Beware the Ides of March

Caesar, who recklessly ignored the clear admonition of the wild vatic he encountered on the way to the Forum, had it coming to him. May our readers, with the vantage of 2,053 years, learn to be wiser than the first and the greatest of the rulers of Rome.

It’s been a good week. Deficiencies of memory and will suggest the expedience of a greatest-hits summary rather than a day-by-day slog through the events of the week.

Well, then:

A great highlight for me came earlier this afternoon (Sunday), when I walked by the girls’ room and heard this enlightening conversation between Julia, perched imperiously atop the diaper pail, and Eli, gazing up defiantly from the floor:

“Look, Eli! This doll’s name is Eli.”

“NO! Her name is NOT Eli!”

“Yes it is. Listen--she’s saying: ‘Behold, I say unto you, my name is Eli!’”

This timely invocation of scriptural cadences did its magic. Eli was duly persuaded.

Earlier in the week—Thursday I think it was—Lia and the girls went on a wild shopping adventure (shopping being by its nature adventurous, and shoppers being by volition wild—or at least mad) with Lia’s visiting teachee, Linda Hite. Linda, a quondam schoolteacher and novelist, has come East in her middle age to become an accredited Medievalist in the Religious Studies program.

For part of the adventure, the crew divided to conquer, Julia going off with Linda, and Eli allowing Lia and Katharine to trail meekly in her wake. Before this great separation, Linda requested permission from Lia to get Julia a present. Lia envisioned a lollypop. So did Linda. Julia had other ideas, though, and it somehow happened that she duped her mom and her chaperone into splitting the cost of a new Dora movie. But what was Julia's shock—her grief and shock—when she realized, upon returning home, that “Celebrate Spring!” was not properly a “Dora” movie at all, but rather a medley of Nick Jr. inanities in which Dora is forced ignominiously to share the stage with Blues Clues, Little Bill, and Ruby and Max. Dora herself gets only one episode. Julia was nearly crushed—nearly, except that it was, after all, a movie, and she spent the night beaming in her sleep over the unconscious recollection of the deft diplomacy that had won her even a faulty prize.

On Friday Lia and the girls invited Gretchen and Carter Cheney to go with them to “Kid City” in distant Middletown. This was a ruse. Kirk had called the night before to ask what we could do to get Gretchen out of the house during the middle of the day so he could store the balloons, streamers, and other assorted implements of hoopla in the attic against that evening’s surprise party for Gretchen’s birthday.

The party itself was a smash hit. Kirk had asked us all to park down at the end of the Cheney’s lane of condos, so we could avoid irritating their neighbors and letting the cat of the bag by parking a superabundance of cars right outside the apartment. We failed on the former score. A curmudgeonly bloke of advancing years sat watching with a jealous eye over a neighbor’s parking spot. When unsuspecting souls happened to park there—as both we and later the Hustedts did—the man pounced with terrible majesty. “You can’t park there!!!” he thundered from the mysterious window. “Where can we park?” “I don’t know where you’re gonna park," he spat venemously, "but you can’t park there!!!” We complied; the Hustedts defied.

Our compliance almost proved disastrous. Lia took the car and parked on the street while I took the girls to the Cheneys’ house. Unfortunately, as Lia walked from the street to the condo, Gretchen and her escort, Angelina Durazzo, had just pulled into the parking lot and were headed for the house. Angie looked in Lia’s direction. Lia did the sensible thing and turned on her heel with celerity and grace. Fearing this would prove an inadequately swift retreat, however, she added slyness to slyness by hiding behind a street sign.

“That’s weird,” observed Angie.

“What’s weird?” asked Gretchen.

“Well, there was a girl over there, who was walking this way, but then she turned right around and walked back.”

“That is weird.”

“And now I think she’s standing behind that sign.”

Fortunately, however, the ladies’ curiosity ended there, and they walked into the condo absolutely unprepared—which is to say that Gretchen was absolutely unprepared—for the deafening shout of “Surprise!” that awaited them. Katharine, who had been sleeping, was unprepared too. She was terrified, and wept inconsolably until Lia returned from her hideout-behind-the-sign to rescue her.

Now the partying began in earnest. Our great contribution to the festivities was to dispatch Julia and Eli upstairs with a tiny DVD player on which they were to watch “Journey to the Promised Land,” a “Living Scriptures” classic on loan from Dale and Dante Vasquez. The girls apparently took the movie’s message to heart. When Lia went upstairs to check on them, she saw Eli emerge from Carter’s room, dragging Josh Hustedt by the hand, and crying, “Come with me to the promised land!!!”

Promised land or no, it was a wonderful evening.

The next morning Lia and the girls, along with Jeanie Sorenson and her kids, Todd and Rachel, piled into the van and made their way to Hebron for that metropolis’s annual Maple Festival. A website promised dogsled racing and chainsaw carvings. In this expectation, our travelers were sorely disappointed. The dogs and the chainsaws were nowhere to be found. Even the quilt fair charged an admissions fee. But all was not lost. Lia and Jeanie did register their kids with a state child-tracking service that took their picture, gathered their DNA, and recorded their voice in case they ever go missing. Eli was too small to record her own answers to the questions, so Lia answered for her. Asked if Eli had any distinctive birthmarks, Lia answered that she had some post-surgical scars. But Eli, recalling the example of Erica on “The Princess and the Pauper,” solemnly pulled down her sleeve to bare her shoulder (Erica’s royal birthmark rests just above her clavicle). The gang got back home just in time for Lia and me to practice with our accompanist, Lori Davis, for the duet we sang in sacrament meeting today.

Church was eventful today. Lia conducted primary opening exercises and sharing time, and I conducted a baptismal service just after church. Both meetings had their moments of high adventure. In primary, after one child gave a powerful talk about the resurrection, another child was asked to choose a song. No doubt wishing to preserve and promote the spirit of the talk just ended, the child chose “Jingle Bells,” which was duly sung—a capella—obscure “Dashing through the snow” lyrics and all. Here was syncretism taken to new heights (or depths?).

So ends our abbreviated, if not exactly brief, account of the week we’ve lived through. So passes again the fateful anniversary of Caesar’s violent demise. “Here was a Caesar,” Shakespeare had Antony declaim, “where shall we find another?” Rome never did.