Chapter 141: Leadership

Monday, May 19, 1986

We were indeed up before Jas and Paige. They didn’t turn up for half an hour after we’d gotten dressed.

We refrained from teasing them. That might be me tomorrow, after all. There was no way Jas had worn Paige out so much that we wouldn’t get up to something!

Breakfast was good, as it had been last year, and we hit the road around ten. Literally, too. The Joslyn — Omaha’s art museum — was only a fairly short walk from the Red Lion. We would be back here tomorrow. The meeting started at nine-thirty, so we needed to be up about the time we would be for classes, and we might take a cab to the Joslyn that time.

We had gotten a lovely day for our outing, thankfully. Some clouds, but a day in the low 70s with plenty of sun is a beautiful one, in my opinion.

Naturally, the girls thought it was ‘a bit cool.’ Not cold enough to make them wear pants or anything, though.

The Joslyn turned out to be quite good, in our opinion. Not great, when compared to the two truly great art museums we had visited together (the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery in London), but quite good. Houston’s art museum wasn’t all that great as of now. The Joslyn was, most likely, better. Houston would improve, but I imagined the Joslyn would as well.

One of the many bucket-list items for New York was the Met (aka The Metropolitan Museum of Art). And, of course, the Louvre was on the list for France, with or without Camille and Francis. I imagined they would join us. If they didn’t, we would still find our way there, perhaps on another trip. It wasn’t clear to me that there was a lot of Paris time on our trip. Some, most likely, though.

This was the first art museum outing where we started having serious conversations about whether we wanted private art collections. There was something to be said for it, particularly if one donated their collection to a museum after a while. That said: did any of us want to be the sort of people who owned a noteworthy painting and thereby implicitly denied others the experience of seeing it?

Maybe? The idea of owning a beautiful thing just to own it was fine with us, in a vacuum. The idea of owning a highly valuable beautiful thing that some museum would display if we didn’t own it was perhaps another.

Would that be fine, or would it make us assholes? Perhaps something in between?

There were always lines. Where we drew those lines would make a big difference, both for us and perhaps for many others.

During a break for lunch in the museum’s cafe, I made a brief call to Alice and asked her to pass along my schedule to Michael and Lee. We covered this trip, the New York trip, the Marshall family vacation, Janet and Lizzie’s wedding, and the trip to France.

She promised to pass it along and wished me pleasant travels. I made it clear I could, and would, be reachable, though sometimes it would be me calling to check for messages rather than their being able to contact me. That said, I would let Alice know what hotels we were staying in when we were in France. In the US, we could count on the pager to put her in touch with us if need be.

As we were leaving the Joslyn, we were discussing where to have dinner. This wasn’t going particularly well, given that we were in a city we didn’t really know at all. We got a very amusing dinner recommendation from a woman passing by.

She said, “I couldn’t help overhearing. You should try Angie’s Steakhouse. It’s just a couple of miles from here. I’m guessing you came by taxi?”

“Walked,” Angie said. “We’re staying at the Red Lion.”

“Ah!” she said. “Well, you could take a taxi and then either take one back or just walk. Or walk there. It’s two or three miles away, I think, but I’m not sure I could give you great directions.”

“We’ll take a taxi,” Angie said. “Thanks!”

“Happy to help!” she said.

After she’d walked on, we all chuckled. How could we pass up Angie’s Steakhouse, considering? It felt like an omen.

It wasn’t hard to get a taxi, and we were there within fifteen minutes. They weren’t overly busy, so we were seated in minutes.

The menu looked highly encouraging, though Paige said she was putting on pounds just looking at it.

In the end, and after flirting with other choices, we all had steak, though different cuts. Baked potatoes, too, and veggies.

It was all very good, especially paired with the merlot Jas picked out. I had no idea what the drinking age was here, but no one questioned us, so it didn’t really matter.

After dinner, we agreed that a walk would do us good. It was a bit over a mile, which really wasn’t that far by A&M campus standards. It was nearly a mile from our house to the Commons dorms, after all. Toss in a trip to the MSC and an on-campus date night with no driving might be three miles of walking.

I still had enough first-life me in my head to sometimes reflexively balk at the idea of walking those distances, but reality quickly intruded and reminded me I was twenty, quite healthy, in good shape, and had none of the aches and pains that had plagued overweight, out-of-shape first-life Steve.

We had a pleasant walk back, and I’m pretty sure no one was at all tired out when we got back.

It was early enough that we wound up just hanging out and talking for a few hours. The artwork discussion got going again, and we reminded ourselves that to buy a notable artwork, someone has to sell it. We weren’t going to be buying it from a museum! If the museum could afford to buy it, they would have done so. Thus, the question became: would we be better stewards of the work than the previous owners?

Both Jas and Paige pointed out that the road to hell might be paved with good intentions (as seemed to often be the case). Angie joined in, and compared it to her usual touchstone: ‘If I had just a bit lower taxes, and just a bit less regulation, I could do such great things!’

We all agreed: it could work out, but it could also just be a path to suckering ourselves into thinking we were great when we were ... not so great at all.

Jas made an interesting related point. None of us were settled on the ethics of prostitution in the first place, but what about a case where someone crossed our paths and wound up in a sexual relationship with one or both of the partners in a couple (or, perhaps, all four of us) while, at the same time, we were providing that person’s room, board, and livelihood? Even if we worked hard to make it fully consensual (and we would), there was still at least some chance of there being implicit coercion.