As for the pies, well, there is no such thing as a bad pie!
Like most parents, we found the most hilarity with our children. Charlie liked me to take him to Bucky’s races, and Marilyn was happy to let us go and get out of her hair. The babies didn’t like the noise and would fuss a lot. Once Charlie was comfortable riding his bicycle, he and Bucky started dirt biking around the lower half of our property. We figured this out during the summer of 1985, when the Tusks were over for a Saturday barbecue. As we all sat there on the back deck, we watched as the Daring Duo headed up the hill into the woods, and dragged back a fallen down tree. Well, Bucky mostly did the dragging, but Charlie tried to help. When we asked, mystified, what they were up to, plans to build a jump ramp were announced. Marilyn was not amused, and threatened both Tusker and me if Charlie got hurt.
Tusker and I just shook our heads in disbelief. This deserved another beer, at the minimum! We had a pair of adrenaline junkies on our hands.
It became quite apparent that both Bucky and Charlie were little daredevils. We got to calling them Batman and Robin. Bucky would come up with some crazy stunt and Charlie would join in. It wasn’t like Bucky even had to talk my son into it, either. Charlie volunteered!
This all came to a painful head in February of 1986. It doesn’t snow all that much in Maryland, but it does snow, and we got several inches one Friday night. The next morning we called the Tusks and invited them over to go sledding. By ten or so they pulled up in their minivan and piled out. Their house was a nice high-ranch model with a wonderful finished basement set up as a playroom/prison for their boys, but they lived in a development and only had about a quarter acre of flat lawn. We, on the other hand had a nice gentle slope perfect for sledding.
Once they arrived, we quickly dressed the kids and went outside. Holly, Molly, and Carter got propped up in a toboggan and Marilyn and Tessa began pulling them around the back yard, inside the pool area where Dum-Dum could be turned loose inside the fence. This worked for about fifteen minutes before they started getting chilly and fussy. In the meantime, Charlie and Bucky disappeared up the hill with their sleds. We took the little ones inside and left the boys to their own devices. They’d come in sooner or later.
They did. Mid-morning we saw them from the breakfast nook, looking out through the patio door as we sat there sipping hot chocolate. Bucky was half supporting Charlie, who seemed to be holding his arm and limping. I looked over at Marilyn, who was shoveling rice gruel into Holly and Molly, and asked, “Now what have those two gotten into?”
She glanced out the window and said, “Don’t know, but they’re your problem. I’m in charge of girls. You’re in charge of boys, remember?”
I grunted in acknowledgement of our pre-baby agreement. Tessa stood up and went to the patio door and let the boys in. It was obvious that Charlie had a look a pain on his face, and was favoring his left side and cradling his left arm. “What happened?” she asked.
Charlie limped over to his mom, and Bucky answered, “We crashed.”
“You crashed?” asked his father.
“On the ski jump,” he answered, nodding happily.
“What ski jump?” I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew they were the stupidest words I had ever said. What was I thinking?! They were little boys! Of course they had a ski jump!
Bucky started talking and pointing, and I just looked over at Tusker and said, “This I got to see!”
“Me, too!”
We stood up and slipped on our boots and coats, and I grabbed the leash for Dum-Dum. Tusker and I followed Bucky out through the patio door with Dum-Dum straining at the leash, and were led down to the bottom of the hill. “We crashed here,” we were told, with Bucky pointing to a big pile of snow.
Tusker and I looked at the pile, and then at each other. “Just how did you two knuckleheads manage to do that?” asked his father.
“Well, we started up there, and then when we got here we crashed,” was the explanation, accompanied with a lot of pointing.
We continued quizzing Bucky, and then sent him back to the house. I stood there looking at everything for a moment. The plan was simple enough, if audacious, and bird-brained to the point of idiocy. The boys mounded snow up down at the bottom of the hill, down near a small bump close to Mount Carmel Road. Then the intrepid pair grabbed their toboggan and headed up the hill, all the way to the tree line about three hundred feet uphill from the house. The plan was that they would start as far up the hill as they could, race down the snowy slope, hit the ski jump, and be launched into the air. At that point, airborne, they would sail over the drainage ditch, over the fence, over Mount Carmel Road, and finally come down for a gentle landing in John Caples’ cornfield, a distance I conservatively estimated at well over one hundred feet.
It was impossible, of course. The slope was too gentle, the jump was too shallow, the distance was too great. Evel Knievel with jets up his ass couldn’t have made that jump! Instead, the boys had scooted down the slope, blown through the pile of snow, and tumbled ass over teakettle into the ditch, where they finally fetched up against the fence.
I looked over at my buddy. “Can you believe this shit?”
Tusker smiled and shook his head. “All too easily!”
We headed back in, Dum-Dum leading the way. We got inside and I said, “You won’t believe what these two were doing.”
Marilyn was pulling her coat back on. “I’ll believe it later. We’re going to the hospital now.”
“WHAT!?”
“Your son has a broken arm,” she announced.
“What?!” I turned to Charlie, who was sitting at the kitchen table, still cradling his arm and looking unhappy, but not crying. I knelt down in front of him and asked, “What’s wrong, buddy?”
“My arm hurts,” he answered, still cradling it.
“Here, let Daddy see.” I reached out and looked at his arm as best I could, despite his histrionic complaints. It was obvious something was wrong, and there was a big lump under the skin at his wrist. I looked up at the others, and nodded. “I think you’re right,” I told Marilyn.
She snorted. “I ought to make you put that in writing. I might never hear it again!” She went to the utility room and grabbed Charlie’s coat.
“When can Charlie go out and play again?” asked Bucky.
Marilyn looked like she was going to yell at Bucky, but then her face softened. “Not, today, Bucky. Charlie got hurt and we have to take him to the doctor.”
“Oh.” Then he looked worried. “Are we in trouble, Aunt Marilyn?”
She smiled, as did the rest of us. “No more than usual, Bucky. No more than usual.” To me she said, “You stay here with the girls. The last thing we need is all of us going to the hospital.”
“Emergency room at GBMC?”
She nodded. “You’re in charge of the girls.”
I eyed my daughters, now imprisoned in the jail, and wondered who might be getting the better part of this deal. Marilyn put Charlie’s right arm into his coat sleeve, and then zipped it up, rather than try to force his left arm through the sleeve.
Tessa and Tusker decided to take their pair home at this point as well. “Call me later and let us know how it went,” Tessa said. They took off and I helped Marilyn get Charlie into his car seat, and they left as well.