111: Celebration

I never thought about how normal life could become. It’s not that nothing happened in our lives, but that we all kept doing stuff like it was just the normal thing to do. Courtney did a lot of traveling out to California over the next few months. The company that bought her software still wanted her to have input on how they developed it for the consumer market. Jennifer traveled with her, of course, and I found that our businesses were all functioning with more and more non-clan members in significant roles. Courtney’s software company had six people working on the professional video editing suite.

Louise had established her own little accounting firm at our request. Instead of each of our businesses having to hire entire accounting departments, we all hired her. She had four temporaries coming on board in February, just to handle our income taxes. All told, there were over seventy taxable units in the village and ranch, including individual income tax, corporations, and private businesses. And those were only the ones who were part of the tribe and clan. Many of our non-clan employees availed themselves of her services as well.

The big businesses, of course, were Hearthstone Entertainment and Designed by Leonard. That was until Courtney’s James Engineering took off. Smaller businesses included the horse boarding, truck garden, café, grocery store, and various real estate ventures, like the apartment building, and the airport.

Then there were people with independent business income, like Jess, April, and Jason who all worked as contract videographers. Our three models, Heaven, Adam, and Pam. Author Nicki. And consultant Brenda. I was amazed that she was working as a consultant to some big software company in Wisconsin that needed an algorithm for scaling type fonts on screen for optimum resolution. Who knew?

But that’s normal life.

We were out of school, except a few continuing for advanced degrees. We had jobs and businesses. We had lovers, spouses, and children.

I wasn’t all that sure I liked being an adult.

I loved my lovers and children. But back in high school—Well, in spite of the fact that there were only a few classes that I actually remembered, I remembered so much of what we did back then. I remembered the dates, the basketball games, the conflicts, big debate, sleepovers with my girlfriends. I remembered bad times as well as good times, but there always seemed to be something ‘important’ happening in my life. Everything was new and exciting. It was a life filled with firsts.

Now I felt like my life was filled with reruns. Get up, get the kids ready for the day while I cooked breakfast and taught them, take them to do forms, get ready for work and review my script and guests, do the show, come home and sleep, get up. Rerun.

The fact that Heaven had been living an adult life like that since she was fifteen made me far more sympathetic to her desire to leave modeling behind. I was on an all-out search for a truly metrosexual man to take over as the host of XX/XY. One of the things we had learned from nearly ten years in television production was that the second host was often better at the job than the first was. I had a couple good possibilities in mind.

Of course, first I had to do my nightly shtick and hope I didn’t offend too many people. That wasn’t always easy. Like the night I focused on disabilities and how people use humor to cope with them.

ME: My daughter was born handicapped. Yeah, sad. She couldn’t walk. We had to carry her everywhere. They don’t even make wheelchairs that size. It’s a shame the way people discriminate against those who can’t stand up for themselves. Then a miracle happened. She was about a year old and I held my fingers out to her. Her tiny hands grasped my fingers and she pulled herself upright and took her first step toward her Papa.

It was amazing. It took months of physical therapy, but now she walks and runs just like a normal kid.

I found out it was hereditary. All my kids were born that way. It made me so much more aware of people with disabilities. I keep hoping for a miracle to happen in their lives. Whenever I see a person in a wheelchair I walk right up to him and hold out my two fingers for him to hold. I whisper, “Go ahead. You can do it.”

Some disabilities are not as obvious as others. We call them invisible disabilities. In the United States, 96% of all people with a chronic medical condition show no outward sign of their illness. Ten percent of those experience symptoms that are considered disabling.

I have an invisible disability, myself. You probably haven’t noticed. It’s my secret shame.

I can’t levitate.

You seem to have a disability, too. You can’t laugh.

That’s not going to go well for you when you meet my first guest tonight. We have several people with very real disabilities who have learned the art of laughing. I met my first guest tonight when I was a senior in high school. She was just fourteen and became my girlfriend of the day on Young Cooking. Deedee Lechner is still a very funny young woman and is the national young adult representative of the Cerebral Palsy Association. Welcome, Deedee.

DEEDEE: Hi, Brian. My first show with you wasn’t very good. It took you nine years to invite me back.

ME: Deedee, you represent the Cerebral Palsy Association and when we first met you told me you didn’t believe in disabilities and you could be anything you wanted to be. How’s that becoming a brain surgeon working out for you?

DEEDEE: It got lost in my quest to become a professional hockey player. I did my undergrad work at the University of Minnesota and everything in Minnesota revolves around ice hockey. I guess I let myself get caught up in the dream.

ME: But DeeDee, don’t you have to be able to skate in order to play hockey?

DEEDEE: You’ve never seen the Minnesota Gophers play hockey. [Laughter] It’s okay to laugh at me. It’s positive feedback.

ME: We’ve been talking about dealing with disabilities with humor. You’ve had to deal with several of them in your life.

DEEDEE: I’m going to remember the one about not being able to levitate.

ME: What’s the toughest one for you to deal with?

DEEDEE: My speech impediment.

ME: You are a comedienne. How do you work around the speech impediment?

DEEDEE: When people don’t understand me, I just shout at them. It’s like they can’t understand plain English.

Maybe it wasn’t my most successful show, but DeeDee was fun.

George’s children were born on March 10 and 11. Dolly went first and proudly named her son after his father, George William McCall Jr. I was really touched, though, when Debbie named her daughter Danielle Wood McCall after her little sister. Danielle, Xan, and I spent most of the week at the Wood house in the village. I had a feeling, the kids would be giants with both father and mothers topping six feet by a good measure.

I often teased both Doug and Adam about having birthdays on March fifteenth. It was silly. You know, death of Caesar and all that. ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ But this year, the dangerous date was St. Patrick’s Day. My very funny and sometimes fiery redhead Elaine was going to turn thirty. I pulled out all the stops. The guy I was considering for the new host on XX/XY, Lee Farrell, had agreed to be the guest host that night, so I had the time off. I asked Elaine what she’d like to do.

“Please just don’t decorate the house with black balloons and give me a cane. I promise I will beat anyone with it who dares give me one. I am not over the hill!”

I should say not! In fact, if anything, Elaine was more beautiful now than she’d been in high school. She’d been invited back to UIndy as guest star for their spring production of Evita. It was a great female lead role with powerful music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. She’d already been to the campus for a read-through and to meet the cast. The show would be the last week of April. I had a feeling her alma mater was providing a stepping stone for Elaine to be invited to reprise the role in a more commercial venue. The movie had inspired new interest in the musical and there was talk of a revival on Broadway.

As soon as her show was over on Wednesday, I whisked her away. She flopped back in her seat with a long, low moan.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You have nothing to worry about,” I said. “Rose packed for you.”

“Packed? Where are we going?” she asked, suddenly alert.

“There’s a Holiday Inn on the south side of town where I sometimes take redheads for a little tryst,” I teased. The nights I’d spent there with Elaine were some of the most memorable of our times together.

“Beast. Don’t you know I’m a famous star now? I can’t go to cheap motels with my boyfriend.”

“How about the Omni. Think you’ll be recognized there?”

“Oh, I do hope so. Brian, I love you.”

“I love you, Elaine. I don’t get to show you often enough.”

“There won’t be any black balloons or walkers or canes, will there?”

“I promise.”

I pulled into the Omni and let the valet take my car after getting our bag out. I’d already checked in and took her directly to our room overlooking the Circle downtown. The bedroom was in an upstairs loft with a king-size bed. On the main floor, there was a furnished balcony where we’d be served dinner later. But before we got to that, the furniture in the sitting room had been rearranged to allow for a massage table to be set up. I glanced at my watch.

“My love, you should get a shower before your masseuse arrives,” I suggested.

“Will you wash me?”

“Yes, but that is all. We don’t want any unnecessary fluids running onto the sheets on the massage table,” I laughed.

We managed to get through the shower with only a little fooling around and I didn’t leave anything in her to run out and embarrass her on the massage table. When we were clean, I led her back downstairs in a fluffy robe. On cue, there was a knock at the door and I admitted Sue, our massage therapist. She went straight to work and in ninety minutes, Elaine had no bones in her body. She wobbled off the table and I dressed her in her robe again. I’d made an herbal tea I knew she liked and we sat on the sofa after Sue left with her table.

“Mmm. Do I actually have to get ready to go out tonight after that?” Elaine whispered as she cuddled into my arms.

“No. I love your new hairstyle, though. I’d like to take a picture of it to see if Liz can replicate it. It’s so ... wanton.”

“No pictures, please. Room service?”

“On the balcony. We have warm gis to wear for dinner. No makeup or hair styling required.”

“This is so wonderful. Can you afford this?”

“We can all afford this,” I laughed. “Everyone is working and everyone is sharing. This won’t cost half a day’s wages on the show. You could bring all your friends here for a week if you wanted.”

“How about if I only wanted you for a week?”

“I’m pretty sure we could work that out, too.”

We had a little nap there on the sofa after Elaine finished her tea. She drooled on my shirt. We took another shower when we woke up. I fixed cocktails—Elaine had become fond of a martini on special evenings. I joined her. Everything necessary was in the room.

Promptly at seven o’clock, there was a knock on the door and a server entered with our dinner. I directed him to the balcony and in five minutes he invited us to eat. He poured our wine, served our dinners, made sure we were completely satisfied, and then left.

We ate in the cool night air overlooking downtown Indianapolis.

When we had eaten, we found dessert and coffee waiting for us in the sitting room. It was simple, but very elegant. I sipped from her lips as often as from my cup.

“We are so decadent,” she sighed. “I thought I was going to have to leave my family in order to have my career. But then you got us all into television.”

“I didn’t do it. Rhonda did. And she recognized what you could do with your talent on a talk show. If it had all be left up to me, I’d still be doing a weekly cooking show.” I guess I sighed a little.

“You miss that, don’t you?” she said.

“Yeah. I never really thought I’d be doing the same kind of show that you do.”

“Oh, you’re not. My show is funny.”

“Thanks.”

“Lover, go back to doing what you love. What would you be doing if you could be doing anything you want to?”

“That’s a good question. Most of what I do now. I guess I’d get up in the morning and bake bread while I talked to the children and then spend the rest of the day playing with them.”

“They have to learn, too. Can’t just be playtime.”

“Cassie is doing a great job in our new little school. At the moment, Matthew and Ellie are listed as ‘home schooled.’ But Lamar is putting together papers to formalize our little group as a private school. It’s amazing that you can start your own private school pretty easily in Indiana.”

“A school just for the children of our clan. Wow.”

“Not exactly. Well. Sure, the reason we’re creating the school is for our kids. But we actually have applications for next year for three more first graders from the township. They are people we’ve been in touch with through the community or are employees who want their kids to go to school with ours. The dormitory in the barn is going to get a complete remodel this summer and in the fall it will have a daycare, pre-school, kindergarten, and combined grade one-two class. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Cassie can’t handle all of that!”

“No. She’ll have the combined grades one-two. Brett got his degree in el-ed. He’ll handle kindergarten this year and next year it will be K-1 while Cassie moves her group up to 2-3. Although, I guess they say grade levels are irrelevant. They will teach the kids what they need to know.”

“Who is handling the little ones?”

“Well, Theresa has always kind of had our daycare. It might get split with a nursery if we decide we need it. I’m not interfering with how the school is structured. I do my thing with the kids first thing in the morning and then turn them over to the pros.”

“What you do with them is just as important as what Cassie, Brett, and Theresa can do. Do you want to make a baby with me, Brian?”

I looked at Elaine trying to decide if she was serious. Some days, it felt like I was fathering an entire clan of my own. Still, only three children shared my last name. I don’t even know if that counts for anything these days. My other three children bore the last name of Swift and I loved them every bit as much as Dani and Liz’s kids.

“My darling Elaine,” I whispered. “When you are ready to have a child, I would be honored and enthused to help produce her. Or him. Whichever you prefer. Tell me what you want and I am yours to command.”

“I’m kind of feeling my biological clock ticking now that I’m twenty-nine and holding, you know. I’m not quite ready yet. I don’t know if I ever will be. It excites me, but like everything else, I wonder how I can handle it with the career I’ve chosen. I tell you what. When you get to be my age, we can revisit the issue and see if anything takes. Okay?” she said.

“So okay,” I whispered. “Do you think we could go up to that incredible bed upstairs and practice?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

I got a nasty shock in the mail. It was one of the Christmas cards I sent out. It had been forwarded twice and then marked ‘Return to Sender. Unknown.’ It looked like it had been through hell and back. But I got worried. Renee hadn’t contacted anyone lately and this wasn’t good. I tried the last phone number I had for her and it was disconnected.

I went to see Lamar and Donna and took them the card. Lamar sadly shook his head. He went into his study and returned with the birth announcement of Joyce Renee they’d sent to her. It had also been returned to sender.