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.