Chapter 112: 1992

1992 proved interesting on several fronts.

Grace Hopper died in January. I had met her back when I was a lowly Second Lieutenant. Hell of a mathematician, hell of an officer, and a hell of a lady! Marilyn and I went to her memorial service and funeral at Arlington. The world lost somebody special that day.

Charlie was now in his first year of the Boy Scouts and he went camping overnight in January again, this time for two nights. During the summer he did an entire week and had a grand and glorious time. I was much too busy these days to be much of a volunteer leader, but I managed to spend time on each of these trips. He thought this was just great! I would end up coming home with kinks in my back from sleeping on a rock somewhere and thinking to myself that this was the reason we invented houses.

The only real issue with camping occurred that summer when I helped out one night as a volunteer leader. Scout leaders are almost always volunteers. The only professionals are the guys who man the district offices or man the camps. Probably ninety-plus percent of us are just parents of the boys. It’s too much to ask any father to take an entire week off to stay up at camp, so we usually worked up a rotation. Most of the dads could manage to take a day off at some point, and then spend a night in a tent. While there you were the boss. It was always a couple of men, though, for safety’s sake.

The issue came about at the end of the day I was there, a Wednesday. We were having a “retreat parade” after dinner, where you line up the boys and lower the flag in the campsite. It’s supposed to be a somber and sober ceremony, quiet and polite, and the boys are supposed to be standing silent and at attention in their uniforms, saluting. That was the theory, anyway. That night was different, though.

Instead, the boys were joking around, laughing, and talking through the ceremony, Charlie among them. It’s a quick ceremony, not even five minutes long, but they were just fucking around. It pissed me off, and I just stepped up into the middle of the ceremony. “KNOCK IT OFF!”

Everybody’s eyes were on me. The two boys who were lowering the flag stopped what they were doing. I turned to them and ordered, “Raise that thing back up to the top! Do it now!” They hustled it back up, and I turned back to the assembled boys and gave them a piece of my mind. Pointing back to the flagpole, I said, “THAT IS THE AMERICAN FLAG! THAT IS THE SYMBOL OF THIS COUNTRY! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW IT THE RESPECT IT DESERVES!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other adult leader, Bo Parsons. Bo was a teacher over at Hereford High. He was eyeing me curiously, but otherwise was smiling and nodding. I decided to keep going. “MY FATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! MY GRANDFATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! A COUSIN OF MINE WAS BURIED UNDER THAT FLAG! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW SOME RESPECT WHEN YOU ARE AT A FLAG CEREMONY AND YOU WILL BEHAVE LIKE SCOUTS AND KEEP YOUR FAT FUCKING MOUTHS SHUT! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?”

The boys were staring at me, half terrified, and a few mumbled out a, “Yes, sir.”

“IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!” I roared. “I WANT TO HEAR IT LOUD AND PROUD!”

At that the boys looked at each other and gave me a ragged but loud “YES, SIR!”

I turned back to the two boys at the flagpole. “Now, let’s do this over again, and do it right!”

After the ceremony, the boys took off, Charlie included, getting away from crazy Mister Buckman as fast as they could. I was left near the chuck wagon with Bo Parsons, who was smiling. He was an official Assistant Scoutmaster, much higher up in the hierarchy than just a parent. I gave him an embarrassed smile, and said, “Sorry if I got out of line there.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’d have stepped in if I thought you were out of line. They’re a bunch of kids. They need their asses kicked every once in a while. We probably won’t have to chew them out on this for another few years.”

I gave him a curious glance. “Really?”

He nodded and chuckled. “Every few years the older guys have either dropped out or grown old, and you get a bunch of new guys who need a lesson in... practical civics, let’s say. It will be a few years before they forget it, too.”

I grunted and shrugged. None of the boys said anything to me, and nobody said anything to Charlie, as far as I could see, but they all were a lot better behaved during ceremonies from then on.

The twins started out the year in the second half of the second grade. I was wondering whether they were identical twins or not. I suppose there’s a genetic test. They looked almost identical, maybe ninety-nine-point-nine percent the same, but there was always something about them that let you tell them apart. Maybe it was just the way they carried themselves and their mannerisms. They could confuse new people, but after you had spent some time with them, even the clothes switching routine wouldn’t work. Holly seemed just a touch louder and more extroverted than her younger-by-five-minutes sister Molly.

Marilyn showed an astonishing degree of cognitive dissonance with our daughters. When I once asked her if she thought they would try the swapping routine with their boyfriends when they got older, I was promptly informed that ‘her’ daughters would be good girls and do nothing of the sort. When I asked Marilyn if she wanted me to tell ‘her’ daughters what their mom used to do, Marilyn started squawking for me to behave, and besides, she had been a good girl, too, at least until she met me!

I grinned at that and asked if she thought our son would be a ‘good’ boy.

“Hmmmppphhh! Not hardly! He’s too much like you!”

Charlie wandered in at that point. “How am I like Dad?” he asked. “We don’t look anything alike!” That was true. With his blond hair and stocky build, he looked like Marilyn’s brothers Matthew, John, and Michael.

Marilyn looked down at him, her hands on her hips. “Because you’re just as much trouble as your father!”

Charlie put his fists in the air, like a victory dance, and yelled, “YES!” and then turned to me and said, “Give me five!” I slapped his hand, and he ran out of the room, followed by Dum-Dum.

I looked at my wife and said, “Oh, brother!”

“Just remember, you wanted boys!”

“Wait until Holly and Molly start dating. You’ll wish you had boys, too!”

“Never!”

In the spring we put a landing pad out back of the house. This sounds a lot more grandiose than it really was. Lloyd Jarrett and Tyrell Washington figured out what we would need and passed it on to me and to John Steiner. John took care of arranging the permits, and then we called in a contractor.

However, before we ever got that far, both Lloyd and John told me to make nice with the neighbors. “Huh?” I commented. I’d never had any problems with them before, and to be fair, didn’t have all that many.

“This is going to play out one of two ways. Either nobody gives a crap and we have it done in a few months, or one of your neighbors gets a hair up their ass and decides to gum up the works. Wait until you are the billionaire throwing his weight around and buzzing their swimming pool and such. This thing will need FAA, state, and county approvals. Somebody starts bitching, and you’ll get this sometime in the next century,” replied Lloyd.

“That won’t look too good at re-election time, will it?” added John.

I grumbled and rolled my eyes. “So, what am I supposed to do?”

“You’re a politician now. Go kiss some ass. I’ll draw up a sheet where you can have your neighbors sign something saying they won’t mind you doing this. It will make it so much simpler. Kiss a few asses in Towson and Annapolis, too,” he said.

I spent the next three weeks visiting my friends and neighbors. To the south of me, on the other side of Mount Carmel Road, the only person there was John Caples, and he was a friend. To the west was a large, wooded area that I had bought when we increased security. To the north were some more woods, but on the other side of the hill was a small development that I needed to canvas. To the east was another development, on the other side of a wooded stream. I had to concentrate to the north and east. I also had to promise the State Police and the Baltimore County Police that they could use my pad as an emergency pad, not that I would have ever complained anyway. It took me longer than expected and cost me a few favors in Annapolis to get everything signed off on, but it promised to be worth it. Fortunately, my upcoming opponent for the election was from Carroll County, and didn’t get to toss his two cents in.

The pad was located about halfway between the house and the woods and wasn’t anything more than some crushed gravel with a vapor barrier and a heavy layer of asphalt over it, with a windsock on a pole nearby. We cut a hole in the fence and put in another driveway to the pad, and then a small walkway down to the house. We put some small lights in the pad in case we needed to drop me off after dark. After they painted the white circle with the ‘H’ on it, we were in business. All we needed to do was to drop me off and let me walk to the house. The LongRanger would then lift off and head to the barn in Westminster. It wouldn’t even need to shut down. We did put a waist high fence around it, but mostly to keep the deer and turkeys from wandering through. And the kids! They found it fascinating, and this was a way to keep them a safe distance away when they heard us landing.

Everybody in the House of Representatives was massively distracted throughout the year because everyone was up for re-election. I suppose the Senate got some work done, but even there a third had to run again. As for the House, forget it! The Democrats were up shit creek this year. There was a mounting chorus of ’Throw the rascals out!’ and most of the rascals were Democrats. Of the twenty-two Congressmen singled out by the House Ethics Committee for massive overdrafts on their House Bank accounts, eighteen were Democrats.

The Post Office scandal was just more fuel on the fire. This wasn’t as fully developed as the Bank scandal but looked to be even more serious and long lasting. We already had reports of embezzlement and drug use in the Post Office, and criminal charges were swirling around. Again, it all pointed at the Democrats.

Several Democrats simply decided it wasn’t worth the candle and retired. Quite a few faced primary challenges, and a few even lost, which sent tsunami level shock waves through the House. Most were having to raise massive amounts of money to fight for re-election. Additionally, if you were a Republican incumbent, it worked against your Democratic challenger. That was good for me. Bud Hawley was going to have an uphill battle. He had used most of his money throwing mudpies at Tommy Hoffman. Since Tommy had returned the favor, Brewster McRiley, his designated hitter John Thomas, and I had lots of ammunition to slam him with if necessary.