How Many

I called a friend today, a former running buddy who got married and moved out of DC; he asked me how things were going. I said, "Everything sucks." 

I was losing money in my retirement fund, down 45% this year alone despite this month which was the most robust in 30 years, I ate my Thanksgiving dinner alone (oh, doesn't that warm your heart Sharon!) and the holiday season was upon us which keeps me depressed from Veterans Day till March. You see, I have 3 children, all now in their early thirties, who threw me over and ceased all communication with me or any Lamberton due to the divorce two decades ago thanks to her insidious, invidious utilization of PAS back then when they were tender children and my three children all have their birthdays in January or February.

This makes me sad every holiday season. So my friend, a very smart man, embarked upon an enlightening discussion thinly disguised as a quest to find the winter of my discontent and he asked me to list three things that were good in my life now.

I was hard pressed to say what made me feel uplifted currently but I finally settled upon the very important and blessed situations that a) I have enough food to eat (no food insecurity); b) I have enough liquids stored to drink for several months if necessary; and c) all of my five siblings are alive (which is more than I know about my three children). We simultaneously decided that I wished I knew more about the welfare of my real family (my kids) during this lugubrious season; and I decided further that it would be decent or human to know not if I have any grandchildren, but how many I have, and how they are.

Very Unusual Human Beings

 This Thanksgiving I was home since I am not traveling in deference to the over-stressed US health care system, thanks to the criminally negligent pandemic nonresponse on the part of President Baby Huey. At Noon I went to take out a pizza from the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover but it was closed for the holiday, although several Uber-Eats drivers were hanging around with putative takeout orders, wondering what was going on. 

I waited awhile in my car to see if anyone I knew showed up. Nobody I recognized came by so I went home to cook a solitary meal for myself.

The meal was fine, a pork roast slathered in BBQ sauce plus fixings. I ate it wondering how many grandchildren I might have, but I also knew two immutable things: my ex-wife who turned our children against me through PAS when they were minors (a form of child abuse) would never tell me if one of them suffered a tragedy; or if I as a parent would ever be informed by her or them of the pleasure and pride of indulging in any grandchildren of any of these three now-adults might have had by now.

I wouldn't want to be my ex-wife, Sharon R. Lightbourne (nee Sharon Rogers), good luck to her at St. Peters gate! And as for JJ&D, I wonder how any of them could have accepted such largess as their Lamberton grandmother provided for them through her own frugal sacrifices as a widow and still diss all Lambertons for these last two decades as being unworthy of having any gratitude towards or communication with, I would have thought that accepting such a sum of money (about 100K each in trust money) from so apparently foul a source would have compelled them to either refuse it or cause them to turn it over to charity; those three now fully mature male adults are unfortunately very unusual human beings, persons I wouldn't recognize now as having had any upbringing influence from me as to what they have become from all appearances.

Veteran's Day 2020

 On Veteran's Day earlier this month I went to see my main street corner man, Trevor, who holds down the intersection of Route 29 and I-66 while wearing a sign declaring himself a combat vet and asking God to bless America. I hadn't seen him in months because I don't hardly ever go by there anymore since since the pandemic began, I only go to Merrifield sometimes in the other direction from my house, which has a Home Depot, and to the grocery store a couple of miles away. He had been sitting on some intel for me for months he said when he saw me. Sharon, the mother of my three estranged children, a heartless covert narcissist (in my opinion) who turned all three boys against me by using the form of child abuse (in some people's opinion including mine) known as PAS, had been in a red car driving by weeks earlier.

Sharon, who has stonily refused to tell me anything about any of my children (even whether they're all still alive--this is a very abnormal woman), is the only link I have with any of my children, since in the consuming hatred she harbors in her flinty soul towards me she influenced our children not to communicate with a single relative on my side of the family for over 15 years. Now that's abnormal! She used to live two miles from me, a block away from Trevor's intersection, and she used to use her phony concerned Christian blather on him whenever she walked by him with her most recent husband Jim.  A couple of years ago she moved away for parts unknown, thus severing my only link to my children.  

Trevor knows cars as well as people.  Whenever I drive by, even if I'm three lanes over, he'll shout out to me, "Hey, lawyer man!"  He knows Jim drives a Jeep.  He knows Sharon drives a red convertible Mustang. The car he saw her in was red but not a Mustang nor a convertible nor a Jeep.  But he said it had North Carolina tags.  Thanks Trevor!

Then since it was almost noon and a federal holiday, I went over to Westover and went into the Lost Dog pizzeria and looked around but didn't see anyone I recognized so I left and hung out outside for awhile watching the comings and goings at the restaurant, which has limited seating inside as well as takeout.  It felt like I used to feel every holiday when I went to Sharon's residence until the youngest one turned 18 to execute upon my plain vanilla visitation, but she never cooperated with the court order; the house was always dark, the phone was never answered and no children ever came out.  For a few months initially when the children were learning under her tutelage how to become scofflaws and that court orders meant nothing (there wasn't enough money in my world to go running to court to get a hearing 6 weeks later every time this happened), the kids would come out in their stockinged feet, even in cold weather, to brightly recite, "Mom sent us out ready to go but we don't want to go with you so we're not."  And then they would skip back into her house, close the door and that was my visitation for those two weeks.  After a period of time they even abandoned that charade.  You see, research shows that children would rather keep the parent happy with whom they spend the most amount of time (she had them 83% of the time to my 17% of the time under the visitation order) and who puts the most amount of stress upon them through manipulation, oftentimes unrelenting in the case of an alienating parent, to the point where they abandon or start to hate the other parent to keep the grotesque manipulator happy.  

Anyway, I went home from the Lost Dog this Veteran's Day and cooked myself a frozen Stouffers Pizza on French Bread for lunch.  The holiday season is coming up fast so I'm starting to get sad again.  Then the three children, now all adults in their 30s, all have birthdays in January or February.  The middle child, whose birthday is next, registered to vote in Seattle a few years back, as I discovered poking around on the internet, the only child who ever moved any distance away from her.  I thought he might be trying to break her unnatural influence upon him as he started to fully mature in adulthood.  Since she's now in North Carolina, I wonder if he'll move back east and maybe follow her there.

And the winner is . . .not Chump Trump.

Biden won going away. By more than 5.5 million votes. He blew Don the Con out in the electoral college by an historic landslide. Really. He won 306 electoral college votes, the same amount Trump won by in 2016, when the orange bloviator used to hand out maps of his electoral college victory to visitors and claim it was the greatest wipeout in history. Not the Trump is insecure and craves adulation. Never mind that Tricky Dick won 49 states in 1972. Ignore that Trump won his victory by about 77,000 votes in three states combined, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the so-called Blue Wall. Biden reclaimed those three states by a quarter million votes combined and flipped three more states Trump won in2016, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Yeah, that's right, Georgia. 

I think that when Biden calls at the White House on the morning of January 20th, he ought to bring the Baby Huey president a gift--a framed picture of the electoral college victory that Biden won, entitled An Historic Wipeout of an Incumbent President. Yeah, that's what I think. It'd be perfect, a perfect gift for the departing president perfectly outlining the 306 votes that Biden won over the biggest election loser in presidential history.

Trump should look forward to departing the presidency. Even more time for golf. No more boring briefings which cut into his TV time. He won't have to salute North Korean generals anymore. Angela Merkel won't be around to throw candy bars at. No more annoying powerful women around to feel inferior to like Nancy Pelosi or Angela Merkel. He can surround himself with even more foolish and feckless women than the gibberish-spouting Kellyanne Conway, the stupid, lying bimbo Kayleigh McEnany, the pathetically untruthful Sarah Huckaby Sanders and the hopelessly corrupt Hope Hicks.

It's a shame Trump's going to spend his last two months in office doing nothing about the raging pandemic but everything about subverting our democracy by denying the incoming president classified briefings so he can be fully informed when he takes the reins of power, that is whenever L'il Richie Rich isn't stamping his foot wherever he's sulking and railing that the election was rigged, somehow, thus turning his 71 million cult followers into vacuous conspiracy believers for the rest of their lives. None Dare Call It Treason.

We can now announce . . . .

 I dragged myself off to my motel room in 2016 at 11 pm in Newport News on election night after a 16 hour stint being an inside poll observer in that town (apparently SE Virginia doesn't have any democratic lawyers, so they have to reach 300 miles up to Arlington and Falls Church to find lawyers willing to drive down there for three days). I switched on the TV set and settled into bed ready for an exciting night watching the returns come in leading to a Hillary Clinton victory. Remember how she was 99% certain to win?

I had been inside a bubble all day since 5 am locked into a polling precinct place in the poorest part of town where the tally at the end of the night was akin to 80% Clinton, 11% Trump and 9% those faux candidates the pothead Johnson and the useful idiot Stein so nothing had prepared me for what I saw within a minute of turning the TV on. I have watched enough presidential returns to know that something unimaginable and momentous was afoot. Florida was gone, North Carolina (where I had canvassed) was gone, Clinton was losing in Virginia (where I had canvassed) with 95% of the vote in, but some returns from Democrat-rich Fairfax County were not yet in (where indeed Hillary eked out a thin state victory). I switched off the light and went to sleep with the TV set still on.

At about 4 am the change in the tone of the announcers woke me up in time to hear, "We can now announce that Donald Trump has just been elected as the 45th president president of the United States. I instantly knew, lying there in darkness in a strange bed all by myself in a seedy motel room far from home, that a bottleneck had arrived that my life was flowing through at that very moment. Into the one end my past life entered, a proud, confident American who knew America for all its faults was exceptional, and out the other end was emerging a citizen who knew he no longer knew his country and was fearful of the future, both for himself and his country. I felt like this moment actually might be a death knell of either myself or my country.

Sound overblown? America and its democratic institutions have become empty husks of themselves in four short years, no longer a world leader and having become the laughing stock of the world in its response to the worldwide pandemic with the most deaths and infections from it by far. Me die as a result of the occurrence of that moment? How about the threats or perhaps eventualities of dying by COVID-19, nuclear war with North Korea, a one-off nuclear exchange with a state like Iran (I do live in the DC blast range), shot by a heavily armed militiaman or soldier at a protest or denied necessary medical care by administration-ordered retrenchments in the health-care networks so the super rich could get get another hefty tax cut.

The last four years have been horrible for America and Americans who care to keep informed.

Last night felt pretty much the same as that 2016 moment for me, mingled with incredulity because Americans have seen what's happened in the past four years (caged and orphaned children, separated families, a quarter million Americans dead unnecessarily, unemployment at record-level, a looming depression, racism exposed and coddled, assassination plots against political or governing leaders tacitly encouraged, rampant corruption, allies cast aside, adversaries embraced etc. etc. etc.) , but I when I went to bed last night I still thought Biden would win, barely, the electoral college, perhaps by 270-268.

The political landscape was even more bleak when I woke up this morning, with no chance of the Dems taking the senate, the Dems losing seats in the house and Biden temporarily behind in his Blue Wall reclaiming bid, but I still think Biden will win, barely. We know that Biden will win millions more votes than Trump nationwide--so much for one person one vote--yet he has only one one tenuous path to a nail biter victory. But Dems are used to this; the last two Republican presidents, both tenures being utterly ruinous for the nation, were both outvoted yet entered the people's house (Dubya Bush thanks to a single vote--GOP appointed Scalia's).

Next perhaps I'll recount last night's fevered dream while I fitfully slept, no TV blaring this time to wake me up into an ongoing nightmare.

When I was on the radio . . . .

This post was inspired by a FB post that went like this: Child--Alexa, play Let It Go. Parent--When I was your age, I would call a radio station, wait on hold for 30 minutes till I got through, request a song then sit by my boombox for an hour with a blank cassette in it so I could record the song when it came on. Child--I don't know what that means.

I recorded myself on the radio once as a boy of about 11. It was on a general call-in talk show in New York City and I lay on my parents bed upstairs next to the radio tuned in to the station, dialed it up about 50 times on the rotary dial phone, which required seven twirls of the round number wheel for each call, always got a busy signal, had to hang up and repeat the process, but after an hour of constant dialing I got through to the station, waited 5 or 10 minutes more and got through to the radio host.

I talked for three or four minutes with the host about potholes in the roads which jarred my bike as I delivered the Herald Tribune each morning at 5 am and these vibrations sometimes caused the folded papers to fall out of the bike's basket. As soon as I got on I switched on my little reel to reel tape recorder and recorded the interview as it came out of the radio by my parents bed. 

The host explained that potholes were caused by the expanding property of water as it turns to ice after it gets into the crevices of roadway asphalt during cold weather. (I actually knew this but pretended that I didn't.) 

When I got off the host wondered to the audience why I was still up, it being about 9:30 pm by the time I got through to the station, and when I announced to my parents downstairs that I had just been on the radio, they merely said, "We wondered what all that dialing was for." 

So I check marked Being On The Radio on my life's list, but I doubt any kid today would have the patience, or the idiocy, to make a dialing motion 350 times, which also involved removing the finger each time so the wheel could slowly spin back. I also wonder if they would know what a cigar-box sized two-reel tape recorder was, or how to operate a rotary dial phone, or how to record a program by setting a running tape recorder next to a radio which was tuned in to a station. Memories of the early 60s.

Happy birthday, Mom! Vote tomorrow!