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.