My Dad

Earlier this month my dad had his birthday. He would have been 95. He died too young at age 61. 

He was the most important person in my life and he is still my moral compass. "What would dad have done?" is a question I ask myself often. Lawrenceville '41, Peleliu '44, Okinawa '45, Carleton '49, Yale Law '52, Cleary Gottlieb till '84, father of 6, husband to our mother for 42 years, grandad to 9 kids.

Then there was his civic work to make this world a better place. Board Member on the Staten Island Mental Health Counsel, President of the New York County Lawyers Association, President of the Carleton College Alumni Association. He dedicated two of his month-long vacations in consecutive years away from his family in the mid-60s working in the deep south to institute voter registration after the passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act, among other things. My mother was a stalwart angel, a partner to him, as she took care of six young children during those hot, steamy New York July days, seamlessly even while she was probably worried sick about his safety.

He taught me the lessons about the slippery slope, that the best is the enemy of the good, and that the law is merely the minimum of morality. He showed me through his manly but loving and sensitive manhood how we men should strive to proceed through a man's life as a man, both intellectual yet physical if presented as such.  I miss him still.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Glad to have known you.

My father had his 95th birthday this month. As is my wont on birthdays important to me, I contributed a dollar coin, along with my regular contribution, to the collection basket in church on the Sunday closest to it as a talisman to marshal my thoughts and prayers for him. It's what I did for my middle child as well earlier in the month near his birthday. Then I reflected on that person as I knelt for a few moments after taking communion and prayed for him, in the ethereal or the physical world.

I didn't have any specific thoughts that struck me about my child earlier in the month (I haven't heard from or anything about him in 13 years) other than I prayed that he was alive, well and happy and asked God to continue to give me strength to keep on loving him as a father would.  But as I knelt in prayer for my father at a later service (he died at age 61), something fantastic happened, and for 3 or 4 minutes his life flashed through my mind's eye amidst images I saw of him, even 60 or more years ago, during my life and the superimposed images of him as he was when he was a young man or a boy, even decades before I was born, created from memories of what I knew or imagined of his life when he was growing up and a struggling young family man during and after the war before he became a successful (and affluent) Wall Street lawyer.

I saw him as a red-headed boy hunting with his dad, or alone, in the wetlands around his hometown in Winona, Minnesota. I saw him as a stand-out student and athlete at his boarding school (I subsequently went to the same one) and taking weekends to listen to jazz in New York City and during his matriculation at Princeton walking down Nassau Street. Then he went off to war and survived two harrowing battles in the Pacific, and I saw him at the few supposedly funny or descriptive combat tales I heard (one involved him bathing and unarmed on Peleliu when a squad of armed Japanese troops came upon him--[pause] ["What happened!"]--""They all got away.") (and another involved him getting hit by lightning during a rainstorm on Okinawa when the bolt came down his radio antenna as he was transmitting radio coordinates with the nearby fleet while he was set up on a ridgeline--["I remember hearing a tremendous noise and watching sparks fly from one set of fingertips to the other."] ["What happened next?"]--"After a few moments of sitting there, I got up, ambled about for a minute or two, decided I was all right, and I went back to transmitting." I saw the sparks fly as I knelt in prayer, and I saw him return and greet his wife, my mother, after being away for two years and all the gnawing anxieties about the continuing marital compatibility of this man and woman, who knew each other for mere weeks before they wed as teenagers a few days or weeks before he shipped out, fade away in those first few delicious moments of reconciliation. I saw this war veteran attend four years of college in snowbound Northfield, Minnesota, then three years of law school in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born.

Then I saw him through my eyes and my long-stored memories at our first apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, with him working in the District at a law firm. I saw him in our yard in autumn lift too large a load of raked leaves in a blanket with a grunt and stagger off to the metal barrel where we burned them. I watched our move to Staten Island when he was transferred to New York City by his law firm and him fix up our ramshackle house there, and stagger through snow a yard high after a blizzard to get to the bus stop so he could go to work.  Then I saw him moving boxes as we moved from Stapleton to Westerleigh, I saw him breaking up a fight on our porch between a gang of four toughs and a friend of mine being bullied and me when we accepted the challenge, were being overwhelmed and dad sent them packing with that war-instilled killer's look (the only time I ever saw it) in his eyes.   I sat beside him again as he drove me to my boarding school, or picked me up from it. I watched from above as he steadily climbed a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado during a summer vacation because he thought, unknown to me because I was already at the peak and fine, that I was in trouble; when I saw him I waved and he thereupon immediately took a break and smoked a cigarette, probably in a fury, before he continued more slowly to the top. I saw him in Brooklyn when we moved there, and at his retirement house in Santa Fe. I saw him in his sickbed in the adobe house there when he had lung cancer, and I watched him die. These were a precious three or four minutes for me as I knelt with my eyes pressed closed and my hands clasped in prayer earlier this month focusing on him.  I murmured "God bless you, Dad," just as I had said that terrible summer morning in Santa Fe thirty three years ago when I bid goodbye to his spectral being as it slipped from his failing, ravaged body and passed over to God's right hand. The flashing images inside my head completed, the spell broke and I opened my eyes and sat in my pew. After the final hymn was sung, I went forth from the church more enlightened than when I entered it.

MLK Commemoration

I went on a Martin Luther King commemoration run in the District this week so that I could stand in the presence of greatness, in the shadow of the towering, brooding Dr. King statue at the MLK Memorial on the Tidal Basin.  It's directly across the water from the Jefferson Memorial which is dedicated to our third president, a slaveowner who enslaved his own children that he had with his paramour, slave Sally Jennings.  (Far away, illuminated like two shining cities on the hills, The MLK Memorial on the left and the Washington Monument on the right.)

 
Enroute to the MLK site I ducked into the basement of the Jefferson Memorial to use its facilities (runners always know where there are bathrooms on their usual routes) and, strolling through the bookstore down there to catch another few minutes of warmth before I ventured back outside into the cold again, I noticed they sold little books of the US Constitution (it's not very long, even with all of the amendments included), and I asked the clerk how much the purchase of 53 copies would be so I could run across the Mall to the Capitol and deliver them to the Republican senators there currently railroading the rigged impeachment trial through the process in the hope that those 53 craven sycophants might read it for the first time.  The $20 bill I was carrying wouldn't cover the purchase so I couldn't save our country from sliding into a kleptocratic autocracy; always the wise guy!  (Reflections cast by the Father of our Country.)

I made it to the King Memorial a few minutes later, avoiding the ruined, silt-covered buckling footpath (the entire seawall is sinking and the footpath is often flooded in large stretches) by cutting through the FDR Memorial next door.  There I reflected for a few moments upon the King legacy, an uplifting bequeathal to us during my very lifetime time, and ruminated sadly upon how quickly and low we have sunk to as a result of a single foreign-assisted reckless presidential election cycle, an interference sure to be repeated later this year because the faux president and the Senate led by Moscow Mitch have, for whatever corrupt reasons compelling them, not taken a single step to assure that the chaos doesn't get even worse the next time.  (He had a Dream.)

Sad for my country, I finished my run albeit encouraged personally because although my pace was slow, the four miles went easily, my longest run in months since I cut back my mileage total way back in the fall due to a series of nagging leg problems.  Maybe, like my running health, my country will get better come November despite my anxieties.  (I have a dream that a better America is coming...)

MLK holiday.

The Martin Luther King weekend holiday this year was pretty eventful.  The weather turned bitterly cold and it snowed briefly after a spate of unusually warm weather.

 On Sunday I went to the evening wedding of the daughter of a friend and former colleague of mine down on the new DC waterfront on the Anacostia River. The bride and groom made for a handsome couple, and we danced into the night and I made the last Metro train for the night back to Virginia by a bare 4 minutes.

On Monday, being the actual holiday, I went to the local gourmet pizzeria for lunch, where I had a tasty Cheese Steak pizza, which tasted much like a Philly cheese steak sandwich, and enjoyed an excellent Allagash Curieux draft, brewed by a Portland (ME) brewery in a process that ages the beer for eight weeks in barrels formerly used to age bourbon.  The place was busy so I ate at the bar and planned my next three lunches there next month, on President's Day and the two birthdays of my February babies.

After lunch I went down the street a short way to the Stray Cat Cafe, a sandwich, draft and hamburger place that had recently undergone a makeover to add all-day breakfast, Mexican food and shakes and floats to its menu and renovated its interior.  Inside I made the acquaintance of a retired scientist and we had a fascinating conversation about sound waves, mudslides, political assassinations, reading and writing, GIFs and, wait for it, divorce and its deleterious long-lasting effect upon children deeply affected by a parent suffering from a narcissistic personalty disorder (NPD).

Person of the Year 2019

My vote for person of the year for 2019 would be Nancy Pelosi. A patriotic American, she stood up for our country and carefully and prudently charted a wise course through the treacherous shoals of impeachment, which process was introduced to our modern times when the Republicans engaged in tawdry political theatre by impeaching President Clinton over lying about marital infidelity.

In contrast, Speaker Pelosi, in bringing forth Articles of Impeachment against President Trump, curtailed his depredations against the constitution with his Ukrainian quid pro quo of withholding much-needed, already assigned (by Congress) military aid in exchange for political dirt on one of his opponents (Joe Biden) in the upcoming presidential election. Now that the president is engaging in missile strikes against sovereign nations in a reckless attempt to save his faux presidency, and scurrilous republicans are speciously claiming that democrats are enamored  with terrorists like Iranian General Soleimani, assassinated at the Baghdad airport, 

Speaker Pelosi had this to say about those faux "patriots," also known as GOP liars, slinging slurs so casually and contemptuously. "So, we all would die for our country, we take pride in saying that. But to kill for our country is a pretty traumatic thing. So, when we want to engage in these, whatever we want to call this that the President engaged in, you have to be really careful about how we endanger our men and women in uniform who courageously, patriotically put themselves out there to protect and defend." 

Nancy Pelosi, an American patriot and hero who will go down in history as one of the greatest House Speakers ever and a great American.

Reflections

Last week I had lunch at my favorite local pizzeria, the Lost Dog Cafe.  Being a weekday, the premises weren't crowded and I settled into a booth by the windows where I could observe the world going by outside as I sipped my Port City German Pilsner Lager draft and waited for my pizza to arrive.

The pizza was a delicious Italian Pie, made of pasta sauce, cheeses and genoa ham and other cold-cut meats.  I ate much of it but as usual, left some behind as a portend of better luck next time.  Perhaps one of these birthday or  holiday celebratory lunches I'll have a visitor or two or three to share my meal with.

Or not.  After an idle hour enjoying my repast, I paid and left, wandering down the street to amble through the Italian Store, a bustling community hub of Westover, chock-filled with Italian foodstuffs including pizza by the slice, starting at $2.29 for a three-cheese slice.

It was an idyllic, unusually warm midday, with echoes from the now-distant past tugging at forward-looking determinations for the future as I face up to the new decade and my passage in a few short years into being a septuagenarian.  I was bemoaning over the phone recently with a divorced friend of mine from childhood who lives alone, childless because he, like me (threefold in my case), lost his only child many years ago to the pernicious scourge of Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS"), a very real phenomenon in Western culture where usually the mother, typically the primary caregiver as granted by our shortsighted and lazy Mother-knows-best domestic-law courts, brainwashes through grotesque manipulation the impressionable minor children into lifelong patricide.  A message to my sons, all now well over thirty, I still get pieces of mail occasionally for you here at my house, please make arrangements to pick up your stuff by the end of this month or I am likely to dispose of it all, including your 30-year first-year boxes.

Peter calling for Peter...

My iPhone called me. I was sitting at my dining room table when my cell phone, nearby but untouched by me for an hour, suddenly rang and announced that I was calling me, and showed me my own photo for confirmation. 

I answered this anomaly and said, "Hello?" On the other end was a recording from the Microsoft Security Department telling me that my account had been compromised and I would lose my services within 48 hours unless I reset my settings, which they would help me with.

I hung up. How did my phone call itself? 

An hour later the same cell phone, untouched since Peter called Peter, suddenly binged and when I looked at it, a text was scrolling on its black face starting with "HEY". I picked the phone up and Siri said, "I'm sorry but I didn't hear that," and came alive with her familiar clucking noises and swirling colors at the top as she waits for a further command or query.

I held my phone still until Siri went dark and silent, then checked my messages. No message had come in and I couldn't find the "Hey" script again. 

I got paranoid and wrapped my phone in a towel so it (or somebody) couldn't see what I was doing through my camera, and hopefully whatever it could hear going on in my house would be muffled. 

I wondered if the infernal being could see through cloth, and speculated that it could probably hear as good as HAL did in 2001 (Hal tried to kill Dave, remember). I googled "possessed phones" and the stories there were many and hair-raising. 

So my question is this. Should I take a hammer to my phone or my phone to a priest?

490

Then came Peter to him and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me , and I forgive him, till seven times? 
Jesus saith unto him, I say not to thee, unto seven times; but, Until seventy times seven. Matthew 18: 21-22.

Mine honor is my life; both grow in one; Take honor from me, and my life is done.  Richard II, Act 1.

Johnny, I Hardly Know You

My sweet middle boy, John Henry Lamberton, or Johnny, at age 1 1/2 on Nantucket at a photo shoot paid for by his grandmother, my mother. This boy, a victim as a tender minor of the form of child abuse known as Parental Alienation Syndrome perpetrated by his mother and her mercenary coterie of "professionals" here in NoVa during the Divorce, has not communicated with me in 14 years or any Lamberton in 18 years, a classic hallmark of PAS. He has a birthday this month; Johnny, if you are alive and well (your mother stonily refused to answer those questions about your condition put to her by me when I last saw her in a public venue about four years ago), know that on your birthday I'll be at the Lost Dog in Westover for lunch, come and we'll start our lifetime going forward, a boy (now adult) and his dad, one day at a time.

A new year

I started off the new decade with a run in the morning.  Then later I went out for lunch at a nearby pizzeria.

I ordered a draft and a Greek Pie pizza.  It arrived with plenty for anyone and everyone to eat.

The pie was a delicious combination of homemade pizza sauce, sliced tomatoes, feta cheese, olives, onion and spinach and I had soon enjoyed some slices.  Leaving some leftover fare behind as a talisman for my next visit for lunch, I paid the bill and left.

One of my now-fully mature sons has a birthday later this month.  See you there then, son (hahaha)?

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

A new decade!

A new dawn.

We're gonna restore America's greatness this decade.

My New Year's resolution is to do anything I can to work towards effecting the removal of our faux corrupt and dangerous president.