Pomp and Circumstance

Today was a big day. Lia had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, after which she and Justin pulled a fast-action tag-team swap, the latter racing off to school and the former carting the girls off to East Rock Park where, with all due pomp and splendor, Elias Thompson, Jackson Peacock, and our own Julia Collings were solemnly graduated from Joy School. They even had paper caps, though no gowns. The trio enjoyed listening to their Joyful anthems one final time as they chased bubbles beneath the New England sun. Eli made as many puns as possible about the ceremony being a rite of spring.

Lia, determined as ever to prove true the old bromide about their being no rest for the righteous, babysat Maren Wallace while her own girls were sleeping, then stormed the kitchen where she made dinner for Andrew, Lori, and Holly (newborn) Davis, carefully saving the scraps for her own grateful family.

After dinner we mounted the Bull en masse and headed to Wooster Square, center of what was once (and still is, to a degree) the Italian district of New Haven (the square even boasts of a statue erected to the memory of “Cristofero Colombo,” by “gl’Italiani di New Haven” in 1892, the 400th anniversary of the great Genovese’s “discovery” of “America”). We met up with Sander and Bianca, and had fun strolling about beneath the full-bloomed glory of the cherry blossoms. The girls romped gleefully, with Eli thundering out her whereabouts every twenty seconds, endearingly addressing herself to Bianca a tutto volume. “Bianca!” she’d scream. “I’m right here, Bianca! Right here!” “Right here” was usually five or seven feet away. And of course there were a handful of always exciting dogs, which the good folk of New England—emulating, as ever, the Europeans they so resolutely adore—own and care for in lieu of bearing and raising children.

We tried to stop by a famed Gelateria on Wooster Street, but it was sadly closed as its proprietors mourn the death of a family member. Man, however, is a creature who, having allowed himself the anticipation of eating ice cream, will never rest until his desires meat a creamy consummation. We thus needed, imperatively, to find another ice cream place. Since there were none nearby, and since Sander and Bianca had walked to Wooster Square from their apartment, we all piled into the Bull (Justin, Sander, and Bianca up front; Julia, Lia, and Eli in the back) and drove across town to Ashley’s Ice Cream, where the grown-ups filled their bellies and the children smeared their faces (we won’t say to which group Justin and Sander finally belonged). We then came home and went eagerly to bed.