Happy Birthday, Jim

July always makes me think of my 4 or 5 year divorce, that cost me a quarter million dollars.  What I got out of it beyond becoming thankfully clear of Sharon who is, in my opinion, a destructive covert narcissist, was the extra-judicial extinguishment of my fatherhood of my three minor sons though extreme Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS") perpetrated by Sharon, a form of child abuse in the opinion of many including me, and, get this, lifetime alimony.

Lifetime alimony exists pretty much only in Virginia, a state that still clings to contributory negligence, versus the modern doctrine of comparative negligence in the courtroom which effectively ensures some form of righteous compensation from wrongdoers for injured persons.  The reason July makes me think about this stuff is because Jim, her older second husband (I am younger than Sharon--she didn't age well--but Jim is many years older than her), was born in July and after many years of me paying her alimony, he married her and thus ended my lifetime alimony.

She sent me a certified letter to notify me of her remarriage (although even so, per usual, she didn't fully comply with the information required by the divorce decree) but what my corrosive, expensive divorce taught me was never present yourself to receive an unknown certified letter.  You see, I was litigating for years against low-down dirty-lawsuit experts and that's what they did; yes, those scumbags she surrounded herself and our children with taught me a lot.  But eventually my agency accepted her letter notifying me that she had re-married (she always needs someone around to do her manipulative drama on) and I found out on my own what county in North Carolina the happy event took place in and sent away for a certified copy of her latest marriage certificate so that, many weeks later, I could send it to my payroll office to get rid of my lifetime alimony.

That certificate, a public document, was a thing of beauty, giving the full names (including mother's maiden name, if I remember correctly), dates of birth, social security numbers and current addresses of everyone involved, including witnesses.  All that PI stuff in the public domain is good to know, I guess.  I know exactly how old old Jim is.

I wish I could meet Jim so I could thank him for saving me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my lifetime by taking this economic sponge off my books.  She was costing me $18,000 a year and I still wasn't seeing my kids.  How does that work?  Only in current America.

I've seen Jim, I believe, at least three times but I have never met him.  I believe he was the date of Sharon when both came out of her house one Friday evening while I was on the sidewalk calling her number on my cellphone (my calls to her house asking for the children to be sent out for court-ordered visitation were never answered) to say that I was there at the appropriate time for my visitation of my minor sons.  While the wimpy-looking male hung back, she asked what I was doing there and I told her that it was Friday at 5 pm and I was here to pick up my children for my visitation as required by court order.  She dismissively told me that they weren't there (that's "cooperation" in encouraging the children in visitation, as required by the court order, for you) and she ordered the male standing back in the shadows to get in the jeep at the curb so they could depart.  As she came down the steps to the sidewalk to get in the passenger side, I retreated off the sidewalk into the street 15 feet behind the jeep in observation of the learned, unwritten rule that if you hold your ground during an encounter relating to a divorce, and anyone in her camp comes too close to you, they're likely to later claim that you were "menacing" somehow.  Yeah, that's how bad divorces go, and how females can play the Fright card which is a close cousin to, and enhances, the Victim card.

The male got behind the wheel and started up the jeep.  There was plenty room to pull forward out into the travel lane (there was no traffic on this residential street) but suddenly the back-up lights came on and the jeep lurched backwards rapidly maybe a dozen feet and I was frozen in fear that I was about to be struck by it when the gears clunked and the jeep changed course and pulled forward and away.  I've described this encounter in a past blog entry.

Whether the male was ordered to back up by Sharon or he did it on his own, to scare me, or it was a mistake, it left me shaking but I think that was Jim behind the wheel.  It might not have been him though, maybe it was some other older loser.  After all, I've never been introduced to Jim, "dad" to my youngest child at least (Danny so loves being in Jim's summer house on the Outer Banks, that's where he proposed to his wife, at his "dad's" house on the beach, as I learned a couple of years later from reading the wedding book on the Internet to my child's wedding that I was never invited to nor told about until a neighbor mentioned it to me).

I did see Jim once trying to use an ATM outside a bank as I drove home from work one Saturday after they were married.  They lived two miles from me and I was driving past going home when I saw Sharon on the sidewalk by the bank near her townhouse.  Of course I scrutinized the scene as I drove by and there was this poor man trying to get money out of an ATM as she supervised his efforts.  Sharon had her mouth working in a fury, and her visage was as I remembered it, typically furious and impatient when not in the the sight of others.  After all, if she thought people were around when she was haranguing someone close to her she wouldn't want to besmirch her phony image of sweetness and reveal her true character of being a user of all those around her, in my opinion.  Poor guy, but better him than me.

The next time I saw Jim has also been mentioned in a past blog post or posts. I was once again driving home on a public street from work on a weekend, and I saw a large knot of people walking a large German Shepherd dog on the sidewalk not far from where she lived.  I recognized Sharon and I, missing my children as the years dragged by with no communication from these ruined now-adults (PAS is essentially a form of brainwashing immature minds and can have a lifetime effect, especially upon young, susceptible children), parked at my first opportunity on this street so I could ask Sharon, on this public street, how my children, our children, were.

I walked up to the group of people which included Sharon, with Jim next to her, and a few other adults including other men, the large dog, a teen or two and maybe a pre-teen.  I maintained proper social distance, as we would call it these days, didn't impede, block or confront them in any way and asked, taking less than a minute total since I received nary word in reply from anyone, these five simple questions for each child of mine (and hers): Is he alive. Is he well? Is he married? Does he have children? Where does he live?  I encountered only stony silence during that minute as they walked along, and I walked away.

Anyway, your birthday was earlier this month, Jim (I know the day), and even if you didn't want to give a distraught father even a trace of information about his sons in response to his desperate questions about them then (not even an encouraging: They're all alive, okay?), Happy Birthday, old feller!  At least you saved me a lot of money!

Birthday season is over...

...thank God. The first is middle, the middle is first and the last is last for birthday celebrations during the first two months of the year.  These three children of mine, all now adults, were no-shows this year, as usual, at the birthday lunches I invited them to at a local gourmet pizzeria for each one.  I even invited the only wife I know about but she, who once reached out to me on Facebook for just one hour in apparently a cruel jest, was a no-show too.

Johnny.  I really don't know anything about this young man since he turned 18 over a decade ago and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his four years of college tuition and all fees, which I did.  No invite to his graduation followed, nor a word of thanks, nothing.  That he moved out to the West Coast early this decade (and got away from his, in my opinion, narcissistic mother) became clear recently but the screen shot below is as close as I have come to having a photograph of this child of mine since he was a teenager, a screen shot of a marker pointing to a spot on a map of Seattle where he might vote.  I think you are alive and I hope you are well, middle son; I notice your voter affiliation is unstated and I truly hope that you are not the unthinking Trumpite which I fear you might be because you are such a truth-denier in your relationship dealings (Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which then LORD thy God giveth thee).

Jim Rogers.  Internet gambler, law office coffee boy, crowd-funding promoter, entrepreneur of sorts; your career has been as spotty as your educational background.  You love your mother so and also, I suspect, her and your "counselor" during the divorce proceedings, a "professional" who chewed you up emotionally while using you for her own purposes (you were only a boy after all in the thrall of a pretty lady, one who allegedly is still up to the same manipulative tricks recently with teenagers in other families being torn apart by divorce); I trust you are alive and I hope you are well.

Dan.  Keep hanging on to that relationship of yours, man.  There's nothing wrong with being a  salesman, youngest son, and following your achieving woman wherever she goes.  There's no problem with this in the short run at least; I think you are alive and I hope you are well.

Happy Birthday!

It was a Friday evening, and I was there on the sidewalk outside her (our) house, adhering to the sidewalk rule (if you go onto the porch and knock on the door, the police are likely to come sirening down the street 2 minutes later in response to a specious 9-11 call that you're enraged and breaking down the door), awaiting any action to my call to voicemail announcing that I was here to pick up my children for visitation pursuant to a longstanding court order.  Out of the gloam, their mother, Sharon, came down the cement stairs from the house to the sidewalk, with her date trailing behind, as is customary with her menfolk.

"What are you doing here?"  "I'm here to pick up my children for weekend visitation, because this is my time to be with them pursuant to the court order governing this, and I expect them to be here ready to go with me."

"Well, I made them ready to go with you but they refused to come out so you can leave."  In my opinion, she lied (again) because the house behind her was totally dark.

"Come on," she ordered to the man hanging back behind her, "let's go."  He came down the stairs upon her command and got into the driver's seat of the vehicle at the curb as she climbed into the passenger side while I retreated (in order to not present a "menacing" appearance; if you get divorced, this crap will become standard fare soon enough if the woman plays the female victim card as Sharon fallaciously did, and for long while she got the advance to go card) to the asphalt fifteen feet behind this vehicle.

I practically always carry a camera.  It was out, and charged, ready to snap a picture.

The vehicle came to life; it had twelve or more feet in front of it to put it out into the traffic lane going forward, unobstructed.  I was a State Trooper for seven years and I pay attention to these sort of details.

The back-up lights came on the vehicle and it roared backwards.  I was transfixed in place with fear as the 2-ton metal monster closed the distance to me rapidly.

 Well, the man killing machine didn't back over me, and the frightfully close steel behemoth was thrust back into drive at the last moment and driven away.  Hey birthday boy, what happened in the cab at that moment, if that was you dating this covert narcissist (in my opinion) that night, did you actually choose your own course finally at the last split-second, or did you just chicken out in your (perhaps commanded) aggression?

Half full?

I was running four and a half miles on the Mall at noontime last week with R and she was keeping me honest with 9:30 miles, the fastest I've run this year, when we ran by J, a friend and husband of a workmate.  It was great to see him out there jogging because last year he was in a serious car crash that put him in the ICU for a week and necesitated an operation and he's been involved in PT ever since, slowly regaining his health.

Then upon my return to the office I received an email from E, a friend and workmate who donated a kidney to his sister last month.  The operation went well, he reported, and his sister was better and he himself was up and about, taking long walks as he recovered.

Not so encouragingly, I took a call from a workmate who was going through a divorce after twenty years of marriage and guess what, his wife at mediation the day before had spent all day demanding sole legal custody and that he be restricted to seeing their two children, with whom he is heavily involved daily, to every other Saturday and Sunday and two hours on a weeknight once every two weeks.  Tens of thousands of dollars are draining from their small estate as he combats the outrageous default position in our domestic law system of Mother Knows Best. 

That morning I'd attended a funeral service for a workmate in her fifties who'd died unexpectedly during surgery the week before for her recently discoverd cancer.  Life is certainly a series of steps forward, and backwards.

Be Mine!

Happy Valentine's Day, Jimmy,
I would love to see you anon.
You're a victim of childhood's robbery,
Tis truly a current phenomenon.

I miss you always, Johnny,
My most straight and sober son.
The most like me, she once said,
Before she stole your childhood's fun.

I hope you are well, Danny,
You who were the one who would.
I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you,
From those who took your fragile childhood.

XXOO Dad.

 

(circa 1999)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dreams have been bothering me lately, waking me up out of a sound sleep and leaving me in a fitful state aching with sadness. What does it mean?

This morning my mother was in my house saying how in the present bad economic circumstances, no federal workers have left their jobs (I am a federal employee). My sister closest in age to me was expressing her disgust at this as she walked across my living room, when she accidentally stepped on my black lab retriever who was lying on the floor.

As was his wont when he found himself underfoot, Bert immediately jumped up seeking assurance. He found me and attached himself to me, wriggling his body furiously.

I noticed for the first time how this good ol' boy's black shiny coat was streaked with grey. The poor old fellow was finally showing his age.

It saddened me to see the physical manifestation of Bert's impending date with mortality. But my mom died before the millennium, my sister last visited me eight years ago, and Bert was a family member before my oldest son, who is in his twenties, was born.

Dogs don't live that long, do they? Yet my loving four-legged friend was pressing against my legs, moaning in his need for me to pet him.

Even in my nocturnal state I knew that dogs don't live to be twenty. In my befuddled state I remembered that Bert passed on before I left Colorado to attend law school in 1987.

This jarring dissonance caused me to wake up. I was not happy as I lay awake under my covers in my empty house, eyes pressed closed.

I wish these memories wouldn't come around anymore.

I've joined

I was dragged into the new century today because I had to add word moderation (requiring a word recognition pause) to the comment section of my blog. Sorry!

Anonymous was getting out of hand about his investment opps, "school" projects, Vegas fun, adult sites, conspiracy theories and more. I was deleting two or three of his "comments" a day.

I dislike censorship in any form, and I am chary of leaving my own comments on moderated comment sections (where the owner has to approve them first) and I find word recognition pauses to be time consuming and frustrating because I can't make out some of those bizarre, run together letter combinations. Oh well.

It's the world we live in, where nothing is free or innocent or fair or easy and system momentum seems to operate against purely "having fun." Live forever in hell with all the divorce lawyers, Anonymous.

No Bloody Good

I tried to give blood this morning. I'm on a quest to give 100 units in my lifetime, and I'm currently at 80. But my odyssey has slowed down recently because I get turned away sometimes now, deferred, as they politely say.

Not because I've done anything fun with my life like live in Europe or visit Africa or have wild sex or get body piercings. No, it's just because of my mundane elevated blood pressure.

Today my temperature was good, the blood droplet from my finger sank in the solution indicating I have good iron, but my upper BP reading was 190. Too high. They told me to relax (yeah, right), waited ten minutes and sure enough the upper reading was down. But now the lower reading was too high, having risen to above 110. They told me I could have another reading in 10 minutes but by rule, I had to leave the office first and come back. I just left.

I'm on medication for hypertension, which I attribute wholly to my exposure to Western divorce litigation, but I must have lost a bottle of pills because earlier this month, I was suddenly down to one or two pills. I went to Kaiser for a refill but I was turned away (deferred?) because I was too early--meaning I couldn't refill my 90-day supply because the pills I had already received should have lasted through January. The earliest I could receive a refill was on January 18th. I told the Kaiser pharmacist I'd lost those pills, apparently. She shrugged, offered me two pills (which would come out of the next order), and told me to come back on the 18th or else make an appointment with my doctor. It was the rule.

I asked her if she thought I was selling blood pressure pills on the black market. She just stared at me. Next time I guess I'll claim they were stolen, but they'll probably require a police report before issuing a refill. Of blood pressure pills. There's a lot of demand for those babies, you know.

All these "rules" are leaving me feeling so helpless and disgusted that I treated myself to a meal at McDonalds. I had two double cheeseburgers off of their dollar menu. That ought to help my b/p.

Better than a poke in the eye

To me, the situation outlined in my last post cries out why this obscenely affluent industrialized society needs to provide basic health care to its citizens. When I spin this true story out to my Republican friends (I have a few of those), they stare blankly at me and say they have health insurance and they're not going to support any initiative that raises their premiums by one bit. Their awesome selfishness is incomprehensible to me.

There's more to the story of my family member who has a life-threatening condition she contracted from unknowingly receiving tainted blood during a necessary medical procedure. She can't get health insurance because she is approaching 60 and is unable to find any job that offers benefits. Remember, she stayed at home to raise the children and when she was in her 50s, her husband divorced her and took his work-based health insurance with him.

Republicans (including blue-dog Democrats) inexplicibly paint the Public Option as some great evil. Private market-driven forces will cure all our ailments, they say. But when I consider the health insurance industry in this country, I think collusion, monopolistic tendencies, influence-peddling, lobbying, excessive profiteering, deceptive advertising, huge executive salaries and slavish devotion to the corporate bottom line.

HMOs were going to be the answer, private organizations that found economy through efficiency. My family member also contracted shingles in her eye and wasn't referred to a specialist by her HMO until it was too late. She had to see her doctor first to get a referral to a specialist approved and he was away etc. etc. etc. One corneal transplant later, she is going blind. Hers is a typical HMO horror story.

If you read my posts, you might know that I went through half a decade of bitter divorce litigation that cost me my children through Parental Alienation Syndrome, which some people consider to be child abuse. I used to commiserate with this family member about our ongoing divorces, which were occurring at about the same time. In the desperate search for sympathy common to persons enduring divorce prceedings, we used to rate each other on the misery index.

I would say to her, But at least you still have your children. She would say to me, But at least you still have your health.

That shut me up every time.

Roswell

I have a family member who contracted Hep-C from a blood transfusion she underwent when her oldest child was born, because she lost so much blood during delivery. In those days blood largely came from paid donors, including many drug addicts who sold their blood for ready cash so they could shoot up some more. For two decades afterwards she went undiagnosed although she told doctors that something was wrong with her. They merely labeled her a hypochondriac. Finally when she was in her 50s her condition was diagnosed correctly, her husband divorced her, she underwent a year of grueling chemotherapy and now, since she was a live-at-home Mom, she doesn't benefit from America's work-driven health insurance programs.

So now she has a pre-existing condition, which isn't her fault, and although she has dedicated her life since her divorce to getting a job with health insurance benefits, no employer who offers health insurance will hire her because she is approaching the age of 60. (This is the richest nation ever on earth.)

Her only practical option is to become a pauper so that when her house is gone and all her possessions are in her siblings' garages, the government can take her in and administer minimal health care to her that she can't otherwise afford til she dies.

Who in the world doesn't want the Public Option?

Information please

A few years back when I was in the throes of divorce litigation, whenever a child of mine reached majority, the divorce lawyers would negotiate a new child support order at a cost of many thousands of dollars. Each new order that got entered into the public record carried my full name, address, date of birth and social security number. When I balked at signing such a privacy-wrecking document, I was told that unless the order contained this information, the desk clerk wouldn't accept it for filing. Then I wouldn't "benefit" from having my child support payments reduced by about a hundred dollars per month. (It's not smart to spend thousands to save hundreds. That's part of the estate-wrecking "game" of divorce that dispirits men.)

In Virginia that has changed and now social security numbers are contained in another court document which is filed under seal. But there are states that are more backwards than Virginia.

I know a person who recently ordered a copy of a marriage certificate from another state, a public record readily available to anyone. It was an outrageous treasure trove of personal information.

It listed the full name of the man and woman, along with each one's date and place of birth, social security number, current address, status (divorced or not and what month and year), and full mother's and father's names and status (dead or alive). It listed the full name and address of each witness.

Unbelievable.

Contact

I was balancing my checkbook on line when an anomaly popped up on the electronic ledger. A check seriously out of sequence. A blast from the past.

The cashed check numbering sequence read 1244, 1247, 649, 1250, 1251. I clicked into number 649, and up on the screen popped a $100 check I had made out to my youngest child for his 18th birthday.

When my ex filed for divorce eight years ago, she and her coterie of divorce lawyers etc. gamed the American domestic law system to impose an emotional and financial calamity upon me from which I will never fully recover. I'd rather be subjected to the Taliban's imposition of Islamic Sharia than be a man subjected to the modern western divorce process.

I lost my kids through PAS and my estate, modest though it was, was eviscerated by her divorce lawyers in a feeding frenzy that ended only when they reduced it to a dry empty husk. That was long after I had become financially unable to seek any remedy in court for the ceaseless extra-judicial custodial deprivations that I suffered (and by extension, that my victimized children suffered).

Though none of my children has spoken to me in years, there on the electronic page was my youngest child, waving to me. More than two years old, the vintage check was cashed just a few days ago. I stared at the signature. It was his alright.

Hiya, Danny. Enjoy spending the C-note. (Right: A portrait of Dan done in 2001 by Pam Gordimer from an image of when he was about ten. Dan is a young man now and I doubt that I would recognize him anymore.)

The Conduit

Anyone who reads this blog knows that my last post was about my oldest child. He was an excellent boy who, however, needed firm guidance. After the divorce proceeding was initiated, in my opinion he no longer received that and became a victim of Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS"), which some regard as child abuse. On his twenty-first birthday he changed his name and passed out of my life.

I used to create brief write ups of the sundry athletic contributions of my three children, similar to my last posting. I would periodically present inscribed scrapbooks to my kids which I bound at Kinkos, containing the summaries along with photocopies of their pictures, compositions, art, medals, ribbons, certificates and awards.

During the divorce, teenaged Jimmy explained to me that these scrapbooks showed I was pathetically living vicariously through the athletic achievements of my children because I obviously had none of my own. I believe that this minor child came up with this adult notion through the counseling of the Licensed Clinical Social Worker ("LCSW") he was seeing at the time for school issues. She was also counseling his Mother, in my opinion an egregious conflict of interest.

The Court found that this Virginia-licensed LCSW "served as the conduit through which information relating to the divorce grounds and allegations are transmitted from the mother to the children," and barred the LCSW from testifying at the custody trial. She continued to "counsel" my child, though. In my opinion, PAS is achieved with the complicity of such "professionals," and children such as mine are thereby effectively and extra-judicially deprived of their fathers.

It's about over

It's been happening a lot lately.

I go in to donate blood, they take my blood pressure, whistle, and either thereupon wink, take my b/p manually ten minutes later and take my blood, or they take my b/p again ten minutes later as a courtesy and immediately usher me out the door. Depends on which Nurse Ratched is running the donation center that day.

Today the machine read 182/106. I knew that wasn't going to fly. The head nurse was perplexed though. She said, "I don't think the machine is reading right. It has your pulse too low. I don't think it got your pulse."

She said she'd take my b/p "manually" in ten minutes and I thought I was going to get a pass and be able to donate. You know, maybe a b/p of 160/99. The lower number cutoff, I have learned, is 100. So the second time, manually, it often comes in at 99. Amazing.

But this Nurse Ratched lied. She sent another nurse over in ten minutes to hook me up to the machine again.

I asked her if she had had a nice New Year's. "No," she said. I guess I looked crestfallen because then she offered that her favorite Uncle had died that day, of a massive heart attack. At age 37. Oh.

I don't think my numbers changed. This nurse was also curious about my anomalous pulse reading. She asked if I "bothered" to exercise.

"Sure," I said, miffed that I don't look buff. "I run 30 miles a week."

"Oh, I see. That explains your very low pulse. What's going on in the rest of your life?" She meant my sky-high b/p.

"You get divorced and see what happens to you," I said a little defensively. That's the two-second version of a four-hour epic.

"Haven't been there but I hear ya," she said as she showed me the door. I assured her on my way out that her chances of "being there" were one in two.

I think my silly, compulsive goal of donating blood 100 times is about over, stalled at 77. This is about the twelfth consecutive time that I have had a troublesome reading, and I've actually been declined about three of the last five times. It's not worth the gas to go to the blood center every eight weeks anymore. Looking around the center, you'd think they need the business though. All I saw in there this morning donating were a few old men. Nobody else is eligible, I guess. The list of exclusions is vast and daunting. And if they come up with anything that you have, they report you to the health department. Good luck getting health insurance ever again in our wonderful society then, Mr. or Ms. Good Samaritan.

Oh yeah, I'm on medication for it. Been on different meds for it for a few years now. But you know, every mediation has a side effect. That's a whole 'nother story. The current witches' brew gives me a dry rasping cough that bedevils me in racing. You can hear me a long way off in races. It really bothers me. The last mixture had a completely different, but worse, side effect.

I left the blood center feeling furtive, like I'd done something wrong. So it goes.

How I feel

On Thanksgiving morning, I called the only phone number I have for any of my three now-adult children who are thoroughly estranged from me due to my seven years of survival divorce litigation against my ex-wife (and them--she had them sue me as minors during the litigation, and they haven't spoken to me since the day "their" case got tossed). It was disconnected. So I drove by my ex's former house two miles away, the last address I have for them. I knocked on the door but received no answer. I could see through the barren porch window that the interior was empty and the house was being gutted.

I knew the ex had moved away, having remarried this summer. She has been hiding her new address from me and thereby any contact I might have with any of my children through her. I posit this for you: Have all of your children VANISH forever in the next moment, and see how you feel for the next half-decade.

So then I went to work the finish line at my club's 5-mile Turkey Trot in Alexandria,. Do-good work to generate a feel-good glow on a holiday. Later that day I went to a tofurkey dinner at my girlfriend's house that turned out to be a very short evening as she gave me my walking papers. I'd been with her for awhile. She's a non-runner and always resented this part of my separateness from her. Beyond that factual observation, I have nothing bad to say about her. I miss her.

This year just keeps getting more and more momentous.

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!

"The number you have dialed has been temporarily disconnected."

I have said that this has been a momentous year. While I was healing through the balm of the forgiveness which I embraced last winter, even going to church and whispering prayers that I would never contemplate Sharon again and that God would protect the well being of my boys even while He allowed me to get past them, things happened that roiled my emotions again.

So I related three painful little vignettes here from my interminable divorce, a horrible story relating to each of my three then-minor sons. Divorce is a barbaric proceeding in America and the pain of losing children to PAS is a raw open wound.

I almost always call Sharon's number on holidays to leave a message for my sons who are under 21. I ask them how they are doing in school, tell them that I would love to take them to lunch at a nearby restaurant, and say that I love them. Then I go to that restaurant at noon and order lunch for myself and one or two phantoms.

Seven years ago on Columbus Day, Dr. Victor Elion of Fairfax, a charlatan psychologist in my opinion, suspended my visitation over NOTHING, after Sharon called him to complain that I had brought one child back from visitation tired. I didn't see nor speak to any of my sons again for well over 90 days.

I won't bore you with all that went on during those incredible three months before a court finally heard the merits of this extra-judicial suspension and ordered visitation to resume immediately, but this is an extremely painful memory, even today. This period effectively killed my relationship with my children.

On Columbus Day 2008, I called Sharon's number to leave a message for my under-21 children. Her address in Arlington and this phone number are the ONLY links I have to my children in the whole WORLD. I still persist in calling them and writing them there although they never answer or return my calls, or communicate with me in any way.

A recording came on that said the number had been disconnected. I drove over there to knock on the door to ask for them. Sharon had moved. The house was empty. The for-sale sign out front said "Under Contract."

I always knew this day would arrive someday. I don't expect I'll ever have a way to reach any of my children again.

Help I'm Claustrophobic And Don't Know It!

My son was fidgeting. He kept asking if we were halfway there yet.

We were driving from DC to New York City in my extended cab pickup truck. We were going to stay with my brother for two nights, so we could see the city lights. We weren’t even out of Maryland yet.

I asked my child him why he kept asking if we were halfway there. He said, "Mom told me to call her when we were halfway to New York, so she could tell if anything was wrong."

I asked him what he meant.

This pre-teenager said, "Well, Mom said that she knows how you always overpack the car on trips and a pickup is small anyways. She said I might be claustrophobic and not even know it. So she told me to make sure I called her when we were halfway there, and she would be able to tell if I was alright or not."

He sounded a little scared. I reassured him as well as I could, while driving down the highway, that if he were to suddenly become claustrophobic, I would help him with it and we would deal with the situation together.

His Mother had filed for divorce a couple of months earlier, after taking our children from our home on a pretext and going to her parents house in another state with them. This was my first opportunity to spend over 24 hours with my child since then.

Making repeated, insidious suggestions to impressionable young children about potential frightening situations involving the other parent is a way that custodial parents perpetrate Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). It is effective over time at causing immature children to perceive the targeted parent as having flaws that could be dangerous, whether true or not. It can have an enervating and pernicious effect on the children and cause them to become alienated from the targeted parent by making them fearful of being with him. It is hard for the non-custodial parent, who typically has been allotted less than 20% of the children’s time, to overcome these constant, scary innuendos, especially since he is probably unaware that the children are uneasy about something (or, really, nothing).

In my case, I haven’t seen nor spoken meaningfully with this under-twenty young man since 2003. He hasn’t communicated with a single relative of mine during that five year period. Ditto for my two other children, both now of majority age. There are subtle mental-machination stories I could tell concerning each of them, too.

Some people claim that PAS is child abuse. Many people deny it exists. What I know (along with thousands of other American dads) is that PAS absolutely afflicts our western society. What I think is that it absolutely cripples children emotionally for life.

The Seven Years War

A Jewish friend, being more religious than I, tells me that the old and new testaments are full of seven year epochs. Plagues, wars, that sort of thing.

Sharon took our three kids out of the house for "spring break" in 2001 and they never came back. Having plunged the children into the middle of our troubles, she filed for divorce. The "children" sued me in 2002, with Sharon as their "best friend" on the papers because one child was too young to be a party. That suit was tossed in 2003 and none of my children has communicated with me since. They live two miles away.

It's called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), where one parent, usually the custodial one, turns the children totally against the target parent. It's a form of brain washing, and also child abuse, too. A hallmark of it is that children sometimes become litigants too. I don't care whether you believe it exists or not because I know it does. Me and thousands of other American dads know this fact.

Anyway, this has been a momentous year personally for me. My running has sucked but my restoration from the depths of despair over having my children "taken" from me really started this year.

I have never woken up one morning with it all "better." When I was a young man I believed that life was two steps forward and one step back. Now I believe that life is complicated. Both beliefs fit. It's a work constantly in progress.

It started with my trip out west in February to see family. For a week I drove around the high country in raging snowstorms visiting relatives. Uncle Harry in Durango who fought at both Battles of the Philippine Sea. Aunt Betty in Parachute who worked in the defense plants. A sister in Santa Fe who is an attorney. Another person who, enraged at a post of mine, asked to never be mentioned in a post again. So bid adieu to that person forevermore. Sorry!

That solitary white-knuckle driving allowed me plenty of time to think in between bouts of terror on snow-slickened two-lane no-guardrails shelf mountain-pass roads. I came up with the notion of forgiveness. Perhaps I saw or was introduced to the presence of God. Who knows?

Forgiveness is a Christian tenet, from what I gather. I guess it exists in other religions too. It has helped.

I forgave those awful people who participated in stripping my children away from me. I forgave my children, who sought to demolish me in court and who religiously took my money without ever uttering a word to me. No calls, thank-you notes, return messages or cards on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Father's Day, my birthday, their birthday, graduation day, no day no way, nope, nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero.

But this is 2008, seven years later. Seven years of heartbreak and heartache, of feeling depressed and unworthy of even familial love, of struggling to make ends meet financially amidst lifetime alimony and crushing child-support obligations. Things have happened this year. I'm going on travel for work in a few hours but more later.

More Shi**y Divorce Stuff

On the morning of Memorial Day, after the Falls Church 3K Fun Run, I paused at the local USMC Memorial Plaque on the town hall grounds to reflect upon all the sacrifices of the former Marines in my family (my father and uncle in WW2, and my brother in Beirut). Then I went home to get ready to attend dollar day at the minor league baseball stadium in Woodbridge. Plus I wanted to see what the boxes on my porch were that I had noticed when I ran by my house during the 3K race. I thought that maybe a pizza deliveryman had left four or five pizza pies there on Sunday night by mistake. Do you believe that during the race I considered whether I'd eat them?

I received a real surprise. Placed on my front porch, on Memorial Day, were four falling-apart, taped-at-the-corners boxes of old board games from the sixties, with partial contents inside. All related to warfare, three being American Heritage games representing the War of 1812 (Broadside), the Civil War (Battle Cry) and WW I (Dogfight). The fourth was based upon the sixties TV series Combat. On top of the stack was the Landmark Book Medal of Honor Winners. The Landmark Books were a series of illustrated history books written for children, mostly boys, in the fifties and sixties on obscure topics like The Winter at Valley Forge and Wild Bill Hickok Tames the West. I devoured them as a boy, and I have a full collection of them now.

There was no note. Just a stack of decrepit boxes placed upon my porch, secretly and anonymously, in a fashion (set near the front edge) that made it clear the delivery person had likely not set foot upon my porch.

The Landmark book was not mine. Three of the games were unfamiliar. They had all been acquired, apparently, by my former family when we were together. We used to go yardsaling and flea marketing a lot when we were on vacation in Maine during the late nineties. One box had a yardsale price sticker on it.

Then a half-decade of nuclear divorce litigation began, and in my opinion, my children became victims of PAS or parental alienation syndrome. This is where the custodial parent actively turns the malleable minor children against the other parent. The children view it as a form of support for the parent they spend most of their time with, and hence are most dependent upon. The domestic law courts are the great enablers of this very real tragedy. Research indicates that PAS has a devastating effect upon children for all of their lives. Some regard it as a form of child abuse. Others deny that it even exists.

My children haven't spoken with me, or anyone on my side of the family, for years even though I provide for full college tuition for them and they have residence a mere two miles away at their Mother's house. What do you think, is PAS real?

The fourth game, Dogfight, had been my family's when I was a boy. On the inside of the box, in my handwriting, was a log of a series of games I had played with my brother forty summers ago. Since he was eight and I was sixteen at the time, the score was 35 games to zero, mine. But I almost lost the last game. I still remember that he had several planes left to my one, so I had to take the 50-50 chance of flying through his AA batteries to destroy his fleet on the ground. Then I quit while I was ahead. Do you think I scarred him? My bad!

Obviously the boxes left on my porch came from my children's Mother's house in Arlington. From whom? Them? One of them? Her?

What did it mean? When half of you out there go through your divorces, you'll see how paranoid it makes you. Because it's an incredibly vicious free-for-all. It has no rules that anyone abides by, and the divorce lawyers rip and tear at the estate until it's an empty husk, whereupon they finally settle the damn thing. Feel free to email me if you would you like to know how I really feel.

The last thing my children or their agent ever left on my porch was a Motion for an Injunction. It was taped to my door, announcing that "they" had filed a "fiduciary" lawsuit against me during my divorce. Talk about piling on! I found it after work on a Friday. I had a grand weekend, and a really fun subsequent three years while it was being litigated and appealed.

The court later threw "their" petition out, finding after a full evidentiary hearing that it was a harassment suit, an unconscionable attempt by their Mother to interfere with my relationship with my minor children. It was appealed, of course. The appellate court found it was an unjustified appeal and socked her full court costs. But the matter was kept alive for years and that, my friends, is how PAS is done.

So I had concerns. My children haven't communicated a Christmas, Thanksgiving, Birthday, Fathers Day or Easter greeting to me in years. They haven't acknowledged a Christmas, birthday or graduation gift from me or anyone on my side of the family in years. They haven't responded to any offers to attend their graduations or take them to lunch or dinner. They have stonily ignored offers to take them to see David Beckham, any sporting event, or their cousin (on my side) who is a professional bull rider (he competed in an event in Virginia). What was the purpose of placing this pile of boxes silently upon my porch? My thoughts on this ranged far afield, from they're moving to they're dissing me by sending me war games on Memorial Day to they're thinking about me. Why no note or voice mail?

I asked two friends, a man and a woman, what they thought. The man said it wasn't nice; since there was no note I couldn't tell who it was from or what it signified. The woman merely said it was odd.

That's what the boxes on my porch were. More shi**y divorce stuff.