Chapter 35: Revisionist History

Friday, November 16, 1984

We’d put off shopping for furniture long enough. Tonight was the start of fixing that.

By the time stores closed at nine, we’d visited three of the five thrift stores in the Bryan / College Station area. We had spotted a couple of possibilities for couches and tables, a couple of desks that we might purchase, a dresser that would work for the guest room, and a couple of chalkboards that might work if we couldn’t get whiteboards.

We hadn’t purchased any of them. The plan was to visit more stores tomorrow and see what else there was to see. If someone bought these in the meantime, so be it. We’d be fine without them. Most likely, though, they’d still be there.

Of course, that wasn’t all we purchased. Angie found a vintage dress and a corset that she liked. Jas found, of all things, a blue and gold ao dai that would require only a bit of alteration to work for her. Cammie and Mel each wound up with a few things. Paige, meanwhile, found something that had the girls giggling and that I wasn’t allowed to see, or at least not yet. More importantly, Angie wasn’t allowed to see it. I suspected they thought I’d spill the beans to Angie if she tried hard enough to get me to.

They were probably right.

Saturday, November 17, 1984

We made the right call in not driving to Fayetteville. The game was, pretty much, a debacle. A&M lost 0-28, and it might not even have been that close. I felt sorry for those who had traveled there.

I was pretty sure A&M would start getting revenge next year. We would see.

Aside from the game, we spent the day shopping. The biggest issue turned out to be getting the furniture home. That took a short-term rental on a U-Haul truck, which took a fair bit of negotiation and, eventually, a call to the RV rental place to verify that I was indeed a trustworthy driver. Big as our land yachts were, there was no getting a couch into them, and we weren’t going to try to transport one on the roof. I’d seen it done, but it was too crazy for any of us.

A real furniture store would have delivered, of course, but this was thrift-store furniture. No deliveries were to be had.

The six of us had no problem moving the couches, though. The basement entry (which we almost never used) was great for this job. Moving them through the house and down the basement stairs would have been much worse.

While we were out, we visited an office supply store in Bryan. They didn’t stock whiteboards, but they could order one for what seemed like a moderately reasonable price. Far more expensive than they would have been in 2021, but the difference between a whiteboard and blackboard made the cost reasonable, at least to me. I decided to wait for now. We would be in Houston within a month, and we might be able to pick them up there directly or have them shipped to the house.

Sunday, November 18, 1984

We largely took the day off, but not completely. Each of us put in some work on our papers and spent a bit of time studying.

Most of the day, though, was spent playing games, talking, and just hanging out. We even had a beer or two, just like regular college students.

Angie and I checked in with Jane again. As before, we really didn’t have anything big to discuss, but checking in was important.

Jane had passed along Angie’s message to Sharon’s therapist. It pretty much boiled down to ‘Take the time you need to get better. I’m still here, I still believe in you, and I’ll be in touch when I can.’

That felt like the most reassuring message she could send. As she’d pointed out before, any attempt to say (in the words of a future President) ‘I feel your pain’ would fall flat. Angie couldn’t ‘understand’ (even though she did, in fact, understand), but she could forgive and support. That would have to be enough.

Monday, November 19, 1984

The Batt had some good news on the subject of winter plans. We had a one-week extension. They were talking trip reservations until November 30th. That would give us time to discuss winter trips with our families, as well as discussing options among ourselves.

We were, for now, back to leaning toward all four of us doing something together. That was hardly set, but it seemed more likely. At some point, we would definitely start taking separate vacations, of course. We had before, and we would again.

Still, we were family. The four of us would, most likely, all be related before too long. Even if none of us shared blood, some (all?) of our children might. No matter what, we were a family of choice.

We already had plans to all be at Disney World, complete with our kids and our parents. One big, happy, just slightly complicated family! For someone who’d taken kids to Disney World several times and never once had that, it mattered.

I’d taken kids to Disneyland with my sister-in-law and nieces twice, so that counted for something. No grandparents there either, though.

Skiing was really starting to sound like it would be the plan. None of us knew anything, so we’d all start at the same level. What could be more fun than falling on our asses (or faces, or whatever) repeatedly and freezing our butts off?

It wouldn’t be a luxury trip, but we’d get a feel for whether luxury ski trips were in our future. That’d be a nice side benefit.

Tonight’s ‘entertainment’ was a very interesting presentation by Vladimir Sakharov, a former KGB agent who had defected a few years ago. His presentation was mostly about the Russia (and/or Soviet Union — the terms really aren’t that interchangeable) that Americans don’t see.

One point that he made had played out very differently from how he’d expected it to. He discussed how the birthrate within the Soviet Union vastly favored the various Muslim populations over ethnic Russians, and predicted that, in the future, the Soviet Union would be a majority-Muslim nation ruled by Russians.

The breakup of the Soviet Union had largely ended that possibility. Most of the major Muslim populations had become their own nations. Chechnya was the obvious exception, and had caused Vladimir Putin quite a number of headaches before he ‘solved’ that problem, quite ruthlessly.

Sakharov didn’t mention Chechnya, though, nor Putin. Putin, as of now, was just another member of the KGB, after all.

I wouldn’t mind changing history where Putin was concerned. While it’s possible that no one would have done better, it’s entirely possible that no one would have been as bad, ultimately, either.

Another excellent point was the blind spot Americans (both in general, and among our leaders) have when looking at other countries. We tend to focus on those countries’ leaders and ignore the populace. Partly that’s because most Americans aren’t multilingual, whereas most Europeans tend to be. The Soviet Union, in particular, had pushed their population to be multilingual.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, they hadn’t pushed English as the second language. That made sense as a short-term measure, since it kept Soviets as distanced as possible from the American point of view. On the other hand, once the Soviet Union collapsed, English would likely have been more useful than any European language. Many (most?) residents of Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and so forth spoke English, simply because they used English to talk to their fellow Europeans.

Nearly alone amongst the Americans in this room, I’d actually been to Moscow and other places in Russia. Not only that, but I was the only person present (and, quite possibly, anywhere in this world) who’d visited post-Soviet Russia. I suspected that Mr. Sakharov and I could have had a most interesting conversation.

Sadly, that would be impossible. Still, it was interesting to imagine what might be said.

I got some questions about that during the walk home. After all, the girls knew (without a lot of details) that I’d visited Russia at some point in the future. I refused to answer some of the questions, but they were quickly able to infer correctly that it had been ‘Russia’ and not ‘the Soviet Union.’

We agreed to not dwell on it too much. Things might change, after all, and what I’d seen might never come to pass.

As for us, I’d love to visit Russia after the collapse (if there was, indeed, an ‘after the collapse’) and take Jas (and our kids, if we had any by then). I’d want to give it a decade or so if things went mostly the same. Russia had been problematic for Americans soon after the collapse, and became problematic again by 2010 or so.

Everyone else wanted to go, too. Mostly likely we wouldn’t go as a large group, but we might.

Of course, there might well be business reasons to go there one day, too.

Tuesday, November 20, 1984

We had a bit of disagreement over whether this was the ‘best of times’ or the ‘worst of times’ for a Broadway show. Angie and Cammie held that it was lousy timing because this was a holiday week and students would be distracted or might have gone home early. Jas, Paige, and Mel, on the other hand, held that it was good timing because most classes had light workloads this week since professors knew we were distracted and might take off early.

I tended to agree with the second view, but could see the logic in the first one.

In any case, tonight was ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’. This time, we had an actual Broadway touring company.