Confusions of a Wasted Youth

To our readers,

We know your minds are preoccupied with other things. David and Victoria Beckham, with all their multitudinous entourage, have arrived in this grand old Republic of ours, and only days separate you from David’s first match with the Los Angeles Galaxy and the debut of NBC’s reality show, “Victoria Beckham Comes to America” (will real people really watch this?). But even the arrival of a British soccer has-been and his Spice Girl spouse can hardly compare with the pomp and the circumstance, the frenzy and the fury, the agony and the expectancy that attend the world’s collective anticipation of the appearance on bookshelves everywhere, in just a few days time, of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final volume (mercifully!) in a series that some optimists, in a fit of wishful thinking, have convinced themselves would introduce a new generation of young persons to the joys of reading (the New York Times and the Washington Post have both reported this week that this is not the case). Our own view is a good deal less sanguine: the publication of Ms. Rowling’s latest volume may signal the last time that millions of persons will ever read anything they do not absolutely have to. Will your editors read The Deathly Hallows? Almost certainly not. And why not? Because we are unreformed muggles. More to the point, we are unrepentant snobs; having each read the first half of the series we shall follow the mob no further. For us it is a matter of principle. But if our readers have it in them to plow through 784 pages of plodding pedestrian prose we certainly have no objection. Only let them always remember where their first literary loyalties lie.

Monday (7/9): In furtherance of her proposition to conquer the world with a pair of oars, Lia sought this morning to comply with the requirement that members of the venerable New Haven rowing club be able to float unassisted for five minutes. She didn’t quite make it, but with the assistance of Becca Lloyd (our neighbor, ward member, and friend) and the solid reminder of the swimming pool wall, Lia made some not inconsiderable progress. Just before dinner Lia did what Mormons do best, which is to say she made some Jell-O (not green, though, quite inexplicably). She put said Jell-O in a Tupperware container without a lid and asked Justin to place it in the back of the fridge while it congealed. Justin, dutiful as ever, did just this, carefully placing the lidless liquid behind the other contents of the fridge’s top shelf where, hidden from view, “Kool-Aid could become Jell-O” (as Eli put it in her diary). Not thirty seconds thereafter, Lia essayed to put a gallon of milk back in the fridge. Meeting some initial resistance, she pushed harder until the upper shelf’s contents gave way and the milk fit nicely. Alas, in the course of thus making room for the displaced milk, the Tupperware in which the nascent Jell-O sat was capsized, and moderately jiggly red liquid spewed hither and anon throughout the width and breadth of the fridge. Lia, disconsolate, immediately embarked on the laborious task of emptying the entire fridge and cleaning its contents piece by piece. Justin helpfully scooted away into the living room and read The Economist. For FHE we made a care package for Lia’s paternal step-grandfather (“Pops”) who lay ill in a Kansas hospital.

Tuesday (7/10): Taking her revenge against Justin’s dereliction during the fridge-cleaning festivities, Lia included every back issue of Justin’s beloved Economist in the package for Pops and sent it off in the morning. She also allowed our subscription to lapse, relegating Justin to the unromantic (but blessedly cheap) labor of reading The Economist on-line. The ladies also sent a belated gift to Brielle, the editors’ newest niece and their daughters’ second newest cousin. Lia went rowing very early in the morning and was dismayed to find five of the most impressively abysmal rowers from her recent course seated in her very boat. But she loved it all the same. After work, Justin did a second round of recording with Guido the Honorable, after which the ladies picked him up on the way to deliver dinner to a couple in our ward and their new baby boy.

Wednesday (7/11): Lia and the girls took dinner to Ina Lebow, a sister in our ward recovering from a recent bout with pneumonia. Ina emigrated from Russia to New York, where she worked as a model (this was some decades ago). Still a cynosure of all things fashionable, Sister Ina has a formidable collection of hats, one of which she graciously gave to Eli, who showed a great interest in the headwear.

Thursday (7/12): Lia went a-rowing once more in the morning, apparently for the last time, the dispositive considerations being the cost of membership, the distance of the docks and the corresponding cost in terms of travel time and petrol, the unmitigated oafdom of Lia’s fellow rowers, and a passion for foreign novels. In the morning, the feminine triad went to the Kleinman’s house to babysit Eli Kleinman; Eli Collings repeated her “homonym for a homeboy” joke at least a dozen times, to Julia’s mounting irritation and cultural disdain. It was a thoroughly normal day thereafter.

Friday (7/13): This day was marked by a dual triumph. First, in the morning, Lia—whose erstwhile, hawk-like surveillance of any and all relevant updates on Craig’s List had bordered on the maniacal—finally found her much-coveted treasure: a Tike-tech double jogging stroller in impeccable condition, complete with a bad-weather cover, for the mind-bogglingly tiny charge of $100 (retail price is four or five times that). The stroller was posted at approximately 8:13 a.m. ET and Lia called to claim it eleven seconds later. The stroller is indeed a beauty, if considerable of a behemoth. It even collapses (though getting it into the trunk of the car entails the cumbersome process of removing all three wheels; even so, the cumber morphs to sweetness when we pretend to be Jeff Gordon’s pit crew). The day’s second triumph was the arrival in our very own New Haven of Grandma Patti, who had been in New York for a conference (mysteriously, there seems to have been a surge in the number of statistical conferences held in New England since about August 2006). Justin and Lia took advantage of having a babysitter in town by racing to Hannah’s Dream (a beachside park in East Haven) for a friendly tennis match. Justin won in two sets (6-1, 6-3), though some controversy arose about the placement of a Justinian backhand in the second set—Justin insisted it was in; Lia suggested otherwise. Justin prevailed in the debate only after a racket-tossing eruption ala John MacEnroe.

Saturday (7/14): As befit Bastille Day, this was a day of true adventure. In the morning, Lia made pancakes with the kitchen door barricaded close. Justin, Grandma Patti, Julia, and Eli then stormed the kitchen ritualistically, battering down the door like so many citoyens of the Third Estate, liberating the pancakes like so many political prisoners. These formalities accomplished, we mounted the Bull—all five of us, with Grandma Patti insisting on a seat in the back with her granddaughters—and rode it to Hartford for a series of adventures. We first visited the Wadsworth Aetheneum, America’s oldest art museum, where we saw works by the likes of Tiepolo and Caravaggio, along with a number of lesser (because not Italian) luminaries not unknown in their day and ours. The Aetheneum also houses several originals of John Trumbull’s paintings of the American Revolution and a number of pieces from the private collections of J. Pierpont Morgan. After this dose of high culture, we went to the Bushnell Carousel which, to Julia’s great delight, was “JUST LIKE ON MARY POPPINS!!!!” (that’s a quote from Julia herself), with a vintage old organ and everything. We then pried Julia off her carousel horse (no easy task) and made our way to the historical home of Samuel Clemens where we had lunch in the Mark Twain café. We had hoped to tour Twain’s abode, an idiosyncratic icon of the gilded age, but the tours proceeded only on an hourly basis, and we missed the 2:30 tour by a few minutes and the girls were in an advanced stage of pre-naptual meltdown. We contented ourselves with touring the exterior, as well as the exterior of the home of Twain’s sometime neighbor, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. We returned home touched by the ghosts of nineteenth-century American letters. After the girls went to bed in the evening, Justin and Lia took a walk downtown to see how the other half (i.e. the other 99.8 percent) of New Haven lives. Sinfully, it would appear, though we had fun stopping by a couple of downtown bookshops.

Sunday (July 15): Not ten minutes into nursery an unfortunate encounter involving Julia, a ride-on toy, and a square wooden pillar in the interior of the room left our first born weeping and bloodied. She had a considerable cut on the back of her head, though fortunately it was not very deep. Thankfully, the Yale Health Services building is adjacent to the church, so it was only a matter of walking over there while Grandma watched Eli and waiting briefly at Urgent Care until a pediatrician arrived to clean the wound and close it with a pair of staples. Julia is just fine, though her behavior for the duration of the Sabbath might have indicated otherwise.

[Ed. Note: It may amuse some of our readers to know that the blue-gowned girl in the picture above is "Cinderella", the blue-shirted man "Prince Eric" and the photographer of this beautifully choreographed dance "Carlotta," that lady who gives Ariel a bath.]