Books

I read only ten books last year, my lowest total in 35 years.  But on the positive side, I started reading classical literature after decades of reading mostly history books.  Here's how I would rank the half-score of books I read, in order of their importance to me.

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, published in serial form around 1861.

This is a fabulous book, all about Pip's coming of age and his ultimate change from an ungrateful and foppish dilettante into a worthwhile man.  Who could forget the aging yet frozen-in-time jilted bride, or the beautiful but cold and heartless Estella.  And there are two endings to choose from.

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, published in 1847.

The perfect love triangle, also a sort of ghost story, set on the unforgiving Scottish moors.  Heathcliff and Catherine are unforgettable and inseparable in both life and death.

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.

The novel depicts New York City's upper-crust society in the 1870s, exposing its sycophantic, seething and unseemly nature, plus it is a great revenge piece.  Wharton's well-deserved prize made her the first female recipient.

• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, published in 1954.

Cannery Row's sequel, this follow-up novel is a sweet rendition of the unforgettable new girl in town, Thursday.

• The Missing of the Somme by Jeffrey Dyer, published in 1994. 

A haunting evocation of the somber and reflective memories evinced by the many monuments and memorials populating the WWI battlefield at the Somme River, where in 1916 the flower of English manhood was slaughtered as it walked in straight lines into German guns.  An ethereal travel-guide.

• The Apostle: A Life of Paul by John Pollack written in 1972.

Everybody should know more about the life of St. Paul than the abridged version that is taught in bible class.  After all, he is at the center of Christian doctrine.

• The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 by Robert Citino, published in 2012.

The German will to carry on their barbaric war after it was obviously and irretrievably lost by 1943, and the tenacity and skill with which they did so, are astonishing.

• Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945 by Max Hastings, published in 2009.

This was a great man.  Utilizing his great oratory, he single-handedly propped up the British will and ability to resist.

• Hitler's War by Edwin Hoyt, published in 1988.

The Germans lost the war in this book too.

• Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899-1940 by Robert Citino, published in 2002.

Most people don't know anything about the series of post WWI Balkan Wars.  These conflicts were the petri dish where the form of war known as blitzkrieg, so successfully used by the Germans to conquer most of Europe by 1942, was developed.

Busy at Work

I haven't been keeping up with this blog because I was being kept busy at work.  You know, do more with less.

It is my opinion that becoming a sexagenarian makes a person a target for job removal.  It's illegal, it's age discrimination, but it is my opinion that it goes on all the time.

I believe that with any subtlety, it is easy to get rid of an older worker and replace him or her with a younger, cheaper, more technologically facile and harder-working person.  Experience, know-how, wisdom, the ability and willingness to mentor younger workers and institutional knowledge bleed away in torrential geysers in such occurrences though.

In my opinion, some managers improperly, deliberately and in collusion give a bogus rating to the older employee which is lower than anyone else in the heavily subjective annual review process, then set up a series of ridiculous tasks with artificial, unrealistic deadlines, demand completion of the most unimportant and least advanced tasks first, paper the situation with "confirming" emails, and wait for the employee to fail or be said to have furnished an  "unacceptable" product.  In my opinion, unless the manager is a complete ham-handed boob, the method is tried, true and unerringly applied by many ambitious modern managers who are a generation or more younger than the employees they are actively purging.

A Terrible Dream

I was dreaming about my 3 children again, estranged from me since the divorce 15 years ago, and the younger 2 were following me around, in their pre-teen forms, the same as the last time I had any association with them the year before their mother filed a stealth divorce petition after she took them out of town under false pretenses and refused to come back until I left the house (I "abandoned" it).  In my dream, although it has been 9 years since I have heard anything from any of them, and well over a decade since any Lamberton has had contact with them (typical PAS stuff), I had had a brief visitation with them shortly before that I remembered, feeding off a prior dream I had many months ago.

We were up on the local high school playing grounds.  I was walking slightly ahead of a tiny knot of little people and dogs, and Johnny and Danny were a small ways behind me.  I don't know where Jimmy, the oldest child, was, except that he was in the gym which we had just left to take a short walk outside.  We had rounded a corner around the bleachers and were headed back to the gym and the event inside it.

Somebody yelled out my name and hollered, "Run!"  As I looked up, I heard emergency klaxons sounding and the storm-tossed horizon above the gym was quickly filling up with fast approaching giant birds of prey, winging quickly towards the playing fields on a mission of destruction.  This was a deadly, imminent peril and people near the gym were running into it and safety.

I was 100 yards from the gym and I looked around behind me for my 2 children but all I saw behind me was a little dog.  The rest of the children had fled back behind the bleachers and, I supposed, were cowering underneath them, exposed to the depredations of the deadly claws of the giant birds.

If I ran straight for the gym I could make it there and get inside just before the predators arrived.  I was swept with indecision.  I knew I had to go back around the bleachers and find my children and try to protect and shield them from the death-dealing talons.  I stood rooted in my spot.  Already it was too late to get back to the gym.  My options were turning more and more fearsome for me.  I remembered the last visitation I'd had with my children a few months earlier, a short happy interlude.  But somehow, I argued with myself as the birds bore down on me, I know I haven't seen any child of mine in years.  I was remembering another dream within a horrible dream.

I forced myself to wake up rather than be destroyed by the airborne giant host as I ran to find my hiding  children.  As I lay in bed, in the darkness I could see dancing across the white ceiling a pattern of swiftly moving dark shapes, cast there by the dim light inside the display on my alarm clock,  projecting its customary blinking "12:00" because I never re-set it after the power last went out.  This was the source of the approaching birds of destruction filling the sky.

That was the worst dream I've had in several years,  I still remember it vividly days later.

When I'm 64

Happy belated 64th birthday to the mother of my three children. 

Although you are such an absolute, cunning master of PAS, so proficient at it that none of my children has spoken to me, or any blood kin of mine, in almost a decade, their wills overborne when they were minors, since your birthday fell on Easter Sunday this year, I wanted you to know that I have forgiven you.

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?"

W.B. Yeats wrote the above poetry quote.  Yesterday my oldest son, who I haven't seen or heard from since 2007, turned 30.

I was at the usual spot at noon on his birthday, The Lost Dog Cafe in Westover, for lunch.  As always, the empty chair showed up.

I ate a Rin Tin Tin personal pizza pie, leaving a slice, with a symbolic bite out of it, and drank most of my draft, then took a symbolic swallow out of Jimmy's, excuse me, Jim's, paid and left.  The pie and libation were good, the company was nonexistent.

Two years ago I encountered his mother on a public street and asked her if Jim was alive, well, married, had children, and where he lived.  Stony silence was her answer to these five indispensable questions any parent must know about their child, but this year I discovered her Twitter account and saw that she had invited him to address her first grade classroom last June on "Heroes Day," so as of eight months ago at least he was alive.

 

2015--A long backwards step.

2015 was a year for taking a step backwards.  It can be summed up best by saying in October I was 98.6% of the way to reaching a long-standing goal in my workplace's 401K plan, wherein I contribute $25,000 of my salary, after taxes, into a retirement fund and my employer puts in about $9,000 into it in "matching" money.  A mere 100 days later I am only 86% of the way there, having turned 2015 into a year where I paid Wall Street for the privilege of working for managers half my age who only care for themselves and their own furtherance.

Before the Decider wrecked the world economy and almost sent the country into a Depression, thereby pushing everybody's retirement five years further into the future, he said that he was going to spend the "political capital" he had earned in getting himself re-elected to a second term (by stealing his second election in a row--this time in Ohio) by privatizing Social Security.  I smelled a rat immediately.  Fortunately, like his "Mission Accomplishment" statement, his words were overmatched by reality and this scheme to allow Wall Street access to the Social Security trust fund, a huge pot of money, never actually happened.  America's safety net for retirees, the lifeline of Social Security, remains fully intact.

And what about Paul Ryan's notion that we should all just work till we're 70?  Workers get pushed out of their jobs beginning in their 60's, and that liar (what about his phony sub-three hour marathon boast?), born with a silver spoon in his mouth, should go out without his inherited advantages and millions and get a real job and work it till he's 70.

So another year of drudgery starts as I slide into my mid-60s and I return to a workplace rife with management by bullying and unbridled and unabashed arrogance exuding from these chosen, privileged and all-knowing millennials, having lost another 6% of my retirement money this first week alone.  Stick a fork in . . .  .

So Predictable

My phone rang tonight; it was a friend (who actually reads this blog) saying she was sorry that my middle son Johnny didn't show up at my annual ritual of having lunch on his birthday at a restaurant near where he grew up, for the tenth year in a row.  A full decade with no communication whatsoever with the lad; yeah, PAS sucks.  (Johnny, on the far right in 2001.)

It was nice of my friend to be concerned, she was thinking I'd be feeling low, but actually…I'm not.  He's 28, he makes his choices, and I'm past pining away because my kids are not a part of my life.  (A Rin Tin Tin pie for two.)

Johnny, I loved you, and I love you.  I hope you are well, although I would have no idea about that.  (My solitary lunch done, I took a swallow out of Johnny's beer, symbolically and actually, and took the other half of the pizza home for breakfast.)

Johnny, I'm glad that you were able to attend VCU for eight semesters totally on my dime (I provided for full tuition and fees at your request), and I thank you for the invitation to your graduation (I'm being sarcastic, son).  I do believe that what goes around comes around.  (Once so innocent, you proved to be susceptible as a minor to adult predators and joined in with your mother in trying to bury me through a phony "fiduciary" suit which got thrown out as "unconscionable" and a "harassment petition," with sanctions and my full costs imposed after years of litigation reaching all the way to the state supreme court.)