16 September 2007

Dear Reader,

We posted nothing last week for the good and sufficient reasons that, first, we were in mourning over a late, sad occurrence in Pasadena, California the previous evening and, second, we were irrepressibly lazy. But Time, great healer of all wounds, has blunted the force of the first obstacle and the second is a fit that comes and goes, though in the case of our senior editor it seems to come with greater frequency and intensity than it goes. No matter. For the present hour the fit is gone, and the Milky Way’s favorite blog is back.

Monday (September 10): The first Monday of the new school year is always a painful experience, and the length of the day was commensurate with that pain. But the general gloom was more than mitigated by a morning trip to Yale-New Haven hospital (not the planet’s most cheering location) for Eli’s six-month check-up, the results of which indicate that Eli’s improvement has been dramatic (the examining physician actually said “drastic,” an odd choice of words, but the history of the medical profession indicates that the elegance of doctoral style has varied inversely with the level of medicinal competence—doctors wrote well centuries ago and killed patients by the thousands) and her next six-month check-up (now inaptly styled) need not be held for another year. Hooray for Eli! Three cheers for Dr. Charles Duncan! Meanwhile Justin stayed home with Julia, who wept with the weeping of the bereaved and howled with the anguish of the damned when she learned that she was not to be allowed into the hospital with Mommy and Eli. Justin consoled her by letting her watch “Mommy Teach me Spanish” and “Dumbo” on his computer while he did the dishes. In the evening we had a family home evening lesson about agency, a lesson which so excited Julia’s interest that she interrupted at the rate of three times per spoken clause, discoursing garrulously on a wide variety of topics generally associated with gospel principles or tales of princesses. She was adorable, though she gave the lie to Justin’s assertion that good choices yield happiness when, heeding her mother’s strong request that she not steal Eli’s stuffed monkey, Julia instead stole off into a corner of the room and wept bitterly.

Tuesday (September 11): “Not wanting to sound accusatory,” Lia confronted Justin late this evening, “but what would you do about the laundry if you didn’t have more garments than I?” A probing question; one we should all ponder. Eli has taken up the venerable habit of desultory screaming, and we are at a loss when it comes to convincing her that screaming is not nearly so fun as she knows it by personal experience to be. Julia, ever the obedient eldest child, has similarly taken to screaming with righteous fervor that Eli should not scream. Justin succeeds only in irritating Lia and confusing his daughters by responding to such situations with the classic ditty about your screaming, my screaming, and our all screaming for ice cream[ing?]. So the old world goes. Lia and the girls road-tested our double-jogging strollers heavy duty rain tarp by braving the steady New Haven drizzle on their way to playgroup. When Lia asked the girls what they thought of the tarp, Eli asked what Bonaparte’s troops could not have accomplished in Russia with such tarps and Julia asked whether Cinderella’s pumpkin coach was so equipped. Meanwhile, Justin sat in a course on constitutional interpretation where in honor of the anniversary today celebrated Professor Akhil Amar read movingly from the Gettysburg Address as miscreant undergraduates in the hallway raised the ruckus of a deafening bedlam. A plague on their admissions prospects. In the evening, Justin excitedly bombarded Lia with a blow-by-blow recitation of another day in the life of a mediocre law student, which she cut short by falling asleep with the drowsy observation that she had heard enough about law school for several lifetimes. So, assuredly, have our readers.

Wednesday (September 12): Justin got home late tonight, as school was followed by the project of transporting a hundred or so chairs from our ward building to the stake center for an imminent stake conference, a project followed in its turn by bishopric meeting. When he got home, Eli was in bed, but Lia had promised Julia she could come out to see Daddy when he came home. And she was ebulliently glad to see him. In a moment of tender reunion, Justin scratched his nine-o’clock-shadowy chin across the surface of Julia’s adorably rotund cheek. Julia giggled and pulled away, remarking, “Daddy, I like you; but I don’t like your face.” Lia said something similar in repulsing Justin’s preliminary flirtations years ago, though the documentary evidence from her diary belies her verbal protestations. (We would also remind our readers of the contrast between this assessment and one of the many scintillating dialogues from the Star Wars saga: Alien: “My friend doesn’t like your face.” Han Solo: “Oh?” Alien: “He doesn’t like you.” Han: “I’ll be careful.” Alien: “You’ll be dead!!!”) Justin ate dinner with peculiar relish, since the promised “free lunch” at the Moot Court information session turned out to be a single slender slice of mediocre pizza (we say “mediocre” somewhat gratuitously, since for Justin this has never been a deterrent—but quantity is essential). He then read Julia the two stories Lia had promised, after which she plaintively requested a third and, daughter being almost intolerably cute, father consented. He soon wished he hadn’t, as they made their plodding, painful way through a tedious Raggedy-Ann volume, unencumbered by the constraining coherence of a plot. But Julia was cute enough to make up for it, and at length she went to bed and Justin and Lia enjoyed a quiet evening of perfect serenity.

Thursday (September 13): Lia spent every moment her daughters’ generosity afforded her—which, in seventy-three increments, added up to about four minutes distributed desultorily over a period of eleven hours—sewing a pillow for Kari Heward’s baby shower. Given these constraints, the finished project was little short of miraculous, and although Eli insisted that a “baby shower” smacked of the objectionable practice of infant baptism (and here she invoked strong language from the eighth chapter of Moroni), the ladies went anyway. A grand time was had by all, and the pillow was much admired. Where was Justin? He fled to the Benelux countries at the first mention of a baby shower, but returned to New Haven in time for his first Institute class. To understate things, Justin was excited about his class. Indeed, it may be fair to say that he has not been so excited at least since Lia said “Yes,” probably not since Ty Detmer won the Heisman trophy on December 1, 1990. He arrived at church half an hour early (CES shares the building with the wards) to unlock the door, then ascended to his classroom on the second floor where he fiddled his thumbs nervously. The clock ticked and the minutes passed. No one came. First 7:15, then 7:20, then 7:25, then 7:30 came and went. Justin looked at his watch at 7:32 and there flashed before his mind the picture of an eager new Institute teacher waiting in vain for the students who never came. Perhaps LDS motion pictures could make a film about it. Perhaps if he, in desperation, tried unsuccessfully to drown himself such a film could serve as a heart-wrenching sequel to “The Cipher in the Snow.” At about this point Justin decided to go downstairs to greet whoever might come at the front door, though probably no one would. But before he could descend the stairs he was met with a mass of students ascending them, one of whom gently informed him that he had not unlocked the door correctly—which means, of course, he had not unlocked it all. In all, about fifteen students came, and the class, once Justin gave up on sharing his brilliant insights and let the students talk, was a solid success. Afterward, Justin wondered why he had ever come to law school, why he hadn’t pursued a career in the Church Education System instead. Then he recalled that, constitutionally incapable of entertaining teenagers or inventing even the most pedestrian of scriptural games, he never would have made it.

Friday (September 14): Eli’s therapist came for the penultimate time today. As she filled out her report Julia and Eli scampered off into their room and there followed a couple minutes of uninterrupted silence. Taking note of such silence, Tracy (the therapist) looked up from her writing and asked Lia, “So, Julia and Eli are playing together pretty well these days?” Before Lia could answer the air was pierced by a deafening shriek from Eli, an ear grating yelp from Julia, and a Latin colloquy in which each girl alternately cried “Meum!” with mounting vehemence and color. There arrived in the mail today a lovely little volume that contains a photographic chronicle of our summer adventures; in future years the book will be a wonderful memento of our family’s history. But not, of course, if Eli eats it first, which we fear. Lia joined with a couple of her friends today in the first Joy School planning meeting of the new school year (the Sevys returned this week from a prolonged vacation, leading Julia to comment, “Mayah’s back, so I can start my Joy School. But Callie isn’t back, so I can’t start my Joy School forever.”) When evening fell, and we tried to send the girls to bed, our erstwhile cherubs morphed into furies, and there was open revolt. Bedtime started at 8:30: Eli fell asleep around 11:20; Julia at midnight. In the end Lia punished our belligerent eldest child by holding her tightly in her lap and reading to her aloud from the Book of Judges. At length, Julia was asleep on the floor, so Lia stopped reading, upon which caesura Julia raised her head and began weeping anew. “Julia,” Lia said sternly, “I have ten verses left in this chapter. When these ten verses are over you are going to bed and that’s that.” Then, recollecting on the absurdity of her being reduced to reading the most violent pages of the incarnadined Old Testament to a willful triannuarian, Lia changed her tone. “You know what Julia, never mind. You’re going to bed right now.” To which Julia, with the most piteous and pouteous face the world has ever known, responded plaintively, “But I wanted to read those verses!” So Lia continued: “And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly: And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out” (Judges 3:21-22). At this point, Lia turned down the leaf as Julia yawned, “Ah, Judges. As true today as when it was written,” and scampered off to bed.

Saturday (September 15): Justin, who apparently won some sort of lottery, got to attend not one but two stake leadership training meetings, in addition to the adult session of stake conference. He pulled out of the Whitehall parking lot in the passenger seat of Brian Knudsen’s (Justin’s friend and our ward clerk) truck at exactly 1:42 p.m. to make it to the first meeting which began at 2. He pulled back into that same lot, mounting the unflaggingly faithful Bull and with family in tow, at exactly 9:42 p.m. that evening. Lia and the girls, meanwhile, went shopping with Bianca Daniels. Julia got a new pair of shoes which, lacking the Princess sticker (in future, a capital ‘P’ in ‘Princess’ denotes a Disney princess) that graced (cursed?) the pair next to it, cost a modest $83 less than its neighbors. This concession to the constraints of domestic finances infuriated Julia, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Arrived home, they briefly attended the Whitehall fall barbeque, where Julia ate a hot dog and Eli ate someone else’s hot dog. The evening ended on a sad note indeed, as our beloved Cougars managed to lose to Tulsa despite scoring forty-seven points and putting up eye-popping numbers on offense and special teams. To make matters worse, that contemptible (beneath contempt, really) school some ways to the north of Provo whipped eleventh-ranked UCLA 44-6. All is not right in the college football world, though this illustrious blog remains as magnificent as ever.