Chapter 5

Mention the name Robert Heinlein to most kids my age and you'll get a blank stare. Maybe a "Huh?" if you're lucky.

I'm convinced my father was a great doctor long before he graduated from med school. Of course, not everyone knew that back then. He had to put in his time to get to the point where patients came to him and he could pretty much pick and choose who he wanted to treat.

It was during this period that my mother started looking elsewhere for what she thought she was missing. After she left, he didn't have the time to spend every evening with me, but he seemed to give me every minute he did have.

The thing I remember most is the reading. It started out with me sitting on his lap, the book in my lap, Daddy moving my finger across the words on the page as he read. That changed to me dragging his meaty hand along as I read to him, slowing only when I needed some help with a word. He was of the "let her figure it out" school of reading. He had the patience to sit there all night if needed, asking what sound this letter made, putting the word together, sound by sound until I had it. I remember the time the words "rough", "thought" and "through" were on the same page. I'm sure Daddy does, too.

The thing I remember most is the feeling of being the only thing that mattered to my Daddy when I'd be on his lap, his arms around me. Talk about security.

Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill (yeah, I read that one), all those children's books got real old, real quick. One day my Daddy brought out a book that was bigger than any I'd ever had in my lap. The front cover had a picture of a teenage boy wearing a shiny suit, a helmet at his side. There was this big pointy thing just behind him and several planets or moons in the sky. But there weren't any pictures inside the book. Each page was covered with words, probably more than in any complete book I'd read up to that point.

Well, I found that the big pointy thing was his space ship. Not quite like Daddy's BMW, but not like the rotten excuses we have for them today. He was able to go from planet to planet, all by himself, no NASA involved. If he had to take a couple of days off to fix the engine with whatever happened to be around, he did. He happened to be in the business of mining space garbage and selling it, but the big thing is he had adventures. He thought for himself, he was able to figure things out, and he knew right from wrong and wasn't too wimpy or too correct to act on it. This 16 year old kid could figure out the proper trajectory for a space ship, practically in his head. My love for math started then, probably so I could figure out exactly what the hell he was talking about in some of those explanations.

When my Daddy was a kid, Heinlein put out a book every Christmas, just for kids. Daddy had a set of them, the hardcover originals. Not that they were anything a collector would want. He told me he must have read each of them at least twenty times. Like father, like daughter. I'll still grab one of them and stay up most of the night reading it for the twenty-first time once in a while.

I was 9 or 10 when I went into Daddy's office, looking for something to read. That was the day I discovered that Heinlein wasn't only a writer of kids' stories. The first book I came across was "Time Enough for Love." It started me on a completely new Heinlein journey.

I'd read "Methuselah's Children" many, many times. The main character in the book was Lazarus Long, a man who had happened to live several "normal' lifespans and the head of a family of long lived people who ended up being persecuted for their "secret" to long life.

My old friend was thousands of years old in this one, thought he had done all there was to do and had given up. He was convinced to tell his life story to a computer, then they would pull the plug if he still wished.

By the time Daddy got home, I was well into the book. We talked for a bit about what I'd read and I could tell there was something on his mind. He was kind of nervous, afraid of something but not ready to talk about it. It actually took a question from Jack to make me realize what it was.

Daddy and I talked about suicide, whether a person has a right to say, "That's it, I've had enough," the differences between Eros and Agape, whether a computer could really be that intelligent, genetics, lots of things. We also talked about laws, politicians, lawyers, the whole gamut of government from slavery to anarchy and everything between. No lectures, most of it was questions that I had to discover my own answers for. When I read "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", I discovered that he was acting a lot like Maureen Johnson's father, making me think my own thoughts, not feeding them to me.

I figured out that a lot of the stuff our society runs on doesn't apply to me. Elitist? Arrogant? Probably. Responsible for myself and my actions? Definitely. That was the key, the thing every question my father asked led to. Responsibility. The R word.

I also realized that sometimes, you have to play the game. Maureen and her husband both pretended to be devout churchgoers. Oh, they went to church, and they gave more than their share of cash, but they weren't devout, at least as far as religion went. She even let herself be "seduced" by her minister, only to bring her husband down upon his head when he abused that trust. Again, that R word.

I learned a lot of mechanical things in school. How to write, how to add and subtract numbers, how to use a calculator so I didn't really need to know what I was doing if I wanted. I memorized dates and names and events.

But I learned how to think for myself from those talks my father and I had, and some of that stuff we went over in school had some use. I was way ahead of most, if not all the kids in school and most adults as far as that was concerned. That doesn't mean I always used it.

Dora was one of the loves of Lazarus' life. He'd lived many normal lifetimes and was on a planet that was in a period like our Wild West stage. Since he didn't age, he would dye his hair and do other things to grow older, then move someplace else and start over as a young man when it got too hard to keep up the charade.

Dora was a little girl he rescued from a fire when she was a child and he had a full grown son making trade runs on a space ship. He was going to split when his son next came back.

Well, Dora grew up and though she wasn't considered an adult, she wasn't a little girl anymore. She convinced him to take a ride with him away from town and the next thing he knew, there was a naked Dora in front of him, telling him she knew his real name and that she wasn't going to let him go back to town to desert her before he made her pregnant.