On Sophie’s growing wardrobe, Ari’s new job (and bike commute), and Grace’s performance that brought the crowd to their feet at the swimming state championships. (Vol., xxvi, No. 2)

“Yea, and we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men.” (Alma 46:9)

Dear Family,

Two Saturdays ago while riding my bike north on New Hampshire Avenue with a group of dads from the neighborhood, we pedaled past the St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral:

A short time later, two miles north on the same street, we rolled past the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church:

I have biked past both of these houses of worship countless times and I did not take either of the pictures above (so sue me). But it felt different riding past them this time. Both places now display giant blue banners with yellow lettering. I slowed down enough to pull my phone from my jersey pocket and snap an admittedly less attractive picture (this one in front of the orthodox cathedral):

Not to get too political, but do you remember that 2012 presidential debate when President Obama derided Mitt Romney for characterizing Russia as America’s most significant foreign threat? “The 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” the president scoffed.

I suppose we have all said things that sound dumb with a decade of hindsight. I know I have. (You should read my old letters.)

I grew up in the 1980s. I was a high school senior when the Berlin Wall fell and I was a missionary in France when the Soviet Union collapsed. I remember what it felt like to be afraid of Russia. What I feel now is not so much fear for my own safety (not yet, anyway) as despair for the people of Ukraine (not to mention the Russians, most of whom I expect are not happy about this, either). Mormon was right — sometimes it just takes one bad dude.

I honestly can’t recall a time when I felt this particular kind of despair about anything. It’s hard to say whether I would feel as emotional as I do if not for Sophie’s connection to the country. On Thursday as the invasion unfolded, I found it hard to think about anything else. I think about Sophie’s Ukrainian mission president and his family and wonder whether they’re okay. I think about her new friends in Dnipro. Her Russian-speaking friends in that largely Russian-speaking part of the country that Putin claims are mistreated by Ukrainian-speaking “Nazis” from the west. I think Sophie would argue that isn’t true. I wonder about the temple in Kyiv where Sophie lived for a month. I wonder and I worry. There’s a vigil tonight at the Orthodox church. I think we’ll go.

One of Sophie’s letters this month recounted how she and several of her fellow Temple Square missionaries greeted five incoming sisters who had just been pulled out of Russia. The impromptu meeting took place in the parking garage under the apartment building where all the Temple Square missionaries live.

Together they sang a hymn. “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord. I’ll be what you want me to be.” It was reportedly an emotionally charged moment for everyone, particularly for the transplanted Ukrainian and Russian missionaries. Just imagining the scene makes me cry.

Sophie sounds genuinely happy. The pleasure I derive from reading her weekly letters is exceeded only by that of seeing and speaking with her on Wednesday nights. These Facebook Messenger sessions have started to feel like mini family reunions with Hannah and JT often joining from Orem. During our most recent call, Hannah announced her intention to deliver a bag of, I don’t know, something, to Sophie this weekend. She asked Sophie where she would be stationed at such-and-such time on Saturday.

“I’m not allowed to tell you that,” the always-obedient Sophie responded. But she pointed out that the entirety of her mission is essentially two blocks — the Square and the Conference Center — and you’re bound to find who you’re looking for if you wander around enough. I’m pretty sure this is also what Sophie tells the many friends and relatives of Temple Square missionaries who show up and ask if she knows where Sister _____ is right now.

Anyway, Sophie now can tell you how many pipes all the organs have, attends Sunday services at a Russian-speaking branch (except for this week when she went to a Thai-speaking branch with her companion, who is learning Thai, which sounds hard), and regularly expands her wardrobe by raiding something called “the rack.”

“The rack,” it would seem, is one benefit of serving in a women-only mission. If I understand it right, when a missionary gets tired of an outfit, she puts it on the rack and some other missionary (usually Sophie) claims it for herself, perhaps replacing it with clothes she no longer wants. As best I can tell, it works sort of like the Little Free Libraries we have scattered around our neighborhood.

It’s brilliant.

Sophie’s siblings have likewise had eventful months. Although the high school swimming regular season ended a month ago, Grace has spent all four Saturdays in February attending divisional, metro, regional, and state championship meets. She actually swam in a couple of these and attended others in her new capacity as a team captain.

At the regional championships, where her school finished second (behind only Montgomery Blair, the high school where Hannah went and swam, literally a mile down the street from Grace’s), Grace swam the 100 free and a leg in the 200 free relay. She was also unexpectedly pressed into service singing the national anthem. I wasn’t there, but in Grace’s telling, she was pulled from the pool during warm-ups and was asked if she would be willing to sing the anthem. As she stood dripping wet on the pool deck, someone handed her a mic and she sang. Everyone said it was lovely and I guess it was because they had her sing it again at the state championship meet this morning.

The state championships were held at the University of Maryland’s aquatic center, a very nice facility for a Big Ten school that doesn’t even have a swim team.¹ The mic was terrible, the acoustics were what you might expect in a giant room with three swimming pools, but Grace powered through.

Grace did not actually swim in the meet, but they still gave her all the swag the participants get. So that’s nice.

Grace also learned this week that she has been cast in the role of “Rona Lisa Peretti” in Northwood High School’s spring production of the musical comedy The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I am not familiar with this work, but “Rona Lisa Peretti” is listed first under “major characters” on the show’s Wikipedia page, so I guess it’s a fairly important role.

Ari got some good news this month when they learned they had landed a new job with a local company called Kids After Hours. K.A.H. provides before- and after-school child care for elementary school students at the school they attend. (Parents drop their kid at school in the morning on the way to work and pick them up in the evening.) Kids effectively spend the entire day at school, which sounds kind of miserable to me, but people like Ari make it fun for them.

The ideal scenario would have been for Ari to work at Forest Knolls, the elementary school all our kids attended, half a mile away. But ideal scenarios seldom materialize in life and Ari instead has been assigned to Garret Park Elementary School, about five miles away.

Driving would be the easiest way for Ari to get there — if not for their aversion to learning how to drive. This aversion is most frequently blamed on Ari’s father and his penchant for loudly (and at times coarsely) expressing displeasure with other drivers, occasionally going so far as to assert that the world would be a better place if they were removed from the gene pool. In less heated moments, I acknowledge that this is probably one of those things which, while true, it might be best not to say out loud. Ari routinely beats me in Mario Kart. It stands to reason that they would be better than me at driving real cars, too. But, alas, it does not appear to be in the cards for the immediate future.

The bus is another option, but there are no direct routes between here and there, and it would take forever.

That leaves biking. Until a couple of weeks ago, Ari claimed not to know how to ride a bike. But that was before Ari was properly incentivized. Within a few days of learning where they’d be working, they had more or less figured out how to do it.

Geographically speaking, much of Maryland, including the part where we live, is part of the vast American Piedmont, the remnants of what 300 million years ago was a series of mighty mountain ranges. Consequently, apart from some relatively small expanses that have been artificially leveled out, very little around here is flat. To ride a bike here is to deal with one hill after another and our neighborhood is no exception. Literally every street, in every direction, is a hill.

This makes our neighborhood not the best for learning to ride a bike. The fact that no one has a garage and the narrow streets are perpetually choked with parked cars — which somehow seem to actually attract novice cyclists (and drivers) into them — makes it hard enough. But starting on a hill is hard and you really want a flat surface when learning to ride a bike. The nearest one of those is the elementary school parking lot, but that’s a half-mile up the hill.

Ari was not deterred. Within a few days, they were pedaling up and down our neighborhood’s hills, only occasionally bumping into the parked cars. On Presidents Day, they declared themself ready to try the 5.1-mile route to work.

I rode it with them. It was probably more nerve-racking for me than for them. They’re still a little unsteady and sometimes veer a little closer to the traffic than I’d like. They fell quite a few times and I literally could have covered the 5 miles considerably faster on foot, but they made it.

Two days later, while Crystal and I were at work, Ari attempted the same journey on their own. They made it to Garrett Park again but crashed on the way home, twisting their ankle in the process. Not even bothering to try calling their parents, who were not in a position to help anyway, Ari called our neighbor and bishop, Rick Kemper. He dropped whatever he was doing, drove to where Ari was, loaded the bike into his car, and drove them home.

That Rick Kemper’s a pretty great guy.

Ari is still limping a bit on the injured ankle, but I expect they’ll be back on the bike soon enough.

One of the reasons Ari didn’t call me was out of concern that I would be mad at them (which probably tells you all you need to know about me). I in fact would not have been angry, but it would have taken me a while to get to them with a car because I was in Arlington with only my bike, having ridden to work myself that day.

I have started going back into the office a couple of times each week, which is probably a good thing. I found that I’d lost a little of my nerve riding in rush hour traffic, but that is gradually coming back. My commute is actually quite a lovely ride, mostly through Rock Creek Park before cutting through Georgetown, shedding a tear as I pass the Ukrainian embassy across the street from my favorite bike shop, and crossing the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Potomac into Arlington’s urban neighborhood of Rosslyn.

I mentioned in last month’s letter that I have never worked in an office with a door.² This is true, but my desk probably has a better view than yours. We routinely mock movies and TV shows set in Washington, D.C., in which every window looks out at the Washington Monument. As it happens, my desk, while technically in Virginia, nevertheless has a view not only of the Washington Monument, but the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and the Capitol, too.

(Not in the picture, the Pentagon is also visible from where I sit, but I have to crank my head to the right and that’s kind of a lot of work.)

The month began with Grant, Andrew, Peter and me driving down to Raleigh for a brother’s weekend with Matt. The short trip was ostensibly occasioned by the annual “Krispy Kreme Challenge” at North Carolina State University in which participants are given one hour to run 2.5 miles from campus to a Krispy Kreme shop, eat a dozen original glazed donuts, and then run the 2.5 miles back.

As sometimes happens these days, the event waited for as many people as possible to pay the entry fee, and then announced at the last moment that covid had forced them to cancel it.³ They gave us all vouchers for a dozen donuts, which we ate, and Grant, Andrew, and I did our own little 5 miler around Matt’s neighborhood, but it just isn’t the same thing.

The cancelation was something you would more expect to have happen here in 125-percent vaccinated Montgomery County, where even though our indoor mask mandate was finally lifted earlier this week,⁴ I still encountered people this morning on the Sligo Creek Trail (i.e., outdoors) wearing cloth masks over their N95s. Even with that level of local craziness, it’s been quite a while since an outdoor event (like a race) was cancelled here.

But the Krispy Kreme Challenge was really just a pretense for visiting our faraway brother, which we enjoyed. We ate at an Asian fusion restaurant that Jackie basically runs and had a great time playing frisbee golf with nephew Henry and niece Morgan’s boyfriend Cory. (Morgan, an N.C. State senior, stayed home with covid.) It was my first go at frisbee golf and I’m happy to report that I am every bit as bad at it as I am at real golf. But they’re both pretty fun.

Finally, Crystal’s work as our stake’s delegate to what has been characterized as the longest standing temple open house committee in the history of the Church appears to be finally entering the home stretch. The gigantic posters and literally thousands of pass-along cards that have been occupying Hannah’s bedroom for the past weeks are gradually finding more appropriate homes.

The poster shows an end date of June 4th, but it was announced in January that the open house has been extended “as needed” (whatever that means) with the dedication pushed back to mid-August. Extending and delaying were probably easy decisions to make for people who live in a state that will soon have 28 temples. After four and a half years, it will be exciting to have our one in Maryland up and running again.

And speaking of church, I went camping with our ward’s Young Men last weekend. Faithful readers know that I don’t love camping generally, and I particularly dislike it in sub-freezing temperatures. But I really like our guys! We camped at Marsden Tract, just off the Billy Goat Trail, bound by the C&O Canal on one side and the Potomac River on the other. It’s a nifty little place that has the added benefit of being really close. Win-win.

We send our love.

Tim, et al

1. You read that right. The flagship university of the state that gave the world Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky axed its swim program several years ago.
2. Literally no one at my 100-person firm works in an enclosed office. The two co-founders sit at open desks maybe 15 feet away from mine.
3. Rather than cancelling, they actually announced the event had “gone virtual” which is a load of crap and just the new way of saying “the event’s not happening but we’re keeping your money.
4. Masks are still required in schools, in case you were wondering.