Dear Family,
Grace is now “officially” engaged (the officiality having been cemented last night with the presentation of a ring). I would have felt comfortable announcing it here even absent the new jewelry — ever since two weeks ago when a friendly woman I barely know told me at the pool that she had met Grace’s “fiancé” at her house several days earlier.
I was never under the impression that the forthcoming betrothal was a secret, but encounters like the one with the woman whose name I am already struggling to remember removed whatever hesitation I may have felt about referring to the young man in question as something other than Grace’s “boyfriend.”
The young man in question is named Matthew Buongiovanni. (WordPress is flagging his name as a misspelled word, but I’m about 70 percent confident I’ve got it right.) I sing his last name more often than I speak it. If you are familiar with how the eponymous character’s name is sung during the Mozart opera Don Giovanni, then you know how I (and countless others) sing “Buongiovanni.” (If you are not familiar, then I can’t help you.) I’m sure Matt never tires of this.
I genuinely like Matt. In the interest of family harmony, I would probably tell you I liked him even if I didn’t, but I honestly can’t think of anything dislikable about him. (Okay, one thing: He doesn’t like Buc-ee’s. But that might be his only flaw.) Apart from that, he is a kindhearted, capable person who is very nice to Grace and has gotten her out of countless car-related and other jams.
The two of them have been friends since Grace started at Southern Virginia University three years ago. He finished his B.A. a year ago (I think) with hopes of going on to graduate school and becoming an English professor. While he sorts out what that path might look like, he is starting a new job the week after next as a high school English teacher in (or near) Buena Vista. I imagine (but don’t know for sure) that this will force him away from his current job at The Bookery, a quaint rare/used bookstore in Lexington. But English-teacher-by-day/rare-book-dealer-by-night would be a very on-brand career combination for this boy.
Also, crime fighter. I think Matt would also make a very good rare-book-dealer/crime-fighter while he’s not busy figuring out how to grade AI-generated essays submitted by high school students. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together for him.
Wedding details are still coming together, but it’s shaping up to be a Memorial Day weekend sort of thing. (Crystal and I were married 33 Memorial Day weekends ago, and so we’re cool with that.)
Semiquincentennial
I don’t have a single July 4th picture on my camera roll from this year. Someone else in the family might, but I’m too lazy to collect it. I’m generally not a huge Fourth of July guy. Not because I don’t feel profound gratitude for my country and the founders, etc. (I sincerely do), but rather because 1) it’s just too damn hot, and 2) most of the exciting stuff happens after my bedtime. Fireworks are cool, but by 9:15, when the downtown fireworks usually start, I’m ready to be puttering around my nicely air conditioned bedroom (if I’m awake at all).
We often go to the downtown fireworks despite all this (mostly because Crystal likes them). And, as I said, they usually start at 9:15-ish. This year, however, owing to a combination of severe evening thunderstorms and the president running his incessant yap for an hour or more, as he does (or so I’m told — I wasn’t awake for any of it) most of the July 4th fireworks didn’t go off until the wee hours of July 5th. I understand they were amazing — the greatest fireworks show in human history — no one’s ever seen anything like it…
Do I regret having slept through it? I do not.
Instead we spent most of July 4th hanging out with the Eskelsens at their Fairfax home. Like many of our Eskelsen hangs, this was a seven-hour, highly unstructured affair beginning early in the afternoon and ending around 9:00, after the neighbors from around the corner finished shooting off all the of the illegal fireworks they had smuggled in from Pennsylvania.
Before that, we spent most of the afternoon eating, lounging, and watching France dismiss Paraguay from the World Cup “round of 16” (as we clumsily call it in English). When four teams remain in a tournament, we sensibly call the two games a semifinal (or semis); when eight teams remain, we call each of those four games a quarterfinal (or quarters). It drives me nuts that, for some reason, once we get to sixteen teams, we forget how fractions work and just lazily call those eight games the “round of 16.” This is stupid and angers me. The French, who speak a far more enlightened language than ours, reasonably call this round the huitième de finale — or simply les huitièmes (the “eighths”). It’s totally logical and we should do the same. We should call it the “eighth-final.” Calling it the “round of 16” is just innumerate idiot-talk. Someone really needs to do something about it.
It was easy to root for France against Paraguay in the eighths because 1) I always root for France, and 2) while the French team was playing soccer, Paraguay was playing something that more resembled American football, except with more tripping. There were moments when it felt like I was watching Argentina.
[I just wrote (and then deleted) some 500 words explaining the irrational resentment (all sports resentments are irrational) I have harbored toward Argentina’s national soccer team for the past 40 years. It has nothing to do with the country or people of Argentina (which, other than having seen Evita, I know next to nothing about) and mostly to do with noted cocaine addict/soccer cheater/tax evader/Argentine national hero Diego Maradona, whose cheating in the 1986 World Cup has its own Wikipedia page. I thought I’d gotten over my pointless disdain after Maradona finally died four years ago. But then this year’s final happened and the whole world got to watch Argentina regress to its typical thuggish ways. Spain should have won that match 5-0 and Argentina should’ve been red-carded down to eight guys. It’s a shame because I really like Messi.]
But it was an enjoyable Fourth!
Living in Nature
I believe I mowed the lawn a grand total of one time this month. To call the green stuff that grows around our house a lawn is to push that term to its logical breaking point. If you squint, the grass in the relatively small part of our yard that gets a lot of direct sun sort of resembles a lawn. But most of our yard is shaded and looks more like, to put it charitably, a campground.
Some years ago, I made the decision to put zero effort into lawn care. I justify this by pointing out that lawns are generally terrible for the environment (which is true) and so I just let grow whatever wants to grow. The real reason is that I’m lazy, but I take comfort in knowing that there is virtue in my sloth. I can’t tell you how excited I was to learn a couple of years ago that simply mowing the fallen autumn leaves and leaving them to decompose into the soil is far more environmentally friendly than raking or otherwise removing them. I might never touch a rake again.
The upshot of all this is that we find some interesting things growing in our backyard.
Like this pretty mushroom. (Crystal took the picture for Ari’s benefit — Ari loves to discover mushrooms.)
As if that weren’t enough, I got to swim with a turtle this month. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, Crystal and I (and sometimes Grace) swim laps together at the neighborhood pool a block from our house. The pool is basically in the woods and so the lifeguards have to fish out a lot of different critters from the pool.
Usually it’s frogs. We get tons of frogs. This is the first time (other than in Hawaii) that I’ve shared my lane with a turtle.
One of my favorite things to do in Hawaii is swim with the giant green sea turtles (which are seemingly everywhere). That’s more fun than this since those turtles are closer to my size than they are to the size of this little guy. But this one was still pretty cute.
Hanging with Crystal
With no lessons to prepare or IEPs to write, summer means more downtime just hanging out with Crystal. Sometimes we talk about stuff, sometimes we watch TV (ok, we watch a lot of TV), and sometimes we just independently stare into our phones. But it’s all good and sometimes we engage in actual activities that, to an impartial observer, could be mistaken for dates.
We had our first couples massage this month. This is something I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to do (having a stranger touch me has never held any particular appeal to me). But for Mother’s Day, Hannah gave Crystal a Groupon for a free couples massage at some nondescript strip mall in Rockville (the kind of place that, from the outside, you might think offers more than just massages…). I initially thought that Hannah had discovered a diabolical way of simultaneously treating her mother and punishing me, but Hannah genuinely felt that it was something I would enjoy if I gave it a chance.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. I mostly enjoyed it. I can’t see myself actually paying for it. But if someone were to treat me to another one, I’d probably be willing to subject myself to the experience again.
Crystal and I also hopped over to Ocean City all by ourselves. I can’t think of the last time we did that. Maybe never. The weather was uncharacteristically perfect, the surf was just right, we ate at The Dough Roller (because it’s the law) and, even though, in the whole history of Ocean City, Maryland, no motorist has ever yielded — no, not once — to any pedestrian in any crosswalk, anywhere, we had a good time!
She’s a pretty swell gal. I like that she lets me hang out with her.
Before I go
I devoted an arguably undue amount of space in last month’s letter to explaining how my overall happiness tends to be negatively correlated with the dew point (and why discussing humidity in percentage terms irritates me even more than the term “round of 16”) and rhapsodizing about my favorite weather reporters, who are now at capitalweather.com (formerly the “Capital Weather Gang” of the Washington Post before the paper flushed everything good and decent). Almost as if they read my letter (they didn’t), they helpfully and dutifully released this delightful little explainer two weeks ago.
May your dew points be ever in the 40s!
Looking forward to seeing most of you very soon.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
Thanks for the science lesson. The older I get the more fascinating it is that I am still capable of learning new things and understanding what I’ve just learned. Now I’m going to investigate more about dew points. As for massages, if you want a good one (single or couples), you need to go to Caye Caulker, Belize. The massage therapists are wonderful and the massages only cost $60, way less than I pay in MD. Thanks for the monthly entertainment read. I look forward to hearing about the Willis family and all the things you do every month.