Dear Family,
Hannah vowed to Crystal earlier this month that she would never allow her to live in a nursing home. (The vow reportedly did not mention anything about me.) In addition to her full-time job at the Utah State Hospital,1 which she loves, Hannah also occasionally pulls shifts at a private nursing home, which she loves a little less. Should circumstances render Crystal’s move to such a place unavoidable, Hannah says she’ll make sure it’s located between her house and her work so she can check in every day and give the people who work there hell.
I feel sorry for those hypothetical future people. And I’m glad we have daughters.
I’m not sure why I opened with that. It could have something to do with the two milestone birthdays our family celebrated this month.
The first was Lucy’s, who turned 21, and while that isn’t a particularly significant milestone for teetotalers, we tried to make a thing of it anyway. We built a fire in the backyard — one of Lucy’s favorite things — and sat around it talking until well past dark. Apart from binge-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, there might be no better way to spend a fall evening around here.
Lucy is into a bunch of things that I wouldn’t even know were things were it not for Lucy. Most of these things, like “mermaiding,” probably could not have become things without the internet’s power to unite people with similarly peculiar interests.
The latest thing that I never would have known existed were it not for Lucy is an exercise app called Zombies, Run!. As I understand it, this is a game in which you run (actually, physically run in real life) while the app plays music and prompts you to pick up the pace by creating the impression that you are being chased by zombies. Lucy amplifies the intensity of this experience by listening to it while running the Northwest Branch Trail through the woods behind our house at night.
A good father might be more troubled by this activity than I am. But even if it did bother me, Lucy’s 21 now and — apart for renting a car, which wouldn’t interest Lucy anyway — can do pretty much as they please. The dog usually accompanies Lucy on these runs, which might bring a modicum of comfort if the dog weren’t an idiot.
So into Zombies, Run! is Lucy that for the past several month’s they’ve been immersed in the creation and development of Zombies, Run!: the Musical, a collaborative bit of fan art based on the app’s missions and storylines assembled by 16 mostly British and other European friends of Lucy’s whom Lucy has never actually met. The principal composer is some girl who Lucy and Grace have described to me as “someone whose brother writes music for Nintendo.”2 The Act I soundtrack “dropped”3 last week and we had fun listening to it with Lucy.
Lucy, with some assistance from Grace, is also our house’s primary Halloween decorator. I don’t know what we’ll do if the zombies ever catch up with them.
This month’s other birthday was Crystal’s 50th, which only seems significant because we use a decimal system and, for all our technological advances, struggle to contain our excitement at watching an odometer roll over. If we used a number system based on 7, as the Creator obviously intended, then 21 would be 30 and Lucy’s birthday would seem more significant than Crystal’s. Crystal would now be 101, which, apart from some nice symmetry, doesn’t seem like such a big deal.4
But we live in a fallen world and (decimal-based) 50 must be commemorated! She got her morning started with a 50-mile bike ride. (I tagged along to gather photographic evidence — I’m getting better at taking pictures while cycling with no hands, but I don’t always manage to focus on the right things.)
After the bike ride, the four of us went over to Annapolis for crab and other Maryland stuff. Then we came home, ate a chocolate cake with maple frosting and chocolate ganache that Crystal made herself because birthday cakes are too important to Crystal for her to entrust them to anyone else.
Cake was followed by a Zoom-based birthday celebration with members of Crystal’s family spread from here to Alaska. The whole thing was put together by Crystal’s sister Liz and their sister-in-law, Mimi. Mimi and Liz make it difficult to ascertain who is the actual kindest person I know, but they’re both on the medal podium.
Because I’m a pathologically self-centered person, Crystal’s birthday got me thinking not so much about her mortality as about my own. I’m not 50 yet, but it’s on the horizon. When I turned 40, I could plausibly tell myself that most of my life was still ahead of me. Now, at age 48 and three-quarters, I have almost certainly made the turn and started playing the back nine.
I ran some numbers from my genealogy to prove this out. The odds of my making it to age 97 don’t look promising:
I am not blind to the flaws in this analysis. One problem is that it overweights the influence of people who died a really long time ago, before Americans had universal health care — oh, wait. Because my ancestors grow exponentially with each preceding generation,5 my 32 great-great-great grandparents account for more than half of the people represented on the histogram. Some of these people were born in the 1700s and most of them died in the 1800s, when people on average didn’t live as long. These more distant ancestors account for much of the left half of the distribution, as the following chart illustrates.6.
The longevity of my more recent ancestors would seem to indicate that I probably have at least a few more decades ahead of me. But confounding variables are hard to account for and it’s unlikely that any of these people ever challenged Washington DC rush hour traffic on a bicycle, as is my wont.
Notwithstanding all this, I didn’t really start feeling old until a few days ago when I had a conversation with Grace. I was asking her about her computer science class and she told me she’d been learning about Vint Cerf, who is one of about a dozen people who can legitimately claim to have “invented the internet.”
“That’s wrong,” I interrupted. “Everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.”
“What’s algore?” replied the 15 year old.
Which is fine with me. A world where Vint Cerf (or any scientist) has more name recognition than Al Gore (or any politician) is a world I could live in. The exchange took me back to a more innocent time, a simpler time, 20 years ago, when the presidential debates featured George W. Bush comically stumbling over every third word and Al Gore loudly sighing and just repeating the word lockbox over and over.7 It all seems so quaint now. I remember watching Gore’s concession speech — in December, after all the dust finally settled — and how statesmanlike he sounded. Bush was equally gracious in victory. Raise your hand if you expect to hear anything like that next month (or the month after, or the month after that).
Hey, speaking of elections, Maryland’s about as self-righteous as a state can be when it comes to progressive sensibilities, which is why I was delighted to learn this month that not only did Lincoln fail to carry Maryland when he won the presidency in 1860, he actually finished fourth here. Fourth! Gary Johnson did better in Maryland in 2016 than Lincoln did here in 1860. (Look it up if you don’t believe me.)8 Lincoln carried California, but nobody cared since Maryland had twice as many electoral votes as California back then.
Crystal is a lover of state songs and compels us to sing Idaho’s any time we enter that state. Like most state songs, “Here We Have Idaho” is awful, but “Maryland My Maryland” is even worse. Crystal, who has now lived half of her 50 years in Maryland, would love to have us sing it every time we cross the state line. But she can’t bring herself to make us learn a song that refers to “Northern scum” and characterizes Lincoln (without explicitly naming him) as a “despot” and a “tyrant.” I find Trump revolting (even though we’re technically cousins–see footnote 5), but when it comes to Marylanders and our excessive use of superlatives to describe politicians we don’t like, he’s in good company.
Church is slowly returning to something resembling normalcy, though we still obviously have a long way to go. Our second-hour meetings are still conducted exclusively via Zoom, but we received clearance this month to increase our in-person sacrament meeting capacity to 100.9 One hundred sounds like a large number in the context of the pandemic, especially since cases are spiking around the country and we’d been limited to 25 for much of the summer. But cases are not spiking here (pro tip: everyone always wears a mask here) and not only is the exterior of our meetinghouse just a couple of loading docks away from having all the beauty and character of a large manufacturing warehouse, its interior is every bit as spacious. The Montgomery County executive order currently in force allows churches to admit one person for every 50 square feet of worship space, which means 100 people would need 5,000 square feet and we have nearly double that. Keeping people socially distant during the meeting is easy. Getting them not to congregate near the exits after the service ends is proving to be harder than I expected. It’s difficult with adults. With teenagers it’s impossible.
We run a 10 a.m. YouTube livestream of sacrament meeting for the benefit of the elderly and infirm, other members of high-risk groups, and people who’d just rather not come. I have somehow become the guy in charge of this, which means we can now add one more thing to the already endless list of stuff I’m not very good at. It also means I haven’t actually enjoyed a sacrament meeting since March. Instead I spend most of the meeting worrying about whether everything is working and only half-hearing what anyone is actually saying.
My job becomes more difficult when the meetinghouse wifi goes down, which happens with annoying regularity. Earlier this year, the Church changed the name of all meetinghouse wifi networks from “LDSAccess” to “Liahona.” Changing the name hasn’t really improved performance, but assigning the name Liahona to a seemingly magical bit of technology that works only intermittently was pure genius.
Pray for our country. Pray for our world. (Pray for our wifi if you still have time.) And remember we’re all related.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- The Utah State Hospital is a well-regarded psychiatric facility in Provo and should not be confused with the Utah State University hospital, which does not exist.
- Say what you will about the rising generation. They know how to name-drop!
- “Dropped” is one of those 21st Century idioms that make me feel old. It would seem to be synonymous with “uploaded” or “published,” both of which are more descriptive of what’s actually happening than “dropped,” which sounds like just the opposite. I learned last month that Sophie had dropped her French class. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I’m not so sure.
- I’m currently 66 years old in base-7, which means I’ll roll over to 100 in January, but I doubt anyone’s planning a party.
- Before you jump all over me, I realize this growth stops being exponential once you go back far enough and start figuring out that we’re all cousins one way or another. Crystal and I are 10th cousins, which means that at least one of our children’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers on my side (Matthew Bunn, born 1633 in Plymouth, Massachusetts) is also their that-many-greats grandfather on Crystal’s side. Because all of us are ultimately cousins (George W. Bush and I are 9th cousins, Barack Obama is my 11th cousin, one generation removed, and President Trump and I are 14th cousins — there is a remote possibility that none of these relatives actually read this letter or even know that I exist) the exponential growth eventually starts falling apart. Nevertheless, my 32 great-great-great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, 8 great grandparents and 4 grandparents are, in fact, 60 different people.
- Throwing a wrench into all my generalizations, the longest-lived person in this distribution (and its lone centenarian) — my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother’s mother, Elizabeth Hill Jones — lived from 1787 to 1887, thus proving that outliers can come from anywhere.
- I can’t say I remember the actual debates as much as I remember the Saturday Night Live parodies of the debates, but those tend to be pretty spot on. I’m also old enough to remember the aftermath of that election, which was when Americans started speaking in terms of “blue states” and “red states.” This has driven me crazy for 20 years since red has historically been–and everywhere else in the world continues to be–the color associated with left-of-center ideologies. At every place in every time, except in 21st-Century America, blue connotes conservatism. Crazy Americans. Not only are we unable to adopt a sensible set of weights and measures, we can’t even get our political colors right.
- Maryland was a slave state at the time, which didn’t help, but at least we stayed in the Union.
- More accurately, the instruction was to hold sacrament meetings of whatever size state and county officials would permit while giving the government-imposed limits a wide enough berth to avoid the appearance of even coming close to surpassing them.