On scenic bluffs, appliance nightmares, and where Grace might very well possibly go to college (vol. xxvii, no. 1)

Dear Family,

I am starting to write this letter at 10:22 p.m. on Friday, January 27th, inside my tent at the Marsden Tract Campground perched atop a bluff¹ overlooking the Potomac River a little less than 3 miles south of Great Falls. It’s 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and I suppose I’ll continue typing until my hands get too cold and I need to bring them back inside my sleeping bag.

This particular end-of-January camping trip has become an annual tradition for the White Oak Ward Young Men, who for some reason enjoy it. I barely enjoy camping under the best of circumstances. I don’t care for it at all when it’s cold, but I am awfully fond of the White Oak Ward Young Men and, with our bishop turning 5 next month, I’m starting to think that I won’t have many more opportunities to spend time with them like this.

If this night proceeds the way nights usually do when I camp in the cold, I’ll fall asleep around 11:00, wake up around 12:30, toss and turn for a while, try in vain to find a comfortable position, maybe fall back asleep, wake up at 2:30 needing to pee, spend the next 30 minutes trying to convince myself that I don’t really need to pee, lose that argument, climb out of my tent, stumble around the campsite for a few minutes, pee, climb back into bed, toss and turn some more, and wait for the sun to come up. On the plus side, the long night should provide ample time to write.

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Well, that didn’t work. It’s now 9:17 a.m. on Saturday, January 28th. The night went more or less as I predicted. But I gave up on typing because I couldn’t keep my hands outside my sleeping bag for more than a minute or two at a time.

I’m actually in the exact same place I was when I started typing last night, just a little warmer now that that sun’s up and I’ve been able to get in a quick 7.5-mile run along the C&O Canal with my friend (and fellow YM leader) Weston Ricks. 

I need to break camp now so I can get up to Gaithersburg in time for Grace’s swim meet. I’m telling myself that I will work more on this letter during the meet, even though, realistically, there is very little chance of that actually happening.

12:08 p.m. and I have migrated from our campsite to the Gaithersburg Aquatic Center for what may prove to be the last high school swim meet I ever attend. This will function as Northwood High School’s “senior meet.” Grace and the other graduating seniors will be recognized at halftime, so I probably ought to stick around at least until then.

I at times need to be more judicious in my use of superlatives, but the Gaithersburg Aquatic Center may be the worst public pool in the county. It’s certainly among the worst places to watch a swim meet. There is virtually no seating and the sun is beating down on my neck through a wall of windows and effectively transforming the place into a greenhouse. (Consequently, in a very short period of time, I have gone from being uncomfortably cold to uncomfortably hot, which is only fitting since I’m always complaining about something.)

The first semester of Grace’s senior year is officially in the books and the prospect of her departure is becoming increasingly real. Where she will go to school next year will remain an open question for at least another week or so. Unless I am mistaken, she has narrowed her top two choices to (in no particular order) Brigham Young University and Southern Virginia University. Whether BYU accepts her may factor into her decision, but I suspect it also might not.

SVU rocketed up Grace’s preference list after she, Crystal and I visited the campus in Buena Vista, Virginia (pop. 6,641)² this past Wednesday. While an SVU campus visit was something we planned to get to at some point, it was expedited by some gentle nudging from the university’s new acting president, my old friend Eric Denna. 

We visited on a rainy day, which denied us the opportunity to fully appreciate the campus’s magnificent setting, nestled among the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the place did not disappoint. In fact, I think all three of us were blown away by it.

Grace met with at least four professors that I can remember and attended a music theory class. President Denna told us that half of the school’s roughly 1,300 students³ are involved with the music department in one way or another. The other half compete in (NCAA Division III) intercollegiate sports, he said, and I got the impression that some do both. The intimate nature of the school was on display as three or four additional professors (beyond the four Grace formally sat down with) popped out of their classrooms in between lectures for impromptu conversations with her. 

The whole day felt a little like visiting the princesses at Disney World. The admissions officer spent essentially his entire day with us and everybody else seemed to go out of their way to make us feel like meeting Grace was the main reason they came to work that day. I am given to understand that all of next year’s 450 or so incoming freshmen who visit campus get this same treatment, which is remarkable to me.

Our day ended with Grace participating in the daily rehearsal of the university’s Chamber Choir (at the invitation of the director with whom she had met two hours earlier). The director introduced her to the choir as a “future Knight” and asked how many others were from Maryland. Precisely zero hands went up. He then asked how many were from “the east coast.” Somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the hands went up — substantially fewer than I would have guessed.

I walked away completely enamored with the place. At the risk of unduly influencing Grace’s ultimate decision, I can’t help but think that my own undergraduate education would likely have gone better at SVU than it did at BYU. The school did not exist in its current form when I started college. Back then, I think it was a women-only college with fewer than 100 students and on the verge of losing its accreditation. But even had it been available to me, my decision to enroll at BYU was based in no small part on the size of its bowling alley and strength of the football team.⁴ SVU would not have been able to compete based on those criteria, which factored more than I’d care to admit in my opting for BYU over what was then Ricks College⁵. It continues to astound me that my decision-making skills as an 18 year old did not get me killed. It is only by the grace of God that it didn’t. 

Stay tuned for Grace’s final answer. In the coming week, an avalanche of eye-roll-inducing posts about high school seniors being admitted to BYU will overwhelm many of our social media feeds. I plan to resist the urge to mute/block the authors of these posts by reminding myself 1) that many of them are my friends, 2) that the happiness and relief these friends are experiencing is momentarily blinding them to their insufferableness, and 3) that a number of similar posts in the past have originated from my own household (possibly from my own account).

We’ll get through it.  

The swim meet has ended and the senior recognition stuff was nice. It is now 4:19 p.m. and I am going to type as much as I can before I inevitably nod off because I could not have gotten more than two hours of sleep last night.

Utah Kids

The first month of Sophie’s first semester back at BYU after her mission seems to be going smoothly. She reports that she knows someone in every one of her classes (which would seem to buck the odds at a school of 35,000 students). 

She is taking an organ class at which she presumably is wearing the new organ shoes she got for Christmas. (I’m sure her heart leapt with excitement when she opened the large box under the tree and found … a pair of organ shoes.) She got the shoes primarily because Temple Square organist Linda Margetts told her that she would play better with organ shoes. (Sister Margetts had a half-dozen or so extra pairs of organ shoes and offered to give a pair to Sophie. They were too small, alas, but Sophie’s companion reportedly went home with a pair.) 

There is no debating that organists play better with shoes.⁶ I have been telling Sophie as much since the first time she sat down at the console. The difference between Sister Margetts and me, however, (other than her being a much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much better organist than I) is that she actually wears organ shoes and I don’t. Why don’t I? As it happens, I was also told as a teenager that I would play better if I wore shoes by my organ teacher, Virginia Southgate. But despite her also begin a better organist than I,⁷ I don’t think I ever saw her play in anything other than her stockinged feet. And so that’s what I did. Monkey see, monkey do. All this goes to show, I suppose, that counsel is more likely to be followed when delivered by people who actually practice what they preach. (Also, maybe, when delivered by people who are good enough to play organ for the Tabernacle Choir.)

Anyway, I trust Sophie is enjoying her organ class and, now that she wears shoes, I’m sure she’ll be playing better than I do any day now.

Sophie has also started a job doing custodial work at 5:00 each morning in the Harman Building, at the far north end of campus, across the street from the Missionary Training Center. The fact that Sophie has to commute from her apartment two blocks south of campus probably makes 5 a.m. seem even earlier. But we’re talking about Sophie here, someone who possibly has never complained about anything in her life, and I continue to wonder how I possibly could have sired such a person. 

Good news, though! Hannah’s company finally gave her the car they had been promising her for more than a year to facilitate the many home hospice visits she makes. This has freed up Hannah’s other car for Sophie’s use. Sisters helping sisters. I love it when things come together.

Ari

Ari continues to excel in their job at Kids After Hours. Most days, they seem to have an amusing anecdote to share, but I never think to write it down. I’ll try to do better next month. Ari is also into their final semester at Howard Community College where they are earning a child development certificate that will enable them to work as a group leader next year.

Crystal

You get the sense that a special education teacher might be going through a particularly challenging stretch when her response to “How was work?” begins with “Well, nobody tried to kill themselves today…” I can imagine few dilemmas more vexing than one in which children threaten and/or try to harm themselves because they dislike the measures that are being taken to prevent them from trying to harm themselves. But I guess that’s why she gets paid the big bucks.

Meanwhile, Crystal’s  new semester just got underway at Hopkins, and so she is back to juggling that with everything else. I have no idea how she does it.

Me

In some ways, it feels like I have spent the month of January waiting for repairmen. Crystal and I gave each other a new range and double wall oven for Christmas. These replace a double wall oven that we had had for nearly 18 years and a range we’d had for more than 20! Like the unit it replaced, our new range runs on gas. We had no way of knowing that we were making a political statement by buying a gas range when we bought it. (The only statement we thought we were making was the self-evident one that electric cooktops are garbage.) The new range works like a champ.

Our new electric wall oven, in contrast, is a $4,500 hunk of crap. It looks pretty and it even got hot enough to cook food for about 30 minutes before completely shutting down the day after it was installed. The store sent a guy over who replaced a thermostat – or something, or I don’t know what it was. Whatever it was, it got the oven working again. The repairman left and the oven worked for about five more minutes before shutting off again. 

I have reached a point where I am no longer capable of discussing this matter without resorting to swearing. The store told me that a replacement for whatever the “defective part” is has arrived and they’d send a guy out on Wednesday (presumably sometime between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.). I’m starting to think that the “defective part” is the whole damn oven and they should just replace it. But I guess I’ll wait and see how Wednesday works out. If it’s still working on Friday, we’ll have set a new record! 

In happier news, my Thursday-night rehearsals with the Washington D.C. Temple Choir have resumed following a very brief post-holiday hiatus. Our Easter concerts will be two weeks before Easter (don’t ask me why) on Saturday, March 25th, at the Temple Visitors’ Center and Sunday, March 26th, at the Mount Vernon Stake Center. I don’t know what time, but I’d guess probably 7:00. Both events are free and we are doing some lovely pieces (same program both nights). You should come!

Love,
Tim

1. I don’t actually know whether where we are technically meets all of the geographic characteristics of a “bluff” but the campsite is elevated and overlooks the river. It’s a lovely place — or it would be if it were a little less cold.
2. However you are inclined to pronounce this particular “Buena Vista” is probably wrong. If you speak Spanish, you are almost certainly saying it wrong.
3. making SVU a little more than half the size of Grace’s high school
4. We were good way back then. In our 1990 season opener, the first BYU game I attended as a student, we beat the defending national champion University of Miami and our quarterback Ty Detmer won the Heisman Trophy. That all feels like a very long time ago now.
5. An institution coincidentally named after an ancestor of Weston Ricks, the man I ran with on the C&O Canal towpath this morning
6. It probably goes without saying, but shoes improve an organist’s adroitness on the pedalboard. Anyone who has talked organ with me for more than 10 minutes has heard me complain that we have raised a generation of church “organists” many of whom do not actually know how to play the organ. This is because almost every ward organist under the age of 50 came of age learning how to play on an electronic organ with a “bass coupler” feature that, when activated, fraudulently makes it sound as though the “organist” is playing the pedalboard when in fact they are not. These pianists masquerading as organists can fake their way through a typical sacrament meeting but get exposed when they are asked to play the organ for conferences in our building, which, as I mentioned in last month’s letter, has a great old pipe organ that can really rock the place, but, what I did not mention last month, does not have a bass coupler. Consequently, if you want to get that full rich organ sound out of our organ, you have to play the d@mned pedals. Not everyone does, and (in case it isn’t obvious) This. Drives. Me. Nuts.
7. Sister Southgate was one of at least two women in the Moorestown Ward while I was growing up with an organ degree