You say it's your birthday...

I had a birthday earlier and it was a most unusual affair.  I didn't enjoy the company of anyone else in person, and except for the morning stroll to the head of my driveway to pick up my morning Washington Post, I didn't leave my house the entire day.

After a desultory morning during which I enjoyed my usual two cups of coffee and watched the news about how dire our current situation and how endless were our dismal prospects for escaping our self-imposed and self-dealt quarantine (no tests), I had my "party" at noon by making myself and enjoying a special sandwich made of braunschweiger, a liverwurst pate, and mayonnaise seasoned liberally with coarse ground pepper and sea salt.  It was a glorious party, like something out of the Mad Hatter's realm, although during the day I did have several phone calls from relatives and friends wishing me a happy birthday, with more than one refrain of Happy Birthday sung to me over the phone.

That was it, happy birthday to you, cha-cha-cha as the Beatles song goes.

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too, yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you

I want to thank my sisters, my girlfriend, and my other friends who called for their well wishes and good cheer as I hurtle towards my seventies.  And as I approach sooner rather than later my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil, I'm also so glad that I fostered three children (now adults) and wiped their bottoms and drove them to school and helped with their homework and coached them in soccer (bleh) all those years and provided for payment of full tuition and fees for college and during this deadly pandemic, they have expressed nary a word of concern or care about how I am, as always.

Reflections

Last week I had lunch at my favorite local pizzeria, the Lost Dog Cafe.  Being a weekday, the premises weren't crowded and I settled into a booth by the windows where I could observe the world going by outside as I sipped my Port City German Pilsner Lager draft and waited for my pizza to arrive.

The pizza was a delicious Italian Pie, made of pasta sauce, cheeses and genoa ham and other cold-cut meats.  I ate much of it but as usual, left some behind as a portend of better luck next time.  Perhaps one of these birthday or  holiday celebratory lunches I'll have a visitor or two or three to share my meal with.

Or not.  After an idle hour enjoying my repast, I paid and left, wandering down the street to amble through the Italian Store, a bustling community hub of Westover, chock-filled with Italian foodstuffs including pizza by the slice, starting at $2.29 for a three-cheese slice.

It was an idyllic, unusually warm midday, with echoes from the now-distant past tugging at forward-looking determinations for the future as I face up to the new decade and my passage in a few short years into being a septuagenarian.  I was bemoaning over the phone recently with a divorced friend of mine from childhood who lives alone, childless because he, like me (threefold in my case), lost his only child many years ago to the pernicious scourge of Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS"), a very real phenomenon in Western culture where usually the mother, typically the primary caregiver as granted by our shortsighted and lazy Mother-knows-best domestic-law courts, brainwashes through grotesque manipulation the impressionable minor children into lifelong patricide.  A message to my sons, all now well over thirty, I still get pieces of mail occasionally for you here at my house, please make arrangements to pick up your stuff by the end of this month or I am likely to dispose of it all, including your 30-year first-year boxes.

Dirty tricks

Divorce Dirty Tricks 101, as practiced by an expert:

Send the children out for their every-other weekend visitation without their daily prescription medication, so the father will have to utilize his lawyer at $300/hour to schedule a hearing two months later to resolve the issue of the mother not providing him with adequate, or any, prescribed pills for the children, making sure to write a letter on the last visitation Friday before the hearing which describes how she has (just) provided him with said medication (after a month and a half of not doing so) so that he can cancel the hearing which has cost him thousands already.

When under a duty to let the father know where the children are at all times, by either communication in person or by phone or in necessary circumstances, by written communication, mail a letter while leaving town after school on Friday, describing where the children will be during a three-day holiday weekend, using a nearby pre-scouted mailbox that the Post Office picks up from at 11a.m. on M-F but not on weekends or holidays, so that the children can see how cooperative she is but which written communication will get to him the following Wednesday at the earliest, days after the children are already back in town.

When the father calls on his cell phone (never answer his calls of course) and leaves a voice-mail asking if the mother would bring to him the spare key she has to the jointly owned pickup he uses (while she is exclusively using the far-more comfortable family van) because he has accidentally locked his key in the vehicle while miles from home, put the children in the car so they can see how cooperative and kind she is and leave the key in his mailbox but don't tell him it is there, so he can find it days later after considerable expenditure in time and money to get a second key already.

When the mother's lawyer tells the father's lawyer how she doesn't have enough money at hand to provide for the children for the following week, and he gratuitously brings over two $500 money orders and leaves them inside a padded envelope taped to her top porch stair so she is sure to see it when she returns home (as well as leaving her a VM), and as he sees the envelope flapping in the wind, he puts a skipping stone inside the envelope to weigh it down so it won't blow away, spend the next year of litigation writing in practically every motion how the father has menacingly sent her rocks in the mail.

Send the children out in their stockinged feet and shirtsleeves for their court-ordered visitation when their father arrives on a cold winter Friday afternoon to announce by a well-practiced refrain that "Mom sent us out ready to go with you but we don't want to, so we're not coming," whereupon they scamper, like skipping, jolly little elves, back into her house and shut the door.

Don't tell the father about a gasoline and matches episode in a park involving one of the children while under her care, and, I suppose, the police, and when the father lights a couple of hand-held sparklers in the driveway with said child on the Fourth of July, have her unscrupulous-at-best divorce lawyer William Reichhardt of Fairfax bring this sparkler "incident" to the attention of the court at a subsequent hearing as an example of how unfit as a parent the father is in light of the prior incendiary issue in the park (unknown to him till that moment in the courtroom).

Send the children to several undisclosed psychologists (which is contrary to the prevailing custody order), at least one of whom was subsequently disciplined or maybe disbarred for general incompetence, until one finally had to report to the GAL that one of the children, in my opinion the child most vulnerable and put-upon for these suggestive get-dirt-on-dad attempts, had expressed violent ideation against himself, his father, or both if he had to go on visitation pursuant to the plain-vanilla court-ordered schedule.  This abuse of this susceptible tender child breaks my heart even now.

Withdraw a child who is a special ed student from his public high school during the summer and send him to an out-of-state boarding school that fall which the father only learns about when he arrives in September at the public school for a long-scheduled IEP meeting which, unbeknownst to him till that moment, has long been cancelled by the school as no longer being necessary.

Shall I go on?  Even a decade and a half later, my heart practically seizes up at these rending memories, and there are several even worse examples of despicable, unconscionable adult behavior in my opinion that went into brainwashing these now-adult children who haven't spoken to their father or any member of his bloodline in over a decade. 

But congratulations on achieving full retirement age, Sharon!  (BTW, how are our kids?  And their kids?)

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.

And More Happy Happy

It's a new dawn… Happy birthday to my oldest, who will be closing out his twenties soon.  (A hat-trick striker with the McLean Sting, below, and also the FYPC Lightning.  But then again his agenda-driven "counselor" when he was a youth, who was his Mother's "counselor" as well, convinced him that I was living my life vicariously through his athletic achievements.  In my opinion, she was and is full of pure crap.)

I haven't spoken to him since 2007, nor seen him since perhaps 2005, but hope springs eternal.  I read an article about him, relating to a project on Kickstarter, in November, so at least I know he's alive.  His Mother, a public school teacher, stonily refuses to tell me anything at all about him or my 2 other sons.  (He's the one on the right, below, I think, although this article describes him as the one on the left.)

He lives, I surmise, either with his Mother a couple of miles away or else somewhere else in Arlington, the next town over.  Yesterday I sent a birthday greeting card to him care of his Mother's address asking him to call me about the VA prepaid tuition plan I am the owner of, and so I can relay some important family news. Perhaps this will be the year… .  (The collage below featuring our first-born is circa 1987.)

At noon today I'll be having lunch at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover, Jim.  (Happier times, before the "experts" who prey on divorce situations as they suck the Estate dry and drive their own agendas got involved.)

Happy Happy

One of my favorite memories from law school is a party some students in my small section threw at their townhouse to celebrate the end of our three years of study.  I was an oddity in my small section in that I was older than everyone else in the section and I had three kids already.

Two of my children, four year old Jimmy and two year old Johnny, were there with me enjoying the party and I was keeping an eye on them in the hub-bub.  There was a keg of beer out back in a little enclosed outdoor patio and everyone was festive at the conclusion of our last finals week.

Once when I hadn't seen either of my two kids in a minute or two, I got up to look for them as any dad would do.  There weren't any stairs in the townhouse and they couldn't get out of the premises so I wasn't overly worried about them.

I found them soon enough, out back in the momentarily deserted back patio.  They had obviously been watching the comings and goings of everyone and observing the frequency with which my friends had been going out the back door to get a cup of beer.

They had waited for their chance and when the coast was clear, the two of them had gone out into the little fenced-in space to do what the adults did.  As I went outside, I saw that Jimmy was furiously pumping the keg and Johnny, as directed by his older brother, was dutifully holding a plastic cup in his chubby little fists under the dispensing hose, waiting for the golden elixir that everyone was enjoying so much to appear.

The only problem was that Jimmy didn't know how to push the dispensing lever on the outlet to allow the beer to flow after being pumped.  But amidst Jimmy's hurried whispering to Johnny to hold the cup more steady and the older boy's frenzied pumping, they were certainly trying to imitate the big people.

Happy Birthday Johnny.  I love you.

Seventy Times Seven

Happy Birthday, oldest son.  Now in your late twenties, I trust you are alive, I hope you are well, and I wish you happiness.  Call me about the VA Pre-Paid Tuition Plan, which will be forcibly dissolved by the state this year if it's not used.

Then came Peter to him, and said,  Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me , and I forgive him? till seven times?  Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.  Matthew 18:21-22.

Happy Birthday, Johnny. I feel like I hardly knew ye.

ca 1999.

Happy Birthday Kate

It's my sister's birthday.  Happy happy!

Huntington Park, Columbus Ohio, August 2010

The Choice

"You take the baby and the toddler and go to Pottery Barn and I and the three year old will catch up with you there when we're done here," she said.  Thinking he understood his wife's thinking, the father carried the baby and escorted the toddler by the hand across the busy divided four-lane highway when the light was right and started for the mega-store entrance with the two children firmly in his charge.

Because the father, now a law student, wasn't too far removed from police work, he could sense that something was wrong and he looked back.  The mother had told the little boy to "wait here" on the sidewalk on the far side of the busy roadway for daddy to return for him while she headed a short way away to retrieve the nearby vacant stroller.  A potentially deadly error in judgment, she should have brought the boy with her that thirty feet, tired though he was.

The boy immediately wandered into the road to go to daddy, with swift traffic bearing down upon him in the two lanes he was crossing with two further lanes of rushing cars separating him from his daddy.  The dad, carrying a baby and holding a toddler by the hand, was appalled by the developing situation but he quickly ran through his options.  The boy would certainly get killed if he wasn't immediately rescued.

If the father set the baby down and let go of the toddler and left him on the sidewalk and ran across the street, he might get killed himself in traffic but he also might somehow save the boy.  This was worth the risk to him.

But it was likely that he would be struck in traffic as he ran across four lanes of traffic and killed or incapacitated and the boy would be killed anyway too, but also that the toddler would likely follow his father into the street and be killed as well.  Three deaths instead of two or one.

The father looked at the little boy in the roadway, kept holding the baby and gripped the toddler's hand tight.  He had made his choice, to trade one life for two or three.  It was agonizing to choose to allow one child to die as he watched the onrushing band of Chevys and Fords bear down on the oblivious boy, and he would trade his life for a hopeless attempt at rescue, but he couldn't trade the highly probable death of the toddler, now safe, for that boy's life with the possible harm to the baby as well if he abandoned them in a long-shot gamble to dart across four lanes of rushing traffic in a rescue attempt.

His former life flowed into this moment as he declined to act, no matter how hopelessly, and a future life of permanent grief stood beckoning him as he watched death come for his oldest child.  He was incredibly sad but resigned in that moment of terrible conscious choice.

Then providence intervened.  The drivers in each foremost car in the two far lanes saw the little boy in the roadway in time and stopped dead on the busy highway, jamming up the honking traffic behind them.  The mother swiftly returned from her ill-chosen task and fetched the child.  In a happy jumbled rush of emotional relief the father's former life returned to him, at least for another dozen years before he permanently lost all three of his children to spousally-induced estrangement during the divorce.

Happy 61st birthday, Sharon.  How are Jimmy, Johnny and Danny?

Free at last!

In a few days it'll be my youngest child's birthday.  He's in his mid-twenties and I haven't seen him since he was fourteen, even though I provided for payment of 100% of his college tuition and fees. 

I do know he went to an in-state school; otherwise I have no idea where or how he is, as his Mother, who works as a first-grade school teacher less than a mile away from my house (on my local "hill" running route), refuses to provide me with any information whatsoever about him.  Divorce in Western society, which tolerates and enables the purposeful overbearing of the will of children by the most wickedly scheming parent, is absolutely unbelievable.

On Danny's birthday I'll have dinner at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover in Arlington, Virginia starting at 8 pm and I invite any of my sons to join me.  We could start catching up on the lost last decade. 

For Danny I'm bringing along a book I recently read, Night by Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  It's a chilling tale about a boy and his father, two Jews amidst the holocaust, each of whom is struggling to survive overwhelming societal forces.

"All around me, there was silence now, broken only by moaning.  In front of the block, the SS were giving orders.  An officer passed between the bunks.  My father was pleading:  'My son, water...I'm burning up...my insides...'
'Silence over there!' barked the officer.
'Eliezer,' continued my father.  'Water...'
The officer came closer and shouted to him to be silent.  But my father did not hear.  He continued to call me.  The officer wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head. 
I didn't move.  I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head.  My father groaned once more, I heard:  'Eliezer...'
I could see that he was still breathing--in gasps.  I didn't move."

The son's broken father was taken away that night, to the crematorium.

"No prayers were said over his tomb.  No candle lit in his memory.  His last word had been my name.  He had called out to me and I had not answered. 
I did not weep, and it pained me that I did not weep.  But I was out of tears.  And deep inside of me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like:  Free at last!..."

Have a happy birthday Danny, and I hope to see you then.

Happy happy, Jim.

My mother, who died in 1999, once observed that the birthdays in my house came fast and furious.  She always sent presents for my three sons, of course, and on the heels of a bountiful Christmas she laid in birthday presents for the middle child in January and the oldest and youngest in February.  None of the three lads has spoken to a Lamberton relative  since 2003 because of the divorce--that's a hallmark of the Western phenomenon called Parental Alienation Syndrome, or PAS.

Half a century ago, long before such unnaturalness was visited upon our society by "advanced" thought about the role and voice of genders in our familes, I read a book I received from my parents called Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody.  It was about a lad growing up on a hardscrabble ranch just outside Denver around the turn of the last century, a boy who came to appreciate his ailing father as his dad, a fount of wisdom, capability and morality, approached the end of his life.

I never forgot the scene near the end where the boy's father died. "Father looked so bad it frightened me when I went into the room.  I couldn't think of a thing to say, and I guess Father was so sick he couldn't either.  I had found a coil of inch rope [on my walk].  I could only think to tell Father about the rope.  He raised his hand up a little, and I took it.  His voice was almost a whisper, and he said, 'You take care of it, partner, you may need it.'  That was the last thing I ever heard him say."

That boy's parting from his father always haunted me all my life.  I was there when my ailing father died in 1986, and I could only think to say to him as he breathed his last, "God bless you, Dad."  That was the last thing he ever heard me say.

I read Little Britches again last year and remain haunted still at the thought of a father passing and a son not being able to think of a thing to say beyond, "Look at the rope I found," or "God bless you, Dad." 

My oldest son, who enters his late twenties on his birthday next week, hasn't spoken to me since the day the superstar quarterback Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl.  Since then Peyton's little brother Eli Manning has won two Super Bowls.  I no longer use this blog to invite Jimmy to join me for lunch at a restaurant on his birthday, or Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or Easter, or July 4th or Memorial Day ... you get the idea.  Jimmy was a minor. a mere child, when his will was overborne by the grotesque manipulations of his Mother and her coterie of "professionals" and he ceased communicating with me or any of my relatives, but now he is a fully mature adult (I have to suppose).

Jimmy knows where I live, at least for the foreseeable future (he pointedly dropped in to see a neighbor, but not me, a few years ago), and my work number hasn't changed in over two decades (just call the FTC and ask for me).  He can contact me if he wants.

I'm placing my copy of Little Britches in Jimmy's box in the basement for him.  Happy birthday, son.  I love you and wish you a long and happy life.

Where Black is the Color and None is the Number

Youngest son, I hope to see you at 8 pm on your birthday at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover for dinner. I miss you, I love you and I want to be a part of your life.

Just as I miss my middle son, and my oldest son, and love them and want to be a part of their lives. You both know how to get in touch with me, as I live in the house where you all grew up in, my work number and residential numbers are listed and my email address is my first and last name, no space, @yahoo.com.

I hope to see you there then.

Happy New Year! Johnny, it's been years since I've heard from you, please join me for dinner on your birthday later this week at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover at 8 pm and we'll start the lifelong task of catching up again as father and son. I'll be there then, I hope to see you!

Happy Birthday, Dad!

James Wilson Lamberton, lawyer; b. Winona, MN, [mid-1920s]; Henry M. & Gretchen (Leicht) L.; m. Barbara Ann [maiden name]; children: [six]. A.B. magna cum laude, Carleton Coll. 1949; J.D. Yale U. 1952. Bar: D.C. 1952, N.Y. 1960, U.S. Supreme Ct. 1963. Assoc. firm Clearly [sic], Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, N.Y.C. 1953-62; ptnr. Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, N.Y.C. 1963-1982, ret. ptnr., 1982--; dir. Western Union Corp., Western Union Telegraph Co. Bd. dirs. S.I. Mental Health Soc., 1965-1973, Community Action for Legal Services, N.Y.C. 1968-74, Carleton Coll. Alumni Bd., 1981--; chmn. devel. com. Carleton Coll. Alumni Bd., 1982--. Mem. ABA, N.Y. County Lawyers Assn. (dir. 1973-82, pres. 1981-82). Clubs: Yale (N.Y.C.); Nantucket Yacht. Home: POB Santa Fe NM 87504-8366

Source: Who's Who in America, 43rd edition 1984-85 (Published by Maquis Who's Who).

Happy birthday, Dad. There's a lot that didn't make it into the book, like your wartime service with the First Marine Division, and those two month-long summer "vacations" you spent in 1963 (Jackson, MS) & 1964 (Gainesville, FL) volunteering your services in the civil rights movement. I'm glad that you were able to hold at least one of my three sons (the one named after you, even though he has since changed his name) in your strong hands before you passed on at too early an age when you were 61 years young.

A Birthday Wish

I want to wish my old friend a happy birthday and express my thanks, and say good luck in the future because you will need it, I'm sorry to say.

He's over there.

"Are you Jimmy?"

The burly fullback on the South Arlington team had strode into the center circle and asked this of the skinny centerforward as the suburban house soccer team was about to kick off.

"No, that's Jimmy over there," said the centerforward, pointing to the right wing.

The fullback ran over to stand in front of the wing. The referee blew his whistle to start the second half and the fullback grabbed the wing and held him, preventing him from getting off the line. Meanwhile the centerforward tapped the ball to a teammate and received it back in full stride.

The South Arlington team knew the suburban team had one excellent athletic player who usually pitched a shutout in goal the first half and then came into the field in the second half to try to score. The suburban team had won a few 1-0 games with this very fast player named Jimmy scoring all of his team's goals so far.

While the fullback wrestled with the wing on the pitch behind him, the centerforward swiftly took the ball through the midfielders with long dribbles. He streaked into the box, getting past the sweeper with a scintillating fake. The sweeper received no help from the fullback, who was occupied with the wing thirty yards behind the play.

The centerforward was ten yards from the goal now in open space, moving rapidly with short dribbles. Suddenly his right foot flashed forward and he shot the ball past the flat-footed goalie, scoring the only goal in the game like he'd done a few other times that season.

Happy Belated Birthday, Jimmy. I witnessed this classic escapade.

Dad, I hardly knew ye

Happy birthday, Dad. Winona born, Lawrenceville class of '42 (Raymond), WWII vet (Fifth Marines, Peleliu at age 19, Okinawa at age 20, post-war duty in China), Carleton grad, Yale Law School, husband for 43 years, father of six, ethical and activist lawyer. I have missed you ever since 1986 when I was a mere pup of 34 and you were only 61.

Happy Birthday, Dad

My father was born on this day during the roaring twenties. I was present when he died in 1986 after a courageous battle with lung cancer. I remember my mother standing over him weeping quietly, my brother sitting next to him with a long, set face, and my father obviously choosing that exact moment to leave us because it was time.

He was the most influential person in my life. Father, husband, lawyer, scholar, soldier, leader, doer, ethical man.

He just got things done with no fanfare. In WW2 he was a radioman in the Marines. At the battle of Okinawa he was atop a ridgeline during a torrential downpour when his aerial was struck by lightning.

This was one of the few war stories he ever told, none of which involved "combat." It came up in relation to another family member's description of a close encounter with lightning.

He said he was alone on a hilltop transmitting in the rain when suddenly there was a brilliant flash and a terrific sound. He was dazed and looked down to see sparks shooting from his fingertips. Then it got quiet and he realized that a lightning bolt had struck his extended antenna.

That was all he said about it but I asked him what he did next. I had visions of the forties equivalent of dialing 911 to get medical attention there fast, at least to look him over.

He said, "Oh, I got up, ambled around for a minute, decided I was okay and so I went back to transmitting."

Those were the days. That's the type of man he was. That's how he spoke. He was a hero to me.

Wassup Johnny, or Father Figure

My middle child Johnny was born while I was in my first semester of law school in Charlottesville. Since I was embarking upon a second career, I was the oldest student in my small section, by a lot. I became a hit at our small section parties because I would attend for a couple of hours, bringing the baby to give my wife a break, and then go home. My presence enabled the younger students to "practice" at having children. They'd hold the baby for awhile, beaming, and then hand him back to me when he turned fussy. There's nothing better than playing with babies and being able to unload them as soon as they start to fidget. Just ask any grandparent. (No, I'm not that old.)

The song that was being played endlessly on popular radio while we were busy with newborn Johnny was Father Figure by George Michael. It's a fine song all right, but the real reason it is listed in my Favorite Music section is because whenever I hear the lush and beseeching tune, I think of Johnny, who I haven't spoken with in two years nor seen in four. (Johnny a long time ago.)

What a fine boy Johnny was! Somber, industrious, responsible, determined, stubborn in a good sense, very intelligent, an award-winning science team member and a crafty and analytical sweeper on his select soccer team. I know from providing full tuition that he attends college in Richmond. Wassup Johnny? And happy birthday!


I will be the one who loves you til the end of time.