A Frail, Caliginous Matter

Dear Reader,

Posting on even an illustrious blog for an American audience awash in a sea of Pottermania must be something like proselytizing in Brazil while the national team competes in a World Cup final. The sinking feeling of howling at a surrounding hurricane bids us be brief.

The highlight of the week came on Saturday, when we joined forces with the Sevys for a trip to the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT. Justin and Eli—who had been up all night traveling from one bookstore to another, setting up shop next to the Potter queues and conspicuously reading Tasso and Proust while looking directly down their noses at the adjacent madding crowd—were abominably tired (“You can leave the mob,” taunted Julia, “but you can’t leave the mob alone”). Julia and Mayah, who both happened to be wearing sunny yellow shirts, bounced merrily through the aquarium, so gleeful that they fairly forgot to quarrel. One of the main attractions was a “4-D” Sponge Bob Squarepants digital ride. Justin and Lia first took Julia and Mayah, then Travis and Lindsay went alone. Mayah, seated next to Lia, alternately cooed with delight and bellowed with mirth from start to finish. Julia, from start to finish, howled with terror. Justin embarrassedly raised his hand and asked the conductor to turn off his and Julia’s seat. The rest of the capacious aquarium was filled with a variegated omnigatherum of sea creatures of every shape and art—otters and sharks and jellyfish and stingrays and tortoises and seals and seahorses and all the rest. Julia had quite a shock when a giant turtle unexpectedly stared her down from inside the tank. At the end of it all, we watched a film about ancient Greece at the aquarium’s IMAX theater. The film was beautifully done, if oddly insistent on the notion that if Greece of the Golden Age stood for one thing it stood for Democracy; siding with the authors of the Federalist, we had previously thought it stood for political pandemonium. The film even had the gall to suggest that Greece’s cultural legacy was, on the whole, a good thing—a shocking proposition indeed, which to postmodern sensibilities held all the heresy of hinting that the influence of the West on the course of history has not been all bad (this simply would not do at respected and respectable American English departments). But the IMAX experience is not about culture wars; it’s about a really big screen, and “Mysteries of Ancient Greece” came through on this count. The film also had an unmistakably cool computer reenactment of history’s grandest volcanic eruption, during the whole of which Julia whimpered and had Justin cover her eyes while Mayah eagerly asked Lia how many princesses the blast was likely to have killed or maimed.

In other news:

Prompted by the incentive (read bribe) of neither one nor two nor three but FOUR Disney Princess dresses (two Cinderellas, a Snow White, and an unidentified princess of lower Asiatic origin), Julia quit sucking her thumb. She finished her week long period of initiation on Sunday and immediately slipped into one of her compensatory prizes. On Sunday evening we took a walk to a park nearby where we had the priceless pleasure of watching a Snow White as diminutive as any of her dwarves racing with her might across an open field. Her raptures, however, were interrupted by the sight of a dog, at which point the princess turned on her elegant heels and ran with redoubled vigor back to the safety of her father’s protective arms and awkward attempts to cover a grin (Eli, by the way, later chased this dog for all she was worth, screaming, “Dog!!! Come!!!” She got to pet the dog, but when it left, there was more screaming in store: “No!!! Stop!!!).

Way back on Monday, Grandma Patti went back to Utah. Eli and Julia histrionically donned black for the rest of the week. “Mommy, do you like my outfit?” asked Eli of Lia around Thursday evening. “Yes, sweetheart, I do.” Disappointed, Eli tried to rally. “But aren’t you going to tell me to cast off my nighted colours?” she asked. “Probably not,” Lia answered. Discouraged, but not defeated, Eli emitted a hearty harrumph before galloping away with The Remembrance of Things Past.

The catastrophe of Grandma P’s departure was mitigated only by a wholesome harvest of cucumbers from our very own garden. Justin immediately thought of turning the harvest into family home evening lesson by pickling the cucumbers in the grand Bednarian tradition. He then remembers that he abominates pickles and desires his children to do likewise.

In news of great statistical significance (at least of significant statistics), Eli took seven steps and had her vocabulary assessed (by Lia) at seventy-five words. Julia, animated perhaps by a touch of sororal jealousy, pointed out that Travis Sevy gave Asher a similar account: he says, “Bah,” which means ball; “Bah,” which means bath; “Bah,” which means banana; “Bah,” which means Bah, Bah, Blacksheep; “Bah,” which means baccalaureate; “Bah,” which means The Baghavad Ghita; “Bah,” which means Baldassare Castiglione, etc. Lia stood her ground and there ensued quite a spectacular row. While this debate proceeded, Justin noted that Eli herself was missing. He searched all over the house; he searched all over the yard; he searched all over the playground. No Eli anywhere. At length, he discovered her in a loft in the Divinity School library, poring over a considerable tome. Something seemed amiss, and what was Justin’s horror when he tore away the “Swann’s Way” dust jacket to discover that Eli was only forty pages shy of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? At first he subjected his most-recently born to the scrutiny of a severe and exacting gaze; but then Eli burst into tears, and he was done for. “Oh, Daddy!” she wept. “I had to come here because I knew you would never understand.” As she sobbed, Justin calmed his incipient fury and wisely recounted the tale of then Elder John Taylor, whose son returned from school one day happily to report that he had won a copy of Robinson Crusoe in an elocution contest. Alarmed, Elder Taylor told the lad sharply that the novel was the devil’s bible, unfit for the consideration of intelligent minds. The boy was forbidden to read Defoe’s classic. The next morning, young man Taylor arrived at the breakfast table where his yawning father announced that he had been up all night reading Robinson Crusoe from start to finish, that in the end he approved, and that the son now had permission to read what the father had at first proscribed. “Daddy,” Eli then asked, “what’s your point?” Taken aback, Justin fumblingly responded that he supposed his point was that, as he had always said, literary snobbery ought to be considered one of the seven deadly sins—right up there with truancy and missionary slang. “Oh,” said Eli. “May I finish my book now?” Yes, he said, she could. And now, friend reader, so can you.