I was intrigued. A big part of Eat Your Peas! was that our politicians lacked the discipline to finish what they started and make it work. You had to hold their feet to the fire. When I was a kid, it was the Democrats who would pass all these crazy programs as part of LBJ's 'Great Society', and the Republicans were constantly hounding them because the Democrats couldn't pay for this stuff. The Republicans weren't any better, since they cut taxes under Bush II, and radically raised spending.
I told them I would need a co-author or two, somebody to do the research, maybe an economist, to help. The nice thing about academics is that they always have these students around who need extra credit or a paper or a thesis, and you can tap them to find things out. If they found somebody for me to work with, we could write it and have it ready by the fall. When I told Marilyn, she just laughed and asked when she was supposed to get my gun to shoot me.
Tessa and Marilyn coerced me into attending our 15th high school reunion in June of 1988. It was pleasant, but not as fascinating as our 10th. To be honest, it brought back a lot of memories of Hamilton and my family. The collapse had started that night. Well, it started a month earlier, during Suzie's graduation, but Hamilton started stalking us that night. I ended up explaining what had happened to several people, including Shelley Talbot and her husband. The cops had questioned them, but they had questioned just about anybody from high school who knew me, and she wasn't the only girl they talked to. Worse, several people I barely knew treated me as their long lost buddy, and then hit me up for an investment in their business. I wasn't sorry to leave at the end, and we simply went home. I wasn't sure I would come back for the 20th.
Meanwhile, we continued to just live our normal lives. Charlie was really getting into the whole dirt bike and motocross thing! Many weekends would see us taking him and his bike to a race somewhere. He was actually pretty good, and was winning some of his races and climbing in the standings. He finished the season in second place overall, which only made him want to do better.
There was some real high comedy with this. The twins had gotten over their fear of the noise and crowds, and now were eager to go and watch. However, since they were so small, they insisted we put them up on our shoulders to watch the races. I would load one of the girls up, and Marilyn would load the other. That was still a problem, in that I was still seven inches taller than Marilyn, so one girl was always sitting higher than the other. If the ground was uneven, we could stand so that Marilyn was up higher than me, but in mid-June we were out near Hagerstown and our spot was level. The girls kept fussing and we kept swapping them back and forth. Finally, Holly, who was sitting on my shoulders at the moment, said, "Daddy, you need to get a taller Mommy!"
I tried to keep the smile off my face as I looked at Marilyn, who was starting to stew. Molly got in on it then, adding, "We need a Mommy your height, Daddy!"
I did my best to keep a straight face, and told my wife, "You know, they're right! I'm thinking maybe blonde, blue-eyed..." I held my hands in front of my chest, like I was playing with a pair of bowling balls.
"Very funny, the three of you!" I just started laughing, and for the rest of the afternoon, every time we swapped the girls, I would start laughing again.
It got worse that night, back at the house. After dinner, with the kids all washed up and fed, and Marilyn and I laying back in our recliners, the girls came into the living room and went up to their mother's feet. I noticed Charlie, however, hanging back by the archway, so I knew he was up to something. Marilyn was laying back, barefoot and watching the news with me, and the twins went up to her and each went up to one of her feet. Then they looked over at their older brother.
"One foot for each of you. You have to pull evenly.", he told them.
Holly and Molly grabbed their mother's ankles and began pulling. Marilyn looked up at all of this and said, "What in the world are you two up to?!"
"Charlie says that in order to make you taller, we need to stretch you!", answered Holly.
Unbelievable! I slapped my face and turned to stare at my son, who was grinning from ear to ear and scampered off down the hallway. Then I started laughing helplessly as our daughters tugged on Marilyn's ankles. She was laughing too, and ordering them to stop, it wasn't going to work!
"It will work better if you start to tickle Mommy's feet.", I told them.
That really got the girls to working, and Marilyn, who is very ticklish, started crying out! "No, NO, NO! Stop it! Don't tickle ... NO! ... Stop!" She began kicking her legs up and down, and the girls kept trying to hold on. "Stop!" She looked over at me. "Get them to stop!" I just laughed until my sides hurt and the tears came. Marilyn had to finally reach down and snag the girls and drag them into her lap, and tickle them back. For years after I could tease her about her height by telling her we'd get the girls to pull her ankles again.
Then, in late June Marilyn blackmailed me into something I wasn't at all sure I wanted to do. Well, maybe blackmail isn't the proper term. Fraud doesn't seem right, either. Coercion, that's what it was, coercion! I was totally unprepared for her idea. My pants were on the floor, and Marilyn was giving me a blowjob, when, right at the point where I should have been happily sighing in bliss as she swallowed, she stopped and said, "Carling, I was thinking, maybe we could have another child..."
All contracts entered into when the parties aren't wearing pants are to be considered null and void! All contracts entered into when the parties are exchanging bodily fluids are to be considered especially null and void! I couldn't even argue about it at the time, since we were sixty-nining, and Marilyn was sitting on my face at the time she made this announcement. I was being smothered and sexually tormented at the same time. It's just not fair!
This time I didn't cave in completely. First I made her finish me off, then we discussed it reasonably and rationally. By that I mean that I agreed to it. Marilyn agreed that if she didn't catch immediately, she was to give me blow jobs and let me fuck her ass when she was on the rag. Then we sealed the deal missionary style.
I'm not completely sure that any of this made for a valid contract. I seem to remember something from a business law class about the elements of a contract, and I don't ever recall oral sex being part of the list.
Anyway, by the end of August, Marilyn had missed her latest period, which she enthusiastically told me about that night. Very enthusiastically, too, as in lock Dum-Dum out of the room and break out the handcuffs and lube enthusiastic. She was expecting our next child in May of 1989.
We decided to call the new book Paying the Bills: America's Need For A Balanced Budget. While I am personally socially liberal, without a doubt I am a fiscal conservative. This new book gave a history of political economics in America, and showed the effects of entitlement growth, and the effect on government policy. I had almost no hope that anything would ever be done about the problem, because people just didn't want to deal with the problem.