The pang of parting with all this familiar life

Today was a bad day for Lia. She hadn’t made it through mid morning before she determined that she had had enough of New Haven. She sent Justin an email announcing that she and the girls were on their way to Vermont and would be back tomorrow, and then they were off, packed into the Bull with so many snacks, spare diapers, and Disney DVDs. But a little way past Hartford Lia realized that she had made a terrible mistake in her effort to “get away from it all”: she took the girls with her. So they stopped for lunch and back they came. Justin, who had spent two miserable hours tossed between the Scylla and Charibdis of the unspeakable tedium of a tax lecture and the anguished prospect of a lonely evening, was relieved to get another email stating that the Vermont trip had been postponed until next week (Lia claims this message carried an implicit indication that Justin was invited on next week’s trip; if there was, it was very implicit indeed). So Justin came home forthwith where he found Lia dead asleep and both the girls wide awake. He took the girls to Edgerton Park where they ran gleeful wind-sprints, chasing after robins as they cried out with one accord, “Stop, Robin-Bird! Stop, Robin-Bird!” Julia pranced around with her hands in the air singing, “How does she know that you love her?” from “Enchanted.” This, as the film gives one to understand, is what one does in a public park. The girls know Edgerton Park as “the dog park,” and it lived up to its name on this occasion. Julia and Eli got to meet a couple of puppies, with one of whom Eli exchanged a mutual mauling that left Eli giggling and the puppy quite frightened.

When they came home, Lia still slept soundly, but Eli put a quick end to that (when Justin asked her to be quiet she responded, “No! That’s rude!”). Even after a hearty nap Lia looked weary and beleaguered, so Justin thoughtfully offered to make dinner. As he set to work, however, he realized that asking someone to eat a meal prepared by him might not be the sort of thing one could do in good conscience. But he held his breath and took a page from his missionary cook book, mixing whatever was at hand into a pot with tomato sauce and noodles and calling it a pasta. Lia hedged her bets with an ex ante averment that it “smell[ed] good,” since no ex post compliment might, without prevarication or dissembling, be possible. Happily, the combined judgment of the editorial board is that it wasn’t that bad. Though later on Justin got a call from Henry Paulson warning him that under the new Treasury regulations the presentation of such a brew under the name of pasta would be subject to the most stringent disclosure requirements and the most exacting of regulatory scrutiny. “And don’t even think about selling pasta derivatives,” Mr. Paulson warned.