Way 23
Take time for yourself, so you can bring that sense of fulfillment with you to the family.

He'd never been a solitary man.

In the Air Force, he'd spent all his time surrounded by fellow pilots. Time around his commanding officers and later, around those men who served under his command.

In his youth, he spent every free moment with Lucille, or her family, or working with his father, mother and the few animals they had on the farm. The most alone time he ever got was driving the tractor, the harvester, the combine. And even then, he had music as his companion, blaring in the cab of the monstrous machine he was handling.

In high school, he was surrounded by a gaggle of friends, not to mention the girls always trying to get into his pants.

As an astronaut, he was surrounded by NASA personnel, by his fellow astronauts, researchers, lab techs. Even on his missions into space, he was never alone.

When Lucy had died, he'd been instantly surrounded by a multitude of both close and distant relatives from both sides of the family. He may have only had his parents, but they had brothers and sisters with families of their own. And Lucy's family - nearly all of them came, children included.

Plus, of course, he had his own five sons.

The years after she left them so violently, so unexpectedly, were hard, and yet as much as Jeff ran away from his boys, from every memory of Lucille, he was never actually alone. He was always working, always meeting with potential backers, buyers, partners, military men and women. It took people to make a business happen, and Jeff surrounded himself with the best.

One by one his sons had gone off to pursue their own careers. Scott to Oxford, then on to the Air Force. Virgil to Colorado to study engineering. John to Harvard University and then on to Jeff's own astronaut training academy. Gordon to college and then WASP. Alan to college as well.

As Jeff began pulling International Rescue out of Dreamland and into reality, he'd had to surround himself with even more people, though it was all hidden beneath a veil of secrecy. Hours upon hours with Brains, once he'd been brought on-board, and with Lady Penelope, to help him secure agents and gain her trust.

And as each of his sons climbed aboard this new, different and exciting ship of his, he spent an untold number of hours with each to talk about what the whole point of International Rescue was, to work at designing each Thunderbird and rescue vehicle. To carve a secret base and a home out of a hunk of volcanic island in the South Pacific.

And then they were all living on the island, inviting Jeff's own mother, plus Kyrano and Tin-Tin and Brains, to live there with them. Sure, the island and the villa, not to mention all the storage areas and hangars and the lab, were large enough that if any of them truly wished, they could find themselves all alone on any given day. But they were a family-oriented bunch who liked people. Liked conversation. Like each other.

Even when Jeff went on vacation, he wasn't alone, with Penny and Parker there at the Australian sheep ranch. On a trip to see about an investment, he went with Tin-Tin and Brains. In the city he spent time with Wilbur Dandridge the Third, and attended all those other meetings that had to be scheduled within a one-week time frame to accommodate the fact that he no longer lived within driving distance from his world headquarters.

No, Jeff had never been a solitary man.

And yet on this day, for the first time in more years than he could even count, he found himself standing at the precipice of the dormant volcano that had given birth to Tracy Island over hundreds of thousands of years. He stared down into the plugged cone, then out over the vast blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean beyond. Above, the sky was clear and light blue without a cloud to be seen; the sun shone brilliantly, and a gentle breeze tossed his hair lightly from side to side.

Interestingly enough, it had been John who'd suggested he might want to make this climb, as apparently he sometimes did himself with an old-fashioned tripod telescope in hand just to see what space looked like through the eyes of those who'd only had such things to observe the stars and planets as little as a decade ago.

Jeff leaned down and looked into the telescope's eyepiece, twisting the knob on the eyepiece assembly until Jupiter at last came into focus. Even in the daylight, at this time of year it stood out in stark contrast to the blue sky. He stared at it, wondering what people from decades ago thought when they viewed the planets this way. Wondering what John thought of it, having grown up surrounded by technology much more sophisticated than this.

He leaned back and looked down upon his dream that had come true; at the sprawling villa, the pool. The tennis court and far at the opposite end of the island, the large boathouse. The various piers and small docks here and there. The runway used for both regular aircraft and Thunderbird Two. The Roundhouse, hiding the most amazing space rocket ever created. The Cliff House. The palm trees, the sand, the rocks.

His home.

His family's home.

International Rescue's secret base.

Jeff smiled. Sometimes, he supposed, being solitary wasn't that bad at all. It felt good to reflect on the things you'd done with your life. To feel good about the differences you had made and continued to make. To set aside the cell phones and the vidphones, the email inboxes and the holographic computer tablets. The television screens and the radio stations. The hustle and bustle of your family living all around you. Smells wafting from the kitchen and dozens of news reports, stock reports, status updates and specifications to read.

Sometimes it was good just to be.

Way 24
Remember what you hated to hear from your parents as a kid and vow to be different.

"Because I said so."

Oh, there was nothing worse than that phrase. Thankfully, Jeff's mother hadn't used it all that much, but oh, boy, it had been his father's favorite response to Jeff's questions. But Jeff had found a way to work around that; he would simply ask his dad, get the canned reply, and promptly go ask his mom. Made things a lot easier on him growing up.

"Children should be seen and not heard."

Bullshit, is what Jeff always used to think. It was an old-fashioned saying that pretty much ensured adults wouldn't have to endure non-adult talk and really, if you had something like six kids at a table at any given time, it was understandable. But with only one, well, it seemed more that his dad was just cranky and didn't want to talk or listen to any talk, period, when he was shoveling down Ruth's latest culinary delight. Jeff solved this problem, however, by learning sign language, teaching it to his mother, and then carrying on silent conversations that could only be seen. With a hearty laugh and a commendation for his ingenuity, Grant Tracy had reneged on this particular rule rather quickly.

"Maybe."

In Jeff's experience, this word always just meant no. Because truly, if a parent was going to say yes, they'd just say yes and have done with it. Jeff had tried to go the route of pestering his folks by asking every hour on the hour if they'd decided on something other than the "maybe" answer, until his mother had threatened him within an inch of his life if he didn't stop asking. So he'd chosen a different tactic, and bought one of those 8-ball things that said Yes-No-Maybe when you asked it a question. He'd managed to take the thing apart, fiddle with the little triangle in the middle that had those words on its three sides, and then presented it as the tool which would answer all of his questions. Once Grant and Ruth realized Jeff had scratched the word 'maybe' off the thing altogether, they laughingly promised never to use that particular word to answer one of his questions again.

"Not now."

This, of course, was never qualified with any sort of indication as to when. It could mean "Not now, but in five minutes," it could mean, "Not now, but next week," it could mean "Not now and not ever," for all any kid knew. Jeff had puzzled over the best way to handle this response when he got it, and decided that taking the two words very literally indeed was his best bet. And so when he asked if he could drive the family car to a nearby store, and his mother told him, "Not now," he replied, "Okay. I'll leave in five minutes, then." Ruth had blinked twice, stared at him a moment, then shook her head and clucked her tongue. Seconds later, Jeff had the keys in-hand and left the house with his mother's admonishment of, "If you weren't so charming, I'd ground you," in his ears. He grinned. His parents hadn't grounded him since he was eight. And he knew they wouldn't start now.

"When pigs fly."

Grant and Ruth should've realized a statement such as this was nothing more than a challenge for their only child. It had taken weeks and weeks of planning, building and testing using something other than real live pigs, but Jeff had finally gotten it to where he actually could make a pig fly, courtesy of a miniature VTOL contraption that fit snugly around the pig's waist. Once Ruth got over her belief that the pig was going to crash and wind up pork stew right there in the front lawn, he was praised for his resourcefulness, told never to make a pig fly again, and allowed to buy himself that old clunker that Eleanor Hawkins' dad had for sale.

Jeff Tracy had never been one to take things at face value, nor to just walk away when he wasn't getting the answer he wanted. He'd been born with it. And he'd been quite the entertainment for his parents because of it.