To Venture Upon an Act of Power

Still awaiting the contributions and corrections of the junior editor:

As the Democratic presidential primaries slouch toward Pennsylvania amid furor over Barack Obama’s aspersions on the name of American Everyman who, Mr. Obama, alleges clings to guns, God, and nativism as a consequence of deep-seated economic malaise; as the Italophilic world (i.e. our senior editor and persons of good will everywhere) braces itself for the third (and what looks to be the longest) premiership of the tragicomical Cavaliere, Silvio Berlusconi; as the press and paparazzi scrupulously follow Benedict XVI throughout his first tour of the great U.S. of A. and assiduously report every papal pronouncement on every subject under the sun (religion excepted); and as our beloved Jazz prepare for a run at their first NBA championship (we are sanguine but not Panglossian about their prospects)—in such a world, our readers naturally turn their gaze from the madd[en]ing crowd, connect to the world wide web, type a URL they recall more readily than the names of their children, and breathlessly hit the return key, hoping against hope to be rewarded by the latest installment of their favorite blog. That failing, you’ve now come to our own illustrious blog in hopes of consolation. And console we shall.

Monday (April 14): The most exciting thing that happened this day actually happened the day before. Our hearts took a leap of joy last Sunday when we saw that our friends, Kirk and Gretchen Cheney, were absent from Church. This is not to say that we dislike the Cheneys, but that we suspected—rightly—that they were at the hospital having a baby, with Gretchen making rather a more momentous contribution toward this end than her well-meaning husband. So Monday morning we awoke to an electronic annunciation of the earthly arrival of Carter Sterling Cheney. Kirk, usually laconic and subdued, had forwarded to all the world an effusive email, enthusing that the manchild bearing his genetic code “seem[ed] like an all right kid.” Justin responded that appearances can be deceiving, but Lia deleted that message and replaced it with a rolling torrent congratulatory superlatives interlaced with eleven dozen well placed exclamation points.

We had a family home evening lesson about fellowshipping (though that word was never used), after which we had treats of cashews, jelly beans, and fancy cheeses from Sugarbush farm in Vermont. The treats were essentially assigned randomly by Lia, who hid one treat under each of three cups and then asked the other three members of the family to make a blind choice from among the cups. Regardless of the random distribution, Justin did an impressive amount of wheeling and dealing, and in the end had before him a mountain of cheese, at which his daughters looked longingly as they chewed slowly on their sugar and nuts.

Tuesday (April 15): The last day of Lia’s "women in scripture" Institute class.

Wednesday (April 16): The third-to-last day of Justin’s Institute class.

Thursday (April 17): Lia and the girls joined Amy Whittaker and two of her three kids (Bethany [5?] and Seth [2?]) for a trip to a local farm/petting zoo/animal observatory where they, in Eli’s words, “saw the animals.” During the drive out all parties loaded into the Whittaker van, while the Bull sat sullenly, slighted, in the Whitehall parking lot. Bethany sees Julia as something of a natural protégé, and generously devoted much of the car ride to teaching Julia the eternally funny quip about ABC gum. (In the course of the years, the infantile collective has apparently forgotten that in the original joke “ABC” stood for “Already Been Chewed,” but the substance and the overwhelming humor of the thing remain unchanged.) The kids loved the animal show, as a sign of which they spent most of their time there circling about one another giggling wildly. The most dramatic episode of the trip was reported to Justin in Eli’s laconic but earnest recitation, “The horse bit my forehead.” This was apparently using “bit” in its broadest sense, though the snout of the beast did touch the forehead of our shining seraph, who was however too fascinated by the presence of a flesh-and-blood horse to be really frightened.

In the evening Lia went to girls night out, for which they reviewed the art work of Gerald Murphy, who, along with his wife Sara, was a cynosure of the Lost Generation, at the Yale Art Museum. It was a good day.

Friday (April 18): Gladriel Clayson and Jarrod Shobe—Justin’s classmates who, in the portmanteau spirit of celebrity power couples march, in YLSLDS circles, under the uninspiring sobriquet of “Gladrod,” a nickname that was, admittedly, Justin’s own brainchild—graciously offered to babysit the girls after they did an early-afternoon session at the Boston Temple while we attended the session at 5. Gladriel had watched the girls once before, and since Gladriel’s name sound like a princess, and because the girls had been allowed to watch “Enchanted” on that prior occasion, both girls, but especially Julia, venerate Gladriel extravagantly. Julia hopped up and down at the prospect of cruising Boston in Gladriel’s company.

We tried to leave New Haven at 2 but were waylaid when a caravan bearing a pair of governors (including the Governator himself) on a bus that ostentatiously announced its eco-friendliness made its way through town with the full pomp and splendor of a police escort, which clogged the roads and caused Justin to miss the bus. We then met with several more delays on the way out of our apartment, the most significant of which can be grouped under broad headings labeled “Eli” and “Julia.” We didn’t get out the door until 2:30 or so. To make things more exciting, there was a real question as to whether the Bull had enough blood (i.e. fuel) to make it all the way to Boston without a pit stop. We also failed to calculate that this was the weekend of the Passover, and that the Jewish population of New England was reenacting the exodus on its way to be with family. But through a felicitous concatenation of miraculous occurrences—whether the greatest of them was our not getting lost or Julia’s not needing to go potty is an interesting question—we roared reverently into the temple parking lot with several minutes to spare.

To be in the temple together with the girls in good hands on the outside was unspeakably wonderful for Justin and Lia, who haven’t had that experience in over a year. We were very, very grateful to Jarrod and Gladriel.

Who meanwhile had their hands full. Duly equipped with car seats and strollers they took the girls to the most kid-friendly place they could think of in the greater Boston area: Harvard. Julia and Eli, conscientiously brought up in the way they should go (i.e. as rabid Yalies), sneered in disdain at the admirers who passed by them as they strolled through Harvard Yard. At least, that is, until a couple of these admirers made their admiration vocal, at which point Eli conceded that, say what you might about Harvard people, at least their aesthetic sensibilities were in fine fettle. Julia concurred, citing an obscure theorist of art who insisted on the proximity of the moral sense with an appreciation of beauty. But soon such lofty discourse was lost amid the heady promise of ice cream, which Gladrod generously supplied and the girls with avidity devoured.

Contrary to all expectation, the Passover traffic hardly slowed us on our way home and, with the girls sleeping/watching “101 Dalmatians” for the duration, it was an irenic, peaceful drive. To pass the time we shared stories from elementary school, moving chronologically, year-by-year, from first grade on. Most of Lia’s stories ended with an apostrophe on the order of, “Mom! How could you have let that happen to me!?!” Most of Justin’s with his best friend Jason nearly getting into a playground fight of epic proportions but fleeing with so much celerity as thought of thought instead. It was a great day for the girls, a better day for their parents.

Saturday (April 19): Julia had her Creative Movements class this morning, to which Justin accompanied her, The Economist firmly in hand. Julia’s movements were indeed creative, though only occasionally did they bear anything approximating a mimetic relationship to those of her teacher. She was, in any event, deliriously happy as she gamboled and frolicked and galumphed about the dance floor, contentment coruscating from her happy face.

Lia spent most of the afternoon organizing the girls’ clothes, bringing spring/summer up from storage and sending fall/winter down, as well as separating each category by age group into capacious totes. It was a lot of work, a monument to just how many clothes Justin’s mom has kindly provided for the girls over the years.

Sunday (April 20): Eli babbled loudly and incessantly in the security of her crib for several minutes after we put the girls down for their naps. At length, Justin could take no more and he marched into the girls' room intent on putting the fear of the Almighty into the heart of his youngest child. His wrath was attenuated, however, when he saw Eli quickly roll onto her back and close her eyes intently, in a singularly unconvincing effort to show that she was already asleep. Justin stood above her for a moment, trying hard not to laugh as her eyelids quivered under the strain of their being shut so intently. He then warned Eli that consequences would follow further intransigence, to which she responded sweetly, "I'm going to sleep," which she did. Many paragraphs ago, most of our readers did the same.