Lia's Birthweek

Twenty-six years ago, as mortals reckon time, Lia descended from Olympus, full formed and divine, to make her way among the race of men, a dea incognita (my mother-in-law tells a slightly different story, but the fact of her having turned twenty-six this week is indisputable). Mortals and immortals united to celebrate her arrival, chanting birthweek ditties to the music of the spheres.

To me fell that awkward assignment of a husband who feels at once charged to do something unusually charming for his wife’s birthday and anxiety, for reasons of self-regard, that such charm not seem altogether out of character. So what to do?

On the theory that anyone who would marry me must be inured to boredom (as well as marvelously endowed with charitable condescension), I arranged for Lia to go to a public lecture somewhere on campus each day of her birthweek while I watched the girls. It wasn’t exactly a dozen dozens of crimson red roses, but Lia assures me she enjoyed the intellectual stimulus combined with the rare reprieves of solitude and silence. Last Saturday she learned about French feminists of the nineteenth century who advocated the teaching of Latin to girls. On Monday she heard Louise Arbor—a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, and the prosecutor who indicted Slobodan Milosevic—speak about “Peace and Justice.” Lia liked the lecture, though it had its measure (not unjustified) of Ciceronian self-importance (“I need hardly recall the time I exposed Catiline and saved the Republic—and yet I do recall it”). On Tuesday she heard Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, expatiate on the theme of “Human Nature.” In a rousing burst of egotism, Ms. Robinson conflated her declared theme with, “Musings I’ve had lately.” She sipped white wine and ambled languidly from one abstraction to another in an incoherent dissertation of marvelous pomposity. Lia was unimpressed.

Wednesday was Lia’s birthday proper. We met up for lunch at the food carts outside the business school. By happy coincidence, I ran into the Cheneys on the way and invited them to join us, which they did. With four adults and four children, we thought we were evenly matched.

Now if there is one specimen of mortal whom New Englanders despise more than the Rush Limbaugh Dittoehead, that specimen is the human child. Our introduction of four children into the leisured sanctorum of the SOM courtyard was thus, to put it mildly, unwelcome. The kids had the temerity to enjoy themselves, always an irritation to the prickly descendants of the dourest Puritans. Even more galling was the kids’ willful disregard of the disapproving glances being launched at them from all sides. To have a good time and not to care whose sensibilities are thereby ruffled is, in New England, a crime of no small order. Yet our incorrigible offspring were unrepentant.

As were their parents—at least until Eli, newly out of diapers and climbing about merrily on the bike racks, suddenly pointed with anguished visage to a small, yellowish puddle beneath her and cried, “There’s pee! There’s pee! There’s pee!” When all eyes had turned on Eli, Kirk deftly defused the scandal by dissimulating engagement in a sort of imaginary alphabet game. “Oh, you’re right!” he burbled. “There is a P! And look, Q and G and W as well!” With the attention of the Pharisees returned to their coffee and quiet, I swiftly fetched Eli and returned her to the fold of our inner circle. A few moments later Julia, laughing loudly and running laps around the courtyard in defiance of direct parental injunction, tripped, and fell smack on her stomach and hands. I rushed to her rescue but her weeping was inconsolable and very, very loud. Now the Puritans were in high dudgeon. Having children instead of well-manicured dogs was bad enough, but to let them go on like this . . .

Happily I had arranged to give a tour of Yale to an old BYU chum en route to New York that day. Lia was displeased (to say little) at this early termination of her birthday lunch, but we packed our things and went (Kirk wickedly whispered to Julia that she should sing “Hakuna Matata” a tutto volume as we went, which she did to a silent chorus of stony glares). Our food had been quite good. I had enchiladas; Lia had an Indian dish whose name she never learned, having simply ordered the scrumptious-looking fare of the man next to her in line. We’ll just hope she queues up next to the same bloke on her next birthday.

Lia’s birthday was marked by presents from her many admirers. I gave her a cloth-bound, Everyman’s library copy of The Portrait of a Lady, but most people gave her clothes. She looked dazzling in everything, though Eli archly warned, at opportune times, “Remember the Zoramites!”

That evening, unbeknownst to Lia, a handful of friends came over to eat an ice cream cake that I had the Cheneys purchase and deliver. We sang and we feasted and we feted the first lady of the world. I hope it was a happy birthday. In any case Lia went to bed with the satisfaction of having grown one year older and—if the primary chantey is to be believed—wiser to boot.

Thursday’s lecture was a neuroscientist’s introduction to brain imagining. Lia, endowed with a mind of prodigious capabilities, has long been fascinated by the human brain. This may have been her favorite lecture of the week. Earlier in the day Julia, who earlier in the week had been subjected to a Prussian regimen of Italian from Professor Toto and German from Rosetta Stone, asked if she could watch “Celebrate Spring,” a series of animated episodes featuring Dora, Little Bill, Max, Ruby, and others. But it was a warm and sunny day—balmy by New Haven standards—and Lia had rather go outside. “But Julia,” Lia enthused, “do you know what the best way is to ‘celebrate spring’ on a sunny day like today?” Crestfallen, Julia sighed. “Learn languages,” she muttered.

On Friday Lia attended a lecture on “The Search for the Fundamental Nature of Dark Matter,” presented by Dan McKensie, a physics professor and husband of the inestimable Eva Allen, who generously shared her garden with Lia and the girls last summer. In planning Lia’s lecture series I noted that this lecture was “Open to the Public.” I did not notice that it was, “Part of the Physics Club’s Graduate Student Recruiting Weekend.” Lia entered the hall and became quickly aware that she was the only non-Asian female around (there were only two or three Asian females) and the only person in the room with no name tag. Undaunted, she stayed, and even learned a thing or two about dark matter from a discourse of which she recognized all of the conjunctions, many of the verbs, and precisely seven of the nouns. Lia crowned her encroachment by racing to the pulpit at the meeting’s conclusion to congratulate Dan, in the presence of two colleagues, upon his reception of an academic honor that he had, in fact, not yet received. She had been misinformed by a mutual friend.

Insufficiently weary from the week’s adventures, we went to the temple on Saturday. I had dragged my feet, but in the grand Relief Society tradition of “provoking the brethren to good works,” Lia induced me to relent. Off we went. I did a session first while Lia watched the girls, then we swapped.

Some families from New Hampshire whom we met on a previous temple trip were doing the same thing. We made common cause. At one point while Lia was in the temple, I played catch outside with a five-year-old boy named Jacob. Little boys mostly just annoy me, and I’ve been generally glad to be the father of only girls. But as Jacob threw the ball with immense gusto and regaled me with the facts and figures of the triumphs and failures of his NCAA tournament bracket, I had a partial change of heart. Time will tell.

While we were playing catch, it emerged that Jacob’s little brother, Bradley, had soiled his trousers and the floor inside the church. His parents were in the temple, and no change of clothes for little Bradley was to be found (as it transpired, he had a change in the van, which was locked). His babysitters improvised, eventually fitting him out with a pair of adult men’s shorts, which Bradley held up slightly beneath his shoulders. Moved with compassion at the pathos and absurdity of the scene, I raced to our van, fetched one of Eli’s pairs of backup pants, and loaned it to Bradley. Bradley surveyed his new attire, discovered his left leg to be emblazoned with a pink heart and the shibboleth “Princess” inscribed in large cursive letters, he pronounced it not altogether to his liking. “These,” he fulminated, “are NOT my favorite pants!” But beggars cannot be choosers, and Bradley made do with grim determination.

Feeling charitable and chivalric, I noticed that Katharine was fussing a bit. I picked her up from her car seat and had it pointed out to me that she had blown out. The diaper bag was in the car, so I lugged my precious cargo to the parking lot to fetch it. I had to transfer Katharine from my right to my left arm in order to reach into the van to grab the diaper bag. It was only then that I noticed the dramatic extent of Mt. St. Katharine’s eruption. I have never seen such a blowout, reaching as it did into every nook and cranny and corner of her once-clean outfit. Ironically, Katharine had no spare outfit, so I bedecked her in the shirt that was supposed to be matched with the pants now donned by Bradley. (I think Eli had no idea of the extent of her charities.) I wrapped Katharine in blankets and tossed my coat over her. I silently prayed that Lia would come back soon.

She didn’t really, but we bided the time by watching the Belmont ward’s pinewood derby and scavenging on the leftovers of a senior missionary feast. It was a long afternoon, but I was sustained by a keen consciousness of my own heroism. When Lia returned she came as an angel of mercy. I conclude, after a week of spending more hours on my own with the girls than I have spent in any previous week, that I am not cut out for what Lia does—not close to cut out for what Lia does. I knew this well enough before, but here is an added witness. At the same time, a prolonged celebration of Lia’s birthday, capped by a trip to the temple, has afforded a happy season of reflection on just what a wonder my wife is. No one I have ever known can match her; no one even comes close. The girls and I unitedly adore her, just this side of idolatry.