Vol. 24, No. 5

Dear Family,

[Before getting into the mundanity of my life this month, I should open by expressing my sincere gratitude for what appears to be the gradual recovery of my 17-year-old nephew who has been hospitalized at Children’s National Medical Center for the past week with what I believe can be characterized as a life-threatening condition (and what I know for sure can be characterized as a very painful one). It isn’t my story to tell, and I’d probably get the details wrong anyway, but I’m thankful for talented medical professionals and I’m willing to believe God may have had a hand in it as well. We send our love and, of course, our wishes for fast and complete healing.]

I sometimes measure our tenure in “the DMV” (how the cool people — and pretty much everyone else around here — refers to the D.C. area) by the number of presidential inaugurations we’ve lived through. That figure, by the way, currently stands at seven. We moved here so long ago that no one back then even called it the DMV (which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, stands for the District and those parts of Maryland and Virginia that are convenient to the District). But after this month, I may start reckoning our time here by the number of Brood X cicada emergences we’ve lived through.

As of this month, that figure now stands at two. They emerge every 17 years, which is just infrequent enough to make me contemplate my own mortality.¹ A lot happens in 17 years, and a lot stays the same. But we all get noticeably older. We still live in the same house (2004 was also the year we added the second floor), but among our children, only Hannah and Lucy are old enough to remember the insects’ last appearance. (Lucy, then age 4, liked to eat them.) Sophie was 2 and Crystal was about to learn she was pregnant with Grace.

I remember well the cicadas of 17 years ago even though, bizarrely, my letters from April, May, and June of 2004 make no mention of them. Those letters do, however, reveal a number of interesting symmetries. The April 2004 letter, to take one example, opens with my complaining about stake conference (some things don’t change), recounts Hannah’s well-reasoned argument (at age 7) for why she should have a cell phone, and includes my admission to having literally shed tears of joy at watching Phil Mickelson birdie the 18th to win his first Masters. I experienced similar emotions last weekend watching the now-50-year-old Phil capture the PGA Championship — the cicadas come out for Phil! Some people cry at church. Sometimes I do too, but not as often as I cry at the end of golf’s major championships.

The cicadas are everywhere but, as flying insects go, there are a lot of other things that annoy me more. Their incessant chorus is loud enough to be heard inside the house, through closed windows, around the clock. But I find it oddly pleasant, not unlike the ocean.

They sure are ugly, though.

Two weeks ago, we celebrated our vaccination status by having dinner inside the home of our neighborhood friends, Miwa and Richard Krikava,² and their two children (who are still too young to be vaccinated, but we went anyway — sue me). Miwa is from Okinawa and was our chef. She had previously taught some of the people living in our house how to make sushi and we were confident the meal would turn out well.

It did.

Miwa refused to take offense even after I chose to a) mention that the dinner spread reminded me of Korean barbecue (I was referring only to the circular stoves in the middle of the table), or b) ask whether she had learned any karate from Mr. Miyagi’s family. My children, as usual, were mortified. It’s great being a dad!

Lucy continues to hold things down at the hosting station at Outback Steakhouse, which sounds persistently understaffed. The situation is becoming more tenuous from Lucy’s perspective as Montgomery County (finally — as of Friday) has removed virtually all remaining restrictions on businesses and gatherings. This means the Aspen Hill Outback is now seating people until 11 p.m. (instead of 9 p.m., which was already plenty late for Lucy). Apparently Mother’s Day is all hands on deck at Outback — no one gets the day off. Lucy was scheduled to work from 9 a.m. (who goes to Outback at 9 a.m.?) to 4 p.m. but wound up having to stay until 9 p.m. They were understandably exhausted afterward but made a boatload in tips. I guess Father’s Day will be the same deal, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed for that. Fortunately, Lucy has a kind manager who drove Lucy home after Friday night’s late finish. This was especially generous since the manager lives up in Aspen Hill, which is close to the restaurant but not very close to us. I have had the good fortune throughout my life of working for bosses who, virtually without exception, have been extraordinarily kind to me. It makes me happy to think of Lucy starting off the same way.

Attentive readers of these letters with unusually good memories will recall Lucy’s involvement with Zombies Run, the Musical. You will be excited to learn that Act II is dropping soon. A lot of Lucy’s fellow collaborators on this project are in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, and Lucy has never met any of them. But Lucy learned this month that one of the handful of U.S.-based collaborators happens to live in Silver Spring. And so they got together for lunch at Lebanese Taverna. It made me happy that Lucy was able to do this.

Sophie visited the University of Maryland’s Child Development Lab this month, possibly for the last time. She has been getting tested there basically since birth, I assume as part of some large-scale, longitudinal study. The university students conducting the experiments now are only a few years older than Sophie herself. Over the years, she’s played video games, taken various cognitive assessments, and was even subjected to a variant of the famous marshmallow test³ (using delicious Skittles in place of disgusting, non-melted marshmallows). She failed the Skittles test, as virtually every child does, but I seem to recall the video of her failure as including a fair amount of pacing and singing to pass the time and being pretty funny. It’s a stupid experiment that was obviously not predictive in Sophie’s case. I don’t know if I can think of a person with more persistence or ability to delay gratification than Sophie.

Sophie needed every ounce of her native tenacity to get to Maui earlier this month. She was meeting her Kent grandparents and cousin Emma there for the graduation trip Rod and Karel take grandchildren on after they graduate from high school. Covid delayed the trip by a year and nearly derailed it again this year. Apparently boarding a plane to Hawaii, even if you’re fully vaccinated, requires producing evidence of a negative covid test from no more than three days ago. She got a negative test from CVS a day or two before departure but subsequently learned that the “antigen” test she had taken the wrong kind of test. Her only option was to schedule whatever Hawaii thinks the “right” kind of covid test is (presumably the “non-antigen” kind) at a Walgreens somewhere in Virginia, and Karel had to push Sophie’s flight back a day. She handled this and the hundred other micro-frustrations the trip required with remarkable calmness. (Just writing this paragraph is getting my blood up and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I would have punched holes in walls and cancelled the trip. I love Hawaii, but it takes forever to get there, I find travel miserable under the best of circumstances, and I don’t like any place enough to endure the level of torture Hawaii is currently inflicting on would-be visitors.)

But it looks like they all had a nice time.

Speaking of long flights, Sophie has begun the process of obtaining her Ukrainian visa, which, fingers crossed, bodes well for her actually getting over there. She is already headlong into daily Russian study and has access to a Russian tutor through the Missionary Training Center’s online portal pretty much anytime she wants. I find this remarkable since she technically doesn’t begin the MTC (from home) for another three weeks. The Provo MTC’s gradual reopening has begun but only with English-speaking missionaries, and at this point it doesn’t seem likely she’ll go there. Sophie is fine with this since, if she actually does get to go to Ukraine in August, she doesn’t see the sense in first flying 2,000 miles in the wrong direction.

Grace completed lifeguard training this month and, along with what seems like about 85 other kids, landed a summer job at Forest Knolls Pool, around the corner from us. The pool was to have opened for the season yesterday but failed an inspection and remains closed for now. This might sound like a tragedy on Memorial Day weekend, but it was 55 degrees and rainy yesterday, today doesn’t look much better, and I can’t imagine anyone’s all that upset about it.

Despite not actually going to school, Grace has been involved in the drama club’s production of a play called “Help Desk.” The show is being produced entirely over webcams (I think) and, based on the number of times I’ve been politely asked to shut up in the past week, they seem pretty close to having it in the can. I understand it goes live on Friday (via YouTube) but extracting details about forthcoming events from 16-year-old girls is not one of the things I’m good at.

The county board of education has announced that schools will be back to normal in the fall, thus bringing to a close Grace’s luxurious lifestyle of attending class while doing any number of other things, including lying in bed, making breakfast in the kitchen, and waiting to get vaccinated in the Six Flags parking lot. I trust she will be able to re-adjust.

The board’s decision did not come as a surprise as things are gradually returning to normal here, though not nearly as fast as they seem to be in most other places. Mask-wearing very much remains a social norm. It is highly unusual to see a bare face in any indoor place other than while seated at a restaurant. Masks are no longer required outdoors, but lots of people continue to wear them anyway, including a shocking number of runners and cyclists. Two weekends ago, I overtook a fellow maskless runner on that closed upper part of Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. He apparently felt it necessary to pin a sheet of paper to his back with “VACCINATED” printed in large letters to justify his bare face. I contemplated pinning a note to my own back saying something like “I happen to be fully vaccinated, but even if I weren’t, no one’s catching this thing outdoors and you’re all morons.” But I ultimately decided against it because — remain calm, ladies — I usually run shirtless this time of year.

Finally, Crystal and I celebrated our 27th anniversary on Friday by walking to Nova Europa in Kemp Mill for a twilight dinner on their romantic patio with its stunning views of the Lamberton Shopping Center parking lot. The food was good, the waiter was extraordinarily attentive and we had a nice time. The walk home was complicated by a torrential thunderstorm and, even with a large golf umbrella, we would not have been any wetter by the time we arrived home if we’d jumped in the pool on the way. But it was fun. I sometimes think about the many things I would do differently if I had my life to do over again, but I honestly and sincerely cannot think of a single way in which my life would be better if I’d married differently.

The rest of the letter is about my sometimes fraught relationship with sports. If that does not sound like something that will interest you, then thanks for reading this far and have a great month!

Love, Tim

If you’re still here, I had to share a lap lane with someone at the YMCA this past week for the first time in more than 14 months. I didn’t really mind, but after logging some 283 kilometers in lanes all to myself since pools re-opened with covid protocols last June (and yes, of course I have that data) it has taken a little readjusting to not be a lane hog.

Dramatically reduced restrictions prompted the YMCA this week to raise the cap from 6 swimmers per pool at a time to 12. Sharing a lane with one other person is something no one has any business complaining about. But I’m learning from experience that if you want to make sure yours is the absolute last lane someone chooses to double up on, all you have to do, whenever somebody new comes in, is start swimming butterfly. Because nobody wants to share a lane with this.

This month also marked my triumphant⁴ return to triathlon following the covid-enforced, 19-month race hiatus. If you want to find out how my sixth go went at the “Kinetic Half” earlier this month (a half-iron-distance event at Lake Anna State Park in Virginia that Grant Willis, Esq., and Roland Kent, M.D., turned me onto many years ago) you can click on the video below, skip ahead to 9:23, sit back, and enjoy the awesomeness.

If you don’t have that kind of time, the TL;DR version is that the swim leg was longer than advertised (I think), fitness issues led to a sub-par bike leg and a recently injured left calf wrecked my run — all contributing to an overall lackluster performance. But I’m happy to be racing again.

I created the video in response to an invitation from a terrific young man in our ward who is organizing a stake youth 5K next month and, as part of the lead-up, asked me to put together a short video (3 to 5 minutes) about running. Not really being one to follow directions, I instead created a self-indulgent, 20-minute video that is a little about running but mostly about me. I’m not sure whether anyone in the stake has actually watched it, but if you thought last month’s 11-minute cherry blossom video wasn’t long enough, then maybe you’ll like this. (I even turned my phone sideways this time so everything’s in landscape!)

Whether you watch it or not, I hope it finds you happy and well!

Love, Tim

1. This is not saying much since lots of things make me contemplate my mortality — this month it’s this.
2. Regular readers might remember Richard as the other counselor in the White Oak Ward bishopric. He has appeared in these letters a number of times.
3. Like most social science “research,” the marshmallow test, which purports to predict future success in life by gauging a young child’s ability to refrain from eating a marshmallow, fails to replicate and has been thoroughly debunked
4. It occurs to me that it’s possible I have never in my life used the word triumphant in a non-ironic way. That streak continues here.