"Uhhhh..."
"Well, we don't need an answer now, but you need to start planning. You need to think about what is important to you. Nobody, not even me, can do everything.", I told my son.
He didn't say much, so I sent him off to think. Marilyn came through from the kitchen at that point and saw his somber face. She asked, "What's with him? He looks like his dog just died." Dum-Dum took that opportunity to jump up and try to lick her face. "No, Dum-Dum, not you!"
I had to laugh at that. I rubbed Dum-Dum's head and she jumped into my lap and lay down for a nap, well deserved after a long day of sleeping. Then she farted and both Marilyn and I had to rub our watery eyes! "It wasn't me!", I protested.
"No, even you don't smell that bad. Oh, Dum-Dum, what have you been eating!?" Marilyn sat down in her chair and Dum-Dum jumped across to her lap, eliciting an "Ooof!" from Marilyn.
"I told Charlie he has to set some priorities. He can't keep racing and doing Scouting and doing afterschool sports. He has to make some choices." I explained our conversation.
She sighed and agreed. "I know! I mean, there's his sports and the girls in Brownies and ballet and his Boy Scouts and the church and..." She finished with a line I had heard before. "I need a wife of my own!"
I let her run down for a bit before interrupting. "Marilyn, you're as bad as the kids. You need to make some priorities. You can't do all this stuff either. You have to tell the kids what you can do and then stick to it! Unless you want to hire a nanny..."
"NO!"
" ... then you need to get serious about your schedule. You can't keep up like this. You'll kill yourself!"
As I expected, Marilyn protested that it really wasn't that bad, that she could do everything she needed to. It was an argument we had had before, both in this life and in my last. She refused to believe she couldn't do everything. At home this usually meant a long list of projects she would start and then never finish. Time management was not Marilyn's strong suit. I sighed and half nodded to her. The only way this would end was when the kids all moved out and we were on our own. "We just need to sell the kids off.", I said, which elicited a laugh from Marilyn.
Just then Holly came wandering through. I looked over at her and asked, "When's your birthday?"
My daughter gave me an odd look. "July 23."
I nodded solemnly. "Just like last year. And you'll be how old?"
"I'll be eleven."
"Excellent. Only seven years to go.", I announced.
"Seven years to go to what?"
"Seven years to go until you're eighteen and I can kick you out the door!" I jumped out of my chair and chased her around the living room. Holly started squealing and ran away, to be joined a moment later when Molly came out. Then Dum-Dum jumped up and hopped around on Marilyn's lap. After a couple of minutes the twins ran squealing down the hallway and their bedroom door slammed shut.
Marilyn rubbed the dog's belly which made her settle down. "Do we have to wait until they're eighteen?", she asked.
"Why wait! We've got 25 acres here. If we dig a deep enough hole, nobody will find them!" I went into the kitchen to make dinner.
By August I got a phone call from Helen Steiner that I had been dreading. I had been checking with Tucker Potsdam and a few of the people around the Buckman Group all spring and summer. John Steiner had told us that after the going-away party none of us would see him until the funeral, and he had been true to his word. After their round the world trip, they had returned home, puttered around a few days, and then had flown to Europe for an extended tour and vacation. They stayed in Europe until the beginning of July, when John's health began completely falling apart, and the cancer and pain had spread too much. They came home, and he had hospice begin treating him at his home. He passed away the second week of August.
As I promised him, I acted as one of his pallbearers, and spoke at his memorial service. I don't remember what I spoke; I had written words down, but never bothered taking them out of my coat pocket, and simply spoke from the heart. Nobody seemed to notice, and everybody had a good cry. In the audience, I saw my father sitting, but I had been closer to John than I had been to my Dad. We didn't talk. That made it doubly worse for me. I realized that not only one of my oldest friends was dead, but to me, my father was dead also. I drank more than I should that night, sitting in my office at the house.
Then it was back to work. Back in D.C. the American Renaissance Institute came into being. Marty found a guy named Porter Boardman over at the Cato Institute who wanted to move up in the world, and passed his name along to Bob Seaver. We had Bob sound him out on a few things, and began funding things. The only people who knew what I was doing were Seaver and Marty, and we wanted it kept that way. The ARI was set up ostensibly as a think tank devoted to 'common sense' ideas, somewhat libertarian, which was how Porter was found. The ARI would have a board of directors and a fundraising staff, they could hire lawyers and lobbyists, and start trying to influence things.
I wasn't sure how this would play out, but Seaver promptly got Boardman to hire a law firm registered as lobbyists to start pushing to pass D2A. His line was that a major funding outfit wanted it passed. Initially this was just a junior lawyer and a staffer sitting in on some of our meetings at the Heritage Foundation. Still, you had to start somewhere. Ultimately, I'd be able to go to my think tank, just like a regular Congressman, propose some ideas, have them actually write the legislation, and then hire the various lobbyists as needed. As long as the money flowed, nobody would care. We budgeted five million that first year.
A big part of getting things passed is 'counting noses', determining who will vote which way and why. We had enough House votes to override, but not in the Senate. As much as I detested working with them, we needed the NRA to bend over and get butt-fucked. The only way I was going to get this passed was to repeal my repeal of the assault weapons ban. This was simply foaming-mouth anathema to them, and the restraint on magazine capacities of over 10 rounds wasn't much better. The only thing they really liked was the demand for reciprocal permitting and the 'shall issue' requirement (and they really liked those parts, which made some of the other stuff acceptable.) Again, I had the House lined up, but digging up ten Democratic Senators was going to be tough – as in, expensive. There would be a lot of campaign contributions for this one.
You have to love Congress. It's the best that money can buy.
One thing I continued doing was to overtly use my 'toys' to swing a vote here and there. You or a constituent needed to fly somewhere? Hey, I've got a G-IV that I'm not using this weekend. Why not take that? Didn't get to Barbados this year? Maybe you'd like a weekend in the Bahamas, a little place called Hougomont? Sure thing, not a problem. Just remember, we have this little vote coming up...
At one point in late summer I had a meeting with Wayne LaPierre of the NRA about the bill. He'd only been on the job for a few years, but he was a hard core gun rights advocate. He was pushing hard for me to remove the magazine capacity restrictions from the bill. I let him fulminate for more time that I really wanted to waste on this, and then shut him down. He was never, ever, going to get what he really wanted, which was a constitutional amendment outlawing any and all restrictions on who could own guns and how many and where they could carry them. If you left it up to him, it would be perfectly legal to strap an automatic machine pistol into your holster and march down the middle of the street, daring anybody to stop you. He wanted the good old days down at the OK Corral, never realizing that what really occurred there was that Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday were actually enforcing various gun control ordinances.