The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor

Dear Reader,

Well, the hapless Paul Wolfowitz has capitulated at last and will vacate post-haste his post as the chief of the World Bank. So ends the drama that has marked these several weeks, rare in the history of mankind, during which more than eleven or so souls have known the name of that bank’s president (no more than eleven will ever know what such a president does). In more momentous, though less cheerful, news, our beloved Jazz lost 108-100 in game one of the Western Conference Finals to the clammy gorillas who call themselves the San Antonio Spurs, an organization fast rivaling the Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s as the most odious squadron in the history of the National Basketball Association (with Tim Duncan paralleling Joe Dumars as a lone bastion of decency amid a surrounding flurry of detestables). We bring such a lamentable fact to the attention of our sensitive readers, only to inaugurate the latest installment of this illustrious review with this augur of ardent defiance: San Antonio delenda est. Go Jazz.

Monday (May 14): If this day were a novel, and if in the grand Carlylean tradition that novel were to be given a Latin title, that title would certainly be something like “Lia Dominitrix” or “Lia Regina Commercium.” For on this day in the city of New Haven, Lia led her loyal brood of loquacious striplings to the local Goodwill store and, in the words of the inestimable Henry Fielding, “made out like a bandit” (the quotation is from the author’s cut of The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Wilde the Great). This feminine cynosure of purchasing prowess came home with a chalkboard (to further the cause of adding visual support to the homiletic fervor of our frequent lectures to Julia), secured at the fantastically economical price of $1; a pair of picture frames (which now house adorable portraits of the world’s two finest specimens of little girl) at the splendidly rate of $2; and, to top it all—indeed, to top all shoppers everywhere—a magnificent contraption readily employed in the soaring and sugary office of producing home-made ice cream. What might such an ice cream maker cost? Thousands, think you? (remember Napoleon’s ringing mantra in negotiations with President Jefferson over the purchase of a small tract of land in what was then western Louisiana: “Billions for ice cream, but not a cent for toppings”; “This was not altogether to the point,” wrote the eminent Virginian in that evening’s diary). Hundreds at least? Nay, fond reader: Lia haggled with the overmatched Goodwill employee (who spoke nary a word of English) until she secured the peerless product for the slender sum of six dollars. And all of this in one trip to Goodwill! And Hillary Clinton thinks SHE deserves to be the first female president of our venerable Republic! Che Donna!

Tuesday (May 15): We watched Callie this evening while her parents went to dinner with Addie’s father and stepmother. Julia was thrilled by this turn of events, though an otherwise otherworldly evening was marred by a series of petty property disputes which Justin, thick in the midst of cramming for a property final, brought to speedy and amicable resolutions (“What’s property among friends?” queried Julia in a great good humour. “Indeed!” responded Callie. “Just look at Abraham and Lot!”). The airways of Connecticut were inundated for much of the day with strenuous warnings about an imminent and prodigious tornado. It never came (“Not in Kansas after all!” roared Eli, who followed this quip with an ingenious discourse on the relative flatness of that state and the breakfast morsel known in most Western countries as the pancake and as the Euro-cake to some virulently anti-American Frenchmen).

Wednesday (May 16): Justin took his first exam of the semester this morning—in effect, his first authentic exam at the Yale Law School, since first-semester exams are calibrated in such a way that a chimpanzee of middling intelligence might fail them only with difficulty. Criminal law was the subject; it was not our hero’s finest hour but only time will reveal a grade. Justin then spent the rest of the day studying property and came at length to the conclusion, in rank betrayal of his Marxist upbringing, that he is, on the whole, in favor of it.

Thursday (May 17): For the second time in as many days neither of our beloved daughters took an afternoon nap. Lia, thrilled at the opportunity of extra hours with her girls, was nevertheless a good enough mother—concerned enough about her children’s health and the potentially adverse effects of prolonged insomnia—that she made the high sacrifice of sending the girls to bed well in advance of the customary hour of their retirement. Before such a peremptory dismissal, however, Lia took the kindly step of supping them on a meal traditionally reserved for history’s best behaved children: some broth, without any bread. Justin returned from a day spent drilling the arcanae of adverse possession and testamentary estates into his beleaguered brain and came home discouraged and discontented with the entire project of law school. “O, hang it all,” he said to his unflaggingly supportive wife. “Perhaps I’m not cut out to be a lawyer after all. Besides,” he added, “there’s no money in it.” “What do you purport to do instead?” “I’m not entirely sure, though I’ve thought of several prospects,” Justin answered, “the most lucrative of which is to become John Edwards’s barber.” He wisely spent the evening with his own Beata Beatrix in the flesh without so much as thinking about the law of property, real or otherwise.

Friday (May 18): Justin’s performance on his property final almost confirmed the worst of his doubts of the previous evening. But again, only time will reveal a grade. In the evening Lia, distressed at the consummate uncoolness of her own husband manifest in his studied inability to play the guitar, invited our upstairs neighbors, Eduardo and Marfisa, and our friends, the Thompsons, to gather in our humble abode where the men among them would provide us with a guitar concert. She enticed them with the proffer of home made ice cream which, together with the bananas provided by Kim Thompson and the chocolate syrup provided by Marfisa, made for some respectably spectacular banana splits. So we ate and played and sang and merrily passed the time. Julia and Elias Thompson played together in perfect contentment, both behaving so well that we knew with absolute certitude they were up to something. Justin, animated we suppose by vanity and a vague sense that inviting others into one’s home for the purpose of providing one with a private guitar concert violates some social code or other unless propitiated by the host’s embarrassing himself in a monumental fashion, volunteered his service as a singer of Italian. The result was unhappy, though the audience was gracious. When the evening’s festivities were over and done a tragedy was unfolding in the People’s Republic of Texas where the abominable Spurs upended the heroic Suns to advance to the conference finals, there to do war with our beloved Jazz. All the world knows of the infamy surrounding the suspension for game 5 of Phoenix’s Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw—a wrongheaded application of an imbecilic rule which cost the Suns the series. It is now up to the Jazz to avenge this indignity. Ecrasez l’infame!

Saturday (May 19): Having moved on to preparation for his First Amendment exam, Justin tried to bury himself deep in the jurisprudential vortex of free speech doctrines but his allergies intervened with such violence that he aborted the mission and came home for lunch. He then spent the afternoon and evening at the stake center in Woodbridge, where from 4-6 he attended a stake priesthood leadership meeting and from 7-9 he attended the adult session of stake conference. Lia stayed home with the girls all the while, joined at length by Addie and Callie. Lia and Addie talked at length on the familiar and difficult subject of what they can ever make of their incorrigible husbands. “One cannot well reform what was not first formed well,” Eli archly interposed, and seeing wisdom in such fatalism, the ladies all turned the more pressing business of home made ice cream. We can only wish such a happy conclusion for all our readers. Failing that, we could wish for them the supernal gift of sleep, and send them this blog as an aid in the achievement of such a result.