The Spectacle of Genius

Today, of course, is Father’s Day, and we send our warmest salutation to the fathers among you, the vast readership of our illustrious Review. We couldn’t help but overhear a note or two of discontent today from fathers who feel they get short shrift on their special day. Fathers on Father’s Day, it was suggested, receive nothing like the attention lavished on mothers on Mother’s Day. We respond only that in the course of human events it has invariably proved a simpler matter to join the former ranks than the latter. Even so, for those who consider the rumble of power tools an insufficient counterpart to the cant of so many poetasters, we have composed the following original verse in honor of the day just celebrated:

There once was a father . . .
Oh, bother!
Why ruin it all with a poem?

Monday (June 11): A jolly fine day capped by a rousing family home evening—a day and an evening about which we remember precisely nothing.

Tuesday (June 12): Justin, and his inestimable comrade Cameron LaDuke, both received their Father’s Day presents this evening in the form of a Collings/LaDuke adventure into the Big Apple itself to see the Yankees take on the Arizona Diamondbacks at the fabled Yankee stadium. The LaDukemobile, more familiar with the route and the terrain, led the way down the Merritt Parkway with the Bull following close behind, impatient at having to hold in check the full fire of its velocity and power. We drove into Manhattan, parked at the bizarre price of $8.46 for the evening, then took the subway uptown to the Bronx and the-house-that-Steinbrenner-built-upon-the-ashes-of-the-house-that-Ruth-built. The subway trip proved more adventurous—meaning lengthy—than we (read Cameron) anticipated, but it was just as well: thanks to the kindly interposition of a providential rain delay we arrived during the first inning. As we entered the hallowed precincts of Yankee stadium, Eli apostrophized the imperious shades of Ruth, Gherig, and DiMaggio; Julia suggested that she would very much like a hot dog. We bought several, each costing something in the neighborhood of $5 and each endowed with a gram of fat for every penny spent. We were in heaven. The game itself proved to be something of a pitchers’ duel, and even the mighty Alex Rodriguez failed four times to hit the ball out of the in-field. The Yankees won 4-1 while managing only five hits. Even so, the company and the atmosphere made this the best Father’s Day present in the long career of Justin’s fatherhood. And the fact that the LaDukes did all the navigating allowed Justin to receive this gift without hurling a horde of execrations at the metropolitan sky. It was a wonderful evening.

Wednesday (June 13): We didn’t arrive home after the game until after 1 a.m. and today we paid the price for our nocturnal revelry. The girls were prodigiously high-maintenance and skipped a couple of naps between them. In the middle of the day, the ladies of the house went to the church building where Lia, as charitable as she was tired, babysat the children of parents who were attending a lecture nearby. Justin, who awoke only with a timely phone call at about 8:30, got to work later than usual and so arrived home later as well. The upshot of this was that Lia and the girls enjoyed a long day indeed, proving that the price of a perfect gift is never purely monetary. The silver lining on an otherwise gloomy day was that Lia spent a great deal of time reading Daniel Deronda, which she finished later in the week, pronouncing it a masterpiece of many wonders—not so great a work as Middlemarch, she observed, though we hardly chide Macbeth for not being Lear.

Thursday (June 14): If Wednesday was a bad day, Thursday was decidedly worse. Lia babysat Ava (4) and Eli (2) Kleinman in the morning, during which adventure our own girls were resolutely awful. Julia and Ava’s generally amicable relationship was marred by a series of property disputes of mounting ferocity and ire. There was, for instance, only one Princess cup in the house, over which the two damsels fought tooth and nail. Similarly, though the headstrong and glaringly immodest Ariel ranks as Julia’s seventh favorite princess, it became imperative that she possess and control all things Ariel as soon as she learned that Ava loves Ariel best of all. These were the times that try mothers’ minds. Returned home, neither girl napped, though both helpfully provided multifarious and voluble evidences of fatigue. Even the much anticipated return of Justin—whose beneficent glow has been known to make nectar and ambrosia of wormwood and gall—did nothing to cheer Lia’s dampened spirit. She peremptorily handed over the girls and fled to her chamber with her novel and her key. Lia did her best to stay gloomy for the duration of the evening, but Justin’s vivacity and charm proved altogether too winning, by and by. When Lia’s fury approached the melting point, Julia and Eli emerged from the proverbial dog house to serenade their mother with a sonorous duet of, “Love at Home,” followed by a less reverential number called, “If Mommy Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy,” beautiful arranged to the tune of the Ode to Joy. When the day ended all was piece and harmony on the home front, though, as Eli glumly observed, the war in Iraq dragged on.

Friday (June 15): Elder Holland once wisely observed that the Almighty knew what he was doing when he placed a night between every two days, and we all benefited measurably from a respectable night’s sleep. The ladies of the house turned the already exciting venture of doing the laundry into a veritable rumpus, with Julia practicing on her bike in the basement and Eli being tugged leisurely in her wake in her shiny (because plastic) red wagon. When Justin came home from work, we mounted the bull for a familial jaunt to the Goodwill store, where we bought frames because, as Lia explained, one can never have too many frames. Justin and Eli pointed out that one can never be too sure that the best frames aren’t hiding behind some book, so they carefully examined each book shelf to be as sure as possible. While there, Justin was sorely tempted by a colorful biography of General MacArthur, a heavy tome that began beautifully, “He was a great thundering paradox of a man.” But Eli reminded him that before leaving Utah he had assured Lia in an elegant echo of Bush 41: “Read my lips, no new books.” Justin countered that this wasn’t properly a “new” book, but Eli admonished that he exercise caution all the same. Back on the shelf went the bumptious general. For date night, we read Shakespearean sonnets and Justin asked Lia to lecture for an hour or so on the subject of, “Why I feel so grateful to have married the man I did.” She did so with a good will, and Justin found the resulting encomium perfectly to his satisfaction.
On a sadder note, Julia had a fever today and took two very long naps. After a blessing and a good night’s sleep, she was her normal engaging self again on Saturday morning.

Saturday (June 16): As he stared in the shaving glass early in the morning, Justin went beyond the usual professions about being Ozymandius, King of Kings and about sounding his barbaric yawp from the roofs of the world and uttered extended assurances about the untouchable supremacy of his shining English prose: “I am the best prose stylist in the whole world,” he thundered. “I am the best summarizer of tedious law review articles in the whole world. I am the best comparer and contrastor and assessor and evaluator in the whole world, and I am all of these things in 2,000 printed words or fewer!” He needed this extra motivation, you see, because he was about to take the long walk down Prospect Hill to the Lillian Goldman Law Library where he was to put the finishing touches on (i.e. compose the first, second, and final draft of) the writing component of his application for an editorship on the Yale Law Journal. He wrote for six or seven hours straight. The result was dismal, but it was submitted all the same, and Justin returned home at about four in the afternoon an unquestionable free man. In what was perhaps a meteorological commentary on the quality of his submission, it began to rain as soon as Justin left the library and the rain picked up the pace throughout his liberating ascent of Prospect Hill.
In the evening we, along with most of the rest of our ward apparently, were graciously hosted for dinner at the Nick and Tiffany Buehner home. The food was wonderful, though Julia, Elias, and Callie managed immediately to dive into a box of Oreos, dispatching with a prodigious quantity of cookie before their unobservant parents despairingly intervened. It was all great good fun in the midst of great good company.
Unable ever to get enough of Goodwill, we took another trip there after the Buehner Bash, this time to drop off some pants on our way to JoAnn’s, where Lia bought the raw material for the Father’s Day craftsmanship of the feral yahoos over whom Lia now presides in the nursery. Good luck to her, and good night to you, friend Reader!