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.

Sorry I missed you, son, and I hope you got my birthday card

Just as the first bell above the Post Office at Westover rang signifying noon, I walked into the Lost Dog Cafe pizzeria for lunch and noticed it was pretty empty.  I was seated at a table by the window where I could see anyone entering or leaving the restaurant and ordered a draft beer and an Italian Pie.

While waiting for my pie to be prepared I walked once through the eatery and saw that there was no one in the sparse crowd of diners who could conceivably be from my immediate family and after availing myself of the men's room (I have three sons), I resumed my place at the table and kept watch on the door.  The beer arrived but I didn't like it, too cloying and sour tasting, so I only sipped it occasionally.

The pie soon arrived and it was cooked just right, with a delicate crust ladled with a savory pizza sauce, with lots of pieces of salty diced or round-cut cold cut meats piled atop crunchy white onion strands basking under a melted mozzarella cheese film.  I cut the four pieces into eight and allowed them to cool, then slowly ate most of the slices while watching out the window to observe the front door and sip my beer sparingly.

At the end of the hour I paid my fare, left a piece of pie and half a beer as a good luck charm for next week when my youngest son has a birthday and I'll return one more time for lunch in the hopes of seeing him and his wife of several years whom I have never met and, who knows who else.  I departed thinking back upon my dad, who for all his faults as a person would never have been cut out from the family by all of his children and left in childless loneliness for the rest of his life by those offspring; such an action would seem to the ordinary person to be a pretty damning indictment of an unnatural cruelty imparted to those children by one of of their primary caregivers and her coterie of soulless enablers, children now grown up to be fully mature adults by the passage of an ensuing decade and a half, having seemingly incorporated those same characteristics of immutable cruelty into their very beings.

Later this month

Many years ago one February, my mother said wryly to me in a note accompanying yet another arriving birthday gift that birthdays come fast and furious in my household after the turn of each year because one of my sons was born in January, the other two were born in February and their mother had a birthday in March and mine is in April.  Then, relief till Christmas.

Next up a few days from now is my oldest child's birthday, and I hope to see him during the lunch hour at the local gourmet pizzeria after all these years of him being away, apparently getting over the fiduciary suit he and his brothers (and mother, who stood in for the youngest child who was too young to be on the papers) brought against me during the divorce, a case of not-so-subtle coercion of these tender children by overbearing adults supposedly caring for them, that was tossed out by the judge as being a "harassment petition;" which ultimately incurred almost $50,000 in sanctions and costs assessed against their mother.  Yesterday was a holiday and I didn't see anyone I recognized at that restaurant during the lunch hour, but I am hopeful that it will be different on Jimmy's birthday.

Actually on that morning I am slated to have yet more work done on my damaged eye that has bedeviled me through four eye operations and I'll tell him how I am doing as I get older; I am sure he is concerned.  Also a cousin of his is getting married, I'm sure he'll want to know those particulars, one of his aunts has much worse ailments than me and I'm sure he'll want to know about that, and a great aunt who used to often take care of him when he was a baby passed away and I'm sure as a normal human being, he'll want to know that sad fact.

I sent him a birthday card in care of his mother at her address, with a birthday gift inside the card as it's my belief that he lives sometimes at her house, at least when she lived in the area and he used to park his car outside her house in the adjacent bank's parking lot for extended periods.  Being my first-born I of course love him and have many happy memories of him (enjoy these old snapshots of a dad's oldest son) and I hope that after about 15 years I'll see him later this week; I trust that he is alive and well although his mother stonily refuses even to tell me these simple things about the wellbeing of our oldest child, or any of our children.

Is February half over already?

It's midway through February already, closer to spring than to fall, practically halfway to income tax day.  I've been trying to stay busy, continuing my routine of running three times a week, albeit at reduced milage due to the limiting factors of a balky achilles and an aching arthritic hip. The mostly 50 degree-plus weather has been an inducement to get out there and enjoy the day on a pleasant jog which is more like a shuffle than a run these days but still, ten months ago I wasn't running at all.

I believed my eye woes were finally behind me with the coming of the new year, but this month I thought that my good eye might be starting to suffer the same malady as my bad, right eye.  I imagined I was seeing what I call "fly-bys," a feeling or glimpse that something small, like a fly, was whizzing past the periphery of my vision, and feared that the floating junk in my left eye was increasing.  These are the ominous warning signs that your retina may be deteriorating and it can lead to a hole in your vision which is a real and immediate medical emergency.  Also I just felt that my vision was subtly degrading because it seemed harder to see my footfalls during runs in low or flat light conditions.  So I called for an appointment with an ophthalmologist and within a few days had both of my eyes checked out.  The verdict?  My good eye, the left one, was fine although I was at a "greater risk" than the normal population for its retina to deteriorate because it had already happened to my other eye.  But in my bad eye, the subject of all those operations a year ago, I had developed scar tissue that was attached to the plastic lens inserted during my cataract surgery last April, that was obscuring my vision in that eye, a "one in five" occurrence I was told, which seems like a high rate of failure or at least significant side effects for such a commonly performed operation to me.  After four eye surgeries in the recent past, two of them emergency operations that led in each instance to an onerous week of "face-down" recovery, no movement of the head permitted, I am scheduled for an "office procedure" later this month involving lasering the scar tissue inside my eye to blast it away, from which I supposedly will drive myself home following it.  Supposedly it is a safe procedure which will improve the vision in that already-damaged eye, which carries only a "theoretical risk" of burning a hole in the retina if the laser beam is errant as a possible side effect (I asked).  I'm glad I went to the doc but I'm not happy about this development.

I've also been attending different churches this month as I like to sample a few different religious services each year.  I attended a service at the Washington National Cathedral, a renowned ornate Episcopal church in the District that suffered extensive damage to its spires and gargoyle statues during the big earthquake that shook DC last decade.  I attended the service, involving much singing and several baptismal, with a congregation member who showed me around the beautiful interior afterwards.  I attended a service at the Falls Church Anglican, a mega church whose congregation years ago took over my church, the Falls Church Episcopal.  That congregation, under the leadership of its charismatic priest who in my opinion was homophobic and misogynistic, opposed to gay bishops and women priests, purged the rolls of parishioners who were liberal and followed a Nigerian bishop with those biases instead of the Virginia diocese.  In effect they squatted on the church property for years while a lawsuit to reclaim the property by its rightful owners finally prevailed about seven years later and the illegal usurpers had to leave the property and build its own church.  I usually attend one service there a year to see what they're preaching these days, and their new church was finally completed this year.  The service was the last one I will attend there as their metamorphosis seems to be complete and the congregants seemed a little too in rapture for me.  There was a soft rock religious band that played hymns and psalms throughout the service, projecting their image and the lyrics on two huge TV screens and the congregation swayed to the music throughout and sang along, many raising and waving their hands to the heavens in supplication as they asked Jesus to save them and be their friend.  There was no communion, although the sweet-talking priest did talk about Anna Karenina during his sermon, which I found interesting.

Other than that, I donated double red blood cells last week, which wiped out my running vitality for the next run, my century and a quarter blood donation.  This month I have watched the rapid, perhaps fatal, decline of our great republic as the president spins out of control, enabled by a slender majority of Republican Senators representing about 20% of the US population.  Today I spent a wonderful Valentine's Day with a special friend, visiting a distillery, enjoying a bowl of mussels and seeing the Academy Award winning movie Parasite with her.  President's Day is this weekend and two of my sons have birthdays this month and maybe I'll see either or both of them at the local gourmet pizzeria during one or more of those lunch hours.  And this month also has one more day than usual, it being a leap year.

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.

Presidents Day 2019

Yesterday being a holiday, I went at noon to the Lost Dog Cafe to dine, as is my custom.  I ordered the spinach bacon feta pie, which also contained mozzarella cheese and basil.

As usual, my companion the Empty Chair silently took in everything I had to say, displaying in its structure an inherent strength within.  This contemplation on my part led me to wonder about the strength of character of adults who casually break blood bonds and human norms of decency in rejecting an entire family line and casting aside the full dictate of the 5th Commandment.

The pizza was delicious and there was more than enough to accommodate anyone who might happen by.  No one did, so leaving behind a part of my meal as a good-luck omen for the next time, I left.

My oldest son, who is in his thirties, has a birthday next, and I think I'll try something different on that day.  At noon on that day I'll be in the bustling Italian Store across the street and up the block from the Lost Dog, ordering its New York style pizza to consume at one of the booths or counters inside the store.

Perhaps one or more of my estranged sons, or the one daughter-in-law I know about (I've never met her), will display common human kindness and join me.  After that my youngest son has a birthday, wherein he will enter his thirties, and after more than a decade spent always being available for them, I'll stop trying to hold the door open for them to overcome their adolescent-induced anger at me from the divorce, abetted mightily by their mother's manipulation of them at the time and since then.

A happy day

Recently I had a birthday, which I celebrated by doing a LSD of 5 miles, my longest run since last spring.  It left me sore and tired, but I feel that I'm making progress in my return from lingering injuries and as I shed weight, hopefully it'll go easier.

The weather was perfect and I ran by several splashy spring-color vignettes.  There are few things so great as a long run early on a beautiful day.

At noon I had lunch at the local gourmet pizza restaurant, treating myself on this "special" day to a brown ale draft and an Italian Pie.  As usual, I kept my eye on the door entrance outside the window table I was sitting at, but no one I knew, or at least nobody I recognized, came in.

Leaving a pizza slice symbolically for each of my estranged sons, I bid adieu to my dining companion of this past decade, the Empty Chair, and departed.  JJ&D, I'm sorry I failed to meet your unbelievable, out-of-this-world parenting expectations but I have no regrets and wish you to know that I love you.

January in the rear-view mirror

I was running in the District earlier this month with a friend of mine from where I used to work before I was forced to retire involuntarily and I remarked to her that the first two months of any year were the worst for me in terms of mood because of the proximity to the just-past holiday season and the fact that the birthdays of my three estranged sons come in rapid succession during these two months. Below is me dining at noon at a local restaurant on my middle child's birthday near where we used to live before all the divorce business was secretly launched by their mother.

It was, as I explained to my running partner, as if my ex-wife loaded my three young children for a drive to her parents' house 400 miles away for spring break while I remained behind to work and she drove around the corner and crashed horribly and all three children died, for the amount I've seen my children since then. They live on in my memory although not in my present or presence; here's how I remember my middle child, the most sober and earnest one of the three, someone who you couldn't put one over on, except for the dastardly manipulative influence of his egocentric mother and her coterie of child-devouring "professionals" during the lengthy divorce proceedings all those years ago.

I dined as usual with the Empty Chair a little while later in the month on MLK Day at the same restaurant, as is my custom on their birthdays and any holiday. The conversation was lacking, the hope remained present as ever and the fare was delicious as is usually the case.

Ah, memories.  I'm glad January is behind me; here's a portrait of that month's birthday boy during happier times, before the paid-gun reprehensible adults in the domestic law arena swooped in upon the kids to brainwash them at the behest of their mother and tear the family asunder permanently, as is their wont and their life work, proud work of adults overbearing the wills of mere children.

Birthday

I spent a nice birthday earlier having lunch with a friend and then hiking along the C&O Canal Towpath.  It gave me an opportunity to practice with my new camera.

I have run through the little 8-page set-up guide that came with the Canon, so next I have to print off the 180 page manual and refer to it.  My friends say to just refer to it on line, but, well, it's not written that well and to refer to it and apply whatever it says to the camera, I have to have the instructions  open in front of me.

The camera has a 40X zoom which brings things incredibly close but it's tricky to use because it's hard to find the subject in the field as the initial blurriness of the focus clears, and then hold the camera steady enough to get a clear picture at that magnification.  The slightest tremor or most minor tremble throws off the field or blurs the picture, so I have to practice this feature.

But I am pleased with the new camera and it takes pictures with close detail and vivid colors.  I spent an enjoyable birthday.

Thanks so much for your thoughtfulness

I received a new camera from a friend for my birthday, a Canon SX720.  I immediately loved it as soon as I took it out of the box, and ran outside and snapped a picture of my house with it.

I sent the picture to the friend who gave me the present, who replied, "Great picture, great detail, now mow your lawn!"  The Canon shows great detail in the pictures it takes compared to my trusty Pentax Adventure camera, which is waterproof and shockproof and has served me faithfully for the past three and a half years during which I have carried it on almost all of my runs, through drenching rain bursts and hard falls on cement.

Contrast the image of the the beauty of a tulip, above, taken with the less advanced Pentax, and the image of the beauty of a tulip, below, taken with the more advanced Canon.  Going forward they'll both serve their functions, as the Pentax is rugged and will still accompany me on almost all my runs, whereas the Canon will perform as my artiste camera and will undoubtedly come along in a padded case on certain runs that promise to be safe enough in terms of conditions and terrain.

I've already had the Canon out on such a run, one that I undertook earlier this month with another friend to commemorate the 100 years since the entry of America into the Great War on April 6, 1917, during which we stopped at several of the WWI  memorials in the District such as the District's World War One Memorial on the National Mall.  On another note, with Easter hard upon us, I hope to see one or more of you for lunch on Sunday, JJ&D, and now Laura, and who knows who else?

Maybe next year

Jimmy, Johnny and Danny are my three sons.  All of them have birthdays during the first two months of the year.  (Here's to you, John.)

Twelve, fourteen and fourteen years is how long it's been since I knowingly laid eyes on any one of them.  The last knowing communication I had from any of them was ten years ago.  (Here's to you, Jim Rogers.)

Their mother stonily refuses to tell me a single thing about them, even to say whether they are alive or not.  That's a person with a stone-cold heart, and she raised, from their adolescence on, our children to have similarly hard hearts.  (And here's to you, Dan (and Laura).)

On each one's birthday (and all Federal and religious holidays) I go to the same restaurant at noon for lunch near where they lived nearby as they became young men under her tutelage, when they learned how easy it was to circumvent court orders governing visitation and custody by merely becoming scofflaws.  What was the remedy for the shut-out parent supposed to be, to try to get the other parent (or them) thrown into jail for contempt of court?  (Good times from 2001, just before the parental alienation began in earnest (PAS).)

So that's my routine whenever I'm in town (which is almost always) those days, to try to keep alive some potential channel of communication and rapprochement.  As these three now-fully mature men climb into their thirties, I'll keep up the routine for as long as I can and maybe someday… .  😉

Hope Springs Eternal

My youngest son Danny played football, and other sports, before I crushed his spirit as an 11-year old by not praising him sufficiently when he scored a touchdown once.  That's what he told me as a 12-year old, after he'd been on a series of secret visits to a psychologist or psychologists in the pay of his mother when she was busy extrajudicially burying my fatherhood during the lengthy and financially crushing divorce wars.

He would never play sports again, this tender adolescent solemnly told me.  Besides being a pile of crap (what young boy talks like this? That's an agenda-driven repressed memories "expert" talking through the mouth of a vulnerable child), that is too bad because he was a good football player.

He was fast enough, although not as fast as my oldest boy, and cerebral enough, although not as good a student of the game as my middle child.  But he seemed to combine the most excellent traits of the other children in a superior blend of athleticism and execution and he could excel on the field of play.

I well remember him breaking off a 40-yard touchdown run as a fullback, kicking a PAT to seal a win, and knocking a halfback out of bounds on the one-yard line on a power sweep running away from his OLB position to preserve a precarious lead in the game's last minute of play.  Your birthday is coming up, Dan, and I hope to see you then for lunch at the Lost Dog.

When I'm 64 Part 2, or Unanticipated Guests Arrive.

On my birthday this year, as usual, I presented my three estranged children the opportunity to reconnect with me by very publicly being at my favorite pizzeria in Arlington for lunch.  Four very welcome and gratifying guests appeared during this lunch.  (John and his new wife Riza joined me to wish me a happy birthday and bought me lunch.)

My friend John called around noon and said he knew it was my birthday and that he had read on FB that I was having lunch at the Lost Dog Cafe and if I wanted company, he and Riza would be delighted to join me.  I welcomed them to come, and we ordered a large pizza when they showed up, enough for the three of us and more.  (Then two totally unexpected guests suddenly arrived.)

Well, two more additional guests did arrive, rendering me thunderstruck.  Shortly after the pizza arrived, I glanced out the window and was astonished, and deeply touched, to see a co-worker, Lisa, walking towards the entrance carrying her three-week old first-born, Jacqueline.  (Though adorable, let sleeping babies lie.)

I had recently worked closely with, and came to admire, this excellent lawyer on several difficult matters at work before she suddenly went on maternity two weeks early because the baby came then.  It was the mother and daughter's first outing in public and she came to cheer me up, also having read about my lunchtime intentions on FB, and as John observed later, it was apparent that there was a good working chemistry between us as we easily and animatedly discussed public matters at work over lunch while the baby slept in her car seat nearby.  (Practicing at grand parenting with my friend's newborn.)