Even More Fun

One can no more have--can no more be--a little fun than one can witness a little avalanche. When a man's wife decides that a man's family is to become fun, the gauntlet has been hurled, the Rubicon has been crossed, the Babe has been traded to the Yankees. There is no going back.

So it was that last Saturday saw us at it again, loading the van and madly careening North by Northeast to Glastonbury, CT and Gay City State Park--a place whose very name (obviously running back some decades) bade us have--bade us be--fun. We invite our readers vicariously to be fun with us through the following pictorial pageant.

Occasionally Lia accuses me of not taking our fun conversion seriously, of paying merely rhetorical homage to our family commitment to having and being fun while secretly harboring feelings of skepticism and classical irony. On such occasions, she relentlessly interrogates my allegiance to the Republic of Fun, all while peering at me most narrowly, like this:
As a graduation present, my in-laws sent me an umbrella. This was fantastic because I really needed an umbrella. I haven't had a functional umbrella for many months, and while it was exhilarating the first few times I walked to school in the rain, pretending to be King Lear and bidding the angry skies to rumble their bellies full, I soon became a convert to the glories of dry trousers, as I have long been a believer in the virtues of dry humor. In any case, I now have an umbrella. When I opened the umbrella, down flopped paper raindrops bearing pictures of my spouse, offspring, and siblings-in-law. On the reverse side of the pictures were little notes ("Give me a J!" and so forth), which combined to scream, "Justin Rules!" Which, as a hubristic graduate of the Yale Law School, I sort of do.

One day last week Lia and the girls joined the Billiston crew for a trip to the beach to collect seashells. Maisie Billiston (named for the titular Maisie who knew something or othr in a Henry James novel) is Julia's classmate. The younger Billiston twins, Karl and Rosa (named for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, socialist martyrs of Weimar Germany), are about Eli's age. Their father, Daniel Markovits, was my tax professor. He speaks to the kids in German, and claimed in class to have taught Maisie (then 3) to cry, "Das ist ein kapitalistisches Schwein!" whenever she saw a man in a pin-striped suit. There weren't any at the beach, so we can't know for sure.

Here are Eli and Rosa on the rocks. Tight chums and mild look-alikes:

On to Gay City State Park. We teach our children to reach high:

I started the outing by gallantly sporting Katharine on my back. But Katharine knew very well on whose back she wanted to ride. And she knows very well how to implore, and to command. She wound up on Lia's back, at length.

One of the highlights of this particularly leg of the GCPP marathon was the opportunity to fish for free. They made us practice a bit, though, before they let us fool around with worms and hooks. This is just as well. I've always said, give a kindergartner a fish, and she will plug her nose and leave the table; but teach a kindergartner to fish, and she is likely to remain entertained for at least ten minutes.

I really do believe other men when they say that they enjoy fishing. So in my own efforts to become fun, I thought I'd simulate the actions of fun, and hope that the feeling would follow the performance of duty. Here's me simulating:

We had a picnic. The girls were about as focused on their food as they were on posing for this photograph (Katharine, naturally, was the best eater of the bunch).

Another highlight of the outing was the opportunity, rare indeed, to sit in a broken canoe perched atop an inner-tube:

Here's Julia, only partially convinced by the replication of a whitewater experience:

Eli wasn't convinced at all.

Katharine, however, went in for the illusion whole hog.

Lia loved it too. But then a random little girl approached, giggling, and shoved some worms into her face. Even intrepid souls find it hard to be fun under such pressures.

Shortly after this it began to rain heavily. It was only with great difficulty that we pried Lia--intoxicated with the intellectual libations of a geological tour of the park--away from the booth with the rock jokes ("What does a rock want to be when it grows up? A rock star!") and sought shelter in the car. We made it home in safetly, better educated and, a fortiori, more fun than when we had left that morning.

This doesn't, however, conclude our pictorial pageant. Though our final pictures can hardly be further adorned by comment from me.