Vol. 24, No. 4

Dear Family,

Sophie is home! Having bid adieu to Heritage Halls on Wednesday afternoon, she spent the night with Hannah & JT, who drove her to the airport on Thursday morning. She caught the 11:45 Southwest nonstop from Salt Lake to BWI (which at certain times of year could probably just be called “the BYU flight”) and was home in time for dinner.

It’s been a great couple of days. We asked Sophie where she wanted to go for dinner — told her the sky’s the limit. She naturally opted for the food court at the mall.

I don’t mind admitting that we get dinner from the food court pretty much every Friday — usually from the same Thai place. It might be the swankiest thing we do. Sometimes we mix things up and go to Qdoba. I can’t remember whether this tradition predates the pandemic, but it’s been going on for a while.

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It’s reached the point where I can’t start the car on Friday night without getting an unsolicited alert on my phone/watch telling me it’s an 11-minute (sometimes 10-minute) drive to the mall and what the traffic is like. I might find this troubling if I weren’t already in the annoying habit of publishing details of my family’s life on the internet.

In retrospect, the effectively random process that matched the six girls in Sophie’s dorm, who did not know each other and hailed from states covering every U.S. time zone except Hawaii’s, worked out pretty well. The favorable dynamic was especially beneficial during a pandemic, which dramatically curtailed opportunities for social interaction beyond their apartment. To my knowledge, all six girls managed to dodge the virus, and four of them are now making final preparations to depart on missions to Ukraine, Peru, Mexico, and Japan.

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Times have changed since Crystal was a BYU freshman. Girls then had to wait until they were 21 to serve missions. All the freshman boys would vanish at the end of the year, leaving the girls behind at school to fend off an incoming crop of mostly 21-year-old sophomore boys coming off two years of tightly enforced social distancing from girls. Nowadays, a lot of the freshman boys start school having already finished their missions and it’s the girls who depart en masse for missions after freshman year. It’s probably better this way.

Change is usually for the better, and Sophie has come home to a different domestic arrangement than the “Leave it to Beaver” model of a stay-at-home mom and a dad who leaves for work every day¹ that she grew up with. Sophie now has a mom who leaves the house for work most days and a dad who putters around in sweatpants.

It hasn’t been a complete role reversal. I still have a job and Crystal continues to do most of the cooking. I make the bed most days and probably handle the lion’s share of the laundry, which isn’t much. Crystal packs her next-day’s lunch each night, which is something I used to do.² I used to take my clothes to the cleaners a couple of times a month and would occasionally remember to ask Crystal whether she had anything to throw in the bag. She sometimes did but usually didn’t. Now it’s Crystal’s clothes that prompt trips to the cleaners. She asked me last week if I had anything, which of course I didn’t. In fact, I just looked it up: the last time I went to the cleaners was February 9th, 2020. It’s going to be a major adjustment if I ever have to go back to the office.

Crystal’s commute to Ridgeview Middle School in Gaithersburg³ is considerably longer than my commute to Rosslyn used to be, even though mine crossed two state borders (Maryland/D.C. and D.C./Virginia) and hers never leaves Montgomery County. And while I biked to work 99 percent of the time, there’s no practical way for Crystal to do that. Consequently, we’ve spent more on gas in April than in any month in recent memory.⁴ Crystal would doubtless prefer to ride her bike to work like any responsible, non-Earth-hating person, but, at 18 miles each way it’s just too far (you know, for most people) and there really aren’t facilities at the other end where she can get cleaned up for work anyway.

Crystal and I biked to Ridgeview and back together this morning. It was okay to do once, but there’s nothing charming about the route and even I wouldn’t want to do it every day.

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All else equal, I imagine she’d prefer to work at a school closer to home, but she was drawn to Ridgeview’s autism program and just loves working with her little band of Aspergers boys, settling heated disputes over which comic book character is best, explaining that calling your classmate a “bastard” is not an appropriate coping mechanism, and otherwise helping them get through the day.

Crystal would probably tell you that the most difficult adjustment has been the disruption of her morning exercise routine, which used to include some combination of swimming, biking, and this jog/walk thing she does for as long as her aging, achey hip will let her. She’s been able to move her swimming to after work, but all she has time for in the morning now is a brief yoga session in our bedroom.

I’ve been trying to get better at not mocking things I’ve never tried, and a lot of people I respect have only great things to say about yoga. I do like the pants and maybe I’ll give it a go sometime, but when the instructor in the YouTube video says stuff like, “Breathe like you love yourself,” well, it’s unlikely at this point that I’m ever going to reach a level of maturity where I can just let a pitch like that sail by without saying something snarky. Crystal particularly appreciates when I point out ways in which her position differs from that of the woman in the video. Fortunately, I’m usually out the door for my own routine before Crystal finishes her yoga, which will probably end up saving the marriage.

Lucy is getting the hang of things as a host at Outback Steakhouse, though Lucy still doesn’t understand guests who take their frustration out on the host when the wait for a table is longer than they’d like. I’m about the most impatient person there is and few things annoy me more than waiting for a table when I’m hungry (one of many reasons I prefer the food court). But it never would occur to me to blame the host. I’m more likely to glare at diners who are clearly done eating and occupying a table engaged in idle chatter. Usually the only thing preventing me from walking up to such people and politely asking them to kindly pay their check and get the hell out so the rest of us can eat is fear of embarrassing my children.

We recently learned that Lucy (and apparently anyone who happens to be eating with Lucy) gets a 50 percent discount, which is nice. I have never worked in a restaurant, and I don’t know why I always assumed that people who worked there could just eat whatever they want. But I suppose the people who work at Best Buy aren’t allowed to just help themselves to the TVs, so I guess I’m just an idiot. It’s a shame Lucy didn’t have this job back when I was still eating meat. I guess I could order myself three Bloomin’ Onions for $12 and call that a meal. Or maybe I’ll start eating meat again. I have principles, but few of them are strong enough to stand up to a 50 percent discount.

Sophie is eating meat again, she claims in preparation for life in Ukraine, where she understands she is likely to be fed meat. She feels she needs to practice. That leaves just Grace and me to look down on others for their dietary choices.

We were delighted this week to be able to watch Alex Willis learn of his assignment to the Chile Concepción Mission, making him, to the best of my knowledge, the first Willis to serve a mission in a city named for a biological function. (Amazingly, he’ll also be the first Willis missionary to learn Spanish.⁵) Fun geography fact: despite our living in a state bordering the Atlantic Ocean and Concepción being on the Pacific, Alex will actually be a few degrees of longitude to our east and in our time zone.⁶ This should make talking to Alex somewhat less complicated (scheduling-wise) than talking to Sophie, who will be 7 hours ahead of us. But at any rate, I’m happy to live at a time when parents no longer have to wait until Christmas to speak to their missionary children.

Vaccine updates: Grandma and Grandpa drove Lucy to the mass vaccination site at M&T Bank Stadium to get a dose of Pfizer, fittingly about a 15-minute drive away from the now-infamous Baltimore lab that contaminated several million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Because Grandma was involved, we have a picture of it.

And so our family continues its annoyingly slow march toward immunization. Crystal (Pfizer) and Hannah (Moderna) have been fully vaccinated for quite some time, and Sophie got her one-and-done dose of Johnson & Johnson at the BYU Student Health Center earlier this month. (Fingers crossed, but she appears to be among the very fortunate 99.9999% of J&J recipients to have avoided the blood clots.) Lucy, Grace, and I are now awaiting our second Pfizer shots. Better late than never, I guess, but I still have no particular interest in going back to the office.

I didn’t take many pictures this month (which is part of the reason you got such a heavy dose of the food court earlier) but I did shoot some video while biking through the cherry blossoms a few weeks ago. The video is amateurish and absurdly long (nearly 12 minutes) and I shot it in portrait mode for some inexplicably stupid reason. I’m not very practiced at shooting cell phone video while steering a bicycle. But if you have 12 minutes you don’t know what to do with, the video gives a sense of how lovely things get around here in late March and early April. The first segment is a 5-km loop around Hains Point where I do interval training on my bike pretty much year round, but it’s especially nice during cherry blossom season when they close the road to cars. (Even though it’s still a one-way street and I can barely contain my disdain for cyclists who ride the loop in the wrong direction.) My ride then moves to the more crowded Jefferson Memorial/Tidal Basin and finally up the road to Maryland’s Kenwood neighborhood.

The blossoms are long gone now, replaced by flowering azaleas and other delightful things. May you find beauty in whatever your circumstances happen to be.

Love,

Tim, et al

1. I’ve never actually seen an episode of “Leave it to Beaver” but am given to understand that this was their arrangement.
2. Well, sort of. I probably ate lunch out 75 percent of the time, but when I did pack my own lunch, that’s how I did it.
3. In the interest of decorum, I refer to the City of Gaithersburg simply as “Gaithersburg” in this context, as opposed to “Way the Hell Out in Gaithersburg,” as it is usually called in casual conversation
4. Technically we spent more on gas last August (when we drove across the country and back) but I budget and book “vacation gas” separately from “regular-life gas” so that doesn’t count. It’s just how I roll.
5. I have multiple Willis first cousins (and an aunt) who served Spanish-speaking missions. For the purposes of this paragraph, a “Willis” is defined as Bertram Cannon Willis and Christine Henrichsen Willis, their descendants and descendants-in-law. This currently works out to 30 people (19 adults), of which Alex is the 10th to receive a mission call. The mission languages of the first nine (in chronological order) are English, French, Tagalog, Portuguese, Portuguese, Portuguese, English, English, and Russian.
6. At least until autumn in the Northern Hemisphere when they “spring forward” down there (in September) and we move our clocks back (in November). I guess Alex will be two hours ahead of us then.