On a wedding, a surgery, and the stirring power of a bunch of little kids on bikes (vol. xxix, no. 10)

Dear Family,

I sincerely wonder whether anyone, in the whole history of human civilization, has ever unironically uttered the following two phrases in succession: “That was a beautiful wedding. I just wish it could have gone on a little longer.”

I can’t say I loved every minute of it, but every minute of the wedding of my niece Morgan Willis to Cory Campbell was objectively lovely (the minutes I stuck around for, at least — I bailed not long after the cake was cut, as is my wont). I think the people who know me understand that I like going to weddings — I like being with people I love and care about and witnessing momentous events in their lives — I just don’t like staying at weddings. And I think the people who know me understand that when I complain about weddings (and I don’t think I’ve ever attended a wedding I didn’t complain about) it’s really more about me than about the wedding.

With that disclaimer, Morgan and Cory’s wedding took place at a charming little venue on a small lake in an out-of-the-way corner of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d never been to Chapel Hill and was surprised to still see at least two large banners welcoming Coach Bill Belichick to town — signs that have not aged well. Most of us who traveled south stayed in Raleigh, while Sophie and Luke stayed in Durham, and Hannah and Emma stayed in Chapel Hill. These three places are all relatively close to one another, but not as close as they appear on a map or as close as commentators on ESPN make them sound. College basketball analysts frequently speak of UNC, NC State and Duke as if those universities were just down the street from one another.

They are not. (I mean, they kind of are, but not really.¹) Consequently, we did a little more driving than I expected during the weekend of the wedding, but that’s okay. It really is quite a beautiful place.

You’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you I attended the wedding because I didn’t make the cut for any of the official pictures with the bride and groom. (I was shooed away by one particularly officious² photographer when I walked into a shot I mistakenly believed I was supposed to be in.) It was a little embarrassing but not troubling — and I guess should not have come as a surprise. I mean let’s face it, “uncle of the bride” sounds more like someone who everyone hopes won’t show up to the wedding than someone who is integral to it.

I have previously written about why even though I generally prefer people getting married to people dying, I nevertheless usually prefer funerals to weddings. I won’t rehash my entire rationale here, but suffice it to say that my preference boils down to funerals’ tending to be quieter and shorter affairs. (Emphasis on “shorter.” I rather enjoy the clamor of a live sporting event, but those typically don’t last more than 2 or 3 hours. Weddings, on the other hand…) Also, funerals don’t have annoying DJs, compulsory dancing, and repetitive toasts, all of which I could do with less of.

For the past decade (i.e., ever since Nike ushered in the first generation of supershoes) human beings have been on the verge of breaking the two-hour marathon barrier.³ After this month’s Chicago Marathon, it really does feel like Jacob Kiplimo, even though he faded in the last few miles, is right at the cusp of being able to do it. I believe he will do it. And I’ll be just as excited as everyone else when he does. But not nearly as excited as I will be when human beings achieve an even greater feat: breaking the two-hour wedding barrier. Sadly, the two-hour wedding appears to be far less attainable than the two-hour marathon, and the human race is not showing much interest in getting there.

I’m probably asking too much. It really was a nice wedding. A beautiful afternoon and evening. It looked like it might rain at the beginning — I may have even felt a drop or two during the ceremony, which I managed to listen to while simultaneously monitoring the final two minutes of the Eagles’ victory over Minnesota — but the weather held up. Dinner was great (Carolina barbecue). If only I could have put a giant pair of parentheses around the whole event and multiplied the entire quantity by 0.5, it would have been perfect. At least for me. But I’m slowly coming to understand and accept that most people don’t plan weddings with Tim Willis in mind.

Even though they probably should.

One of the things I liked most about the wedding was how it attracted all of my children (including my two married daughters and their spouses in faraway Utah) to the same place. This doesn’t happen often and so I took some pictures:

First at (fittingly named) Good Graces in Raleigh where we had Sunday brunch:

All eight of us (pleasantly crammed around a table for a 6) inside Good Graces:

And my six children (I’ve officially decided to claim my daughters’ spouses as my children — I hope they don’t mind) a couple hours before the wedding:

And at the reception (minus Grace, but plus Grandma):

My four brothers and I in the parking lot of the wedding venue at what felt like the middle of the night but, upon closer inspection of the photo time stamp, was only 8:19 p.m. (I am given to understand that the dancing went on until all hours of the night (like 10 p.m. or something) but it looks like I bailed around 8:30):

We Marylanders all managed to cram into the same house for the weekend — a sprawling Airbnb that Jen managed to find.

This meant that three of my brothers and I (and several nieces and nephews) all found ourselves in front of the same TV for the BYU/Utah game the night before the wedding.

I’ll confess that I don’t watch many BYU games. My temple shift conflicts with afternoon games, and a lot of night games out west don’t even start until after my bedtime. And even when night games start at a more reasonable hour (say, 8:00 Eastern, as the Utah game did) I usually can’t stay awake much past the first quarter. The way it usually works (with pretty much all sporting events that start at 8 or later) is I fall asleep sometime in the second quarter, wake up between 1:28 and 1:33 a.m. to pee (as I do, reliably, every night), check my phone to see who won, and then go back to sleep.

I’m a superfan; what can I say?

But with a house full of people I was somehow able to power through to the end of the game, which was fun. Because we won. I think it may have been the second or third time in a row we’d beaten Utah — I don’t actually remember (or even care all that much — even though I guess I’m supposed to — I mean, of course I care — I’m happy when my alma mater does well — but I’ve concluded that I feel the same way about the University of Utah as I feel about Canada — even though they seem to overtly despise us, I, a Latter-day Saint who has never lived in Utah except to go to BYU, feel a kind of indirect affinity for them, and, notwithstanding their perpetually hideous uniforms (Utah’s, not Canada’s), I find myself pulling for them, except when they’re playing us). I sort of vaguely remember a period when Utah beat us a whole bunch of times in a row, but I honestly cannot remember when they beat us last. I’m pretty sure it was before the last time Washington won the World Series, and that feels like about a thousand years ago. Everything pre-pandemic is kind of a blur.⁴

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The extended government shutdown continues to take its toll on many of our friends, neighbors and fellow congregants but has not (yet) affected our family directly in any meaningful way. It has, however, compelled me to adjust my bike route to work, which used to cut through a small corner of the National Zoo. While not very long, the zoo segment was one of the prettiest parts of a ride that, by virtue of being mostly in Rock Creek Park, is more scenic than you might think an urban bike commute could possibly be. Sadly, the closure of the Smithsonian (of which the National Zoo is a part) means I’ve had to re-route.

Instead of riding on this pleasant little trail though the zoo, I am consigned to the Beach Drive tunnel, which sucks. There’s nothing wrong with the tunnel itself — if you’re in a car — but it’s terrible to cycle through.

Cyclists have two option in the tunnel. One is the roadway (which I used to ride my bike on all the time back when I was younger and less afraid of everything), ostensibly governed by a never-enforced 25-MPH speed limit but on which drivers routinely travel at nearly twice that speed (except when they reach the speed humps and abruptly slow down to 10 — and then speed up to 40 again only to slam on the brakes for the next speed hump — at the risk of overgeneralizing, all drivers are morons). The other option is a bad sidewalk mushed up against the arching wall of the tunnel that is too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic — you basically have to stop for cyclists and pedestrians coming the opposite direction and overtaking people is all but impossible.

I realize there are about 80 million more important reasons why the government shutdown is stupid. This is my one.

The Curious Magic of the Bike Bus

As a bicycle commuter, you’d think I’d be a strong proponent of the weekly bike bus that meanders through our neighborhood every Friday morning on its way to Forest Knolls Elementary School (which all of our children attended and loved, though, sadly, before the days of the bike bus).

And I am, in fact, firmly pro-bike bus. 100% in favor. But I have some complaints about it. I originally considered lobbing these complaints into the neighborhood listserv, or even directly emailing the neighborhood dad who organizes it (photo below — a prince of a man by all accounts, though I don’t know him personally).

My complaints stem from the fact that the bike bus isn’t so much an organized ride to school as it is a parade — parents in minivans block off the route while kids and their parents on bikes commandeer the entire street from curb to curb. It seems to me that if the objective is to teach kids to ride to school (and other places) we need to teach them how to coexist with cars, not purge the streets of moving cars entirely so people can ride with reckless abandon.

I still harbor these reservations, but rather than voicing them, I decided instead that it would be more fun if I joined the bike bus on my way to work.

And so I did, and the strangest thing happened. I still have my opinions about what might make the bike bus better, but I entirely stopped caring about them. Because it’s just so much fun! There is so much palpable joy in the bike bus, sometimes it makes me tear up a little.

Seriously, just watch the video I shot last week:

I’m pretty sure the first time I joined the bike bus, parents wondered about the mysterious, creepy childless guy riding so close to their children. But then word got out somehow that I was Ari’s dad. Lots of people know (and love) Ari from Kids After Hours (where Ari works) at the elementary school. And so I had my in. The second time I rode, several participants waved at me and said “Hi, Ari’s Dad!”

It’s hard to put into words how much happiness the existence of the neighborhood bike bus brings to my heart. I mean, watch this video I took of them rolling into school at the end of the ride. Look at the scope of it! And this isn’t some once-a-year thing. This is every Friday! Our neighborhood is the best!!

Surgery

Sadly, I won’t be able to join the bike bus (or ride my bike at all) for the next couple of weeks while I recuperate from this past Monday’s surgery.

You’re allowed to stop reading here if you’d like. If details of my groin and scrotum interest you, feel free to read on. Some descriptions may be graphic. Caveat lector.

The procedure was to surgically remove a ginormous (I think that’s the correct medical sizing term) hydrocele from around my right testicle. (As you may recall, six months ago, I underwent a less-invasive procedure to drain a half-liter of fluid from that area. That helped but did not last. Within a month or two, the huge bulge in my groin was bigger than ever.

I visited the dermatologist earlier this month for a long-overdue full-body skin check (which I guess you’re supposed to have every couple of years but I never had before). It was no big deal. He froze a small wart off the back of my left hand (so small that I had not even noticed it was there) and sliced off a small section of suspicious-looking tissue from my back, which turned out to be nothing.

Before the dermatologist examined my groin, I warned him about the hydrocele. Told him I was seeing a urologist and scheduled for surgery to have it removed. He glanced into my underwear and I’m pretty I didn’t just imagine his eyes widening. “Yes, that’s quite impressive,” he said.

There are any number of things someone might say when examining my groin. All else equal, I suppose I could have done worse than “That’s quite impressive.”

A more apt adjective would have been annoying, but unless he’s experienced it, the doctor would have no way of knowing that.

The hospital called five days before the procedure to let me know they had received the results from my pre-operative exam and to give me final instructions and verify my health history. She asked a bunch of unsurprising questions and near the end she asked, “Now it says here that you’re a triathlete?”

I confirmed that I was, but I was confused. “That’s in my medical history?” I asked.

It was. Do you remember that time in July 2021 when I crashed my bike during the Diamond in the Rough Triathlon up in Perryville and was taken by ambulance (across the Susquehanna River) to the E.R. at the University of Maryland’s tiny Harford Memorial Hospital in historic Havre de Grace? You don’t remember? Well it happened. And it turns out all that went on my permanent record.

Crystal drove me to the White Oak Adventist Hospital on Monday morning and sat with me through all the pre-op stuff with the nurses, anesthesiology people, and the surgeon. The surgeon signed his initials on my right forearm, which made me feel like I had to confirm multiple times, “You’re not cutting into my arm, right?”

He assured me it was just protocol — because the hydrocele was on the right side of my body — but it seemed kind of superfluous since it was my scrotum he’d be slicing open, and I only have one of those. I guess he didn’t want to sign that. (He ended up slicing right down the middle of it anyway.)

Anyway, they wheeled me into the O.R. and had me climb from my bed over onto the operating table. Someone put a mask over my nose and mouth, and the next thing I knew, two hours had passed and I was awake in a different room, feeling mostly okay, but also like I had just taken a soccer ball to the groin.

That painful sensation has mostly subsided in the intervening days, except immediately after I stand up and when I try to bend over too far. It’s getting better. I’m not sure my scrotum will ever look quite the same, but I’m not sure I really care. They prescribed oxycodone, which I picked up at the pharmacy but have been too afraid to take. I’ve been fine with alternating doses of acetaminophen (hopefully I won’t catch autism) and ibuprofen. Three days on, I’m not really taking much of those anymore, either.

I can get around okay, but I’m not supposed to do anything strenuous for at least a couple of weeks. Not that I would want to. I feel like I’m still a long ways away from wanting to get reacquainted with my bicycle saddle.

Too much information? Well, I warned you.

Happy Halloween.

Love,
Tim

1. They are closer to one another than BYU is to the University of Utah, but not as close as BYU is to Utah Valley University. Does that help?
2. Most wedding photographers are officious. They kind of have to be in order to do their jobs well. It doesn’t make me dislike them any less.
3. Like pretty much everyone, I absolutely love Eliud Kipchoge, both as a human being and as a runner, but his 1:59:40 in 2019 doesn’t technically count.
4. I refuse to clean up this messy, stream-of-consciousness paragraph. It is what it is. You’re going to have to live with it.