Published: 2 Mar 2020
We stayed in Paris for the closing ceremonies, our brothers and fathers taking the twins with them when they returned home the day after the final medal ceremony the diving squad was involved with. The teens were all busy with interviews and they all wanted Josh and me with them, most especially the ones whose parents couldn’t make the trip over to see them compete.
There was quite a bit of interest in our group, mostly of course because we all came from the same small New England town and as a group the lads had garnered an impressive number of medals. The fact that they were good looking boys, they all looked so buff, there wasn’t an egoist among them, and they were all friends, all added to their mystique. The medal winners were quick to thank the two lads from the middle school who had stood by as alternates for helping them in their practice sessions and their workouts, giving those boys and Josh and I a lot of the credit for their successes.
We all flew home with the rest of the aquatics squads and the plane even made its first stop from Paris at the closest international airport to our home town, Bradley Airport, the one in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. There were two vans waiting for us, one driven by the father of one of the boys and another driven by my dad Ian. The other dad took the other boys’ home to their parents and Ian drove us and Marcus and David to our house, about an hour and a half away. Once there the whole family, including Cindy and Ingrid, were there to greet all of us and Wayne and the ladies had prepared a light evening meal for us all. We sat around and talked about all we had seen and done both as a group while they were all with us over there, and what little we had seen after they went home or even before they had arrived to join us.
It was a great evening and in the morning, I was just a little surprised when Dave came out of Marcus’ bedroom with him, I had thought he had gone home with his moms. He blushed as he told me that he had come back early this morning to wake Marcus up. Marcus admitted that they were so used to sleeping together that they didn’t think they could go back to sleeping apart now; besides it wouldn’t be more than a month and a half before they were 18 and married, just before they started classes at the University over the mountain in Amherst.
Once settled back in and somewhat back to a normal Summer routine we had another meeting with the teens and David’s mothers. We all decided that the interviews and TV appearances were over since the two medal winners in our family had to get ready for two big events, their marriage, and starting college. Cindy and Ingrid had talked with the couple several times and they had then talked to Josh and I and a plan for what the boys wanted for their wedding had been ironed out. To be honest they had earned a lot of money from some of the paid interviews and then much more from some endorsements and ads they had filmed, but mostly what they wanted was much like Josh and I had had, a simple ceremony at the church with their young brothers and the rest of the choir performing and they wanted a large cookout with all their family and friends attending. Nothing too fancy and all of it to be low key.
Since they shared the same diving squad, the same cross-country team, the same classes, the engaged couple had virtually all the same friends, so it was a no brainer when they did the invitations for their ceremony. They didn’t have to invite the members of the choir; they were performing at the ceremony. The adults they were inviting, there wasn’t any dispute over either. They both thought Coach Morgan and his wife should be in attendance, they both agreed on their high school coaches, and they both wanted to ask Greg and his husband as well. They asked Ingrid if Dr. Vrenner had a spouse or a significant other that should be invited also, but Ingrid informed them that he would be away for the whole month of August and would not be able to attend. They did invite the permanent staff at the farm and then there were the honorary uncles, like Terry and Jason. It ended up being a simple ceremony and a wonderful reception after, but the number of invitees had swelled to over a hundred and fifty by the time a few last-minute folks had been invited. It all went off well and since they wanted to live in Marcus’ rooms on the first floor of our house, Josh and I had a couple of years to give them more of a wedding present than the trip to Key West we gave them as a honeymoon present to be used two weeks before the start of their classes. To think they had been engaged for just over three years, and they still only looked barely 16.
They settled into college life, doing what Josh and I had done and concentrating on their first year of college life rather than trying to fit in another year of sports on top of that. What they did do was to continue their running on the property and the side roads, and when they had no commitments or heavy studying after classes they often stopped at the University’s natatorium to talk to the divers on the team there, often helping them get the correct form down or sometimes just answering their many questions.
They did think that after they had a firm grip on their course studies, they might make time to dive in competition for the University team, or maybe become assistant coaches or at least mentors for the diving squad. They felt like Josh and I had, that yes, sports were fun, but unless you were going to make a living competing, you had better have some way of making a living doing something you loved.
To that end, they threw themselves into their first-year studies and did themselves proud. Although a year younger than most of their classmates, and married also, their brush with fame and their outgoing personalities garnered them great study partners and what seemed like tons of friends. Many came out to ride the trails when they had free time, and a driver with a car to take them over the mountain.
Calum and Scott were doing well in their class and they too were popular with their classmates. When the time came for planning the haunted hayrides for the fall season, they chimed in with suggestions just like all the others involved with the planning stage. And when the different groups were forming, they wanted to be involved with the group planning the scare tactics used on the wagon load of paying customers who expected to be frightened a couple of times along the wagon paths.
When it came time for the annual Columbus Day town parade, the town had arranged a spectacular float for the Olympic Games participants to ride on and since this would be one of the last times that particular group would be all together in public they all agreed, but only if the two from the middle school who acted as alternates for the team rode on the float with them. They wanted Josh and I to ride the float with them, but we declined, telling them that we had had our time in the spotlight and this was their turn, plus we were going to be busy watching the twins who were going to be marching with their school’s junior chorus, singing the National Anthem a few times during the parade route, in fact they were the group just ahead of the diver’s float, so we’d be there on the streets with them all.
Well it all worked out pretty well, Josh and I, with several other grade school parents, had a lot of fun “shepherding” or “herding” the twenty grade school students along the parade path, making sure they didn’t wander off the road to visit with friends along the way, or to stop and run after the candy thrown from floats up ahead, at least not far enough away from their group to get left behind. Their singing of the Anthem was wonderful, and of course each time they sang it the watchers on either side of the road would join in. At one point as the parade neared the end point, just past the town common, Marcus called over to me and told me that from what they could see from up on the float there was quite a contingent of reporters and news crews waiting at the end of the route. I wondered at that point if they were local or network news crews and who did they hope to talk to, if anyone? Marcus told me it seemed to be a lot of both as he recognized the trucks from the local stations easily, and he said there were about five he didn’t think were local, but maybe national news station crews. I asked him how the rest of the squad felt about talking to the press again and he told me they were all OK with it, but not all their parents were going to be at the end, the staging area, and they wanted Josh and I with them when they got off the float at the end of the parade which was only a block away.
We still had the twins to think about after we all reached the staging area which was a big parking lot for the local lumber yard and hardware store, so to keep all our charges together we handed the twins up to Marcus and Dave and when we arrived at the parking lot we asked the driver of the float, one of the high school coaches, to pull up nearest the gaggle of reporters and TV news crews. The divers stayed on the float with the twins and we let the reporters treat this as a press conference, they would take turns asking the divers questions and they would respond one at a time.
The press was told that if we didn’t think the question asked was appropriate, we would bypass that and no answer would be forthcoming. It went pretty smoothly and only lasted an hour, all five of the medal winners getting camera time and they all had their say on the answers to the questions asked. We noticed that while all this was going on, we had drawn quite a crowd of local folk and visitors alike. In the crowd I spotted one of the young staff members of our middle school paper and I drew her up to let her have a chance to ask a question, and I found out that Josh had spotted a member of our high school paper’s staff as well, so we let him ask a question on camera also.
The two teen reporters were as good questioners, or better, than some of the press in attendance and there was, as I said, some local as well as national news reporters there. The medal winners being featured in their hometown parade was newsworthy that day. The twins were delighted that day when they spotted themselves on TV news shows, standing with their two medal winning brothers on that float.
Things settled down again and Marcus and Dave resumed their class activity after the three-day weekend was over and now we were all geared up for a very active haunted hayride season, the twins taking an active role with all the groups it took to put these all together. We had another kind of fright during one of these hayrides the week before Halloween. Ian and I had just seen off the next to last wagon of customers as Josh and Tom (his other dad) left the farm yard with the last wagon full of thrill seekers for the night. Marcus and David were with Calum and Scott in the haunting/scare group in a field near where this last wagon would pass, and they were about to get scared by the group in the wagon. Ian and I had unhitched the two draft horses from our now empty wagon, and we were getting them settled in for the night when the emergency alarm from that last wagon came out over the walkie-talkies in our pockets. We both went into the emergency procedures we had established years ago, but had thankfully never had to use, Ian ran up to the end of our driveway to guide the ambulance, and I took one of our emergency first aid boxes and took off on a horse bareback to meet up with the wagon with about a dozen passengers on it.
Right where the wagon had to make the first turn down the farm path between the growing fields, where the “fright” team were to pretend to be zombies trying to get on board, I saw the stopped wagon, with a group of people surrounding someone in the wagon and the rest, about half of the others, were with Tom on the ground with one group of “zombies”, Marcus and David were up with whoever was in distress on the floor of the wagon, amid the five customers still on the wagon. Josh had the twins and some of their zombie friends huddled to the other side of the wagon and even as I raced to them on horseback, I could hear the screams of someone clearly in distress. That didn’t last long and as I was dismounting and racing to the end of the wagon with the first aid kit the screams started again. I climbed up over the tailgate of the wagon and immediately saw my son Marcus on his knees between the legs of a very pregnant woman on her back with her legs up, and they were quite obviously delivering her baby. David was at her side, holding her hand as a woman was doing the same on the other side. David was coaching the woman in labor, telling her that Marcus was saying that one more good push ought to do it.
I stared for a second as what was happening sunk into my brain and then realized something, there wasn’t anything clean enough to catch the baby in. So, I opened the first aid kit and took out the folded “shock blanket”, a thin metallic foil sheet used to wrap up people in shock or stuck out in severe cold to help keep them warm. I shook it out and passed it to Marcus and I could see the baby had started to emerge as the head was crowning. She must have started her last contraction because I could hear both David and the other woman on the other side gasp as their hands were virtually crushed in the hands of the woman in labor. Marcus cheered as the baby boy emerged and into his hands, now holding the infant in the shock blanket but then there was another big scream and the first baby’s twin appeared. Marcus told me he was afraid that the babies would slide around on the metallic blanket, but right then Ian arrived, standing on the running board of the ambulance on the drivers’ side and once the two ambulance attendants assessed the situation they brought out two swaddling cloths and the two infants were wrapped in those, this team took care of cutting the umbilical cords before swaddling the new babies after clearing their breathing passages. Both had a good pair of lungs on them.
Mother and infants were transported by the ambulance to the closest hospital, the paramedics telling Marcus, David, and their helper that the three of them had done a great job. The other woman, the helper, took off to drive to the hospital, thanking everyone for their help in delivering her nephews and helping her sister in delivering her sons. The rest of the customers got their fright night ride after the hay was raked out of the wagon bed and Marcus was left without a costume as he had had the woman in labor lay on it when he realized we didn’t have a blanket on the wagon for her to lay on top of the straw. Thank God it was a cool night and he had his T-shirt and jeans on under the cotton costume.
The next day Josh and I went with Marcus and Dave to see the new family in the hospital. The new aunt was visiting also and there was a mini reunion with both her and the new mother who was so embarrassed to have gone into labor and not realized it before getting aboard the wagon, she thought it was indigestion from the pizza she had eaten before coming to the farm. The twins were absolutely adorable, and their mother wanted to name them after our boys but didn’t know their names and it was then that her sister recognized them, Marcus and David, the local Olympic heroes out of zombie makeup and in regular clothes. It was then that she sputtered out that she now recognized Josh and me, too.
It turned out that the sisters were from the Eastern part of the state and they both were attending school in our area, over in Chicopee at The Elms College, both working toward a nursing degree. The older one, Cindy, was in her third year and her younger sister, Carla, was 21 and just midway through the first semester of her sophomore year. She was a big woman and although she knew she was pregnant she had never even told her sister she was expecting. She hadn’t known she was carrying twins, and she finally had admitted to her sister that she didn’t even know who the father of her babies was, and she didn’t care. She was hoping to find a nice couple to adopt her baby since she didn’t feel she would make a good parent. She wasn’t looking for money, she and her sister were pretty set for money as both had inherited from their parents who had needed care during their final illnesses and then when they died, they were both able to attend school.
Cindy then piped in and told us that neither one of them would make good mothers, that their own mother wasn’t the nurturing type either, but they themselves did hope to become nurses. That would be as much nurturing as they could handle, as it wasn’t something, they would have to take home with them. They then asked if we knew of a couple that would adopt the babies. I turned to look at Marcus and David holding the infants and my heart just about melted. I wanted them to be able to do this, I’m not even sure they had heard a lot of the conversation between the sisters and Josh and I, but I knew what the look of love looked like and those boys loved those little babies, I mean how could they not to some extent, after all, they had participated in their births, they were the first to hold them, the first to see them, I think they fell for the twins at that point, but they were just married, they were in their first semester of college and they had several more years to go before they would be out on their own.
I don’t know what made me look at Josh just then, but I think he knew. He stared back at me and then just nodded his head once. He kept his eyes on me until I nodded back to him and then he told Cindy and Carla we would adopt the babies. We were teachers, we had another set of twins already, and that even if we had never fostered an infant before, we had taken the state mandated classes on the care of infants. We had the ability to give the boys a good life, and if we needed help to do that, we also had not only our fathers, but the twins would also have four brothers to help them thrive, and we had David’s mothers to help as well.
The sisters asked us to give them a few moments and then we went to the other side of the room with the boys and the infants and we each got our turn with the twins and I guess that was all the time Carla needed to make up her mind because they called Josh and me over and asked if we’d be willing to pay for the legal work and we assured them we would, but Carla then asked if everything would go easier if she named one of us as the father on the birth certificate, and Cindy piped up and said why not just put both our names, Joshua Matthew Wheeler and we’d both be able to claim fatherhood. We thanked her for the suggestion and said we would check with our lawyer as to how legal that would be. Josh went off to make the call as I stayed and talked to the two women.
It was arranged that Carla would relinquish her parental rights and both our names would be entered on the birth certificates. But Rich, our local lawyer, suggested that we provide both sisters the means to continue their education somewhere other than just one town over from us. It so happened that the sisters had been telling me about their lives and I knew they had no reason to go back to the Eastern part of our state so when they mentioned they always had wanted to go to the West Coast, Josh piped up and asked if they had ever been there and we were told that they had wanted to go to school there and maybe stay out there for the milder weather, but caring for their ill parents had meant they had to start school here.
Josh spoke up then and told them that if they could get accepted in a school out there, that we would contribute ten thousand dollars toward their move to help them get settled. They thanked him, but told him that they had over a million and a half from their parent’s insurance, and once the old family home sold they would have a nest egg of a total of two million and that they had already agreed to move out there to start the next semester at a nursing college in San Diego that they were transferring to.
The next afternoon we met with them again with a notary from Rich’s office, who had a bunch of paperwork for Carla and us to sign and then we said our goodbyes as she was being released from the hospital, the twins would be held for one more night as they were a few weeks early, the attending physician thought that with Carla so vague about the times involved with her pregnancy they just wanted to be sure they would be able to release the boys as healthy as they could be. Although we really wanted to take them home with us, we knew we had a lot of preparation to finish at home.
Everyone who could drive was given a list of what was needed, and the grandpas were all enlisted as were Marcus and David. Ingrid and Cindy were so helpful in turning our big walk-in closet into a mini nursery and the third bedroom upstairs into the primary room for the infants. We had thought that once the babies were sleeping through the night they could use that room, but in the beginning, possibly for the first year, they would reside in the former walk-in closet at night, making it easier for Josh and me to tend to their needs during the night.
We had our own list to finish and at our evening meal we decided to take Calum and Scott with us to meet their new brothers. They of course wanted to know what their names were, and we realized we hadn’t really thought that out yet. It was funny but since we were all eating together, all the men thought their name would be the best for one of the boys, and Cindy and Ingrid also had some ideas. But Josh and I did too and one of those was to somehow name the two boys after the two young men who had brought them into this world, but since we didn’t want to have four people in the house all sharing two names we decided on Marc and Dylan for their names and that is what we had added to their birth certificates before we left the hospital the next day.
Getting them settled in seemed to go rather smoothly. They had a bunch of attention from everyone every day. At first Josh and I had our classes to attend every week day and we hired as a sitter for them Mrs. Ellis, our friend Terry’s mother who was able to ride in every weekday to work with her husband who was one of the workers on the farm. If Mr. Ellis was ready to go home by the time we got out of school she would leave with him, having prepared several bottles for us to give the twins during the rest of the day and overnight. We at first found it necessary for both of us to get up during the night for their feedings and changes of their diapers, but by the time they were ready for solid food they were mostly sleeping through the night.
Calum and Scott were so anxious for them to be out and about with them, running all over the place and riding ponies with them. David and Marcus were spending as much time with them as they could, but they soon realized that it would have been a true hardship on them to have taken them in on their own. By the time they were three the twins were scooting around in their little wheelie chairs and toddling around in the rooms with rugs or carpeting. They really did like to ride with Josh and me when we took them for a horseback ride in their sling pouches we wore on our chests. The twins caught on that Josh and I were DA and DADA and they kind of got everyone else’s names right too. At four years they were eligible for daycare, but Mrs. Ellis pouted when we brought that up and she declared that one more year at home wouldn’t hurt them and plus they would have by then mastered their potty training, she was sure.
So, we kept on with the current set up for another year, the year Marcus and David started the intense medical training that would lead up to the year as resident student doctors before their graduation with their MD degrees. That was the year we sat them down and made them finally decide on a house plan and a couple of acres we wanted them to have their house built on. It came as no surprise when they picked the two acres that abutted ours and although both Josh and I kept asking them if they were sure, we were inwardly pleased at their decision. So, all the perc tests and well water tests were conducted and then the construction started and Calum and Scott were very attentive onlookers to the whole project, reporting in great detail when their older brothers were at home what had been happening at the building site.
By now Calum and Scott were high school freshmen and had had their own successful diving careers during their middle school years and were now starting their workouts with the high school diving squad. During their meets they had one of the largest cheering squads in attendance. Josh and I, their little brothers, their granddads and their older brothers who showed up when they were not on duty at the University Hospital to finish their residency.
They were good, and achieved some great scores, but they had no interest in becoming Olympic divers. They told us it just wasn’t them. They didn’t crave the Olympic spotlight, what they did in their diving was to help their team and that is what they were interested in, becoming coaches, not necessarily star divers. As they told their brothers, they had more fun singing in the choir at school and in church. They did seem to sing everywhere they went, and sometimes you’d hear one of them singing in the shower and the other one singing the same song in their bedroom as he waited his turn in the bathroom. It wasn’t unusual to hear them singing as they rode their horses along a trail, sometimes singing to Marc and Dylan and those boys loved their older brothers singing to them.
It was during their Sophomore year, Spring semester, that their choir director at school had them do a duet in a choral concert that was put on every year just before the end of the semester. She had chosen a song she had seen two brothers in England sing on Britain’s Got Talent, quite a while ago. They were the brother duo, Richard and Adam, and the song was The Impossible Dream. She had been such a fan of theirs that she even had discs of their recordings and to be honest, I couldn’t tell at times when the boys were playing a disc recording or whether they were singing “live” themselves. The duo was well known in Britain about 15 to 20 years ago but their mastery of some of the world’s classic songs carried through on those recordings from years ago, and the twins were well suited vocally to carry on the tradition.
Occasionally we would hear them trying something more recent in music styles, but those old ballads and love songs were our favorites, and it turned out they were everyone’s favorites as well. Calum and Scott went from thunderous applause and standing ovations for that song and two encores at that first solo performance concert, to the regional choral and singing competitions to state wide competitions and finally to a try out for the new generation of America’s Got Talent competitions where they not only received the Golden Buzzer, but they followed that performance by the end of the show’s season by winning that year’s finale by garnering the most votes total for the season. We now had a pair of recording artists in the family.
Tours or special appearances were only scheduled for the Summer months or during their school vacations during the year, and I have to say that they didn’t take the whole thing seriously. Yes, they loved to entertain, they were marvelous singers, but that wasn’t what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives. It was all well and good while they were in school, but what they wanted to do after college was to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, and that was to teach and maybe get lucky enough to coach the diving squad wherever it was they were teaching.
Well they certainly followed in their fathers’ footsteps, but they added a few steps of their own, they achieved their Master’s Degrees in Education and went on to earn their doctorates and went on to teach at the University over in Amherst. While there they were the assistant coaches of the diving squad and were popular singers in just about every production of the University in one way or another. They continued to sing in the church choir just about every Sunday, and they delighted in taking their younger brothers with them whenever they performed or went to a diving competition.
The younger twins, Marc and Dylan, were now entering middle school and just fascinated by their older brothers, both sets, not making the distinction that David was really their brother-in-law. They rode just about every day and had been involved with all the activities on our riding trail farm, but the Fall hayrides were always their favorites.
THE END
We hope that you enjoyed this little conclusion to the lives of Josh and Max. Our authors receive no payment other than your emails to them. Email Art at: ArtWest at CastleRoland dot Net