Vol. 23, No. 12

Dear Family,

I bought my first pair of reading glasses this month. And getting them at Costco meant that I actually bought my first three pairs of reading glasses this month. It’s impossible to pick up just one of anything at Costco, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t have to get a 12-pack. But three pairs from Costco cost less than one pair from CVS, and so one pair now sits on my nightstand, a second pair is on somewhere my desk, and a third pair is on the piano.

The end of the second part of the video below features an extreme close-up by Sophie of one of these new pairs of glasses–the pair on the piano. If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably already seen the first 4 minutes and 15 seconds of this video (me playing something resembling George Winston’s arrangement of “Carol of the Bells” in the tuxedo I wore to my office’s Zoom-based holiday party this month). You can skip that part.

Fewer people have been exposed to the better, second part of the video — a family home evening activity on the Monday before Christmas inspired by our immense satisfaction at how season 2 of “The Mandalorian” ended. If you haven’t been watching “The Mandalorian,” then you’re probably not related to me and won’t recognize the melody. And if you’re over 40, then you’re also liable to find some of the video effects nauseating. Proceed at your own risk.

Uncorrected, my close-up vision is great. It’s only when I wear contacts to correct my mild nearsightedness (which I’ve worn with no apparent side-effects for more than half my life) that I’m suddenly unable to read my phone or piano music. And so I find myself in the frustrating position of having to choose between being able to experience the world’s resplendent beauty in high-def and being able to read about it. I apparently can’t do both unless I keep a pair of reading glasses handy to cancel out my contacts. Even though I am at least the 7,000,000,000th Homo sapiens to have experienced this phenomenon,¹ this is the first time it’s happened to me, and, like most things inherent to mortality, I’m finding it incredibly inconvenient.

And speaking of Costco, it’s officially a zoo again, reminiscent of last spring’s chaotic run on various household staples. Pursuant to our county’s most recent executive order, which took effect the week of Christmas, Costco is back to restricting store access only to people in possession of an actual Costco membership card. When we went on Tuesday, instead of the friendly Costco employee who used to happily wave 15 people through the entrance at once so long as someone in the group flashed something resembling a Costco card, we were greeted by a no-nonsense, armed Montgomery County police officer. Her build and stature brought Kristen Chenoweth to mind, but it was nevertheless clear that no one was getting in there without proper documentation.

This wasn’t a problem for Crystal and me (we each have cards). It meant that Sophie and Grace had to go hang out elsewhere in the mall instead of coming into Costco with their parents. But they didn’t seem terribly put out by this. Single parents of younger children, who may not have realized they needed to find child care in order to go to Costco, probably found it more annoying.

With covid restrictions tightening again, it’s time to get back to the important business of judging our fellow humans on their compliance. Last month, I finally started wearing a face covering while running outside. I made this change not because I believe it contributes to public health in any meaningful way, but because, in increasing order of importance: a) our most recent county order requires mask wearing at all times, with very few delineated exceptions, including while outdoors, b) it’s a not-too-terribly-difficult way to put anxious minds a little more at ease during a stressful time, and c) (most important) people who don’t wear masks tend to be jerks, and I don’t want people to think I’m a jerk (even though a lot of the time I am).

Before I started running with a mask, I only noticed runners who wore them and wondered to myself why they would make their exercise routine so much more difficult for no reason. Now that I wear one, I only notice runners who don’t and wonder to myself how those people could be such jerks.

Inconsistency is not necessarily hypocrisy.

We further sought to manifest our superiority by generally erring on the side of caution when it came to holiday celebrations. Hannah and JT decided that it probably wasn’t responsible for them to fly across the country just to be with us around Christmas. So they stayed in Utah and Nurse Hannah happily accepted the extra pay associated with taking shifts on Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. I’m not sure how JT feels about all this, but he hasn’t been complaining to us.

Yesterday, Hannah received the first dose (of two) of the Moderna vaccine and is enjoying the peace of mind that brings. She is also reportedly beginning to administer it to the elderly patients at the State Hospital where she continues to mostly enjoy working.

We didn’t see Mom, Dad, Peter, and Coco at all on Christmas Day but exchanged gifts with them on our front porch on Christmas Eve afternoon. We opened presents, they hung around for about 20 minutes, listened from the doorway as the kids sang a couple of songs from the piano, and then they were out of there.

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We cancelled the traditional gingerbread house decorating activity with all my local brothers and their families this year. We missed you guys and hope you had a merry Christmas.

Christmas morning went as usual with just the five of us. We’ve reached the point where the kids are more excited by the gifts they give one another than by the more utilitarian stuff (usually clothes — and this year, shelving) they get from us.

If you’d told me six months ago that the Christmas present that would delight Grace the most would be a record player, I probably would not have believed it. But it turns out the only gifts that excited her as much were the LPs themselves. Taylor Swift albums, mostly.² I never would have guessed her stuff was even available on vinyl. And I’m still trying to get my head around why a girl with no functional memory of life without a Spotify Premium account and immediate access to virtually every piece of music ever recorded would want an old-school phonograph. Apparently the world has persuaded Grace that music sounds better on vinyl. Maybe it does — after all, what do I know about how music sounds?³

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Because inconsistency is not necessarily hypocrisy, we spent Christmas afternoon with some friends from Virginia.⁴ Our eight-person affair put us safely within the county’s 10-person cap on private indoor gatherings, but it still felt like we were getting away with something.

I hope Sophie has enjoyed being home this month as much as I’ve loved having her here. She flies back to Utah next week, her first semester at BYU having ended somewhat differently than mine did. She took all of her final exams from home and finished with an ‘A’ in American Heritage (which is better than the grade I got in it 30 years ago). Being Sophie, she appears to have done just as well in her other classes too, which of course makes me happy.

Sophie has started the long process of gathering all the supporting documentation necessary for her missionary recommendation. She plans to submit these papers in a couple of months in the hope of starting sometime in June. We learned this month that the dental work she’ll need to take care of first includes a crown for the root canal she had yesterday and the removal of all four wisdom teeth. That should be fun for her.

And so here we are at the end of 2020 — a year that people seem hell-bent on castigating using as many negative superlatives as they can think of. It’s become socially unacceptable, it would seem, to talk about 2020 without resorting to some combination of the terms horrific, worst and dumpster fire. (And this from people who voted for Biden. Imagine if he’d lost.)

But if I’m honest, the year hasn’t left me with much to complain about. We’ve had no serious illness in our home. Lucy’s dog-walking business dried up, but apart from that our family has suffered no devastating loss of employment. (Crystal actually started a new job and really seems to like it.) Matt’s dental practice had to shut down for a little while, but they seemed to have weathered that okay and it looks like things down there might be starting to normalize.

All this could change tomorrow of course. And so until it does, let’s look on the bright side, shall we?

Absent the pandemic:

• We never would have learned that virtually all of life’s meetings can be conducted remotely. The extroverts who run the world and other lovers of pointless, soul-crushing meetings will eventually gaslight us into believing this isn’t actually so — that collaboration must happen in person in order to be effective. But we know better and can enjoy it while it lasts.
• I would never have been able to watch the noon organ recitals from Temple Square — now streaming on YouTube (and elsewhere) every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
• We would not have been able to watch Soul from the comfort of our basement. (At least not yet.) It may not have displaced the 1995 remake of Sabrina as my favorite movie of all time,⁵ but I loved everything about it.
• We would not have been able to watch Wonder Woman 1984 from the comfort of our basement. Ordinarily I feel exactly the same way about two-hour movies as I do about two-hour church meetings. They’re almost always at least a half-hour longer than they need to be. And when I saw 2:31:06 come up at the bottom of the screen, I almost bailed on it. But it’s 2020 and where would I have gone?

Ultimately, I’m glad I stuck around. The story is stupid and makes no sense, but it’s still a pretty great movie. It’s fun to watch shows set where you live and to be able to pick out the neighborhoods and landmarks (and recognize what’s fake). We also liked the Mandalorian as the world’s primary antagonist. Personally, I liked that Lynda Carter, my girlfriend (unbeknownst to her) from when I was 8 until I was about 14,⁶ makes a cameo appearance. Time has really taken its toll, though. She appears to have aged all of about 5 years since 1976.

There are doubtless other upsides to 2020 that don’t involve sitting in front of a screen. I didn’t spend as much time in the kitchen with Crystal and the kids as I thought I might, but we still have time to rectify that.

I’ve logged 496 hours of swimming, biking, and running in 2020. While that might be more hours than you logged, it’s 56 fewer hours than I logged in 2019. And with no races to train for, most of these hours resulted in purposeless “zone 3” junk miles — not easy or hard enough to make me a better athlete — just miles for the sake of miles.⁷ I enjoy the exercise. But lacking any particular focus, my level of fitness today is something less than what it was on Dec. 31, 2019.

This became painfully apparent on the day after Christmas, when Sophie and Grace made it possible for me to extend my streak of consecutive years in which I’ve run a marathon to 9 (2011 was the last year I didn’t). I needed their help because all of this year’s races were cancelled and 26.2 miles is too far for me to run without some level of on-course support.⁸

And so on Saturday, Sophie and Grace mounted their bicycles and slowly followed me around a marathon course that started and finished at the end of our driveway. Taking advantage of stretches of Beach Drive and Sligo Creek Parkway that are closed to cars on weekends, we wound through sections of Silver Spring, Kensington, Chevy Chase, the District, and Takoma Park (Dad, here’s the map).

I say the girls followed me, but really I followed them. They rode ahead to set up small aid stations every few miles where they fed me Gatorade, hot chocolate, bananas, and peanut butter sandwiches. They even cheered as I slowly shuffled by. It was about as sweet a thing as I could imagine.

Sub-freezing temperatures didn’t make for an especially pleasant ride (biking in the cold is less pleasant than running in the cold) but the girls never complained. The inch of rain we got on Christmas Eve had turned to ice in places, and Grace crashed her bike on a large sheet of it about 8 miles in. Nevertheless, she persisted.

It took me more than hour longer than my 2019 marathon did, I walked more than I would have liked, and every step of the last 11 miles was uncomfortable, but we made it. The marathon that was 2020 can now go ahead and end.

Here’s to an even better 2021!

Love, Tim, et aliae

1. Demographic Research estimates that somewhere between 5 billion and 9 billion people (out of some 110 billion people believed to have ever lived on earth) have made it to age 65. I’m picking a number in the middle and assuming that virtually all of them needed, or would have benefitted from, reading glasses long before then.
2. Grace learned this week that she listens to more Taylor Swift than 99.5 percent of Spotify subscribers. This is not hard for me to believe.
3. Not much, I guess, but, as the story at this link illustrates, evidence indicates that our brains are fairly easily manipulated by the power of a good story and that Stradivarius owners who are 100 percent certain their violins sound different from non-Strads cannot in reality tell the difference. Could the same principle apply to music on vinyl? I don’t know, but it seems plausible. (Of course, to paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, just because something is “all in your head” does not mean that it is not real.)
4. I’m choosing not to divulge their identity in an effort to shield them from whatever social blowback they might get for hanging out inside someone else’s house during the pandemic, but their last name rhymes with “Shmeskelsen.”
5. Harrison Ford as Linus Larrabee in Sabrina is the reason I started wearing bow ties 25 years ago
6. Lynda lives right here in Montgomery County (according to Wikipedia) but we don’t keep in touch.
7. The spiritual equivalent of this is reading scripture without writing anything — better than nothing I guess, but ultimately kind of pointless.
8. Lots of people run this far (and further) while also carrying all the nutrition and hydration necessary to sustain themselves over that distance. I stand in awe of those people.