Books and Biscuits

Last Tuesday was our last day for the year of books and basketball—the tutoring program I’ve been doing for the last year. Glad as I am to have a summer break, I’m really going to miss it.

I tutored a fabulous 12-year-old girl, who spent the first half hour running away from me and the second half hour telling me about Mitchel Musso while I tried to get her to do her math homework.

Was she rambunctious? Yes. Did the other tutors give me the evil eye every week? Oh yes. And was she totally worth it? Absolutely.

My favorite was the rap she made up about our multiplication problem. The answer was 16, which you can write in green when you’re seventeen if you’re not too mean. In the picture she's trying very hard to look angry with me.

“Working” with her was great, but it definitely reminded me of how often service is not what I expect. I thought I might sweep in and be a noble role model and brilliant teacher for a struggling inner-city kid, when really all she needed was someone to listen to occasionally tease her about her Disney Channel crush.

It reminded me of About a Boy, which we read last month for the Movie Book Club. The self-absorbed Will, who has suddenly found himself unwillingly mentoring the needy young Marcus, isn’t quite sure what to do to help the kid—or even sure if he wants to:

“The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff. He was, after all, the son and heir of the man who wrote Santa’s Super Sleigh. Santa Claus, whose existence most adults had real cause to doubt, bought him everything he wore and ate and drank and sat on and live on; it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on [TV] . . . but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.” (Nick Hornby)

This girl was real stuff. And I wasn’t quite sure what to do about her. But I liked my weekly encounters with someone else’s reality and daydreams.

Chrisman

I believe I should briefly mention that my incredibly awesome brother Chris graduated from college and is headed to Emory for a PhD in immunology.

Elder Christofferson delivered an excellent commencement address at the graduation. The essence of his message was that while academic accomplishments are important, they should not distract us from the most important element of life: our moral quality. Elder Christofferson quoted Hugh Nibley as saying that the point of life is to be morally tested. Everything else we do is “just dabbling.”

I’ve had that phrase running through my head ever since graduation. It’s so liberating: it means I can investigate things that I think might be interesting, or fun, or unusual, but whether it’s work or hobbies or travel or whatever, it’s just a small part of what I’m really trying to do.

It reminded me a little of the message my parents are always trying to get into us: that you should perform well, but it won’t matter unless you’re also good. My boss Alice is the same way. She has multiple advanced degrees, she’s raised a good family, she’s lived in Europe, she knows all the experts in her field, she all but single-handedly runs the company, and yet she’s the most humble, likeable person you could meet. She treats me like a peer even though I’m decades of experience and capability behind her. When she talks about her children, she mentions their awards and honors in passing, but focuses on who they are as people.

That’s what made Elder Christofferson’s speech so appropriate for Chris’s graduation. Because my brother Chris, as I believe I mentioned, is fabulous. I’ve looked up to him for years—and not just because he’s a foot taller than me. He’s brilliant: he had top scholarships, published papers, aced classes, and got wined (non-alcoholically, of course) and dined at almost a dozen graduate schools. He’s daring: he likes all kinds of wild hobbies, from scuba diving to rock climbing to performing in talent shows. He’s hilarious: he’s constantly teasing and playing with words. He’s artistic: he sings, he dances, he writes poetry, he tries to turn bachelor apartments into something attractive enough to live in. He’s a great cook: of pretty much everything. He’s dashingly handsome. And yet all of that dabbling is just the ornamentation on the real substance: Chris is as morally sure, as gentle, as sensitive, as humble, as perceptive, as caring, as genuine a person as you could find. It’s a good thing there isn’t a graduation for character, because he’d be wearing so many robes and stoles and medals and ribbons and tassels he wouldn’t be able to walk. And that would be embarrassing.

Ninja Night

Tonight for our FHE, my roommate got kidnapped by ninjas. I know what you’re thinking: What self-respecting young woman manages to get herself kidnapped by ninjas in the middle of a young single adult activity? Let me tell you, it happens to the best of us.

Let me preface this account by informing you that our family home evening activities tend to be very staid: long formal lesson, brief stiff activity, reserved conversation, quick parting of ways. And Camber had prepped everyone by informing them that this would be an exciting evening of “team-building activities.” We were expecting a big turnout, as you can imagine.

I taught a brief lesson on never leaving behind any of our brothers and sisters. I stalled as long as I could, but the ninjas still hadn’t shown up, so my friend Sherilyn jumped up with one of the most popular games known to adults party-goers: Simon Says. Then Camber ran to answer the door, we heard her scream, ninjas in ski masks came running into the living room doing dramatic karate chops, and we rushed outside just in time to see . . . Camber carefully explaining to the neighbor that it was all a joke and they didn’t need to call the police—before Camber was whisked away by the fearsome ninjas.

Fortunately, Sherilyn happened to have a copy of Worst Case Scenarios for FHE Groups, which just happened to have an entry explaining what to do if your FHE group leader gets kidnapped. We followed the instructions to the letter: we asked the Armenian grocer down the street how to say “Thank you” in Armenian (apparently ninja rescuers should be culturally sensitive in many languages). When we got it right, he gave us a clue sending us to the cemetery up the road.

There we were met by none other than the ninjas themselves. Two of them spoke only Ninjese, but fortunately they had a translator, who sent us on a quest to find a certain name on a headstone. We tracked it down using the light from our cell phones and when we presented it to the ninja master, he sent us to Billy Joe’s Ninja Training Camp at the playground across the road, where we learned to meditate, slide, and build a pyramid.

When we had accomplished our ninja training, we returned home to find Camber ready to reward us with ninja headbands. It was an altogether heroic evening. And no one even had to call the police.