The Dust Enclosed Here

Dear Reader,

The tides of power are shifting, and on a global scale. After ten years in power, Tony Blair has handed the leadership of the Labour party to his anointed successor, Gordon Brown, the moderately dour chancellor of the exchequer who this week moved from Number 11, Downing Street to Number 10; after approximately ten minutes in power, Nicolas Sarkozy has risen to a position of influence within the European Union; and the Milwaukee Bucks’ choice of the youthful phenomenon Yi Jianlian with the sixth pick of this year’s draft seemed to confirm Mom Suttner’s darkest fears of a Chinese conquest of the NBA and of the porcelain sink industry. Our precious bodily fluids are indubitably next. But in a world of swirling change there remain certain granitic constants, chief among them the crisp and congenial prose of this illustrious blog, and the eternal constancy of its interstellar readership.

Monday (June 25): Still on the recovery from a whirlwind trip to Kirtland, Ohio over the weekend for the wedding reception of Andrew and Lauren Stacey, we somehow managed to peel ourselves out of bed and face the day. Lia got up early for the first day of her community rowing class, which she thought was to meet at the Payne Whitney gym but which met instead at the Derby Boathouse. Lia missed the first day of rowing and was devastated. Sadder still, she bootlessly missed a couple hours of precious sleep.

Tuesday (June 26): The reactionary forces of the Roberts Court were unleashed as the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that an Alaska teen does not have a constitutional right to hoist a banner extolling “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school activity. A classmate of Justin’s put it best when she sent a post to the YLS list-serve temperately entitled, “Goodbye to Our Rights.” The editors only regret that they didn’t praise and promote recreational drug use when, as high school students, they still had a right to do so.

Not yet knowing that her most cherished rights were about to be eroded in the nation’s capitol, Lia and the Bull trekked to Derby for her real first day of rowing. Lia was immediately in love, at one with oars and water, with nature and her inner self. Not quite at one with the fellow just in front of her, whose husky figure overlay a pair of beleaguered lungs; the poor devil required repeated rests. Lia, blissfully ignorant of her own need to breathe or repose, regularly rammed her oars into the man’s back as he sat idly in a stupor of heavy breathing. None of this was enough to dampen her spirits, however. She came home certain she had missed her calling in life and asked Justin what he thought it would take to land her on the Olympic rowing team. Eli’s unsolicited response—“A well-executed series of innumerable poisonings!”—drew no laughter. Nor even a smile.

In the evening, Justin returned from work and was handed a meal, two children, and the car keys with the instruction that he deliver the first to an ill sister in the ward. “She lives at 71 Renshaw,” he was told. “Off Whitney.” Whitney, for our readers who know not the region, is something on the order of fifteen miles long, so this instruction was of questionable help. As one child was already in the car and Lia had to hurry to make a babysitting appointment, Justin had no time to check with the redoubtable Googlemaps. Did the trio get lost? Of course not. They only failed of their destination, returned home to check G-maps after all, and completed the enterprise a few minutes short of two hours after they began. In the evening we stopped by the LaDukes and helpfully relieved them of substantial quantities of food they simply didn’t have room for on their imminent venture across the nation. In other words, we pillaged their kitchen. Julia and Callie, painfully aware that the day of their forceful parting was nigh at hand, fought over Callie’s dress-up shoes and princess dresses for the last time. But it was clear their heavy hearts were not in it.

Wednesday (June 27): In the evening Justin helped the LaDukes load their P.O.D. while Lia and the girls played with an inconsolable Callie, who despite reassurances to the contrary would not believe her toys had not been boxed up for good, probably by the satellites of the Roberts Court, which apparently cares no more for property rights than for rights of speech. The men made good progress—at least until Addie turned her back and Cameron launched into an extempore discourse on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. When Addie returned and asked what the fearless band had been up to—since so many boxes and articles of furniture lay unmoved—Travis Sevy volunteered that we had been engaged in “geometric strategization,” i.e. figuring out where to put what. Travis will make a fine diplomat some day.

Thursday (June 28): In the wake of another Roberts Court outrage—this one limiting the extent to which school boards can regulate transfers to achieve or maintain a racial balance in public schools—the same classmate of Justin’s who bid our collective rights farewell on Monday made the following moderate suggestion on the YLS list-serve:

“Someone capable and well-connected at this law school ought to organize a fun panel this fall on the new consolidation of the conservative 5-Justice bloc in the Supreme Court, which after just one term has left a withering trail of decisions in its wake on abortion, sex-based pay discrimination, school racial segregation, campaign finance, student speech, and the ability of criminal defendants to file an appeal after missing the statutory deadline by three days due to the erroneous advice of a federal judge. I can't be the only one having gloomy nightmares over what's going down in our nation's highest court?”

This post was striking indeed, for just this morning a sleepy but terrified Eli shrieked in horror shortly after the crack of dawn. We rushed to the girls’ room. “What’s wrong Eli?!?” we anxiously asked. “I’ve been having gloomy nightmares about the jackbooted fivesome of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy,” she answered. “So have I,” offered Julia. “I think we all have,” said a stuffed Elmo, who generally only giggles.

Gloomy as our nightmares generally were, Julia awakened on a cloud of so many roses, for this was her day of days, the only third birthday she is likely to celebrate so long as the West’s sometime wavering fealty to the Gregorian calendar persists. Justin was almost late for the evening’s festivities, nearly trapped as he was amid the footage of Indiana Jones XIV, for the sake of which most of New England was closed to pedestrian and vehicular traffic alike. College Street was a veritable parade of vintage automobiles, and Justin was so lucky as to see Harrison Ford’s stunt double from a distance of only a few feet. Some of the film was even shot within the hallowed precincts of the Yale Law School itself, though when Justin saw a shade-sporting Bruce Ackerman descend the main stairwell, flanked by Jack Balkin, cynosure of the legal blogosphere, he instinctively hailed them as the true movie stars, a sentiment with which Professor Ackerman nodded his unqualified concurrence.

But back to the party. Our plan was once for Julia to serve as the star of a princess party with her two best friends, Mayah Sevy and Callie LaDuke. But the celebration of such a festival was predicate upon the caesura of Julia’s thumb-sucking—a caesura whose transpiration still lies in the unbounded future. So Mayah participated by calling Julia on the phone and adorably singing, “Happy Birthday!” all by herself. The party itself was a farewell to Callie. The theme was a Mary Poppins theme, and each girl donned a hat with a flower, sported a pink umbrella, and draped herself with a pink scarf. By giving each girl precisely the same quality and quantity of accoutrements, we thought to prevent property disputes. It didn’t work, and for much of the evening Julia and Callie stood nose to nose, each clinging fiercely to her own umbrella and striving just as fiercely to divest the other of hers.

We had a dinner of home-made pizza, which we all enjoyed and Cameron enjoyed most of all. This was followed by a web conference with Lia’s family during the inevitable extinguishing of the three candles and a collective viewing of selections from the Broadway incarnation of Mary Poppins on Justin’s computer. It was a smashing success. At length, however, the hour arrived when the LaDukes, who were to depart the next morning, had to go home. Knowing Cameron’s penchant for the sentimental, Justin preempted its efflorescence by recounting the story of the old Italian uncle who cut short attempted farewells with a peremptory, “This isn’t goodbye; I’ll say goodbye at the train station”—and who never appeared at the train station. Cameron then assured us that the sappiness was in his heart if not on his lips. Julia and Callie hugged several times at the instigation of their several parents, each ignorant that the farewell hug had already taken place. At length, they departed. And that was it.

Friday (June 29): Inevitably, Julia cried out to Justin late in the afternoon, “I want to play with Callie.” “Oh, sweetheart,” said Justin, much moved. “They’re on their way to live in Arizona.” Crying by Julia, soon joined by crying by Justin. “What’s wrong, guys?” asked Lia from a distance. “I want to play with Callie!” moaned Julia; “And I want to play with Cameron!” wept her daddy. “And I had another gloomy nightmare about the Roberts Court!” shrieked Eli from the pantry.

For date night we curled up and watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Justin remembered why ever he resolved to become a lawyer and was renewed in his resolve to become exactly like Atticus Finch and to talk exactly like Gregory Peck. Lia howled with merriment at the sight of Scout in the costume of a capacious ham. We both agreed that we would never have had the courage to approach the home of the mysterious Boo Radley.

Saturday (June 30): This was the first genuine Saturday for Justin in recent memory. We celebrated by babysitting the Buehner twins while their parents cleaned wildly against the time of their imminent inspection. In the afternoon we all went to the beach at Lighthouse Point but, to Julia’s crushing disappointment, the carousel was closed, and one more outlet toward her becoming just like Mary Poppins was closed. She recovered in time for bed, though Eli shut her eyelids only timorously—who knew what gloomy dreams of SCOTUS indiscretion lay ahead? We hope our readers are now enjoying a much less fitful slumber.