How now, a Bull? Dead for a Ducat

We come to our readers in high good spirits. Lia’s never-dormant ambition has been fired by Senator McCain’s selection of the lovely Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin’s combination of uncommon beauty, a masochist’s proclivity for the running of marathons and the birthing of children, and gritty will to power launched from the mayorship of a small city were bound to thrill our junior editor’s fancy. Our senior editor, however, having rather expected the nomination himself, naturally felt a touch snubbed. But candidates these days insist on running mates who intend to vote for them, and Justin resigned himself by muttering, in his three favorite languages, that that’s the way the world goes. Besides, he could hardly stay unhappy long—not with the inauguration Saturday of a new college football season, itself a good of the first intent and harbinger of an even greater good: a new school year (Justin’s nineteenth, for those who, like Lia, are counting).

Monday (8/25/08): Justin usually gives the girls seven minutes of play time in the tub before he returns to wash them. Tonight the girls took full advantage of his absence to pour half a bottle of honey almond bath gel into the tub. This left the girls smelling particularly sweet but made it hard to rinse Eli’s hair, which she had dunked, repeatedly, into the gelatinous brew. During the rinsing process some gel made its way into Eli’s mouth, an unforeseen calamity to which Eli responded by wailing inarticulately for some minutes with her flailing tongue wagging in the wind.

Tuesday (8/26/08): No memorandum.

Wednesday (8/27/08): We went to the Whitehall ice cream social this evening, which afforded the girls the priceless opportunity of smearing one ice cream sandwich after another into and across face, hands, hair, and clothing. During the social Eli played with Peter Lloyd, a cohort from nursery toward whom Eli bears a decidedly ambivalent relationship—most days we arrive at Church amid the rant and storm of Eli’s ferocious vows that “Pete will NOT take my tired!” Other times, though, her reaction is quite different, and she alternately rejoices at the sight of Pete, undertakes to antagonize him in every imaginable way, and protests fear of persecution at his hands. Tonight they played nice. Returned home, Justin asked Eli whether she liked Pete. “Yeah,” she drawled, with studied insouciance. “He’s one of my friends”—the implication being that there are a great many more.

Thursday (8/28/08): This morning the whole family went to the matriculation ceremony for Yale’s entering class of graduate students, Justin among their number. From the front row of the balcony at Sprague Hall the Collings crew witnessed all the pomp and parade of a self-important assemblage of Ivy-League deans, the foremost of whom (Jon Butler, the very nice and highly respected dean of the graduate school) harangued those in attendance at some length. There was good music to be heard, and the girls behaved better than expected (i.e. better than at church), though Eli left her mark on Sprague Hall in the former of marker traces on her chair and the balcony wall (the markers, happily, were wet erase, and Justin’s licked thumb effaced Eli’s handiwork). The most indelible image of the morning was the sight of Julia, adorably decked in dress and shawl, waving sweetly to the departing deans as they filed out of the hall in splendid doyenic dignity. Justin stayed up late watching online as Senator Obama dazzled his Denver devotees with the stirring nostrums of another rousing speech; he went to bed lamenting that he just cannot bring himself to drink the Cool Aid of this post-partisan thaumaturge of political utopia.

Friday (8/29/08): An epochal day. Eli got her new glasses, and Julia got her new ballet outfit. The Reader can only imagine—indeed must imagine, since our long-beleaguered camera has lately kicked the proverbial bucket—how cute they are. We, with words, could never hope to convey it.

At dinner, Eli refused to eat anything. Anything, that is, except broccoli, which she treated the way other American children might treat peanut-butter M&M’s in the absence of parental supervision. She literally stuffed her face with broccoli, several times over. Broccoli is her unqualified favorite food—an idiosyncratic taste unparalleled in the long and checkered history of childhood but one for which her parents feel most grateful.

Saturday (8/30/08): Another epochal day. The Bull having lately failed an emissions test—another casualty of Mr. Gore’s infamous documentary and the exacting ecological scrutiny of the liberal northeast—and shown itself prohibitively expensive to repair, we spent much of the week looking for another car (i.e. Lia scoured the files of Craig’s List with unflinching assiduity, compiling the inevitable statistics and composing the inevitable spreadsheets). Today we took the plunge, buying a 2000 Chrysler Town and Country with under 72,000 miles from a happy and well-settled couple near Greenwich whose children had all grown old, making the van unnecessary. We are very pleased with the new vehicle, though we cannot christen it with a triumphant name like “The Bull” until we get it registered; in any case, we never expect to happen upon a finer sobriquet than “The Bull.” Asked for her parting shots about the Bull, Eli solemnly replied: “It was a car, take it for all in all. I shall not look upon its like again.”