‘Twere Well It Were Done Quickly

All of our entries are good but last week’s was especially so. All was there: grace and good taste, vigor and verve, wit and wisdom, charity and charm, pathos and pictures. We do not say this to boast. Indeed, it has been wisely said that genius can never boast; it can only speak truth, though the effect is the same. And how many comments has such an entry elicited to date? Countless thousands? Nay, fond Reader. Several hundred? Nay again. Thirty-four? Nay, Reader, not thirty-four, but two. Two! Two? Yes, Reader, two. Alas we kid not. And those two, moreover, came from two readers—faithful, diligent, charming, intelligent, amiable, and well-dressed—who hail from outside the Collings and Suttner clans. But while we would plead with our intergalactic readership to bestow upon us a proverbial break, our deep disappointment will not keep us from proceeding with the latest installment of our weekly Review. Perhaps, on second thought, our kindred readers have been sunk and buried beneath the inexorable barrage of Trevor and Caci’s new blog with its daily forays into the uncharted crannies of the cosmos and its relentless salvos against the godless activism of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We proceed.

Monday (April 9): Lia made her skirt!!!! (The skirt, that is, that she didn’t get to make last week—a tragedy of which the two of you who read last week’s post have been painfully aware.) And a whale of a skirt it is. (And a whale of a time it took: Lia’s “practice skirt” for Julia took ninety minutes; the “real deal” for herself took nine hours). Lia also returned a hefty batch of library books to the New Haven Free Public Library. She had stuffed the books carefully into a cloth bag that she had used in the hospital last semester and now she recklessly emptied the entire contents of the bag. But the bag had not been entirely emptied after the last hospital adventure; it carried still the helpful handouts of a hospital visit from our local missionaries. So the NHFPL received, free of charge, a not inconsiderable stack of pass-along cards, a half dozen proclamations on the family, and “Joseph Smith Tells His Own Story” in French, English, Ugaritic, and Swahili.

Tuesday (April 10): In the evening after the girls went to bed, Justin went with Cameron LaDuke out to the stake center in Woodbridge to play basketball with a scattered hodge-podge of hoopsters from around the stake. Justin played better than he has in the past, calling up memories of his former glory. The only hitch in an otherwise flawless evening was when Justin nearly sprained his left wrist on the rim while executing a double-clutch, 360° reverse dunk on a fast break. But he healed quickly. In other news, Julia wore her pink Sleeping Beauty shirt, looked cute in it, and proceeded to wear the confounded thing every day for the rest of the week. In the afternoon Lia and the girls embulled on a quixotic venture out to a remote Stop-n-Shop in the mistaken belief they would there find cheap petrol. They didn’t, but Eli later commented that it was time well wasted.

Wednesday (April 11): Milestones for everyone. Eli, heretofore condemned to the ignominy of riding in a car seat that faced the Bull’s capacious rear, experienced the liberation that comes with the advent of a new, upright car seat that faces the front. Actually, Julia got the new car seat and Eli moved into Julia’s old one. Both girls fairly giggled with merriment as they rode facing the same way for the first time. It was a big day for Julia too. Lia, blind the perils of spoiling children, bought Julia a very respectable hobby horse (see “Humble Pie” by Jennifer Donnelly on the noxious influence of a hobby horse on a child’s character) which Julia, against her tradition of naming her toys after their genus, christened “Prince Phillip.” In the evening, Lia took the girls to the Sears photo place to have taken Eli’s one-year pictures (pardon the heresy Jeni; there is no Kiddy-Kandids in Connecticut, nor Olan Mills either). Justin, smelling misery, fled to bishopric meeting. He was wise to do so. The venture was a disaster, the responsibility for which lies squarely on the shoulders of the ineffable donkey who paraded, in all the grandeur of his inexpressible incompetence, as the Sears photographer. The production of eight resoundingly abysmal photos was the least of his sins. This inveterate jack-a-napes had the temerity to yell at Julia repeatedly for the crimson offense of trying to be helpful. Lia finally silenced this unctuous gorilla by pointing out that by however great a margin Julia’s vocabulary exceeded his own, she was still only two, so some allowances would have to be made. The cretin never spoke another word. If we weren’t writing on the Sabbath, we should have strong words to say against him. La madre del morone è sempre in cinta.

Thursday (April 12): It rained miserably and interminably and the girls were sick. The ladies were house-ridden, but this was no trial for great enthusiasts of Dora’s Candy Land. They played eighteen times, Lia winning fourteen times, Eli thrice, and Julia—who prizes drawing candy cards far above victory—once by accident. In the evening Lia went to book club for a riveting discussion of The Tao of Pooh. Justin stayed home with the girls, where Julia took inexplicably to calling Eli by her full name—Elisabeth. She thought this the cleverest concoction since the Petrarchan sonnet. Justin read in the news today that Kurt Vonnegut, that irrepressible cynosure of American countercultural pessimism and spasmodic science fiction nihilism, died in his Manhattan home on Wednesday evening. So it goes.

Friday (April 13): We let Friday the Thirteenth pass with a thoroughly un-American supply of self-induced fright and audiovisual carnage. But it was Justin’s parents’ anniversary, and Julia suggested it would be well to show respect for the elderly. We did, however, go to Blockbuster to take the almost unheard-of step of renting a movie. The selection seemed considerably worse (in all respects) than the last time we went to a video store, giving the lie to Justin’s prognosis on that former occasion that Hollywood had at last reached the nadir of iniquity. Unable to find anything viewable from the past decade (Julia’s repeated and fervent plugs for Nacho Libre notwithstanding), we opted for The Bells of St. Mary’s, a 1945 cinematic ditty starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. We succeeded in watching it for about twenty minutes; Lia seems eager to finish it on a later occasion. Earlier in the day Eli went to aquatherapy and made quite a breakthrough: she only cried for her first five minutes in the water and thereafter engaged in activities that were, at least on some level, therapeutic.

Saturday (April 14): Still crazed for distant Stop-n-Shop establishments, Lia and the girls headed to north Hamden for the only shopping center in the greater New Haven area with car shopping carts. Julia and Eli rode in the car together and were the very picture of happiness. Lia made better time than ever before on a grocery shopping excursion (forty minutes) and decided to make a quick stop at the Goodwill store in search of a skirt to replace the knee-length monstrosity her puritan husband made her send back some months ago. Within five minutes, she found the perfect skirt (and aren’t they all perfect?) and headed for the cash register for yet another exit in record time. But alas, Julia had other ideas. She had to go potty and took her merry time doing so. In an effort to inspire greater haste on Julia’s part, Lia and Eli waited outside with mounting impatience. In vain. Waiting outside only multiplied Lia’s embarrassment as she realized that all the store could indeed hear as her vocally gifted child sang her merry heart out, enthroned upon the public commode. At great length, Julia mercifully announced that she was done. So, on such a note, is this blog.