Afterwards, I enrolled Charlie in karate classes at the dojo I went to. Marilyn wasn't at all in favor of this, figuring he would just get in more trouble. I knew better. The first thing they teach you in any of the martial arts is self discipline. Then I told my son that if he ever used anything he learned in karate class in a school fight, his next session would be with me! His eyes opened wide at that!
The twins were an absolute delight. They were constantly running around outside and bringing back dandelions and grasshoppers and salamanders and such. In this they were a lot like Maggie, who had brought back every conceivable critter she could get hold of. I knew it wouldn't last. Sometime around when they hit twelve, the hormones would kick in, and my little angels of sugar and spice would morph into the evil twin spawn of Satan.
Have you ever wondered who came up with the idea of dowries? Then you've never had daughters! A dowry is where a man pays another man to take his daughter off his hands. The longer she hangs around, driving him crazy, the more he's willing to pay. In this regard it's similar to divorce, where a man pays his wife to go away. I pointed this out to Marilyn once, and she wasn't amused. Go figure.
We tried to live fairly normally, like your average suburban parents. We're just not a flamboyant pair. Okay, when traveling we flew by a private jet, and had a limo or car waiting for us, but back home I drove a car and Marilyn drove a minivan. We didn't live like hermits, either. Every summer we had a big barbecue/pool party and anybody who could come up with a reason was invited. We had the office and teachers and neighbors and friends over. After Charlie joined AYSO soccer, every fall, during soccer season, we had another one for the entire team and their parents, and it just got bigger when the girls got old enough to play.
Until now most people knew I had money, but generally not that I was ridiculously wealthy. After my face was on the cover of Fortune it was known, and when half the housewives in town saw me on Oprah it just got worse. Generally it wasn't bad. It also didn't hurt that we were easy touches for local fundraisers. Still, some people thought that since I was Mr. Moneybags, I should foot the bill completely, so they didn't have to contribute.
The only time it became an issue was in the Scouts. Charlie was now in the second grade, and was a Wolf Cub Scout. It came to a head in early '88, before the annual Blue and Gold Dinner. It's actually pretty cheap to run a troop or pack. The leaders are all volunteers, usually parents of the Scouts, and work for free. A common joke in any troop or pack is "I'll double your pay if you do such-and-so!" - which was meaningless, since your pay was zero to begin with! There are some costs for camping trips and hikes but they weren't much more than food and some badges, maybe $5 to $10 per event, and the boys (read that as parents) coughed that up for each event.
You could actually run a troop or pack for maybe a grand or two a year. Back on my first go, in New York, we had done the occasional bottle drive, to collect bottles and cans and return them for the nickel deposit. The boy and a parent would spend a Saturday morning driving around and collecting, and then sorting out and returning various bottles and cans, and get smelly and sticky and yucky in the process. Everybody had fun. Maryland didn't have nickel deposits, so we sold Boy Scout popcorn, sort of like the Girl Scouts with cookies, only not as well organized. Again, generally everybody has fun and eats a lot of popcorn.
Well, we were at one pack meeting talking about this and some woman pops up wondering why certain parents weren't pulling their weight! She shouldn't have to drive around and she had to work and she shouldn't have to sell popcorn, when some parents, who she wouldn't name, could obviously afford to do more! I just looked at my wife and we rolled our eyes, but otherwise kept our mouths shut. The Cubmaster immediately popped up and said that there was no way we were going to have an income tax on the parents of the boys, and that helping to raise the funds was good for the boys' confidence and pride, and they generally liked it. She gave a loud "Harrumph!" and sat back down, to glare at us for the rest of the meeting.
After the meeting, the Cubmaster buttonholed the woman and told her in no uncertain terms how things operated. Shortly after that, she yanked her son from the pack. It was his loss. I had enjoyed Scouting, and so had Parker. Now it was Charlie's turn and he was taking to it like a duck to water. It certainly never hurt a boy to be involved, and he generally learned a few useful things. I had been with him all through Tiger Cubs, and it looked like I was going to keep going in the future.
Some of this took time, and ever since I had started work on the book, I had scaled back my time at the office. Now I scaled it back a little more, and stopped going in on Fridays. I spent most of my time schmoozing clients and attending board meetings of companies we were involved in, and otherwise just let Jake Junior run the show. Missy, too, since she had really grown into the investment job. In some ways I was even more proud of her than I was of Junior. John began cutting back his time, too, but he was in his 60s and had earned a break.
Over Christmas, we took a couple of weeks off and went to Utica and then Hougomont. The difference was that this time, on the way south from Utica, we landed at Westminster and picked up the Tusk family, and flew them down with us. We had room at the house, and really enjoyed ourselves. We spent a lot of time running after Holly, Molly, and Carter as they chased seagulls, and trying to keep Bucky and Charlie from swimming to another island. It was also really convenient to have ready babysitters for when one set of parents wanted to go out without the kids. Marilyn and I wanted to invite the Buckminster clan down for a week, too, but Harlan had made major, and was in Germany as a battalion exec. We might not see them for another year or two!
I skipped my 10th reunion at RPI in '87. Somehow it just felt weird. That seemed so long ago, and like a different life. I had been a scientist then, and only in ROTC so I could pledge Kegs and meet Marilyn again. Life had been so simple. I just wanted to find Marilyn again, and then settle down without any money problems. Instead I had gotten a doctorate, gone career in the army, become a zillionaire, and written a book. I wasn't sorry about any of it, but it sure seemed strange at times!
One thing did work out about having money - it was easy to get babysitters! Like I had told Marilyn back in 1983, on the night of my high school reunion when Hamilton had first started stalking us and had scared poor Becky Devlin, that girl wasn't about to keep her mouth shut about the tip I paid her! The Buckmans were known as generous tippers, and we had a choice of girls to babysit the kids.
We did a date night about once a month, usually out to dinner and a movie, or sometimes down to the Meyerhoff to see the symphony. Date night would always involve stockings and not pantyhose, and Marilyn usually went braless and commando style, and we often detoured on the way home to go parking. If any of the babysitters noticed that Mr. Buckman was always smiling when he got home, and that Mrs. Buckman was always giggling, they didn't say anything.
I surprised myself when I got a call early that spring from Simon and Schuster. They wanted me to write another book. The surprise was that I didn't hang the phone up on them! They wanted another book similar to the first one, but on a different topic. The topic was to be political economics, which we had touched on in Eat Your Peas! Specifically, they wanted me to expand my thoughts on how politicians were constantly starting things without ever figuring out how to pay for them, like the various Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid programs. You pick a field, there was a program started by a politician, with no idea if it worked or how to pay for it.