Dear Family,
What felt like an unusually late end to the school year (brought about by a combination of excessive snow-related cancelations — some of these would more accurately be termed “snow-related deferrals” since they ultimately had to be made up for reasons no one understands other than it’s the law — and the fact that I guess we just have a longer school year than a lot of places) means that we’ve only been in full “summer mode” around here for about a week and a half.
”Summer mode” tends to be accompanied by a number of informal changes in the way our household is managed. Most of these changes are of little consequence, and, as a result, I will address them here in great detail.
In summer mode, it’s generally Crystal who makes the bed (mostly because she’s usually still in it when I leave). Making the bed is tacitly understood to be my job during the other 10 months of the year because from 5 a.m., when Crystal’s alarm goes off, until at little after 7 a.m., when she hustles out the door, she is in a state of perpetual motion. If I don’t make the bed, it won’t get made.
Crystal and I don’t really have an official, agreed-upon breakdown of household labor, but several chores tend to slide from my ledger to hers in summer mode. Consequently, vegetables are slowly finding their way back into our weeknight meals, the kitchen and bathrooms are cleaner than they’ve been in 10 months, and I’m gradually re-adjusting to the way Crystal folds my shirts.
Far fewer alarm clocks are set during the two months of summer mode. Often, the only alarm Crystal has to set is on Sunday — Sunday! — so she can get to her various important-church-people meetings. (I honestly can’t say that I miss one single thing about those.)
My alarm still goes off at 4:50 on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. This enables me to meet my running friends for our 5:30 track workouts (on Tuesdays) at Blair High School and hilly tempo runs (on Thursdays) around Kemp Mill. Apart from that, few alarms are set. Crystal and I usually swim together at Forest Knolls pool (a roughly 5-minute walk from our bedroom) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. But that doesn’t open until 6:30, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I managed to sleep anywhere near that late.
But the most exciting thing about summer mode (even more exciting when we set our alarm clocks!) is that Grace is home!
Grace finished her second year at Southern Virginia University over a month ago and has been home since then. But it’s only now that school’s finally out that Grace’s summer life (i.e., her job) begins in earnest.
Grace’s job, as it was last summer, is as a camp counselor at Musa Martial Arts on New Hampshire Avenue, just north of the Stonegate neighborhood, where all of the D.C.-area Willises (other than us) live. The summer camp program consists of Taekwondo training interspersed with “different activities … designed around fun themes to keep [children] learning about different subjects.” Grace’s responsibilities center around these non-Taekwondo activities, which (according to the website) include going to the library, bowling, movies, go-karts, swimming, arts & crafts, laser tag, soccer, basketball, skateboard, tennis, mini golf “and much more.”
Grace’s job entails supervising many of these activities — and, in many cases, driving vans full of children to them. She likes it (and the family who run the place) a lot.
I’m happy Grace likes her summer job, but I’m even happier that she recently joined my Saturday afternoon temple shift. Being there with her is so much fun, even though, apart from our pre-shift preparation meeting from 11:15 to 11:45, I seldom see her.
Grace and I always sit together during preparation meeting. She elbows whenever I make smart-alecky comments. It seems to surprise her that I do this, though I’m not sure why. I have make unsolicited peanut-gallery comments during virtually every church (and non-church) meeting I’ve attended for the past at least 40 years. (I usually manage to keep quiet during funerals, but those are the exception.) I don’t know why Grace would think I would be any different in the temple.
Now well into my third year as a temple worker, I still love almost everything about it, but I’ll confess that preparation meeting sometimes wears on me. (Possibly because pretty much all meetings wear on me, and preparation meeting is the only element of my temple service that is — well — a meeting.) I have no complaints about the training we receive from the presidency in these meetings — it’s repetitive, but that’s unavoidable, and they all do a fine job.
But I’m ashamed to admit that I sometimes allow myself to become annoyed by believers in the false axiom that there’s no such thing as a dumb question. Or worse: the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
A lot of people seem to believe this (or at least purport to) even though it is patently and demonstrably false.
Dumb questions abound. I probably ask at least 10 of them a day.
(My favorite dumb question: Why doesn’t it tickle when I tickle myself, but it hurts when I stick a fork in my own eye?)
But I try not to waste other people’s time by asking dumb questions in gatherings that several dozen people are sort of obligated to attend. Yesterday, while certain of my beloved siblings in Christ were derailing the temple president’s training with the usual barrage of trivial, theoretical, and hypothetical questions, I turned to Grace and said something like, “this — this discussion right here — is the reason the Church got rid of high priest groups.”
That’s not really true, and Grace probably had no idea what I was talking about, but I thought it was funny, even though no one within earshot had the courage to laugh.
(No one laughed in preparation meeting, at least. When I repeated the line later to a much smaller, informal gathering of male veil workers, everyone laughed.)
Crystal sometimes tells the story of an exchange between the sealer who performed our wedding (my Grandpa Henrichsen) and me during the waning moments of my bachelorhood in May of 1994.
Crystal and I were seated next to each other next to the altar and Grandpa was standing at the head of it. He turned to us and explained that in a few moments he would invite us to kneel across the altar from one another and join hands. He said he would then ask each of us a question and that we should answer with a simple yes.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
”Yes,” we answered.
Then he smiled and asked, “Do you know what the question is?”
I don’t know how he expected us to answer, but I smiled back and replied, “Is it, ‘Do I like Popeye’s fried chicken?’”
I don’t remember whether anyone in the sealing room laughed (I’m not even sure how many people heard what I said), but Crystal did, and it remains one of the few things anyone said on our wedding day that either of us remembers.
I like to think I’ve matured in the intervening 31 years, but there clearly remain a number of ways in which I haven’t. I’m grateful that Grace (and Crystal) love me in spite of it all.
Having Grace around means a lot more singing around the house, which is a good thing. Grace and Ari also joined a local neighborhood women’s barbershop group that they rehearse with on Tuesday nights. I never thought of barbershop as a female genre, but, according to the organizers of this particular group, “Men invented barbershop, women perfected it.”
If they say so.
Grace’s presence at home means the piano is getting more attention than usual. But the piano has also gotten a little more attention from me, as I‘ve had the chance to learn quite a bit of new music lately.
This was occasioned by my being asked to accompany two of my Sunday School students’ senior violin recitals in June (one at the beginning of the month, the other this past Friday). I don’t know how often Sunday School teachers get asked to play for the violinists in their class, but it felt like an unusual honor. The students’ parents initially seemed reticent to ask me, apparently fearing either that a) I wasn’t good enough to do it well, or b) they were putting me out. (I like to think it was (b) but have no way of knowing for sure.) But they certainly were not putting me out and I was genuinely excited to do it.
Part of my excitement stemmed from having a reason to learn new music that was challenging (to me). Even though few things make me happier than getting to play Church music every week (and especially while our uncommonly enthusiastic congregation of talented musicians sings it) the music is not difficult (for me) and does not require any significant work to learn. Unembellished, our church music is virtually all sight-readable and accessible with practice by anyone with basic keyboarding competency (as it should be).
I have been thinking recently that we are living through a truly golden age of church music. I think I would probably feel that way even if I weren’t the organist, but I feel especially fortunate to get to be an organist during this era. I mean, seriously, when has church music ever been better? The new hymns are not only beautiful but just so unbelievably deep and teeming with meaning.
Last Sunday, I introduced our ward to the new hymn “Because” by first having Grace sing it to the congregation and then having the congregation sing it. “Because,” a simply beautiful song on every level, is one of the new additions to the hymnbook that sounds less like a hymn and more like something a character in a Disney movie might sing. And I mean that in a good way. Disney music, like church music, has come a long way since the mid-20th Century — I doubt any song in Snow White (or really any Disney movie before the mid-1990s) ever moved anyone to tears. But if you can listen to “God Help the Outcasts” from Hunchback without welling up a little, then I don’t think I can relate to you.
So anyway, accompanying at church is great. But accompanying a recital is a whole other thing. Accompanying a soloist is nothing like accompanying a congregation. For one thing, organists doesn’t “accompany” a congregation so much as they drive it along.
For another, the music I had to learn as a violin accompanist was somewhat more challenging than what I typically play at church.
And learning new music is so much fun! I don’t get many opportunities where I have to sit down, deconstruct and learn a piano piece. I guess that’s not entirely true. Some of the stuff I have to learn to accompany the Washington D.C. Temple Choir requires a fair amount of work. But accompanying a soloist requires nuance that accompanying a choir does not. To accompany a choir, I need only watch and follow the conductor, who essentially handles all the counting for me. To accompany a soloist, not only do I have to count for myself, but I also have to listen to what the soloist is doing, since soloists do not always necessarily count passages in the same way I do.
Historically, nothing has tested Crystal’s and my relationship, now comfortably into its fourth decade, quite like disagreements between soloist (her) and accompanist (me) over questions (e.g., how many beats should a dotted quarter note get?) which, in my mind, have one right answer and which, in her mind, are open to some degree of interpretation.
If I’ve learned anything from these disagreements, which, at one time or another, have left us annoyed with each other for multiple days, it’s that Crystal ultimately is always right. Not because she’s my wife (though one could argue that’s a good enough reason), and not because she counts better than I do (she doesn’t) but because she’s the soloist. And the soloist is always right.
Keeping this in mind has made me a better accompanist.
The highest compliment Crystal has ever paid me as an accompanist came after the first recital (where I felt I had performed reasonably well): “You did not do anything to detract from my enjoyment of the soloist.”
After the second recital, Crystal was a little more circumspect: “You didn’t embarrass yourself.”
High praise, I know. I didn’t play perfectly at either recital, but I was okay with it.
I’m also a little relieved to be done with it.
Other June highlights included pushing my friend Terrence in the Baltimore 10 Miler…
…and my friend Ryan at the Suds & Soles 5K.
Of the many, many fun things I get to do in my overwhelmingly happy life, this remains among the funnest.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly