5 August 2007

Dear Reader,

While Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refuses inexplicably to fall on his sword, and while President George Bush declines inexplicably to deliver the graceful blow himself, we come to you once more, wielding as ever the sword of Adventure itself. We must confess, though, that we are not in our usual good spirits. You see, having heeded the Voltairean and Kimballian dictum that, “il faut cultiver notre jardin,” the inescapable fate of the Mormon gardener has now befallen us: we are burdened by a prodigious superabundance of zucchini, squash, and cucumbers—a burden unmitigated by the countervailing presence of a single watermelon or strawberry. As a result, we have adopted the eminently irrational course of sacrificing many an otherwise wonderful meal in the name of preserving from waste our cosmic quantities of third-rate vegetables. After a week punctuated by the unfortunate experiences of consuming so many peanut butter and zucchini sandwiches and imbibing so many squash milkshakes, we are feeling the effects—psychological and physiological—of our horticultural folly. With what result this may operate on the composition of this post, we cannot with certainty predict. But onward we go.

Monday (30 July): Justin was a bad father today, spending the work day at the office and returning only for dinner before abandoning a weeping Julia and a merrily indifferent Eli and a beleaguered Lia to visit a ward member in need and to chaperone a missionary lesson with a young female. The ladies meanwhile went to the library and spent a good deal of time outside on one playground or another. Eli set some personal records for walking, taking steps numbering in the ‘teens and traversing something like seven feet along the way. Justin did make it back in time for the girls’ bedtime, and Julia roundly insisted that he, and not Lia, read “Believe in Yourself”—volume fifteen in a series of homey homiletics from the house on Pooh Corner. Later, while Justin did the dishes, Julia emerged into the kitchen and plaintively told her father that she “needed [her] other flip-flop for her [other] foot.” Because she was barefoot, Justin was at a loss to know which foot was “other,” but his confusion soon merged with indistinct visions of publishing an article under the banner of “The Flip-flops of the Other: A Post-post Strausserian/Rawlsian Reading of the Politics of the Barefooted.” Hmmm, our hero thought. Perhaps I should insert something about the creation of rhetorical space or the gendered invocation of rhetorical authority and send it on to Rosalyn? But recalling that his eldest sister was in the midst of moving, lamenting her departure from the Quaker Province and its proliferating tag sales (which she must now, alas, term “yard sales”), and facing down a dissertation whose topic was long since chosen—he decided against it. By this time, of course, Julia had already found the flip-flop herself and put that self back to bed. Justin’s musings about publications were not, however, without a portent. For later that evening, when all the house lay in bed, the phone rang with the shrill of an arresting augur. On the other end was the impeccably dry and efficient voice of John J. Hughes III, executive editor of the Yale Law Journal, offering Justin a position as an editor (read bottom-of-the-totem-poll-peon-2L-source-checker) on the Journal for next fall. Justin politely thanked Mr. Hughes for the good news, meekly listened to the nondescript description of a forthcoming workshop and explanatory email, then hung up the phone. After which he pounded his chest with atavistic aggression and emitted a fierce, guttural “Boo-Yeah!”, attended by an equally atavistic tribal dance. And so we ask, dear Reader, Who is the proverbial man? To which query you must certainly reply that, bad father or not, the senior editor of this illustrious blog is the proverbial man.

Tuesday (July 31): Justin’s own delight at making Law Journal was quadrupled by learning that his four fellow Latter-day Saints in the Class of 2009 were chosen as First Year Editors of the venerable periodical as well. Lia and the girls celebrated all these happy happenings by doing the laundry—ever an all day affair, even with Julia’s and Eli’s officious assistance. Stephanie, one of Eli’s occupational therapists, came by for a check-up, during which Eli acquitted herself nicely. This day also marked an added stage in the progressive descent of our daughters into the slough of unadulterated philistinism: yet another package arrived from Grandma Patti, stuffed to the brim with princess paraphernalia of every shape and hue of thundering inanity, the crowning nonsense among so many sterling exemplars of the ridiculous being a princess pin-up calendar whose every month was marked with a mock magazine cover featuring one of the familiar fabricated faces and headlines and subheadlines of desperately rhapsodic absurdity. The girls squealed with delight while their hapless father groaned as though under the weight of a hundred or pierced by the forks of a thousand arrows. The barbarians have long since penetrated the gates.

Wednesday (August 1): Justin celebrated the advent of the month of Octavian by being a bad father again: work, then Guido, then bishopric meeting. He then came home to an empty house, for the three ladies dearest his heart were at the same time assuaging their grief over the absence of their favorite possessor of the Y chromosome by attending a vintage car show and devouring the hot dogs necessary to such an activity, visiting an animal farm of the non-Orwellian variety (Eli liked the ponies best; Julia, aptly, adored the peacocks), and consumed home-made Cookie Monster ice cream (vanilla dyed blue with duly monstrous Chips A-Hoy fragments) at Wentworth’s (no relation to the obscure recipient of Joseph Smith’s most famous letter). When the ladies came home, Justin saluted his bride with appropriate ardor (“Hail, chief Woman of the world, whose banner I bear between my heart and my armor!”) while Eli remarked dryly how much fun there is to be had when Daddy is gone.

Thursday (August 2): Another baby-sitting adventure at the Kleinman’s revealed a pair of instances in which Julia, otherwise as well brought up as they come, still leaves somewhat to be desired in the realm of the social graces. Our amiable eldest fairly drove Ava Kleinman up the proverbial wall by interrupting Ava’s every utterance with ill-timed interpositions of injurious volume and dubious relevance. Julia has also found a penchant for imitation, and her efforts at the recreation of Ava’s still-developing voice did not amuse the model. A series of sharply-worded lectures don’t appear to have entered Julia’s capacious conscience, but we still cling to the distant hope of someday making a lady of her.

Friday (August 3): Justin’s admission to the Yale Law Journal has implanted in Lia’s fertile mind some wild notions indeed. First, she appears to have embraced the dangerous suggestion that Justin’s presence at the world’s greatest law school owes to something other than a momentous admission’s office blunder. Second, and more dangerous still, she has gotten it into her head that she has a moral duty to ensure that her husband looks the part he is called to play in the heady spheres he now inhabits. So off to the GAP the wretch was dragged, and there he was constrained to stay until he became the owner of a pair of embarrassingly fashionable shirts (on which Lia managed to get such spectacular deals that she might almost be said to have won them). Sensing unmistakably that our hero was out of his element, the ladies tried to calm his anxieties by appeals to his considerable, if latent, vanity. “Daddy, you look awesome!” cried Julia as he exited the dressing room, donning his stylish apparel. Appeals to vanity are, of course, invariably successful if skillfully done—and what could be more skillful than the artless exuberance of an adorable three-year-old. Anyhow, Justin now owns two shirts more than he did before, and Lia is to that degree less uneasy at the prospect of sending her husband out to be seen publicly. Before we left on this strange errand, as we walked through the Whitehall lot on our way to the Bull, Julia outlined for her father this important insight into family taxonomy: “Daddy, you can be the tall one, and I can be the short one, and Eli can be the little one, and—Mommy can be the pink one!”

Saturday (August 4): Today we went to the beach at Hammonasset which being interpreted means, as the park’s ubiquitous signs attest, “We put holes in the ground.” In the spirit of this magisterial etymology we made our way to the rocky sands and, indeed, put our own holes in the ground. The surprise of the whole adventure was the readiness with which Julia entered the waters and the reluctance with which she left them. Lia at one point took Eli with her on a preliminary examination of a nature trail which she then determined we should all explore. When Justin looked askance at the trailhead and verbally wondered whether it could accommodate a double jogging stroller, Lia dismissed his doubts as the excuse-seeking nay-saying of his Collings ancestry. After struggling to push the stroller through bushes, quicksand, and over boulders and steep crevices, Lia conceded the argumentative force of physics and we turned back (it should be noted that while Justin performed these Herculean feats with a stroller Lia blissfully marched on a head, contentedly reading aloud from a sprightly tour guide). We stopped at Old McDonald’s on the way home for some ice cream. In the evening we went grocery shopping, where we “scored big” (Lia’s phrase) on whole-wheat organic pasta (one wonders ‘neath the weight of oppressive incredulity why it was on sale). Eli was unimaginably ill-behaved. After the girls went to bed Justin and Lia had the rare pleasure of carrying on a quasi-rational conversation. The experience was thrilling.