To Battle With Trolls in the Vaults of Heart and Brain

The dust has settled. The 64 have been methodically, meticulously, madly whittled down to 4. Your bracket lies in ruins and you are the laughing stock of the office March Madness pool. You have vowed solemnly, like Hannibal over the ancestral grave, that next year will be your year, that your now gleefully scornful co-workers will then consume a hearty repast of a capacious crow, unbaked and unadulterated. In the meantime, you tell yourself (rather unconvincingly), there are more important things in life than the NCAA basketball tournament—things like . . . (and after a moment’s concentrated thought you come up with) The Collings Family Adventures! So here you are and here, after a fashion, are we. Come now, and let us adventure together.

Monday (March 19): Our editor-in-chief claims he cannot remember what transpired this day. Obviously he got the better end of it. The morning started with a quick MRI, a test which sounds more desirable than its more common counterpart because of the adjective “quick”, but don’t be fooled. What was Eli’s terror at being strait-jacketed to a table by one attendant while another taped adult-sized ear-plugs into her 11-month old ears and then being plunged into a spinning, screaming (literally, hence the ear-plugs), tube of 3 ft diameter. Eli screamed right along with the multispectral rays being beamed at her for the full 5 minute duration of the test. Her mother’s arms and the consolatory toy handed her afterwards assuaged her terror none too quickly. We then moved on to a check-up with Dr. Duncan (only about a 45 minute wait in the interim) where it was pronounced the shunt is working. Other than that pronouncement—one my own daily measurements of her head attest—they said nothing particularly helpful. After spending the whole morning at the mercy of other people’s schedules, Lia and Eli took matters into their own hands and took the Yale shuttle home. Eli, between her busy morning and the gentle bumps of New Haven potholes, was soon fast asleep.

Tuesday (March 20): Dutifully calling neurology to see what action Dr. Ment (wife, incidentally, of the legendary Dr. Duncan) would now like to take, we learned that the first round of genetic screening came back showing Eli’s chromosomes are perfectly normal. Part II of the testing will come back in another month or so. We also played with Eli’s physical therapist.

Wednesday (March 21): In the early afternoon Lia performed an act of Christian charity by inviting Damaris Kingery—who spent last week and this battling alone against her two rumbustious sons and free-spirited daughter while her husband idles about in South America on some unidentified expedition in the name of truth and science—and her brood to meet up at McDonald’s where, it was hoped, the mothers could rest while their respective children entertained one another. But the Kingery clan was delayed in its arrival and had to depart for another engagement after only a few minutes. This was long enough, however, for Julia and Jonah Kingery to engage in the infectious, mutual giggling that passes among toddlers for friendship. Julia’s delight was double, for she was furnished by and indulgent mother with ice cream and French fries [“Freedom Fries,” insists our patriotic editor] which she daintily devoured while awaiting the Kingeryian arrival. Julia spent much of the rest of the day sounding a perpetual paean to the glories of these sumptuous treats. After McDonald’s, the three ladies met up with Justin at home and we headed as a family to Wallingford, about twenty minutes to the north of New Haven, where Eli met for the first time with yet another physical therapist, this one promising to submit our youngest child to a treatment parading under the sobriquet of “aquatherapy.” As Eli loves baths almost as much as paper itself, she is almost certain to relish aquatherapy. But this time around she was only given a tantalizing glimpse of what is to be.

Thursday (March 22): In the afternoon we piled into the famous Bull for a trip to Modell’s Sporting Goods® where we, that is Justin, purchased Lia’s birthday present. This consisted of two tennis rackets—pink for the birthday princess and blue for her royal opponent—and an assortment of tennis balls with which Lia and Justin intend to take up the elegant art of tennis. Our initial advantages are that Lia took a tennis class at BYU and Justin knows how to keep score—i.e. when it is appropriate to count by fifteens and when by tens, and that, if not why, it is never appropriate to use so mean a term as “zero.” (Eli suggests that, as it was the Arabs who first discovered zero, the snobbish alternative employment of “love” in tennis is merely another incarnation of Western cultural resentment. But Eli’s a blooming radical.) While at Modell’s Justin, in a fit of incautious spoilsry, bought Julia a variety pack of squishy sports balls that bear the effigies of the ubiquitous “Disney Princesses.” (referred to in the collective in the vain hope of fostering the illusion of an enhanced cumulative I.Q.) Julia accepted this boon appreciatively enough, but with an ominous air of entitlement against which we shall have to take preemptive measures. On the way home Eli intimated that Justin’s birthday gift for Lia was something less than supremely romantic, reminding her unimaginative father of the time when the Dauphin of France sent Henry V a gift of tennis balls and the latter Star of England irrupted with such hot indignation and torrential invective that the poor French messenger’s very ears stung with the fire of the royal declamations. “Yes Eli,” said Justin with the slightest hint of irritation. “I’ve read my Shakespeare; but if I recall correctly the spirit and setting of that gift were entirely different.” Eli took this rejoinder in the silence of a triumphant smile.

In the evening Justin went to a stake leadership meeting. He hitched a ride to the stake center with Mike and Rhonda Turner, a counselor in the bishopric and the primary respectively, who dropped off their tripartite offspring (all redheads, incidentally) with our neighbors, the Peacocks. The meeting opened with a communal song and announcements, after which the group was split by organization with an injunction that all the meetings close by 9 p.m. and Justin trotting off merrily with the other executive secretaries and the ward clerks. Justin’s group dutifully closed at 9; Rhonda’s group closed somewhat less dutifully around 9:15; by 10, Mike’s group was still going strong—or at least still going. At this point Arsinio Bernardo, the first counselor in our bishopric, exited the high council room, looked at Rhonda and Justin with plaintive incredulity, and announced, “I gotta go.” Asked if the meeting was almost over, Brother Bernardo laughed his negation and predicted discomfortingly, “That meeting’s going to go on forever.” By now Rhonda’s mounting impatience had combined with anxiety about the state of her children and their by-now-undoubtedly-overwhelmed babysitter to fill her cup of indignation to overflowing. She fairly burst into the high council room and ordered Mike’s immediate exit; this gentleman, torn between duty and Duty, meekly handed Rhonda (herself, incidentally, a redhead) the keys and told us he would get a ride home with the bishop. The upshot for Justin was a ride home that featured the full fire of Rhonda’s fury, complete with a solemn vow that Mike himself would be the humble recipient of “a Scotch blessing” when at last he came home. Poor, wretched fellow! Rhonda’s oration made even Henry V’s iambic thunder seem mild. It was quite a show. Justin felt more than compensated for the tedious training session that was his price of admission.

Friday (March 23): Julia went to Joy School in the morning where she learned about curiosity—an invaluable lesson not least because several generations of young people have, through the noxious influence of an impish monkey named after the Hanoverian kings, come to equate curiosity with mischief; this week’s Joy School lesson—which featured a magic show, a treasure hunt, and ruminations upon how things work generally—sought to militate against this trend. In the late afternoon we inaugurated the celebration of Lia’s birthday by driving the bull up the full labyrinthine course of Whitney Avenue to Kelly’s Kone Konnection (an establishment whose devotion to alliterative orthography casts it upon perilous acronymic waters) where we split a couple of malts among the four of us. Julia found the malt incommodiously drippy, and expressed her preference for the confectionery ice cream available at “Old McDonald’s”; Eli, however, thought she had stumbled upon some paradisiacal nectar. Justin shared with Eli and knew little peace. After dinner (home-made BBQ chicken pizza with generous helpings of cheese to appease Lia’s formaggiophilic husband) we went to the Church for a ward activity. This activity involved the adults playing “Bunko” and the kiddies playing “Corners” in another. Still a youthful 23, Lia was assigned to the latter group, where, unassisted by additional adult supervision, she presided over the destruction of a framed picture of Our Lord at the hands of one Isaac Turner (a redhead). Cognizant of Lia’s youth, we are inclined to forgive her; but with the birthday to be celebrated this Sunday our standards are sure to assume a rather more exacting character.

Saturday (March 24): Quite early this morning we had the happy experience of receiving a phone call from Lia’s father. During the course of Lia’s conversation with this gentleman the fact surfaced of the next day’s being Lia’s birthday. A surprised Father Suttner marveled, “And to think, I called you—unwittingly—the day before your birthday.” He seemed to think this a felicitous mixture of happenstance, inspiration, and anniversary of Monsonian proportions. To her credit, Lia did not mention that her father generally calls about every two days, so the fact of his missing her birthday by a day might suggest to some minds that the course of coincidence points precisely in the opposite direction. But let us not be detained by trivialities.
After securing a babysitter for the girls, Justin and Lia rode an unusually quiet bull to Edgewood Park (which Lia, never able to forget Provo, persisted in calling “Edgemont”) where they eagerly brandished their new tennis rackets and balls and engaged one another on the Federovian field of battle. Justin won, though Lia, partly on the strength of an unseemly array of Justinian double-faults, gave him a run for his money. After this friendly reincarnation of Bobby Riggs v. Billy Jean King (with the reverse result, of course), the happy pair made their way to an elegant Parisian restaurant (styled “Lou’s Big Top”) for lunch. They then raced to the rescue of their hapless babysitter.
Being babysat was a novel experience for Eli and not, to understate the case, to her liking. When night fell, she exacted vengeance. When Lia left the girls’ bedroom after TBR (“The Bedtime Ritual”), our sweet, docile, and ineffably cuddly Eli became a screeching fury. She was resolved, quite vocally, not to be abandoned again. Two hours later she was finally asleep, after much coaxing and coddling. Julia, who had been thoroughly delighted by the irregularities of the evening, finally slept as well. So, we trust, do you, Friend Reader.

Sunday (March 25): HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIA!!!!