12 August 2007

Reader, the inevitable has transpired in all its ugly inevitability. On Tuesday evening, August 8, Barry Bonds in all his soaring infamy swatted the 756th home run of his controversial career, passing the inestimable Henry Aaron for first place on the all-time list. We have unbounded respect for Mr. Aaron; sneering contempt for Mr. Bonds. We shall say no more on this unpleasant subject; we would only point out, with all the self-righteous pomposity of your average Yale law student, that among all the hundreds of times—spanning a decade of back yard heroics—that Justin hit his 756th home run, never once was such a feat attended by so much as a scintilla of a steroid scandal.

Monday (August 6): Justin was a bad father for the second Monday in a row, abandoning spouse and seed to join the elders of Israel (missionaries current and returned) to help a couple, the Calahans, move into the ward. Why would a Mormon couple have the temerity to violate the sanctity of a Monday evening for such a move? Well, it turns out that Mike Calahan, having stopped for ice in Indiana, witnessed a shooting and was detained for a couple of days as a witness to the crime. So the move was Monday, not Saturday.
And what a move it was! This couple, in their forties, described themselves as “consolidating two households.” Such consolidation was translated into our lived experience as two twenty-six foot Penske trucks packed wall to wall, floor to ceiling, cubic inch by bulging cubic inch, with stuff stuff stuff. But we knew about the trucks beforehand, so we were undaunted. Justin and his bishopric comrade, Mike Turner, were the first to arrive on the scene. “Hello Brethren,” said the stolid Brother Calahan. “The first order of business is to put a fence around this yard”—here he indicated the yard, which formed something of an elevated terrace overlooking the lower property where the trucks were parked—“so the dogs won’t bother us while we load the garage.” So Mike and Justin put up a fence. Mike, perched perilously on a ladder that had seen better days and known firmer ground, pounded the posts with a sledge hammer while Justin held them steady. We felt just like the redoubtable granite men on “The House of the Lord.” Soon the missionaries showed up and started working on a fence post of their own, somewhere near the middle of the prospective fence. Several minutes later, Mike and Justin had worked their way around the elders, who lamented their collective bad luck in not being able to find a rock-free area in which to drive their post. At about this time our quorum president, John Thompson, a man as slender as he is tall—and he’s prodigiously tall, asked the beefy Elder Michaelson if he could “have a whack” with the sledge hammer. The elders conceded the hammer and the post, the latter of which John had driven resoundingly into the ground in a matter of seconds. “A lucky shot,” he assured the crestfallen striplings.
When the fence was finally up—and it was only up after one elder’s shoe had had an unfortunate encounter with a canine souvenir in the yard, and after another elder had unwittingly discovered and accidentally stirred a hornet’s nest—the real work began.
And what work it was! One came to think that all the world had lost its fixity and morphed into an infinitude of boxes. And what heavy boxes! Brother Calahan, as it happens, is a machinist by profession. And what machines! To make matters more fun, the Calahan’s new home was graced by one of the earth’s narrowest staircases, and that stairwell graced by an uncommonly low ceiling. What’s more, the Calahanian property rests on a considerable incline, and our efforts to move the trucks up or down the moderately steep and solidly lengthy driveway to facilitate the convenient unloading of boxes to the house (up) or the garage (down) seemed singularly ill-fated. When we were up, the bulk of the boxes needed to go down. When we were down, the boxes went up. At one point Justin merrily suggested that ours was the lot of the legions of the Grand Old Duke of York (our readers will remember that this gentleman “had ten thousand men” and that he “marched them up the hill” and promptly “marched them down again”). Later, his merriment dampened by sad experience, he suggested that their lot might more aptly be characterized as that of Sisyphus.
For their worked seemed truly Sisyphean, which is to say, interminable. Fortunately the turnout was good—eight elders and four Elders, though the latter group temporarily departed for an appointment at which they were providentially (from our vantage) stood up and had, by rule, to leave before our labors were completed.
More could be said, but it is painful to say. In the hour of our greatest discouragement we hung our heads and hands, hoping against hope that the redoubtable Cameron LaDuke would miraculously descend, Deus ex machina, to finish the job. But the desert refused to relinquish our Cameron, and we pressed on as we could.
Painful as it was, for those present the evening was something of an initiatory experience. When President Thompson expressed, in a next-day’s email to the group, the hope that “by now the icey hot is working and your feelin' refreshed,” one of our number shot back helpfully that “[a] bowl of Advil with milk did the trick for me.” Justin took him at his word and awoke ninety-three hours later in an unfamiliar ward of the Yale-New Haven hospital, confused by his surroundings but having never felt better in his life.
O Babylon, O Babylon, we bid thee farewell—but we may be back in a day or two for some remedial treatment. The Mountain of Ephraim, it appears, is not without its rigors.

Tuesday (August 7): In the evening Lia attended a joint baby shower for Kalee Peacock and Amgalan Saito, both sisters in our ward and both, oddly enough, pregnant. Lia’s gifts—cross-stitched frames with pictures and the respective messages, “I’ll Shine for Him Each Day” and “My Heavenly Father Loves Me”—were such as dazzled all in attendance. Back at home Justin read Winnie-the-Pooh stories to Julia while Eli protested volubly that she had much rather read “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Wednesday (August 8): At lunchtime Lindsay, Mayah, and Asher Sevy came over for the much-touted Princess Party—an early celebration of Mayah’s birthday and a late celebration of Julia’s departure from the ranks of the thumb-suckers. Mayah showed up in an elegant Cinderella dress and Julia received her in an unseemly low cut Snow White dress. Each young lady, upon seeing her friend so attired, was filled with an unquenchable fire of daemonic jealousy and, unsurprisingly, the girls had swapped dresses with one another in a matter of seconds. Lia had learned—no doubt as the result of something won on Craig’s List—how to make a special brand of butterfly cupcakes, and she made several for this occasion. Mayah pronounced them adorable; Asher devoured them with a will. In the true spirit of princess, Mayah allowed her excess and gaucherie of fashion to run untrammeled, donning at one point three separate purses on her left arm, two different hats upon her head, and as many pink scarves around her neck. The party was as pleasant as such a party deserves to be, and Julia and Mayah each thanked their respective moms for all their trouble by granting them the favor of their uninterrupted company for the next several hours—a sardonic euphemism for saying that they ungratefully took no naps. Quite certain that the Sevys cannot get enough of us, we descended upon their home in the early evening for a barbecue that featured, at long last, Travis Sevy’s prized inflatable swimming pool, complete with a slide and a water-spouting palm tree. This last produces quite a steady blast, and Travis had no sooner turned it on than Mayah turned it on Julia, who shrieked in an agony of irrational hydrophobia while her non-empathizing parents laughed good-naturedly. Eli loved the pool without qualification. The food and company were excellent, and Mayah even managed to persuade Elias Thompson (son of the afore-mentioned John) to hold off on singing “Happy Birthday” until after the candle was lit.
After the barbecue, the ladies dropped Justin off at the church for a bishopric meeting, which entailed little more than an exchange of greetings, and an Eagle Scout Court of Honor for Robert Inahuazo, the first Eagle in the history of the New Haven first ward and the first Eagle Scout in the City of New Haven since 1995. Wow!
Justin loved the ceremony, which was beautifully prepared and executed, and he thought from time to time—as he kept confoundedly choking up—of Elder Holland’s self-description as one who “weeps at the ribbon-cutting of a grocery store.” At one point, all the Eagle Scouts in the room were called forward to participate in the administering of the Eagle’s Oath. Among the men in the building, it seemed that only Justin and Arsinio Bernardo—a counselor in the bishopric who joined the Church after the age of scouting eligibility—remained seated. The incomparable Elder Maxwell, he consoled himself, couldn’t get past all those knots either.

Thursday (August 9): A fairly typical day. Lia and the girls babysat Ava and Eli Kleinman in the morning, an adventure that was preceded by the trio’s locking themselves temporarily out of our apartment (Justin was at work and could not save them). In the evening we stopped by the Sevys to borrow some camping equipment for an anticipated Friday excursion (the rain ultimately had other ideas). Lindsay was in control of the equipment transfer situation at the front door, but Travis repeatedly abandoned Mayah and Asher to their general bedlam in the kitchen in order to come to the door to deposit a word or two of officious counsel. “Do you want to help them?” Lindsay asked gently as she nodding toward the kitchen whence proceeded the howls of the damned. “Right,” acknowledged Travis, only to return a dozen seconds later as the howling proceeded apace. Justin and the girls remained in the car, where Julia complained against Justin’s inflexible vetoes that she wanted to see Mayah (our dinner was in the oven, so we were in no humor to unleash the furies). Justin and Lia watched the first part of Amadeus in the evening, which they enjoined, though the editors of this blog wish to warn its readers against a viewing of the director’s cut of the film in question—best to stick with the bowdlerized version originally intended for public consumption.

Friday (August 10): Lia awoke expressing distress over the velocity with which the night seemed to have passed, and an unfortunate commitment to go to the gym with a friend prevented the sensible response of rolling over and sleeping anew. Things got worse when she heard the steady rapping of the rain outdoors and her hopes for a camping adventure went down the proverbial drain. Still, the day wasn’t all bad, and Justin even consoled Lia in her disappointment by submitting to the mild indignity of doing yoga for date night (not that there is anything intrinsically undignified about yoga; the indignity lies wholly in the external manifestation of Justin’s execution).

Saturday (August 11): Another ward temple day, which, for us, meant we were in it for the long haul—we left New Haven a little after ten this morning and got back around 8:30 in the evening (this with a couple of significant traffic jams but without, wonder of wonders, our getting lost). Julia and Eli were both very good during the whole of our adventures, and as we left the parking lot of the Belmont chapel Julia sweetly said, “Thank you, Mommy and Daddy, for taking us here.” After the girls went to bed Justin checked his email and found that Rosalyn had forwarded to him Orson Scott Card’s review of Harry Potter, a fiery screed in which that gentleman denounces the “bonehead” elitists that populate America’s institutions of higher learning and the cultural staff of that paragon of Northeastern snobbery, the New York Times. Almost he persuaded Justin to be a Pottermaniac (or to return to Pottermania after an apostasy that has persisted since a mission extinguished the Rowlingian fire that has yet to be rekindled). On such a note of narratival irrelevance, dear Reader, we bid you farewell.