The bleakest season . . .

It's that extra day in the year, February 29th, one that comes only every four years. The last time it came I was in my sixties, and still within a distant last sighting of any of my 3 children more than a decade earlier . Now I'm in my seventies and my last sighting of any of my children has slipped to two decades earlier. The divorce you know.

This the the day the bleak third of the year ends each year, usually on March 1st, occasionally on February 29th. For persons estranged from their loved ones darkness often descends on Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday season, and ends . . . ? For me it's always at the end of February when my youngest child, now in his mid-thirties, has his birthday at the regular end of the month. The other two sons cram their birthdays in between the New Year and the youngest's birthday. Time moves on, you know?

Do I still care? Yeah, I guess so. Probably a lot. But less so now, as the years-now decades-march on. Their mother made a fine job of poisoning their tender minds back then against me and all Lambertons, none of whom have heard from them since they were mere children. She painted with a broad brush, and has made a lifetime work of it. She's truly extraordinary in her accomplishment, and the boys-now men-have an unnatural enmity hardening their hearts. I'm sorry for them. C'est la vie, or perhaps, c'est la guerre.

The Phone Call

2023 in Review. August 2d. The phone rang at 6:30 AM her time, exactly two weeks after we’d tenderly kissed goodbye and I’d driven away at midnight, a fortnight filled with my phone calls not being taken because she was wiped, busy, buzzed, would call me later. “Are you sitting down?” the familiar voice asked.

For three minutes I wordlessly listened to how blessed she was to have known me and how kind and generous I was. How devoted and considerate I’d been when I’d taken care of her after her terrible bike accident when no family member had had the time nor inclination to come visit her during her two days in the hospital or during those first awful ten days of recovery at home, with her displaced front teeth splinted shut to save them, stitches in her eyebrow and from her lip to her nose to close gaping lacerations, her voice barely discernible from a blow to her larynx, contusions all over her body and her head wracked with pain from a concussion.

 She continued on about how smart and what a good writer I was, and how much she’d learned from me. I could tell she was reading from a list of bullet points she’d written down beforehand, a lawyer’s trick I’d taught her to do before she undertook any important phone call so she could unerringly stay on point and not be swayed from her main purpose. And she was unswerving in where she was going, everything was in the past tense.

 She was wrapping it up. But we were so different! Although we got along so fabulously and had always had such a great time together, now that she was established in her new life so far away, and a long distance relationship was so tenuous no matter how temporary it was, and given how opposite our outlooks and personalities were—her voice gave off a tiny little sob, a manipulative trick in her bag of feminine wiles that I knew well from having heard its use before to create an instant of sympathy and empathy for herself during a highly wrought moment—“We should each go our own separate ways now.”

She paused—it was my turn. I hesitated for a second as thirteen wonderful, blessed months raced in a jumble through my mind. I loved her deeply, and she had said many months earlier, while crying at the realization, that she loved me, but now she obviously wanted nothing further to do with me, I had somehow become a leper to her. In a sudden, three minute termination interview over the phone I had just been discharged.

 I remembered how she had definitely kept me sealed off in July from any of her friends back here that she visited when she came back for a week to see her dental specialist, although many of them had seen us as a couple before she’d moved away in February. I drove a thousand miles gallivanting all over with her that week, but I never met even one friend of hers except her friend in Charlotte for two minutes in the driveway in the dark while we unloaded her bags before I drove away to return home, because it had been made clear that there was no room for me in her friend's expansive house that night or by her side during the next two days’ activities either.

And except for her sister, whom I had contacted on the afternoon of her accident in September of 2022 to say that she was in the ER, I don’t think anyone else in her family knew that I existed or that we were in a “serious relationship” all those months, to use her own words to her sister. Or maybe they did, or perhaps they found out from her sister when my presence didn’t fade away after she had fully recovered and effected her move out west, and they were aghast that she was still in a “serious relationship” with a white, East Coast liberal who fervently believed in choice, sensible gun control, and that women or gay persons could serve as pastors or priests every bit as well as heterosexual or sacerdotally celibate men, stances which I had perceived over time to be anathema in whole or in part to some or most of her immediate family members her age.

I thought with an aching heart of the common grief we had shared those many months of close togetherness over our estranged children, a son and a daughter for her and three boys for me, as a result of our separate, bitter divorces and the pernicious influences exerted thereby upon each set of tender children by other, abusive adults (Parental Alienation Syndrome, or "PAS," is a form of abuse--towards children). Now a descent back into that yawning, lonely void, alone again without a friendly voice to share my sorrow with any more, was my immediate and probable long term or lifelong prospect once again.

 "Goodbye,” I said. A tiny voice came back, “Bye.” The connection was severed.

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The Visit

In July a friend visited me from out west and we had a wonderful time traveling about for almost a week. After she met with a specialist in the District for some followup treatment, we played pickleball in my town and then we travelled to Maryland where we feasted on a dozen crabs in Annapolis and spent a magical three days on the Eastern Shore. We shopped for art and she bought a southwestern piece to have sent out to her apartment, we rode bicycles, enjoyed an elixir by the harbor and explored Tilghman Island.

 Next we jumped into my car and drove to Virginia where we visited a fabled postbellum hotel in Richmond. While my friend attended, in its grand lobby setting, a formal English tea which she had reserved at exorbitant cost, with some family members who naturally arrived late, I walked over to the Virginia War Museum down by the river to have a look at it and gaze at the water. When her desultory "family reunion" was concluded she called me back and we returned to Fairfax. There we hung out in our old haunts in Mosaic, saw a movie, did some shopping and partook in a happy hour at our favorite English Pub, where we each had a gin and tonic that turned to lavender from clear when we touched it. Afterwards we ate a dinner of fish cakes, shepherd's pie and had a sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

 The next day we attended a service at a nearby church of my faith which had a cool outdoor altar, cross and labyrinth that I had wanted to show her, and then she attended a service at her former church and afterwards she had lunch with her friends.

 When she picked me back up in my car late that afternoon, we drove down the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina where I dropped her off at midnight in Charlotte and drove home overnight so that she could visit with a friend there for a couple of days and then fly home.

 I had taken a photograph we both admired of a fiery sunrise on the Eastern Shore during our travels; I didn’t suspect then, being obtuse or perhaps blindly unaware, that as a result of her recent move I had somehow become merely a naive suitor of hers rather than something far closer just a short time earlier, and the picture better represented a fast approaching sunset rather than a grand burgeoning dawn.