Spring

I saw some blue cylindrical flowers with what looked like tiny bells hanging from its central column that I liked last year at the U.S. Botanical Garden, and when I saw them at the Home Depot a little later, I bought a couple of pots and planted them. It was the first planting I've done around my house, besides trees or bushes, for a decade or more.

I noticed one cylindrical head protruding from the earth a few days ago, then on the first day of spring a few more flowers joined that first pathfinder. My friend says they're liriope and it looks great and I feel great, a new start.

Bob O. Berger

The Lawrenceville Alumni Association announced that Bob Berger, '70 passed away on March 4th. He was a friend of mine, quite a character, honest, direct, an athlete and a scholar and an iconoclast. He shared a room at Upper with others where I used to hang out with his acquiescence (leave my books, etc.) because I was off-campus in the Belknap House my senior year and Upper Home was right on the Circle.

I first noticed Bob in Spanish class where he was new to the school as a sophomore, hailing from Cleveland. We didn't have a whole lot of rough and tumble Ohio guys at this New Jersey prep school. The Spanish 2 class was was droning on about the round table when Bob suddenly broke out his comb, like a modern day Kookie from 77 Sunset Strip, and just stated combing his longish jet black hair using both hands to get the forehead back sweep right.  Mr. Walker let him have it in Spanish while the rest of us boys snickered at this uncouth display of manners, not really comprehending everything the teacher was saying but getting it's import, but it didn't bother Bob a bit and he just stared at the Master as he was berated loudly (I liked Mr. Walker, as I think Bob came to, that was just Mr. Walker's acerbic, loud style). Mr. Walker made us all aware that Bob's middle name began with O, which spelled out Bob O. Berger, or Bob, which Mr. Walker often emphasized about Bob in his inimitable way, but it never seemed to bother Bob in the least. Bob's first name was actually Robert, but he was no Rob or Robert, he was Bob, or rather Bob Berger, always.

I remember watching Bob from the stands on the football field, a tough competitor who delivered hard hits that belied his smaller size compared to the older PG athletes surrounding him.

I have a mental image to this day of the chaos that typically surrounded him which didn't bother him a bit, it kind of signified him. I was sitting in his room during a break (he was at class I guess) surveying the hurricane aftermath disorder of articles strewn about his floor, clothes, books, papers, wrappers, when I noticed a bare spot on the floor, free of clutter. In the middle of it was one shoe, upright, Bob's shoe. It was easy to spot as his shoe because Bob always wore pointy black shoes with white socks, quite contrary to the prevailing style on campus of Bass Weejun loafers with dark, or no, socks. Bob was not a penny loafer guy.  Nowhere in sight was the refugee shoe's mate. To me that was Bob, maybe he was in class with only one shoe on for all I knew, that wouldn't have surprised me one bit. Bob always made do.

 He came home with me to Staten Island one weekend in the last spring term because he wanted to go to law school and he knew my dad was a lawyer. He meant to chat him up about it and get his advice. I still remember him catching my dad in our kitchen after dinner and saying, "Sir, I want to go to law school and I wanted your opinion." As any good lawyer would, my dad tried to dissuade him but Bob went to law school anyway after he finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard. At least we had a good time that weekend crawling around Stapleton (Bob had a license, which I didn't have yet, so my dad let him borrow his car) before we headed back to Port Authority on Sunday afternoon to return to school on the bus in time for Sunday night check-in. I don't remember if we were even had permission to officially leave campus that weekend.

When I was considering going to law school myself in the late 80s after spending almost a decade as a peace officer, I sought Bob's advice as I knew he was already established in a practice in Boston. His advice to me was about as short and sweet and to the point as my dad's was to him a decade and a half earlier. He wasn't encouraging of it, telling me that I would have to read a hundred pages a night every night just to keep up. Bob believed that life was a battle, always. He didn't dissuade me, just as my dad didn't dissuade him, and that's why I always thought we were a little bit alike. 

We kept in touch for several years after we graduated, but Lawrentians were from all over and most connections went silent after many years. I should be getting ready to go to England and France tomorrow but instead I sit here at the keyboard saddened, thinking about my friend Bob. This brash character had the ability to become  friends with extremely different types of people, he was incongruous in that regard. Bob was a great guy, an original. I already miss him even though I hadn't spoken to him in decades. That doesn't mean I didn't occasionally think of him during those decades, unbidden.

Juno

Rhea and Eric's plans for their trip to Normandy in the spring included a full day tour, escorted by a sought-after personal guide, of the two American D-Day beaches, Omaha (the really famous one) and Utah.  There were three other beach landings that day in history, Gold and Sword by the British sandwiched around Juno by the Canadians, quaintly referred to by local guides as the "Commonwealth" beaches.  (Omaha Beach.)

My two friends indicated an interest to their British guide in touring those beaches the subsequent day, and he gave them the names of other guides who might accommodate them on short notice (personal tours are locked up months in advance, especially since this year is the 75th anniversary of the landings).  These guides when contacted all lauded my friends as being the rare Americans who showed interest in the British and Canadian beaches, or even knowledge of the fact that there were other beaches involved in D-Day beyond Omaha and Utah.  (Juno Beach.)

My friends locked in the second personal tour.  There's so much to do and so many places to see in Normandy, where the fighting raged all summer in 1944 before the Americans broke out of the bocage country at the end of August and unlocked the German defensive containment of the Allied lodgment on the Cotentin Peninsula, that an overview, with an emphasis in depth on the British and Canadian beaches is warranted, even for Americans.  (Utah Beach.)

Meanwhile, I pondered the invite to come along extended by my two friends.  As Eric the journalist put it to me--If not now, when?  (Sword Beach.)

The 75th Anniversary

When I was walking through the USN Memorial last year at noon on December 6th, the Navy band and honor guard were practicing, and I heard one passerby ask her companion what the servicemen were commemorating (practicing for, the next day), and her friend replied, "Oh, the observance of D-Day, which I think is tomorrow."  Of course, this is the typical shocking ignorance on the part of many Americans of our own hallowed history, but at least the commentator had one factoid correct in that she identified the correct war involved, World War II.

Of course, the commemoration the next day was to solemnly remember the dastardly Pearl Harbor attack by Japan on December 7, 1941, which propelled the US overnight into the already raging global conflagration.  Inexplicably, Nazi Germany, which already had its hands full trying to subjugate the vast expanse of Soviet Russia with its untold millions of people, and which was concurrently battling the world's greatest then-existing empire as well in Great Britain, declared war on the US a few days later and the rest is history.

D-Day followed two and a half years later, when American, British and Canadian troops stormed Fortress Europa by coming ashore on five Normandy beaches in France on June 6, 1944, the greatest military operation in history, and within a year the Nazi scourge was totally obliterated and the Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a fancy name for a brutal colonialist exploitation scheme, was consigned to history's scrapheap a few months later as well.  This summer is the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, an event that will be celebrated in France and the world over.

My first and foremost running buddy, Rhea, who last decade moved to the left coast with her husband Eric, is a military buff and they contacted me recently about their plans to tour Normandy later this spring and to specifically hire a guide for a close-in and personal inspection of the two American D-Day beaches, Utah and the infamous Omaha beach.  Although they know I have never been outside of North America, they invited me to come along.

Returning home... .

I spotted it yesterday in the dirt along the edge of the driveway, a small green glint in the broken particles of asphalt, small pebbles and loose earth over by the fence. A little plastic green army man brought out of the compacted dirt by the recent hard rain, returning home after being absent for two decades, buried out of sight but not out of mind.

These toys have returned home before, about a dozen over the years since my middle child Johnny, now in his thirties, put away his toy soldiers as he grew into an adolescent and ceased having backyard battles with these tiny warriors arrayed in long battle lines of good versus evil. I haven't seen Johnny since he was 16 nor  heard from him since he was 18 and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his college tuition and fees, which I did. (No, no letter of thanks afterwards nor any invitation to his graduation.)

Whenever one of these soldiers returns, I feel a tug at my heart and lament the extrajudicial and apparently permanent loss of any natural affection for his father by this somber, serious and very smart boy, who loves his mother so and had his will overborne as an impressionable adolescent by her and her coterie of "professionals" through the pernicious application of PAS. I took the broken little man upstairs to the bedroom Johnny used to occupy and laid it on the shelf next to the other broken soldiers who have also returned home.

Someday, maybe, Johnny'll come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. Till then, or if never, I'll have to assuage my continuing grief with these sudden reminders of his and his brothers' presence still in the yard, where he and his brothers used to play, and wish him and them all the best.

Goodbye to the Empty Chair

For six years I appeared every other Friday, and on the eve of all Federal holidays, at 6 p.m. at the curb of the house occupied by the mother of my three minor children to execute on the plain vanilla visitation order decreed by the Arlington County court as part of its ruling in the divorce decree brought by Sharon Rogers (now Sharon Lightbourne) against me, and called the house on my cell phone.  (As a practical matter, you cannot go on the porch to knock on the door lest you expose yourself to spurious charges of beating in a rage on the door and a specious arrest.)  For the last four years the phone was never answered and not a person came out as my ex-wife, in addition to not fully cooperating with the visitation order as required by law and by family values, taught my adolescent children to be scofflaws in their own right.

Once my youngest child graduated from high school (I was told that he did), I appeared for the next 12 years at the Lost Dog Cafe, a local restaurant in Westover in Arlington, Virginia, to have lunch at noon on almost every birthday of my children and almost every Federal Holiday, constantly issuing public invitations to come to start a rapprochement with any or all of them via this blog, my facebook page and in letters and cards (all unanswered, none returned to sender) sent to Sharon's address, as she wouldn't tell me where any of them lived.  Always I dined with the Empty Chair during that hour, except for the time a "Jane Doe" appeared to ask my advice on how to deal with the local LCSW who was irrevocably ruining her and her husband's relationship with her step-daughter (his daughter) by aiding in the odious application of PAS by the girl's mother, just as this same man-hating "professional" helped immeasurably to irrevocably ruin, in my opinion, my relationships with my three children via her despicably abetting my ex-wife's pernicious application of PAS, which is seen by some (myself included) as a form of child abuse .

Last month my youngest child entered his thirties and on that day I went one last time to the Lost Dog.  I enjoyed a Dominion Ale (a root beer) and a Kujo Pie, made up of fresh marinara sauce, artichoke hearts and garlic chicken pieces.

At the end of the noon hour I bid a final adieu to the faithful Empty Chair and left, not intending to return to the establishment on any regular schedule anymore.  I wish my three sons (all undoubtedly fully mature adults now, at least physically) the best.