Meanwhile I tried to get home and be father and husband. One of the benefits of having a driver and security detail was that it made it easier to haul Charlie and his bike to various races. When I started with increased security and drivers I had bought a Ford F-150 with a hitch package, and a small enclosed trailer to carry his bike. Then, with one of the drivers hauling the gear, the family could follow in a second people-mover minivan. In neither life had I ever learned to drive while towing something, but I could usually find a driver who had learned somewhere. Charlie was now competing outside of Maryland as well, into Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Virginia.
Charlie was making a real name for himself now, and was actually interviewed at a race in Hedgesville, out near Hagerstown but just across the border into West Virginia. He was named along with several other junior riders in a piece on ‘Pros of the Future!’ I commented to Marilyn later that what he really liked about the magazine was the pictures of the pretty girls standing next to the motorcycles. My wife rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. Our little boy was growing up, and showing decidedly heterosexual tendencies.
I sat down with him one evening after a Boy Scout troop meeting, one where he seemed a bit listless and disinterested. “What’s with you and the Scouts?” I asked.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You, tonight. You didn’t seem all that thrilled to be there.”
Charlie grimaced. “It’s not the Scouts. Next month we’re doing a camping trip down to someplace in Virginia. Some place called Winchester or something.”
I nodded. “That’s in the Shenandoah Valley. Very nice area. Should be fun.”
“Yeah, but that’s the same weekend as a race in Pittsburgh. I mean, I mentioned that to you, right? You said I could go and all.” Charlie was sounding a touch whiney.
“Okay, settle down. Sure, you probably said it, and that’s fine with me. You need to make a decision. You can’t do everything. School’s the most important thing, and if you don’t bring your grades up and keep them there, there’s no racing anyway.” Charlie looked horrorstricken at the thought, but nodded mutely. “After that, you need to decide what you’re going to do. If you can’t do both the racing and the Scouting, you need to make a decision. You can’t do them both half-assed. You need to figure out what’s important to you.”
He nodded again, seemingly lost in thought, so I kept on. “What about school? You were on the JV football team last fall, right? Do you plan to keep playing sports? Can you do that, too? Do you expect your mother to take you to all of these places and still manage to come down to Washington? She’s also taking your sisters to do their stuff, too.”
“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.