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.

The year in review Part 3

In September I mostly concentrated on making my running better.  Although it seemed like a long time since May when I had come back after two years off, progress was slow.  I ran a timed mile in 10:13, disappointing in that it was over 10 minutes (early in the decade I could do a sub 7:00) but at least it showed I was up to the point assigning myself challenging tasks.  I was up to 12 weekly miles, running three times a week, with a long run of five miles, but aches and pains were cropping up in my ankles, knees, feet and calfs, a warning sign.  I decided to cut my mileage way back so I could continue running three times a week to maintain the continuity I had achieved so far.  I ran through the District a few times, running by some beautiful spots like the National Floral Library, below, alongside the picturesque Tidal Basin.

In October, with trepidation, I ran my first race in five years, a 5K in Bluemont Park.  I was happy just to finish it, in 32:39, my slowest 5K ever by a few minutes, but it was a step along the way to participating in a meaningful way in recreational running again.

In November I took a drive along the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park with a friend, as we usually do every year.  We saw a bear shamble across the roadway this year.  He was given all the time he needed to casually perambulate the ribbon of asphalt and disappear into the brush by waiting motorists.  I went to Columbus for Thanksgiving and enjoyed a couple of hockey games, a couple of runs, an interesting conversation with a table full of old men Trumpites I crashed at a McDonald's there early one morning, a delicious holiday feast and spending time with family members at my sister's house.

In December I went on three Christmas Tree Runs in the District (one was actually a walk and bicycle affair after attending a demonstration at the Capitol), and our dangerous faux president was impeached, an historical event which will possibly correct our veering course down the timeline of world history.  Stay tuned.

2018, 4th Quarter

October dawned and I started volunteering for the Jennifer Wexton for Congress campaign in the Virginian Tenth District, one district over from mine, a district a few miles to the west that stretched from McLean to the West Virginian border through the vineyards and horse country of Northern Virginia, one that had been bright red for the last forty years.  There was no sense in working in my deeply blue district inside the beltway, a house seat that was so safe for the Democrats that during the lead up to the Midterms I even met my Congressman, Don Beyer, in a Wexton campaign headquarters about to go out canvassing for her!  The volunteering was satisfactory work as I knocked on forty-plus doors from a dedicated list each time and spoke to 30 to 50 people, collecting pledges to vote and distributing or leaving behind campaign and voting information hung on doorknobs.

In addition to many loyal Democrats I encountered, there were, apparently, a lot of converted Republican voters I spoke with, people who were seething to vote against the two-term GOP incumbent Barbara Comstock in a passion that barely disguised its anti-Trump nature in this suburban, barely outside the beltway district.  The month-long effort produced a gamut of responses to my knocking on doors, from the household where the occupant threatened to shoot me if I didn't get off his property and assaulted me as I turned to leave to several sincere statements of thank-you-for-coming, with a particularly nostalgic, for me, encounter where an elderly gentleman patiently listened to my verbal windup while studying my sweating visage and kindly said that he was a loyal Republican but would I like a glass of water or a cold soda before I left, the way people in our great country used to treat each other, including the occasional stranger.  I was excited and mightily satisfied to see that the Virginian Tenth District was the very first Congressional district in the entire country to be called as flipping by the networks about forty minutes after the polls closed, presaging a mighty blue tsunami of house seats flipping resulting in a forty-seat democratic majority in Congress, including the Virginia congregation going from a 7-4 gerrymandered Republican majority to a 7-4 Democratic majority overnight.

I was scheduled for an operation early in November to remove the oil from my right eye that had been placed there during the second surgery in August to repair my failing retina once the first surgery in July failed in that regard by the insertion a self-decomposing gas bubble, but shortly before the date it was reset to late December because my doctor broke his arm and couldn't perform surgery during his recovery period while he wore a cast.  Although sorely disappointed at this, as my eye-filled eye bothered me greatly as I feel that my body intrinsically knew there an important organ with a totally foreign substance within it and wanted it out, this pause at least gave me the opportunity to travel by car to Columbus to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my sister there and her family.  During that visit I was also able to visit with my college freshman roommate who was there visiting his ailing uncle.

In December I finally had my third, and hopefully last, eye surgery and it was painless, in stark contrast to the first surgery which was, well, agonizing albeit brief (I was totally out during the second surgery at my insistence, but this wasn't an option for the oil removal procedure for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained to me) and so far the retina has continued to "adhere" to its wall of rods and cones and the tears in it have fully healed.  There has been no period of face-down recovery this go-round, although I am severely limited to a sedate recovery for six more weeks (no lifting anything over five pounds) and then to a less-than-strenuous period (no running) for two months after that, and if that all goes well (my fingers are definitely crossed, I'll be as "fully" recovered as I am going to get with this apparently genetically caused occurrence.  I was able to go around the District solo on a bicycle prior to my operation last week on my annual holiday-lights "run."

Thanksgiving 2018, Part Three

Thanksgiving day came and went with the fun of it centering on finding food for dinner that evening (a Korean joint) and navigating the milling frenetic chaos of Black Friday, on Thursday night, to get a cake for my nephew for his birthday party after our meal of Korean BBQ.  That impromptu party dispelled the lingering gloom on the holiday caused by the very serious medical condition of my sister's husband's mom who had been moved to hospice in the hospital.  The next day dawned and I took a frigid walk at dawn in the nature preserve a few blocks from my sister's house.

Then I drove to the nursing home to say goodbye to Jimmy's uncle there, glad that his condition was noticeably improving, especially with the advent of the visit from Jimmy, who was already present at his bedside, cajoling him into arising from bed to walk the hallways as part of his rehabilitation so he could return to his house soon.  I returned to my sister's house midmorning and she and I went to the hospital to visit her mother-in-law who was still unresponsive as my sister read to her from a book but seemed to stir when her daughters, and son and grandsons, arrived soon afterwards to be with her.  Discussions were resumed to have a traditional Thanksgiving meal in Dublin at the house of my sister's sister-in-law the next day and my sister and I returned to her house to do a little meal prep for that upcoming meal.

I was driving back to DC the next morning so I packed to get ready to depart early in the morning; then Jimmy came over to visit and stayed for an enjoyable hour.  He had never met my sister before and he too, was leaving early the next morning to fly back to his home.  Later in the evening my sister and I drove her husband's webber grill over to her sister-in-law's house in my truck, about fifteen miles away, so that the cooking of the turkey could begin early the next morning.

I left at 6 a.m. on Saturday on the nine hour drive home and it was a miserable trip as it rained the entire time and there was pea soup fog in the West Virginia mountains, where for about forty miles visibility was reduced to about 60 feet, or three lane marker stripes.  Regretfully, my brother-in-law's mother passed away peacefully last week.  Although I am sad at her passing, I am glad that I was able to see her again, even though it was in a hospital setting, after not seeing her since my sister's wedding in the eighties.

Thanksgiving 2018, Part Two

The day before Thanksgiving I was in Dublin, OH driving around with my college roommate Jimmy, who lived there for many years.  We visited his mother's and stepfather's gravesite, which had an interesting gravestone for the two--it has an Eastern Airlines commercial jet inscribed on it under his stepfather's name, Peace.  It's quite distinctive, remarkable even, with the prominent word PEACE across its top in bold letters with a jet flying underneath it.  Harvey Peace was a pilot for Eastern and retired when the airline followed TWA into oblivion in the shake-out that occurred following the de-regulation of the airlines in the sixties and seventies.

At noon I went to the hospital where I met my sister and we visited her mother-in-law in the massive Riverside Methodist hospital complex in Columbus.  She was lying comfortably with one of her daughters in attendance, although she wasn't responsive for the most part.  Her son came in and two of her grandsons as well, so she had plenty of loved ones at her bedside.

As evening approached, I went to stay at the place Jimmy was staying at and we called three or four of our friends from our Sewell Hall days at CU.  It was good to catch up with the ones we reached, although we talked a lot about heart attacks, surgeries and other medical maladies in addition to the raucous good old days.  Thanksgiving day I went to visit Jimmy's Uncle with Jimmy and then at noon I went over to my sister's house and we went to visit her mother-in-law, whose condition was pretty much the same, where I met one of the other daughters, who had flown in to spend Thanksgiving with her sister, brother and mother.

That evening there was too much personal sadness going on for a Thanksgiving turkey to be cooked, plus my sister's husband, a gourmet cook, was ill, so we procured some take-out Korean food to enjoy for dinner and braved Black Friday at Walmarts to get the birthday boy in the house a birthday cake.  Black Friday now starts on Thursday.  The birthday party was nice, I gave my nephew a book on the Little Bighorn Battle, which in my youth was called the Custer Massacre.

A Somber Thanksgiving in Columbus 2018, Part One

I went to visit family for Thanksgiving this year, traveling to Columbus to spend the holiday with my sister and her husband and two of their three sons.  Coincidentally, my college freshman roommate was there visiting his uncle who had taken ill and was recovering in a nursing home in Upper Arlington.

The nine hour drive there on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving was uneventful except for the disturbing call I received midway through it that my sister's mother-in-law was in the hospital after suddenly collapsing and was being considered for hospice due to her unresponsive state.  Once I got to Columbus I dropped off my stuff at my sister's house, which was deserted because everyone was at the hospital except for one of her sons who had been sleeping and was unaware of his grandmother's condition, and I went to visit my friend Jimmy at his uncle's institution.

We visited for awhile with Jimmy's uncle and then I spent the night with Jimmy where he was staying and we caught up as I hadn't seen him since shortly before the Trump disaster in 2016.  We had a pleasant time discussing how the midterm elections was a good harbinger for America being restored to greatness again in the next election and I checked in by phone with my sister who indicated that the prognosis for her mother-in-law was not good.

The next morning I took a walk around the neighborhood where Jimmy's uncle's assisted living place was which was a vibrant neighborhood full of shops and restaurants and parks.  Then we went to visit his mother's gravesite in Dublin and afterwards stopped in to see Jimmy's daughter-in-law who was staying in Dublin with her parents while her husband was away at sea, and I met Jimmy's grandson, a fine baby of four months.  We spent a pleasant hour there while I arranged to visit my sister's mother-in-law's hospital room where the stricken person's children were keeping vigil.

Holidays

November gave me a couple of opportunities to try to reconnect with my family. Veterans Day presented two, with the actual holiday being on Friday, November 10th, and the actual day of remembrance being on Saturday, November 11th.  (Lunch with The Empty Chair on Armistice Day.)

Life moves on. I decided to go to visit my sister and her family in red Ohio for Thanksgiving this year, after visiting my sister in blue Colorado for the last two Thanksgivings.  (Holidays are for reaching out to family and promoting family togetherness.)

I traded in my little "roadster" for a big truck for my planned upcoming cross-country trips. I put 1200 miles on it and enjoyed a week in the midwest.  (I visited this sister this year, whom I hadn't visited in many years; any normal person would agree it's natural and important to keep in touch with family.)

Now that I'm home again, it's time to prepare for the holiday season. I already know that someone nearby is moving, maybe out of town or out of state or even, perhaps, out of the country.  (Don't forget to leave a forwarding address, in case I need to get in touch with any of our three children, and enjoy NC!)

Happy Thanksgiving

I woke up at 3 a.m. yesterday for my 7:25 a.m. flight and got up and went out for a 4-mile run, there wouldn't be time for it later.  It was a bracing (it was cold), slowish (I didn't want to stumble in the dark) jaunt around the 'hood and down the W&OD Trail to Arlington and back, a mind-clearing shamble and the full moon really helped with my mood and my seeing.

Two days earlier I had found a last-minute $118 round trip fare to Denver from National Airport; I had always heard fantastic bargains could be had if you had the nerve to wait until the eleventh hour and fifty-eighth minute, and now I'm a believer.  The flight was efficient, we were crammed in like sardines and we made DIA ahead of schedule, and I was at my sister's house before noon.

After I borrowed her car and went out to do some work, I returned and we had a delicious dinner she made of cod with cumin sauce, and we spent a nice evening together.  It's cold in Denver but that's not unusual, and snow is expected, which is also characteristic enough.

A traditional holiday fare at Buca di Beppo in Broomfield was found through the magic of Google (I typed in "Denver restaurants open Thanksgiving 2016" and found at least 28), and it's wonderful to be with family on this day of thanksgiving.  I would wish this for anyone.

One year ago...

A year ago, as Thanksgiving approached, I had a chance encounter on a public street with the mother of my three children, none of whom has spoken to me, or any Lamberton, in over seven years. They were ripped away from us extra-judicially by their mother, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, who engaged in parental alienation syndrome ("PAS") and overbore their wills as minors, given her dominant position with them in terms of time of physical custody, since the Plain-Jane visitation the court imposed gave them to her 81% of the time.

My lawyer wryly characterized the sexist attitude of the domestic law court in Virginia as Mother Knows Best.  Oh, the untold number of secret visits to psychologists my three sons were subjected to in those hours, unbeknownst to me, which induced in their juvenile brains a frenzy of excitement and side-taking as they were caught up in the adult drama of a couple splitting asunder, expensively and publicly (lotsa hearings, lotsa costs)!

When I encountered Sharon a year ago just before our national day of thanks, I asked her five questions about each child.  Is he alive?  Is he well?  Is he married?  Does he have children?  Where does he live?

I received in return only stony silence, a true glimpse into her cold, flinty heart, because those are things that any parent would tell the other parent, no matter what.  JJ&D, I'll have Thanksgiving dinner with your Aunt Melissa this year, give us a call or stop by, she's in the book.

Wardrobe Malfunction

I ran a Turkey Trot race, the Flying Feather Four-Miler in Dublin, Ohio, on Thanksgiving morning with two of my nephews from Columbus.  Now I can say that every one of my sister Kate's three sons has beaten me in a race.  (Below:  M and K flanking their proud Mom pre-race.)

The day started out cool and crisp so naturally I overdressed.  Perfectly comfy at the start, I was dying by MP 1, which we passed at about 9:15.

Stripping off my fleece jacket, I tied it around my waist and we hit the halfway mark at about 19:40.  The race course meanders through rolling wooded parkland in this suburb north of Colombus.

Both of my nephews were being extremely solicitous, running alongside of me.  I could tell that M, the live-at-home college sophomore who had been running nighttime miles getting ready for this outing, wanted to go on ahead, while K, the college freshman who is attending his university on a rowing scholarship, assured me that I was pulling him along.  Except that his words weren't coming out in ragged gasps like mine were.   

In my state of overdress, I was wearing leggings which were proceeding to slide off my hips despite me cinching the drawstring tight.  Just past MP 2 I had to stop, untie my jacket, hoist up my pants, tie the drawstring extra tight, refasten my outergarment about my waist and proceed.  Both young men waited patiently with me despite my urgings for them to go on.  (Below:  Clutching my finisher's bottle of wine with my malfunctioning leggings still sagging below my waist post-race.)

By MP 3 I was once again yanking my leggings up every three steps as they continued to slide down my legs.  Fearing that I would get entangled in my falling-down warmup pants and go sprawling amidst a horde of racers, I had to stop to tighten my leggings again.  This time M went on while K stayed with me, assuring me that he wouldn't even be running in the race if it weren't for me.  I chose to take his comment in a postive light.

Finally we could see the finish banner off in the distance and we picked up our pace and broke forty minutes.  My time was about 39:31, with K a second ahead of me and M about half a minute faster than that.

This was a cool race, with the goody bag containing a tech long-sleeve shirt, a race-logo hat and gloves, plus a shot of whiskey in an airline mini-bottle.  Each finisher received a full bottle of beaujolis to take home to his or her Thanksgiving dinner.

Felicity or doom

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest room,
If in that room a friend await
Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming foot,
The opening of a door!
[Emily Dickinson]

Happy Thanksgiving, Dan. I'm sorry you didn't call.

Call me or write me before Christmas, and let's get together then for lunch. We'll find a place open, even if I have to boil some spicy shrimp and bring it and some cocktail sauce down to Banneker Park at noon so we can sit on a park bench and eat overlooking the DC Waterfront. The hour would surely go swiftly, seven years is a long time to catch up on! I hope you and your two older brothers are doing well on this day of solicitude.

Love, Dad.

The way it was in 1978

My most memorable Thanksgiving? It was a long time and a lifetime ago.

Back then, Sharon wasn't yet an even "better" version of her Mother. Newly married, we were both working in the Boulder County Jail as Corrections Specialists (not deputies, which is what we were, or jailers or screws, which is what the "residents" called us), shortly after graduating from college. Boulder's jail was the first one certified by the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) and its staff was young, enthusiastic and awash in liberalism.

We didn't want to hurt the feelings of these low-level criminals (we housed a few murderers, child molesters and rapists too). At the time I ran the medium security unit and Sharon was the intake processor. The townsfolk called the jail the Boulder County Hilton. Even the cops would alert their dispatchers that they were enroute with their prisoners to the "Hilton."

It was a high stress job. Some of these people were very dangerous. Most were needy for sure. We got it into our do-gooding heads that we could help out both the skeleton staff that day and the residents by cooking the Thanksgiving mid-day repast. So we signed up for that all-day duty.

What did I know about cooking turkeys? Not much but I called my Mom and mined her wisdom about oven temperatures and cooking times, weighing and rubbing the birds, and what to do with the giblets. (We made the gravy from scratch.) At 4 a.m. Sharon and I stumbled into the jail's kitchen and fired up the ovens. We got all the turkeys situated in their roasting pans amongst yards of aluminium foil and quartered onions, carrots and potatoes, and got the roux going for the gravy mix. We washed cranberries and made stuffing. We basted and basted, and even made breakfast for the residents along the way.

Around one o'clock, I started carving and Sharon and a few trusteys started serving. It was a glorious though riotous hour and a half. Three units (high, medium and minimum security) had to be trooped through the dining hall in waves for their holiday meal. We had to prepare and wrap several meals for the forlorn souls in intake. The trusteys had to eat too, and the diminished staff partook in the food on that day as well, if I remember correctly. The satisfied looks afterwards on the faces of many or most of these angry inmates (holidays in jail are very depressing) said it all to Sharon and I. What a team we were back then!

Then it was clean, clean and clean. Finally leaving behind fifty or sixty wrapped turkey sandwiches (or p&j sandwiches for the vegetarians) to be served for for dinner, we stumbled out at 5 p.m. exhausted but fulfilled after a thirteen-hour stint, the day dark again just as it had been when we entered the jail early that morning.

(You don't want to hear about my worst Thanksgiving--the first year of my divorce when Sharon Rogers took our kids out of town for almost a week without a word and left me to contemplate their empty house from the curb each day and wonder when, or if, they'd return.)

That's they way it was thirty years ago!

Thanksgiving

My brother came down from NYC to visit for Thanksgiving, and we celebrated the day by cooking roast beef and watching football on TV. As a friend later remarked, "Two bachelors alone all day in a house with no adult supervision, priceless." This led me to quip, "And for the beer, there was Mastercard." (Left: Yeah, I cooked this meal. Photo credit J.)

I had run before dawn that morning in 60 degree temperature. As I poked along in the dark, footsteps came rapidly up behind me. It was an older gentleman, passing me purposefully.

"Way to work off your feast beforehand," I said to him as he went by. He glanced at me once and proceeded on without a word, rapidly leaving me astern.

Not even a casual retort in return, I thought as I watched his figure recede up the block. This annoyed me for some reason. It’s a male thing, I guess.

Once comfortably beyond me, the other runner slowed imperceptibly. He didn’t put me away, in other words.

I knew I could run that fast. So I did. I sped up and closed the gap that had developed between us. I settled in behind him, practically on his left hip. We silently ran on that way for several blocks.

When my turn-off loomed ahead I pulled even, and then went half a body length in front. Then I turned off. No words or further glances were exchanged.

Later that morning I called my ex-wife’s house two miles away hoping to express a happy Thanksgiving wish to my children. I last spoke with my youngest child in the spring, sometime before he graduated. I haven’t spoken with my middle child in about two years, nor with my oldest child since Super Bowl Sunday.

When there was no answer at their Mother's house, I left my youngest child a message. At noon I called again and left my middle child a message when there was no answer. Neither one returned my call.

I didn’t leave my oldest child a message since he has ignored all of my communications ever since he turned 21. I don't count him cashing the check I sent for his 21st birthday as a form of communication.

Meanwhile, I received an email from a sort-of running buddy who had come to town to visit her folks, fresh from her 3:23 NYCM. She wanted to run medium to long on the W&OD Trail the next morning. I arranged to meet her at nine o’clock to run 14 miles.

I met M at a club SLR last summer, and we ran once after that when we went 14 miles on the W&OD Trail in 2:04, a nine-minute-per-mile pace. That was in July, when I was just starting to gear up for Chicago, and I was in far better shape than I am in now.

That was my last good run, really, because shortly after that I injured my foot and I wasn’t the same when I came back from that injury. Although I had a decent time at the Charm City Twenty-Miler in September on the dirt surface of the Northern Central Railroad Trail, at Chicago in October it was ungodly hot, I was on antibiotics and by the eighth mile I was already walking and considering DNFing. Although I finished that fun run, the race officials were only too happy to help with that last thought as they cancelled the marathon midway through it after they ran out of water. (Left: Did you ever see the movie, Night of the Living Dead? That's me lurching along with 35,000 other fun runners in Chicago on October 7, 2007.)

I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of this adept runner, who is also a very accomplished and interesting person, so I retired early. Still, I was as anxious as if a race was coming up on the morrow. I didn’t know if I could string together 14 nine-minute miles anymore and I didn't want to hold M up.