In November, I made arrangements with Taylor for a family trip to the Bahamas again, and we stayed at the same villa, Hougomont, that we had stayed at in the spring. This time we took the kids, to see how the place worked with children and whether it was practical to take kids back and forth. Holly and Molly were a handful, and Charlie was only slightly less trouble, but we survived. By the middle of the week, I called the real estate office down there and had Mr. Peepers over, and we started haggling over price. I bought Hougomont plus the two empty parcels, one on each side. That gave us well over 1,000 feet of private beach, and plenty of room for privacy. John overnighted me a check for $1,000,000 as a deposit, and I promised to fly down for a quick trip before Christmas to close on the sale.
At Christmas, Charlie got a bicycle and a helmet. He fell a lot, but he kept trying, going in circles in the driveway. He would make ‘VROOM VROOM’ sounds as he pushed and rode it around. Bucky was facing some future competition!
We gave Charlie his bike about a week before Christmas, actually. We were going to Utica for Christmas, and taking a few weeks off for a long family vacation in the Bahamas. In a few years the kids would be in school and that schedule would rule. For now we were still fairly flexible. We kenneled Dum-Dum for a couple of weeks and then flew up.
As I mentioned once before, the Lefleur tradition is that they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, actually in the afternoon, not the evening. There were now so many kids and grandkids that adults pulled names from a hat in the fall, and they were only responsible for that child, and you didn’t buy for everybody. Nobody could afford buying a present for every single person! Today, however, Marilyn and I were going to break the rules.
Everything went fairly normally. Santa showed up about 1:00 and did all the ‘Ho, ho, hos!’ and handed out a small present from Big Bob and Harriet to each child. They also had to pose for a picture with him. Even the adults had to sit on his lap! Afterwards, Santa was sent packing, and the presents for the kids were passed around, which always ended up in a whirlwind of wrapping paper and a cacophony of noise. Normally after that happened, a bunch of folding tables and chairs would be brought out for dinner. However, before that happened, Marilyn and I interrupted things.
“Excuse me! We have something to say,” I said to the room. It fell on deaf ears. Nobody was listening to anybody, just to the screaming kids running around. “Excuse me!” Nothing. I looked at my wife. Maybe she could bring order to the chaos. It was her family, after all.
“You need to be louder.”
“I was loud.”
“Well, yell, then!”
I rolled my eyes. Great! I stood up and waved my arms, and then yelled out, “EXCUSE ME! WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!” At that point the adults, at least, looked in my direction. The kids kept yelling, but the parents saw me standing. I repeated myself, “EXCUSE ME! I NEED TO SAY SOMETHING!”
Marilyn’s family started shushing the little ones, and I turned to my wife. “Okay, they’re your family. You want to say this?”
Marilyn waved me off. “This is your idea.”
“Some help you are!” I turned back to the others. “Okay everybody, give me a minute or two, please.” Most of the others nodded, including Big Bob and Harriet. We had told them of our idea before, and they liked it, and now they started telling everybody to be quiet and listen.
“Thank you. As most of you know, for the last few years I’ve been in business down in Maryland, and we’ve been pretty lucky and done fairly well. Anyway, this year I bought, uh, actually, we bought a vacation home in the Bahamas. This family has been very good to me, and Marilyn and I would like to offer everyone here some time there. If you’d like to use our place for a week, let us know, and we’ll make the arrangements for you. All you’ll need to do is get to the airport.”
As expected, the room broke out in a state of barely controlled pandemonium. The kids didn’t understand any of it, but they sure understood the word vacation! The teenagers were interested, too, and wanted to know when. It was the older Lefleurs, Mark, Luke, and John, and their wives and children who wanted to know more.
Marilyn and I had decided on some ground rules ahead of time. They could call Marilyn and schedule something and Marilyn could keep a schedule (or more likely tell me, because I wouldn’t lose the schedule!) We’d pay for flights out of Syracuse, which was the nearest big airport. I wasn’t paying for them to fly down on a chartered jet, but I would cover business class. Syracuse connected to New York, for instance, and New York has daily flights to the Bahamas. They would have to pay for their own food and amusements while down there. We had decided the same rules would apply to any of the original brain trust at the Buckman Group, too.
If somebody didn’t like it, they didn’t have to go!
We figured that no matter how you added it up, this only added up to about eight to ten weeks per year of people going through the place. The odds that there would be a conflict were low. Besides, I knew enough about my wife’s family to know that they were pretty close. It would not surprise me if several of the boys and their families wanted to go down together. There were enough bedrooms to accommodate grownups, and the kids could always sleep on the couches. Or they could sleep on the beach, for all I cared. If I caught them I’d throw them in jail and fine them!
Over the next few days we talked to all the older kids about this, and reviewed the ground rules and grabbed a calendar. Mark and Lauren scheduled a week in April, and Luke and John and their families decided to share a week in May. We would sort out the flying part when we got back to Maryland. I explained how we subcontracted travel arrangements out and would figure out the specifics in a few weeks time. In the meantime, we were on vacation, and weren’t going to worry too much.
We showed everybody some photos we had taken the last time we were down there. It seemed unreal to some of them. Well, half the time it still seemed unreal to me! Part of the reason Big Bob and Harriet were so enthusiastic about the idea was that they were taking the first trip. When we flew down on the Friday after Christmas, we took them along. Their vacation included a flight on the G-II that Taylor had chartered for us. For once they left the kids home. Even the youngest was now six years old, and there were enough older kids at home to watch them for a week. Winter was the slow season for Lefleur Homes anyways, so they could take off.
I think a big part of the reason we offered to bring them and they agreed to come was to see if it was all true. Were the photos real? Did we actually have a place on the beach? Was this bullshit? For a long time, Big Bob and Harriet had figured that they were going to have to support their idiot son-in-law who couldn’t get a real job and ended up in the Army. The idea of me owning an investment company and supporting Marilyn on my own was just barely sinking in. The idea I was worth so much more than that really hadn’t registered at all!
Taylor had made sure the jet was stocked with a couple of bottles of champagne. Big Bob drank some, but he was much more of a beer kind of guy. Harriet and Marilyn got a little tanked, on the other hand, but not out of control. Charlie was very excited by it all; the twins slept the entire trip. That was a blessing in and of itself! They were now teething, and when one would start crying, she would set off the other one. When I die and go to hell, it will be packed with teething twin daughters! A minivan and a Cadillac were waiting for us at the airport, so that we could split apart and drive separately if we wanted to. From there, we drove to Hougomont and I fished the keys from my pocket.
Well, if we were trying to impress the relatives, it worked! It reminded me of the time when Marilyn and I had lived in northern New Jersey on the first go-around, and her brother Mark and her Aunt Lynnette came down to visit us. We took them to Rod’s 1890s for dinner, a very nice place Marilyn and I liked to go to, with a private Pullman dining car on one side, and a two story bar/dining room with an open well connecting the rooms. The pair of them had just gawked like a pair of rubes right off the farm. We got the same impression this time around from Marilyn’s folks.