8.26.07

Dear Reader,

The one year anniversary of our arrival in New Haven has come and gone. The annual autumnal inundation of overprivileged undergraduates into the city we call home has already begun. Justin’s work-a-day summer is over. Eli is walking better and better with each passing day, ambulatory evidence of the continuing miracle of her recovery from a condition with which she was diagnosed one year ago yesterday. Not content with walking, she has become an inveterate climber—convinced, it would seem, of the truism that all the world’s a bore when life and limb are not in danger. Julia grows daily more bright and beautiful, grows every day more garrulous and willful. We are the parents of two perfect—often perfectly vexing—children. We thus observe the obvious, there being no more obviously available segue to the latest installment of our illustrious Review.

Saturday (August 18): We go back to the unrecorded week to record that on this benighted day we made the unseemly long trek to Newport, Rhode Island to tour the famed “Newport Mansions”—overmoneyed monuments of the most forgettable epoch of American history (though our own generation may well compete for that title when its history comes to be written). Our trip was, it seemed, doomed from the start. Contrary to someone’s assurances to the contrary, we needed to pay a $2 toll to cross the bridge into Newport. Unwilling to suffer the indignity of arresting traffic for two or three minutes so that an irritated attendant could write up a billet decreeing that Justin M. Collings, alleged driver of the notorious Blue Bull, must send $2 in cash to the Rhode Island department of motor vehicles within 136 hours on pain of death or forced attendance at a Kenny-G revival concert, Justin insisted that we stop at an ATM before arriving at the fateful bridge. Finding such an ATM proved a troublesome task, and Lia not unreasonably asked if it was worth all the trouble. Justin responded, also quite reasonably, that no marginal cost could exceed the marginal benefit of sparing oneself from a humiliation abject and unforgiving. In addition to such detours, dense traffic made our trip to Newport slow; impenetrable traffic made our trip through Newport impossible. During all of this the girls, naturally enough, behaved themselves abominably.
Despairing of finding parking anywhere near the mansions, we finally wound our way up into the hills and parked in a remote corner of civilization, from whence we walked—each of us pushing a child in an umbrella stroller—to The Breakers, the modest summer cottage of Catastrophically-spoiled-male-child Vanderbilt the Fourth. As it happened, the Breakers was the farthest from our parking spot of any of the mansions. But distance was a slight hardship when compared to the inexplicable lack of sidewalks along much of that distance. Umbrella strollers are made for many things (including an archaic form of jousting), but they are not made for off-roading. During all of this the girls, naturally enough, behaved themselves abominably.
Before making the pilgrimage proper, we stopped at a local park for a picnic, at which we were serenaded by a pair of young men, strangers alike to shirts and barbers, who played guitars indifferently and sang outright badly. At the end of one incomprehensible number the young gentlemen broke into spontaneous applause at their own performance—applause which in its spontaneous turn became a sort of clap-dance of its own. During all of this the girls, naturally enough, behaved themselves abominably.
At length we arrived at The Breakers—we and 736,244 tourists from the islands and mainlands of Asia. After surrendering $16 a piece for each of us to tour the place, we found ourselves at the end of a queue whose proportions were downright Disneyworldian. Eighty minutes later we found ourselves inside the mansion, where Julia and Eli found ample opportunity to test at once the acoustics of the Vanderbilt estate and the upper limits of their vocal cords, all of which was appreciated immensely by our guide and fellow tourists. The house itself was a disappointment—an inharmonious omnigatherum of architectural periods and styles thrown together in a fashion too chaotic to be called haphazard. All things round screamed that the proprietors were nothing if not wealthy—undoubtedly nothing except wealthy. This was the very apotheosis of Gilded Age gaudiness. The crowning obscenity amid a serried host of barbarisms was the room our guide had the temerity to term a “library.” Your editors counted something in the neighborhood of fourteen books in a cubic room with edges of some thirty feet each. It apparently served no other purpose than for a Miss or Master Vanderbilt occasionally to sit for a portrait. Eli nearly vomited.
Failing that, she effected a quick exit for herself and father in the form of a magnificently soiled diaper that assaulted the frayed ends of the designation, “near blowout experience.” Justin and Eli eventually rejoined the tour, but Eli’s and Julia’s behavior rapidly deteriorated thereafter. So did Justin’s, and Lia soon waved the white flag. We played briefly on the grounds, stopping to take a picture of our externally adorable daughters who were, naturally enough, behaving themselves abominably. The trip, all tolled, took something on the order of eleven hours. It was not a good day.

Friday (August 17): We continue our trip backwards to note the occurrence of the unheard-of. Justin and Lia, sans children, went to a movie theater for the purpose of viewing a movie. Andrew and Lori Davis, neighbors and friends from the ward, graciously hung out in our apartment while the girls slept. The only film we found that was not prima facie objectionable was “Becoming Jane,” a howling extrapolation from the historical record that finds the whole inspiration of Ms. Austen’s illustrious career in the experience of a flirtation passingly alluded to in a pair of surviving letters. The film was not as bad as one might fear. Among its more resounding absurdities was a scene in which the young Jane’s lover—a grand-spirited libertine whose charms over the heroine remain, even at film’s end, quite a mystery—tells the budding authoress that she will never make it in a masculine literary world unless she can write from experience about the thrills and the anguish of human passion. To help Jane see his point, he bids her read Tom Jones(!), which she then does to the backdrop of the couples’ voices reciting one of Fielding’s racier passages with nary an indication that not even the most dour automaton could read said passage with a straight face (Dr. Johnson might have been appalled; but he surely never mistook Fielding’s offenses for serious intent). But such cinematographic guffaws, and the representation of England’s third novelist (Eliot and Dickens are 1 and 2) as a reckless storm of naïve, proto-feminist impertinence, could not destroy the magic and the marvel of an “evening out,” sans filles.

August 19-23: Lia won a filing cabinet on Craig’s List. Not only did she win it, it was free. We also won a bookcase for free from the person from whom we recently won a stereo for $40—the stereo doesn’t work so well, and the free bookcase was an effort to make amends.

Friday (August 24): We now skip over the uninteresting and unremembered details of the week just past to note that we inspired and attended a get-together with several families from the ward (the Turners, Baylys, and Scotts) at Sleeping Giant park where we roasted hotdogs and marshmallows over an open fire. Julia and Eli were in heaven, frolicking freely in an adjacent field amid a veritable Who’s-Who of friends old and new. Justin, with characteristic social grace, bored one hearer after another with his blow-by-blow recitations of Terryl Givens’s, People of Paradox: A Cultural History of Mormonism, which he has lately been reading with relish. Lia embarked with Rhonda Turner on the time-consuming and vain effort at making “Banana Boats”—a distant cousin of the S’more whose only disadvantages are that it never turns out right and never tastes good (at least not as good as a S’more proper) when it does. The evening was proceeding splendidly when a park ranger stopped by to tell us that the park closed at sundown—that is, about a half an hour ago—and ordered us to clear out post-haste. Justin, fired by the conviviality of the company and the consumption of so many hot dogs, took this gesture as only the latest in a long string of anti-Mormon persecutions. “Now look here, Sirrah!” he thundered. “We’ve been driven from Palmyra, from Kirtland, from Jackson County, from Clay County, from Daviess County, and from Old Nauvoo. And we’ll be da—” At this point Julia interrupted, tugging at her father’s pant leg and suggesting meekly, “Daddy, I think we better just go.” Which we did.

Saturday (August 25): This afternoon we went to the stake center for a marathon stake primary activity, at which Julia got to help toss a ball in the air with a giant sheet and run an obstacle course. Eli knew the highest of earthly pleasures when she managed to secure a cup full of pretzels (she’s become an incurable pretzelian of late). Julia then learned a song about Noah (differing only slightly from Ned Flanders’s “The Lord said to Noah / Go build an arkie-arkie!”—we could very well have been at an evangelical Bible camp), which she and the other primarians sang with gusto during dinner. The cutest part of this performance came when the choir intoned, “The animals came on three by three,” at which point Julia cried, “Hey! That’s how many I am!”—referring to her age. While Justin good-naturedly watched the girls run wild, pretending quite convincingly that they were someone else’s children, Lia nobly joined some other relief society sisters in a quilting project. During dinner, we were entertained by a pair of guitar-toting trios, the first of which favored us with selections from “Joseph: A Nashville Commemoration of the Prophet” and the second of which resurrected a string of should-have-been-hits from the lead singer’s high school garage band (quite in the same spirit, an ostentation of girls under the age of seven—Julia was among their number—gathered at the foot of the stage and waved their arms ritualistically, as though in idolatrous homage to one or another Boy Band). Justin could think only of Terryl Givens’s mantra about the collapse of the sacred and the banal. But the music didn’t bother him as it might have; hot dogs, of which he ate a couple more on this occasion, can lighten the spirit of even the most dour puritan. This illustrious blog, of course, can do more to cheer the soul than a multitude of hot dogs. Our readers who now sleep, do so most triumphantly cheerfully.