“Among nine bad if one be good.”

Dear Reader,

Well, Hillary Clinton’s last stand finally belied its name, rendering the race for the Democratic nod truly interminable and sending the contestants back to the mud pit while Senator John McCain looks on, statesmanlike, aloof, above the fray, and inwardly gleeful. Those disappointed with this state of affairs can at least console themselves that Mike Huckabee has finally and mercifully disappeared from the public stage. Forever, we hope, though in an age of recycling diet crazes we can perhaps count on the former governor to pack on the pounds in doleful response to the miracle-that-wasn’t and then lose it all in inspiring and lucrative ways. He may even star in a Western with his comrade and ally, Chuck Norris. Perhaps we should all have majored in miracles.
Monday (March 3, 2008): Monday must be an invariably forgettable day because it is inevitably forgotten. We remember only that we held Family Home Evening, per commandment and custom, at which Justin taught a lesson about gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon. He has become quite enamored of the tripartite slogan as the basis of his lessons (remember, “Truth! Priesthood! Church!”; we also learned about the Three Witness who heard the (1) Voice of God, saw an (2) Angel, and handled the (3) Plates, a lesson Julia quickly translated into an eager chant of “Voice! Angel! Plates!”), and luckily this particular incarnation came with a ready-made primary hymn to go with it (“Search, Ponder, and Pray,” readily recast by Julia as staccatoed imperatives). We had ice cream—Plain-Jane, Price-Right vanilla ice cream—for dessert. Our undiscriminating senior editor devoured it heartily.
Tuesday (March 4, 2008): For the first time Julia, whose physical and social growth proceed apace, went, unattended by a parent, to a birthday party. The birthday boy feted on this occasion was Jackson Peacock, an inveterate hockey fiend. Accordingly, the theme of the soiree was a hockey theme, and Julia came home with a pair of inflatable—if repeatedly and usually deflated—hockey sticks, with which Julia and Eli alternately bopped one another on the head for the rest of the week. This has proved an activity of the highest interest and importance, and the girls abandon it only to demand that one or the other of their parents exercise their beleaguered lungs in behalf of the beleaguered balloons (strangely, when the call for manual inflation came, Justin tended, like T.S. Eliot’s Macavity, conspicuously to prove “not there”). Julia gave Jackson a dual present, with each of her parents contributing a half. Lia provided a set of firemen action figures, Justin the game puck from Yale’s victory of R.P.I. the previous Saturday—fittingly reflecting their roles as the practical and sentimental officers of their marriage, respectively.
Later in the day, Lia took the girls to the toy store, where they bought an assortment of Little Red Riding Hood apparel, including the eponymous hood, a basket, and masks of the wolf and the granny. Most often Julia plays the part of the wolf, Eli the granny, and Justin, when he’s around, the part of the axe-wielding woodsman. While at the store a kindly old worker, a Canadian with a distinctly Edmonton accent, gave Eli a plastic pig the proportions of which are approximately those of a dime. Eli absolutely loves it, alternately clenching it remorselessly in her tiny fist or carefully storing it in some remote nook or cranny of our expansive car (we’ve been reading the Prydain Chronicles and can only suppose that Eli, like the wizened Taran, prizes her high appellation of “assistant pig keeper”).
The evening was marked by a whirlwind of activity. Lia went to her “Women in Scripture” Institute class at 6:15, left early and raced home to tag-team Justin, who then raced off to a welcoming potluck dinner for admitted history students at 7:30, from which he left early and raced home to tag-team Lia, who then raced off to a Wives of the Yale Law School (WYLS) book swap and cookie exchange which began at 8 (she was late). All the events went well, though Justin’s name got somehow placed on the wrong email list and he found himself at a dinner event designed for prospective students of Early Modern History. He stumbled through a desultory conversation with a sixth-year writing a dissertation on drainage in sixteenth-century English parish communities before being rescued by a felicitous introduction to Francesca Trivellato, a professor of Italian Renaissance history and, more to the point, an Italian herself (from Venice, to boot). He left with a new friend and a standing invitation to join the faculty of the Italian department in their occasional Scrabble tournaments, conducted of course in the celestial tongue. Lia and the WYLS enjoyed tasting treats and talking books, while their husbands at home pined away for their absent wives and dreamed dreams of gridiron glory.
Wednesday (March 5, 2008): We went to bed late on Tuesday, much fatigued. Which was why we were so glad to see Julia when she burst desperately into our room at around 3 in the morning, demanding immediate assistance en route to the restroom. But our delectation reached its apex a couple hours later when, to the common delight of all residents of Whitehall, every fire alarm in the complex erupted in a deafening cacophony of flagitious arousal. We were not amused. Nor were we amused when the alarms continued unmuffled and unabated for forty minutes, notwithstanding the early and perfunctory departure of the fire engines who had duly come to honor the pretense of inspecting the possibility of a real fire. Lia, in high dudgeon, even called 9-1-1 and demanded in terms unprintable (only because hopelessly garbled—it was iniquitously early) that the alarms be turned off lest she, a former BB-gun sharpshooter, lose all patience and employ self help. The alarm was off within seconds, and an apology from the mayor, another from the governor, and a $100 bill from 2012 presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg arrived in the afternoon’s mail. Small compensation, thought Lia, for the bereavement of sacred, celestial, magnificent sleep.
The day went on. It was “Campus Visit Day” for admitted PhD candidates in the history program, so Justin visited campus—meaning he trotted the thirty steps or so that separate the law school from the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) where he met his future classmates and professors. It was an exciting day, big with the sweet prospect of several more years of hardscrabble living and perpetual schooling. But the sweetness and light were soon banished by the bitter, dark, and tedious task of spending his evening moiling over a Law Journal source cite. Even professional students encounter opposition in all things.
Thursday (March 6, 2008): Lia and the girls went to Hannah’s Dream, a quiet park by the sea, where they looked longingly at the wistful waves and cursed Fate for not casting them as real princesses. Lia sang an Attic dirge; Julia composed an impromptu sonnet; and Eli clutched her plastic pig with desperate resolve. Then they came home for lunch.
In the evening Justin taught Institute, the last time he’ll do so on a Thursday. Lia had missed one Relief Society activity too many and Justin had spent one too many nights away from home, so Justin unilaterally and peremptorily changed the class to Wednesday, when it will immediately follow bishopric meeting and limit the number of nights he spends away from home each week. We are all excited about the change. So, we should add, is the Relief Society, the activities of which will now sparkle and live with the fire and charm of the most fervent and lovely bon vivant in the New England Church.
Friday (March 7, 2008): Friday, being the end of the workaday week, has since time immemorial been a symbol of reprieve, of quietus, of untrammeled joy. And joy means Joy School, which is exactly where Julia went in the ward. This was the occasion of an uproariously funny anecdote that will some day split the sides of our sentient readers (we hope that’s all of you). But not yet (how’s that for a shamelessly tantalizing lure to continued reading?). In any case, Julia had fun—and, more important, had joy. Eli had joy too, but she had to get it home, second hand, from a joy school CD she has, with the perpetual bedaubing of her adorably grubby hands, nearly reduced to non-functionality.
With Julia returned, the joyful trio packed a lunch and took a walk to Edgerton Park where they sat down to a picnic and ate it too. This was a special picnic, securely tucked in the aforementioned Red Riding Hood picnic basket. Julia donned the red riding hood itself, arrogating to herself the article of clothing as a proper noun.
Justin came home early and sat down on the couch to read a story with Julia. Eli had other plans and began tugging vigorously on her father’s fingers. “Come on, Daddy, come on!” she cried. “Where are we going?” Justin asked. Eli paused, thought, and answered decisively: “Blueberry Hill!” (There is a song on an episode of Dora the Exploer, the refrain of which runs, “Where are we going?” Clap-clap-clap. “Blueberry Hill!”).
For date night we played “Set,” a maddening game of bewildering patterns which Lia loves and Justin despises—a game to which Lia introduced Justin the night after his return from the mission field, recommending it as a great favorite of her then boyfriend, the Latinate form of whose name we shall record here as Usurpus Jerkifus. To make matters worse, Justin was bad at the game, and has generally refused sourly to play it ever since. Lia somehow cozened him into trying again on Friday night. And in the first go round he made a game show of it. Before they could begin another game, however, the phone rang. It was Lia’s dad, which meant a conversation of endless duration, but rather than let this ruin the date, Justin thought this was his chance. Lia set up the game and the two played while Lia talked. This should have been an advantage to Justin. Maybe it was. In any case, Lia mercilessly destroyed him. Justin, defeated and dyspeptic, hurled horrific imprecations at the name of Set, at the memory of Usurpus Jerkifus, and at the whole agglomeration of idiotic, mindless, sophomoric—the string of angry adjectives went on for some time and quickly grew tiresome and appears here in truncated form—games of both card and board (bored?), which succeed brilliantly in rousing his competitive streak but fail catastrophically at capturing his interest. In other words, he bid the plague descend violently upon all those games at which he is dispiritingly bad and can only hope of betterment at the unconscionable cost of playing them often. And he uncharitably wished upon Usurpus Jerkifus a life of perpetual bachelorhood (he has since recanted).
But Lia quickly made him eat some cookies and drink some milk and all was soon forgotten. We then moved on to the real fun of the evening, which consisted of doing the laundry and listening to devotional talks while we folded it. Lia pronounced it the best date night in recent memory.
Saturday (March 8, 2008): We had stake conference this weekend, an event marked by the visit of Elder L. Tom Perry of the Twelve and Elder Clayton M. Christensen, our Area Authority Seventy. Elder Perry our readers know; Elder Clayton is a professor at the Harvard Business School and, even more impressively, stands 6-foot-8 (Elder Perry told the priesthood leaders, “We bring you the Twin Towers of the Church”). Justin went to a priesthood leadership session from 4 to 6, and Lia and the girls joined him for the adult session from 7 to 9 (Justin, not entirely hopeless as a husband, watched the session with the girls in the primary room, while Lia relished some respite in the cultural hall). It was a long but inspiring day, a happy end to a long but not invariably inspiring week. At the end of such a week, the editors express appreciation to our readers, love to our children—and the senior editor confesses to loving his junior colleague just this side idolatry.