Checking In

I wore a tie a lot this week. Tuesday I hosted the first Legal History Forum of the new semester; Thursday I taught Institute; Friday evening Lia and I joined other Seminary and Institute teachers for an “Evening With a General Authority,” which meant dinner followed by a message, via satellite, from President Eyring; and Saturday we went to the temple. I wore a tie today as well, though I can’t remember why. This whirlwind sequence of dressing up rather excited the girls; they thought I’d finally caught the sartorial spirit that so animates their every breath.

Seven years ago this month I asked a stranger on a bus in Como how he was doing. He grunted, then muttered—only just more articulately—a proverb: “Febbraio—corto e amaro!” (“February—short and bitter.”) I’m not sure that the past month has been bitter—though the weather, for more than a week now, has been respectably miserable—but it sure seemed short. Julia, for one, was excited to see it go, or at least to see March arrive. “Tomorrow morning,” she burbled as I kissed her good night, “I’ll ask Mrs. Checko if she remembered to change the calendar!” I only hope the anticipation doesn’t rob her slumber.

This week’s major project excluded me. Lia and Eli, and to a lesser degree Julia, have been memorizing an A.A. Milne poem called “Binker.” Lia has drawn a sequence of square images on our blackboard as memorial prods for their frequent stabs at recitation (the pictures have the added bonus of baffling visitors). Eli is doing a great job, reciting the piece with precision and zeal. Her favorite stanza is this one:

Binker’s always talking, ’cos I’m teaching him to speak:
He sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar . . .
And I have to do it for him ’cos his throat is rather sore.

Eli fairly roars the word “roar.” Lia’s favorite stanza, by contrast, is the following:

Binker’s brave as lions when we’re running in the park;
Binker’s brave as tigers when we’re lying in the dark;
Binker’s brave as elephants. He never, never cries . . .
Except (like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.

My contribution in all of this—not to be discounted—was to buy Eli the book Now We Are Six for Christmas.

Our temple trip yesterday was preceded by a primary activity. Afterward Eli had plenty to report, as usual, about the exploits of that dreamy Ethan Boston (“my big friend,” she calls him; Julia, who, come to find out, has been illicitly reading this very blog, informs all and sundry that “Mommy wrote on our blog, “Julia’s classmate, Ethan Boston, on whom Eli has a mad crush”; upon which Eli grins irrepressibly and adds, “Because I like Ethan so much.”). A secondary highlight was the spontaneous irruption of a dozen youngsters, seated at the same table, who extemporaneously pounded their table in rhythm and sang, “We will rock you!” Coming from the primary, the threat is not to be taken idly.