.
Thursday (21 December): We awoke early in the morning and loaded into the Bull and headed north to the Bradley airport in Hartford, shaken with trepidation and fear that the Bull might not make it that far. But the Bull came through in the end, perpetual threats of overheating notwithstanding. Airport security was less painful than anticipated, and we made it in plenty of time for our early flight to Philadelphia and from there to Dis—we mean, Las Vegas. We were in Philly around noon, and Justin suggested that they grab a bite to eat, but Lia assured him that there would be a meal on our next flight. Since Lia had booked the tickets, Justin trustingly, but nigh fatally, assumed she knew what she was talking about. The flight from the city of brotherly love to the cesspool of carnality, lasciviousness, and baseness of every shade and hue was a painful one, highlighted by a complimentary bag containing three peanuts and one check (which we assume is the singular for the cereal Chex ©) and hours of strikingly inane travel footage, thunderously inane Christmas music videos (including an utterly blasphemous rendition of “What Child is This?” by a Vanessa Williams bearing frightfully horrid bangs—though this was compensated by a crazy symphonic piece called “Christmas in Sarajevo” that reached toward the soaring heights of nutty, Eastern European techno-razzle), and the holiday anti-classic, A Christmas Story. And, pace Lia, there was no meal. We arrived in Vegas hungry as a thousand grizzlies in an aquarium, but quite happy to see Dad Suttner and Lia’s ebullient sister, Jini. Lia informed her father that we were famished and asked that we stop somewhere for a bite, the special meal awaiting us at home notwithstanding. We ended up stopping at a Petro station, whose portentous etymology promised either stones or gasoline; we ended up devouring a pair of plastic burritos that made the meal at home shine by comparison. At length, we wound our way back to Little Valley Road, where Lia’s mother and grandmother feted us with a feast fit for a king.
But as happy as we were about finally securing a hearty meal, this otherwise happy day was blackened by deep tragedy, as the Philly-Vegas flight claimed two victims: our worn but cherished copy of Will Durant’s The Renaissance and Julia’s nine-inch, much-toted and yogurt-encrusted Cookie Monster doll. We can purchase another copy of The Renaissance for a pittance on-line; Cookie is irreplaceable. Justin suggested to Lia that we simply tell Julia that Cookie had “gone on vacation” (not, technically, a lie), but Lia suggested the more pragmatic approach of praising her Elmo doll to the skies.
Friday (22 December): In the evening we joined in a family concert for “Nanni,” Lia’s maternal grandmother, whose flight back to her native Kentucky left late that night. Justin made the house rumble with his tenorial Italian bravado, while Lia soothed even so excitable a creature as her father with her mellifluous sonority. Trevor and Kinsi took turns on the guitar, and Caci chipped in a song or two. Julia, amazingly, slept through it all on the floor in the middle of it all. With a nod to Nanni, Lia then jumped on the piano bench and accompanied us all in singing, “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Way Down South in Dixie,” before moving on to a number of Christmas carols and hymns.
The days get a bit muddled in our generally impeccable memory at this point, so we shall proceed in generalities. We stayed in St. George until December 27th. The Suttners’ neighbors, the Somervilles, were kind enough to let us stay in their home while they headed toward the sands of the desert where they could, uninterrupted, wreak havoc and cacophony with their mutli-wheeled machines of mayhem (Dad Suttner once told an elders quorum that “English is Jay Somerville’s second language; motorhead is his first”). We split the household chores—Justin fed the Gila-monster (which required the handling of live worms) while Lia fed and played with the dogs and set them up in the garage each night. One evening early in the week, Lia planned to lead the dogs from the backyard, around the house, and into the garage from the outside. In preparation for this journey, she asked Justin to make certain the garage door was “open.” Justin peeked into the garage and, sure enough, the side door stood wide open, so Justin informed Lia of this and headed back to the bedroom where we slept and the Gila-monster whom he fed. Advised by her brothers—who religiously played X-box at the Somerville’s place some sixteen hours a day—that the Somervilles usually bring the dogs through the house, Lia did so, gently leading them into the garage and closing the house door behind them. Thirty minutes later, as we lay in bed, Lia turned to me and asked, “When you said the door to the garage was open, did you mean it was open?” “Uh, yes. Why?” “Oh no!” We don’t know how long the dogs stayed in the garage, but they certainly left through the open door before Lia got up to check on them. She asked her brothers where to look for them and they, eyes fixed steadfast and immovable to the X-box screen, muttered, “They’ll come back in the morning.” Thankfully, they came back much sooner than that. Lia heard them bounding around outside and, with Davy’s help, corralled them back into the garage, shutting both doors this time before retiring for the night.
On the day after Christmas, Justin went golfing with Dad Suttner and Davy, both of whom received shiny new golf clubs for Christmas. They all golfed miserably enough but all had a fine time nevertheless. Justin thought often of Mr. Churchill’s definition of golf as the vain attempt to place a confounded sphere into an undersized hole with an instrument entirely unsuited to the task. They rented two golf carts and Justin initially was foolhardy enough to ride in the cart driven by Davy. After two or three holes of automotive terror, he switched to ride with Dad Suttner, who was not himself an altogether reassuring driver, but it was nonetheless an improvement.
But while Justin’s first trip to the links after an absence of many years was lackluster, he dominated the two family football games of the trip: in the first he returned an interception for a touchdown and caught the game-winning touchdown after Davy’s misguided attempt at an interception; in the second he scored all five of his team’s touchdowns, overcoming the double-team of both Davy and Trevor for the final and victory-sealing score. When he awoke the next morning, he could hardly move but was gratified beyond degree. Trevor and Davy bested him, however, in an improvise game of kickball home run derby they invented at a local schoolyard (Davy won that one; Trevor came in second). The triumvirate’s insatiable thirst for competition even overcame Justin’s fierce electronic gamophobia and he teamed up with Trevor in a couple of desperate, but alas unsuccessful, bids to trump Davy at “Madden ’06.” (We must here note two things: (1) Davy is an incorrigible cheater; and (2) Although Justin relented and did, in fact, play a video game, it was a harmless sports game and not one of those unholy rampages of virtual slaughter that are unweaving apace the very fabric of our civilization.)
Julia loved life in the desert, though she managed to forget that she is potty-trained, a mental lapse that persists to this writing and has proved sorely vexing to her hapless parents. Her favorite Christmas present was a Dora-the-Explorer version of Candy Land, and her love for the game paved the way for one of the tenderest scenes of the trip: one day, after Dad Suttner had spent the morning stomping frantically through the house and hurling imprecations in every direction in a vain effort to rouse his backsliding progeny to some vigilance in keeping the place clean, muttering all the while that he simply must get on his way to work, Julia scampered up to him, game in hand, and sweetly asked, “Opa, you want to play Dora’s Candy-Land with me?” Opa looked down in anguish at this toddler temptress; his heart melted, but his lips said no.
Lia loved being back home as well, though she spent most of the week amazed at the growth of her youngest sister. “Can you believe that Chari’s 5’8”?!!?!?” she thundered incredulously to anyone who would listen. We all could, for she is, but this didn’t stop Lia from digressing into a broken record of perpetual disbelief.
On Wednesday the 27th we rented a car (a flashy Toyota Corolla—Lia had ordered the cheapest rental Hertz had, the Kia Microscopia, but Justin upgraded slightly when he discovered that Kia would not hold our children, much less our luggage) and left Utah’s Dixie for Narnia and the North! (well, Provo at least). While in Provo Julia generally ran wild with her cousins Jacob and Joshua as cohorts; Andrew, newly turned one, would have loved to join in the fun, but when he walks he holds his arms in a position of rigid extension and looks rather like a zombie—so Julia was terrified of him. This wild rumpus proved quite a strain on the serenity and repose of Justin’s good father, whose customary companions consist of cerebral statisticians and compliant rocks—hence the society of two-year-olds wreaked comparative chaos, but he loves his grandkids and was glad in his heart for the disruption.
In a nod to scholastic decorum, Justin went twice to the Harold B. Lee Library and pretended to study for his post-festal examinations, an iniquitous holdover from bygone days to which the senior faculty of the Yale Law School still doggedly clings. During one of these naps amid the stacks, Lia, the girls, and the rest of Justin’s family (his father, of course, excepted) went to Salt Lake to visit the famed “Discovery Museum.” Lia’s favorite exhibit was a complex system of levers and pulleys and cranks and whatnot which, ala Mousetrap, transferred balls from point A to point B via the most circuitous rout imaginable. Julia was enamored with the grocery store in a sort of mini-village that capitalized on the affinity of all small children for feeling big. Eli was most pleased when they broke for lunch.
We also capitalized on being in Provo to reunite with some old friends from mission and Wymount days. On Friday the 29th we had a lovely visit with Shawn and Kate Ballard, their sister-in-law, Annie, and two of her three kids. Kate, Lia, and Annie discussed their plans to reform American education and transform the future; Shawn and Justin talked BYU football. On Sunday the 31st, when all the world arose as one man person to hail Justin on his 25th birthday, we drove north to the pleasant enclave of Kaysville, Utah where we crashed the family party of Jordan and Alison Johnsen. While there, we learned to our great delight that two members of Jordan’s family have for some time been assiduous readers of our illustrious blog. One of them even had the goodness to compliment us on what she deemed our delightful prose—we blushed with modest pride, suffused with inward happiness. We loved our time with the Johnsens, during which we were feted with a fantastic meal and included a series of family games, including one, now out of print but called Oodles, which we loved but were catastrophically bad at (at least, Jordan’s cousin-in-law, Michael, was bewilderingly good at it, which amounted to the same thing). The only down side to the evening was the Jordan’s aunt brought with her a menacingly fearsome Doberman pincer, nearly eight feet tall with foaming fangs and angry eyes . . . .Well, actually it was a five-pound pooch, about eleven inches high and as benignly docile a creature as ever lived, but Julia, timorous as a desert pansy, shrieked with terror and clung fervently to one or the other of us any time the beast was in the room. We’re both brave and hardy souls, so Julia’s cowardice must be either a genetic accident or some atavistic effeminacy—the miserable dowry of Lia’s French line. On the morn of New Year’s Day, Justin, together with his BYU 34th-ward cronies, broke into a random church house in Orem and engaged in some of the best amateur basketball East of Westwood and West of Durham and Chapel Hill (though in an effort to save the church’s backboards, Justin dunked only softly). That evening we joined the Ballards and Dave and Mary Pinegar for a New Year’s edition of Family Home Evening. It was a rich experience, and we greatly value all of these renewals of old friendships (though Lia kept reminding Justin that we’ve only been gone four months; it seems like years).
Together with his dad, Justin watched some thirty-seven bowl games in their entirety—a pernicious waste of time but totally redeemed by the glory and splendor of Boise State’s magnificent 43-42 overtime win against Oklahoma. Lia was decidedly more industrious, spearheading a gingerbread house construction project that delighted young and old—all were glad at the chance to work with their hands while pilfering the “construction materials.” Lia’s own gingerbread house was actually a house of worship—a gothic cathedral to make St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s look like child’s play. Samuel and Jacob Tolley built a mighty fortress with a frosting moat. Julia built a boxcar with a getaway slide in the back, just in case.
One day Justin took Julia and Jacob into the basement where they played “Hide the School Bus,” an imaginative improvisation of Justin’s where two people hide in the closet while the third hides a toy school bus somewhere in the room. Jacob caught the spirit of the thing immediately and had a riotous time. Julia loved it too, but she kept hiding the school bus, as she put it, “on [my] hands”—i.e. not at all. We’re afraid she’ll never amount to anything in capture the flag when that special time in her life comes.
On the 2nd of January, a Tuesday, we piled into our rental ride and made our way back to St. George, but we didn’t leave Provo before Julia and Eli both borrowed chest colds from their cousins to take back to Connecticut with them. Careful not to forget anything, Justin managed to forget his backpack, which included the laptop that carries all of his law school lecture notes. But his redoubtable mother caught his error immediately and dashed on behind us, heading us off just before Nephi, restoring the backpack, and winning our everlasting gratitude.
Trevor had left for Europe while we were in Provo, and we found things in Dixie run amok in his absence. Caci, Trevor’s loyal spouse, avenged her irritation at being left behind by incrementally eroding the masculinity of their two-month-old son, Jace—by the time we arrived she had taken to calling the lad, “Jacey-pooh” and dressing him in nineteenth-century frills. Her vengeance still not sated, Caci undertook to sabotage the very purpose for which Trevor had gone to Europe. As part of his commercial documentary about traveling in Europe, Trevor decided to insert a spot demonstrating the ease with which the European traveler may video conference with one’s beloved-back-at-home at one of Europe’s innumerable internet cafes. Caci pretended to play along, but had the temerity to disfigure her hair with a blazing streak of immaculately white hair dye. She looked like a veritable sorceress, leading the viewers of Trevor’s documentary to wonder, “Who wouldn’t flee to Europe from a wife like that?” and wholly undermining the publicitary value of Trevor’s work. Feeling Trevor’s pain, we played “Ticket to Ride: Europe,” one of Caci’s favorite games, without her. Twice.
The saddest part about our vacation (Cookie Monster’s demise excepted) was that it ended. Early—and we mean iniquitously early—on the morning of Thursday, January 4th, Mom and Dad Suttner drove us all back to Lucifer’s home town where we hopped on another airplane and flew first to Minneapolis, then to Hartford and home. The flights back were miserable, but their misery included an unhealthy dose of the scatological—and as this is our blog and not Rosalyn’s, we shall not plunge into details. “Never fly cross country with two little ones,” as Isocrates was wont to say in his latter years. At least we made it home in one piece.
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6 comments:
Well, you will be happy to know that my hair was miraculously transformed by the mere act of parting it 2 inches further to the right. Presto-- fixed! We hope the Tickle Me Elmo can sooth Julia's aching heart and that Eli continues to be such a sweet happy bouncing bundle of chub! It was great to see ya, and as always the post was hilarious!
Lest you tear the house apart in a tremendous search, I will take the time to inform you that you were also "careful not to forget" Julia's new picture book and Eli's tights when you left Kaysville. If there are no objections, we will mail said items back to you this week. We would have loved to monopolize more of your time while you were in Utah, but are none-the-less happy with the evening we had.
-A
It was lovely to see you.
Technically, I was the builder of the fortress and Samuel was the builder of the tower. Thought you might want to know.
I should probably add that Julia's house was not a boxcar with a getaway slide (I'm afraid I wasn't that creative). It was supposed to be a house with a regular pointed roof but the roof wouldn't stay up. Anyway, I figured Julia really just wanted to put candy on the thing and lick frosting off her fingers. At any rate, that's what you get when you have her aunt help her--all my creative ingenuity is being sucked dry by my dissertation.
Hi Lia! It's nice to read about your family's adventures. My my, you are quite the sesquipedalianist aren't you? I found it oddly reminiscent to the times that I endeavor to read anything by Neal A. Maxwell. Dictionary in one hand, large inspiring book in the other. Although I am expanding my vocabulary daily, I found it necessary, (and quite enjoyable) to visit Webster while reading your blog. So thanks for the ed-ja-ma-cation. We can all use more of our brains, thanks for encouraging mine to make more room for vocabulary. Well, for vocabulary words that are used for conversations other than those to which my brain seems to be encompassed, almost monomaniacal about... that being anything music related.
Happy to hear your Holiday was enjoyable!
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