Dear Reader,

We salute you on the occasion of our first post in this brutish, nasty, and short month the ancients called February. We spent last Sunday evening attending a special fireside of the New Haven Institute rather than writing this blog. The speaker was Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Elder Holland is the finest speaker in the Church and was absolutely magnificent on this occasion. An emotional man under normal circumstances (“I weep at the ribbon-cutting of a grocery store,” he said when contrasting himself to the generally stoic President Hinckley), Elder Holland was particularly touched by the experience of returning to his old stomping grounds and gathering with a larger congregation of New Haven saints than might ever have seemed possible when Elder Holland was a Yale graduate student in the early 1970s. He told us of the tiny band of institute students he taught in a tiny room on campus. “I will never forget,” he said, “the faith and the fire of those evenings, evenings when I felt as though my feet never touched the ground as I glided home.” More than once Elder Holland expressed his profound hope that our experiences at Yale and in New Haven can mean to us what his experience here meant to him. May it be so.

Monday (February 12): The psalmist says the years of man are three score years and ten. Experience says the memory of man runs two score minutes and less. Who can remember what we did last Monday? [Justin may have forgotten, but we have not: I braved a very shady part of town, literally on the other side of the tracks, to pick up a Hispanic sister in our ward whom I had invited to make cookies with the girls, Callie, Addie, and I. Having parked the car and wandered the blustery streets to find her elusive address, I finally had to use the phone in a nail salon and inquire after her in the Cigar and Lottery Ticket shop over which she resides before I located said sister. It ended up a successful excursion, nevertheless, and I may have found myself a Spanish teacher!]

Tuesday (February 13): Eli lingers precariously on the verge of crawling; Julia proudly proves that she can crawl already. The ladies of the house attended ward playgroup where Eli and Julia reveled in a romping tribute to that favorite of the hagiographers: St. Valentine. Julia distributed hand-made heart-shaped construction papers on which she had tacked smaller, contrasting-colored hearts (an activity entitled “Fun with Glue”, we are told), and which boasted such worthy sentiments as “I like your pants, they’re really cute,” and “If I had an imaginary friend, I’d imagine it just like you”, Valentinian creeds which left Julia suffering wary glances from her playmates and ardently requesting Daddy’s help for next year’s verse. Apocalyptic-sounding meteorologists warned of an impending maelstrom of ice and snow, so when night fell we all covered ourselves well and huddled against the gathering storm—all except Eli, who threw open the nearest window and shouted defiance at the menacing skies. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks,” she thundered. “Rumble thy bellyful! Smite flat the thick rotundity of the world!” etc.

Wednesday (February 14): Justin woke up before dawn with the uneasy feeling that there was something special about this day that his fickle and vacillating memory just couldn’t call to mind. After some moments of paralyzing anxiety, it came to him: today was the anniversary of Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of holy roman emperor Henry IV in 1076, as well as the anniversary of the 1918 film release of Tarzan of the Apes. “Ah good,” our hero thought, “my memory’s still intact.” And back to sleep he fell. But the intervention of Cupid himself soon roused Justin anew and he felt, though he knew not why, that he ought to do something of a niceish sort for the fair consort who lay at his side. But what? At length he decided on breakfast in bed. Soon the pans on the kitchen stove were sizzling to the tune of mediocre toast and middling eggs. The meal seemed to Justin to lack balance, so he searched in vain for some bacon or a near substitute. But he did find some Italian sausage in the freezer, which he hurriedly thawed and tossed in the pan. When the meal was complete Justin’s heart swelled with pride, his apartment with smoke. Some strategic maneuvering of doors, windows, and bathroom rugs kept the smoke alarm from bidding the entire neighborhood an unseemly Happy Valentine’s, and soon Justin was ready to present his culinary artistry to his unsuspecting—because somnolent—wife. Lia was thrilled, feeling every inch a princess even as she gently suggested to her ingenuous husband that Italian sausage holds no place on a breakfast tray under any circumstances.
Justin stayed with the girls in the afternoon while Lia went to French class from 4 till 6. About 5:30, the phone rang and Travis and Lindsay Sevy asked if they couldn’t still redeem the offer we had extended to watch their two children while they went to dinner for V-day. Justin readily assented, thinking that if he could handle Julia and Eli 1-on-2 then he and Lia could surely handle Julia, Eli, Mayah, and Asher 2-on-4. But apparently the Sevys called from just outside our apartment door, for when the phone hung up, the doorbell rang, and hapless Justin stood face to face with four diminutive yahoos whose collective exuberance intimated it would yield to no authority. But Justin survived until Lia returned and there followed a pleasantly riotous evening, marked by Eli’s and Asher’s untrammeled contentment and Julia and Mayah’s alternately fighting tooth and nail for any given toy and exchanging embraces as the warmest and best of friends. Ah, to be two again.
Plenty of snow throughout the day. The streets didn’t really get plowed because, the city said, it is better to leave a lot of snow in the street than to plow it and risk there being in its place a little ice.

Thursday (February 15): Lia went to R.S. book club in the evening. Justin stayed home with the girls. When the course of time had run from “about time Lia got home” to “high time Lia got home,” Justin’s preliminary fuming was preempted by the timely arrival of Travis and Mayah Sevy, who found themselves expelled from the book club meeting of which they were ostensible hosts. Julia and Mayah quickly resumed their loving quarrel of the previous evening while Justin and Travis discussed the existential anxiety provoked by their vocational insecurities. After Travis had finished a florid soliloquy on the subject just named, Eli’s turned from the stack of paper she had been rapturously reducing to rubble and smiled, “Il est bien-a-dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Lia came home soon thereafter.

Friday (February 16): Justin celebrated the anniversary of Grant’s capture of Fort Donaldson in 1862 by plodding through page after tedious page of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, asking the stars at every turn why all philosophers cannot write like Voltaire. In the evening we had dinner at the apartment of our neighbors, Eduardo and Marfesa (from Brazil), and a couple of other couples. Eli left them dazzled by her charms; Julia left them befuddled by her loquacity. The meal was fine, the company finer.

Saturday (February 17): We were so busy this day that Michael Jordan’s 44th birthday passed almost unobserved. Justin spent much of the day going back and forth from a conference for LDS graduate students in religious studies at the Yale Divinity School, the highlight of which was Justin’s reunion with professors Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman and other friends from the Joseph Smith seminar of last summer.
The real highlight of the day came early in the afternoon when the day train from Boston brought Grandma Patti into town. Julia was outside herself with excitement and Eli caught the disease. Happy as we were to see Justin’s mother we weren’t above cashing in on her arrival for a special night together. As soon as Justin returned from Professor Givens’ closing address at the conference, he and Lia arrayed themselves to the sartorial nines and headed downtown for a night at the Shubert Theater and a Yale Opera performance of Puccini’s La Bohème. But downtown New Haven on a Saturday evening is a holy bedlam, and we were reduced to stopping in a parking garage for the heady price of $10. Being newcomers at this premium parking business, we rolled down our window to ask the attendant how to proceed. He responded, “You’re all set,” and left us to park another car. Giving the attendant’s words their commonest English construction we headed to the theater, assuming we would pay for parking upon our return. So what was our surprise when the redoubtable attendant soon trailed us in hot pursuit, racing wildly over the icy sidewalks and hurling imprecations in our general direction. When he caught up with us he issued a stern reprimand: “This is not how it works.” Irritated, Lia handed the man our $10 while Justin commented unfavorably upon the man’s mother in Italian. It was a scary moment, then, when we learned the man was Italian; but our fears were allayed when we discovered he was also Sicilian.
The opera was a smashing success, but Lia’s ardent hopes to the contrary, the heroine, to everyone’s great surprise, was nevertheless struck with tuberculosis and died in her lover’s arms. May we all have the good fortune to die so geographically placed.

[Sorry no pictures; our camera is caput].