Birthday season is over...

...thank God. The first is middle, the middle is first and the last is last for birthday celebrations during the first two months of the year.  These three children of mine, all now adults, were no-shows this year, as usual, at the birthday lunches I invited them to at a local gourmet pizzeria for each one.  I even invited the only wife I know about but she, who once reached out to me on Facebook for just one hour in apparently a cruel jest, was a no-show too.

Johnny.  I really don't know anything about this young man since he turned 18 over a decade ago and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his four years of college tuition and all fees, which I did.  No invite to his graduation followed, nor a word of thanks, nothing.  That he moved out to the West Coast early this decade (and got away from his, in my opinion, narcissistic mother) became clear recently but the screen shot below is as close as I have come to having a photograph of this child of mine since he was a teenager, a screen shot of a marker pointing to a spot on a map of Seattle where he might vote.  I think you are alive and I hope you are well, middle son; I notice your voter affiliation is unstated and I truly hope that you are not the unthinking Trumpite which I fear you might be because you are such a truth-denier in your relationship dealings (Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which then LORD thy God giveth thee).

Jim Rogers.  Internet gambler, law office coffee boy, crowd-funding promoter, entrepreneur of sorts; your career has been as spotty as your educational background.  You love your mother so and also, I suspect, her and your "counselor" during the divorce proceedings, a "professional" who chewed you up emotionally while using you for her own purposes (you were only a boy after all in the thrall of a pretty lady, one who allegedly is still up to the same manipulative tricks recently with teenagers in other families being torn apart by divorce); I trust you are alive and I hope you are well.

Dan.  Keep hanging on to that relationship of yours, man.  There's nothing wrong with being a  salesman, youngest son, and following your achieving woman wherever she goes.  There's no problem with this in the short run at least; I think you are alive and I hope you are well.

January in the rear-view mirror

I was running in the District earlier this month with a friend of mine from where I used to work before I was forced to retire involuntarily and I remarked to her that the first two months of any year were the worst for me in terms of mood because of the proximity to the just-past holiday season and the fact that the birthdays of my three estranged sons come in rapid succession during these two months. Below is me dining at noon at a local restaurant on my middle child's birthday near where we used to live before all the divorce business was secretly launched by their mother.

It was, as I explained to my running partner, as if my ex-wife loaded my three young children for a drive to her parents' house 400 miles away for spring break while I remained behind to work and she drove around the corner and crashed horribly and all three children died, for the amount I've seen my children since then. They live on in my memory although not in my present or presence; here's how I remember my middle child, the most sober and earnest one of the three, someone who you couldn't put one over on, except for the dastardly manipulative influence of his egocentric mother and her coterie of child-devouring "professionals" during the lengthy divorce proceedings all those years ago.

I dined as usual with the Empty Chair a little while later in the month on MLK Day at the same restaurant, as is my custom on their birthdays and any holiday. The conversation was lacking, the hope remained present as ever and the fare was delicious as is usually the case.

Ah, memories.  I'm glad January is behind me; here's a portrait of that month's birthday boy during happier times, before the paid-gun reprehensible adults in the domestic law arena swooped in upon the kids to brainwash them at the behest of their mother and tear the family asunder permanently, as is their wont and their life work, proud work of adults overbearing the wills of mere children.

Jim Rogers

Have a happy day. The article below indicates how you're doing in life, with some community college coursework, a crowdfunding stake, some video poker, a software job, being the office boy for an unscrupulous divorce lawyer. By the way, have you read the opinion on the internet where the sterling work of that guy got his buddy's client docked almost $50,000 for her unconscionable harassment petition? Your former name was listed first amongst the losing plaintiffs; of course, you being a mere minor then, you weren't assessed any costs. And speaking of your mother, are you still living with her?

Putting aside Toys, p.2

. . . So I got up on my appointed day to leave on a cross-country trip to deliver my 2000 Toyota Tacoma PU to my friend in AZ to consummate the sale of it to him we had negotiated over the phone and went around the corner with it to my local used-car lot with it. I told them there (they know me) that I was driving west to sell the PU to a friend and what the price was, and I said I would eschew the trip and sell it to them if they matched the price.

Obviously, my price was low, but fair for my friend, because the dealer agreed to it, minus $200 for "gas consumption" on the trip (and motels because the trip would take days of driving, plus a flight back).  Built like a tank, my friends described to me my very own single-owner 18 year old Toyota with 99,900 miles on it, and good for 150,000 more miles at least.

I hated to part with it, I loved that truck, and I felt bad selling it out from under my buddy out west, but he understood.  He still gave me hell about it though, because he had used up some of his capital with his new wife to talk her into agreeing to accept such an old vehicle into the household as their second car.

She would get the BMW, see, with the automatic transmission and he would get the manual transmission 2WD pickup that was a little bit beat up but not to bad to drive.  Boy, those Japanese make great, long-lasting cars and now I was down to only one vehicle, a 2015 Nissan 4WD PU.

When we grow up, we must put aside our Toys.

As I pondered having two pick-ups, my new (used) massive 4X4 traveling truck and my beloved Toyota Tacoma 2000 PU with 99,900 miles on it, good for 150,000 more I was told, since I'm involuntarily retired now, I must trim costs. Two ownership windshield stickers ($40 each), two vehicle property tax bills (hundreds, remember No More Car Tax?--that didn't get done), double insurance (almost a thousand), and maintenance costs.

I called up my buddy John in AZ and offered to sell my stick-shift PU to him at a fair price. He recently got married and made the mistake of teaching his wife to drive, so now he needs a second car for himself.

The fact that the Toyota has a stick-shift, which I love, is a limiting factor in selling a vehicle because many people with operator's licenses can't drive a manual transmission. (Do you even know what I'm talking about?) All I had to do was drive to AZ to deliver it to John, 2,000 miles away, in the winter.

Hmm. The morning I was going to leave on my cross-country trip arrived, and I lolled in bed thinking about a series of Motel-6's across the country, gasoline and toll costs and whether I had enough books-on-tape to last the trip. My thoughts turned to the used-car lot a stone's throw from my back yard where I had purchased my new (used) truck a few weeks earlier... .

The news business

And in local news...I ran into Nicholas Benton, the publisher of the Falls Church News-Press, in a restaurant while he was waiting for his take-out order to be completed. I walked up to him and asked, "How's the Fake News business going?"

Since he didn't know me, he had no idea how to take this remark, which was meant to be a droll conversation opener. His is a great small town newspaper. 

I asked him if he remembered my oldest son who once worked or volunteered at his shop years ago, by either his former name Jimmy Lamberton or his current name Jim Rogers. He didn't, and I didn't tell him that I hadn't seen the young man (not so young now, he's over 30) in a decade and we moved on into discussing the Washington Post and the two Timeses, New York and Los Angeles, three great newspapers.

Hey, oldest son of mine (and my two other sons as well, and Laura too), I'll be at the usual place at noon on Prez's Day. I hope to see any or all of you then. ;-)

Jimmy

I ran into a friend from my law school small section, whom I hadn't seen in years. He was the glue, along with one or two others who were slightly older, that bridged the divide between the less-than-worldly 22 year-olds in the section and the more experienced types like me, in my mid-30s with children and a decade in law enforcement already.

He asked how my 3 boys were, the same ones who used to be underfoot at softball games and parties during those 3 years, and I regretfully told him they had all grown up in the image of their mother and I hadn't spoken to any of them for years. I said I knew that two had gone to college because I could tell that from receiving receipts for the eight semesters of full payment for each of them drawn from two of the three fully-paid tuition plans I owned, to be used for their college education.

Regretfully, the oldest had never attended college, something that was important to me and my family but apparently not important to their mother or her line of their family. My friend looked concerned and he said he would pray for him.

I know he will, that's the kind of guy he is. Thanks Jimmy.