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I was balancing my checkbook on line when an anomaly popped up on the electronic ledger. A check seriously out of sequence. A blast from the past.

The cashed check numbering sequence read 1244, 1247, 649, 1250, 1251. I clicked into number 649, and up on the screen popped a $100 check I had made out to my youngest child for his 18th birthday.

When my ex filed for divorce eight years ago, she and her coterie of divorce lawyers etc. gamed the American domestic law system to impose an emotional and financial calamity upon me from which I will never fully recover. I'd rather be subjected to the Taliban's imposition of Islamic Sharia than be a man subjected to the modern western divorce process.

I lost my kids through PAS and my estate, modest though it was, was eviscerated by her divorce lawyers in a feeding frenzy that ended only when they reduced it to a dry empty husk. That was long after I had become financially unable to seek any remedy in court for the ceaseless extra-judicial custodial deprivations that I suffered (and by extension, that my victimized children suffered).

Though none of my children has spoken to me in years, there on the electronic page was my youngest child, waving to me. More than two years old, the vintage check was cashed just a few days ago. I stared at the signature. It was his alright.

Hiya, Danny. Enjoy spending the C-note. (Right: A portrait of Dan done in 2001 by Pam Gordimer from an image of when he was about ten. Dan is a young man now and I doubt that I would recognize him anymore.)