The Dog Days . . .

What do I do in semi-lockdown when I'm not witnessing the demise of our formerly great democracy live on cable news every day?  I used to walk three times a week for three or four miles but now it s too hot for that.  Besides, I still don't feel right from the virulent respiratory ailment I had the last half of February, and my spells of shortness of breath come and go (with, fortunately, no accompanying debilitating cough as happened in February) and the past few days, I'm in a short period.

I have thrown over Facebook posting, which I formerly did once a day, for the month of July in protest of the unAmerican posture of its founder and Chief Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who wittingly or unwittingly allowed the Russkies to throw our close 2016 election to Putin's Puppet by spreading misinformation and verifiably untrue bot posts (but fully believed by Trump's cult followers--like the Pizzagate conspiracy nonsense which brought an armed gunman into the Comet Pizzeria in the District looking for supposed children sex slaves kept in the basement there (no basement) by Hillary Rodham-Clinton) on Zuckerberg's platform.  He still won't fix the problem dangerous conspiracy theories flourishing on his platform, hiding behind the First Amendment while both our democracy and greatness goes down the drain.  Perhaps I'll go back in August, or perhaps not.

I haven't even been to Westover, a flourishing two-block commercial area, with free parking, only four miles away in Arlington that has plenty of free parking, a library, an old-style hardware store and several popular restaurants with outdoor seating, not even to return a library book I took put in early March.  A friend comes over once a week and we have bagels on my porch, or perhaps a pizza or a salad on my porch along with some appropriate beverage.   She started throwing small balls of bagel dough to the birds who cluster in my yard and make a godawful racket all day long; now they're all my "friends" and even come up onto the porch looking for scraps whenever I am out there.

I nap sometimes in my bedroom as it is the only relatively cool place in the house because it has a decrepit window A/C unit, and I retire there to read while lying on the bad.  Daytime dreams are different from nighttime dreams which often are nightmares, and I dreamed recently of my middle child (seen below at age two, now the lad is in his thirties) that he had stopped by my house recently.  As I haven't heard from the lad in a decade and a half, ever since he wrote to me and asked me to provide for payment of his full tuition and fees at his four-year university, which I did gladly; but his silence since then indicates his otherwise loathing for me and all Lambertons, who he hasn't contacted in two decades; I guess that was a teasing, taunting daymare.

490

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 to thee, unto seven times; but, Until seventy times seven. Matthew 18: 21-22.

Mine honor is my life; both grow in one; Take honor from me, and my life is done.  Richard II, Act 1.

Johnny, I Hardly Know You

My sweet middle boy, John Henry Lamberton, or Johnny, at age 1 1/2 on Nantucket at a photo shoot paid for by his grandmother, my mother. This boy, a victim as a tender minor of the form of child abuse known as Parental Alienation Syndrome perpetrated by his mother and her mercenary coterie of "professionals" here in NoVa during the Divorce, has not communicated with me in 14 years or any Lamberton in 18 years, a classic hallmark of PAS. He has a birthday this month; Johnny, if you are alive and well (your mother stonily refused to answer those questions about your condition put to her by me when I last saw her in a public venue about four years ago), know that on your birthday I'll be at the Lost Dog in Westover for lunch, come and we'll start our lifetime going forward, a boy (now adult) and his dad, one day at a time.

A new year

I started off the new decade with a run in the morning.  Then later I went out for lunch at a nearby pizzeria.

I ordered a draft and a Greek Pie pizza.  It arrived with plenty for anyone and everyone to eat.

The pie was a delicious combination of homemade pizza sauce, sliced tomatoes, feta cheese, olives, onion and spinach and I had soon enjoyed some slices.  Leaving some leftover fare behind as a talisman for my next visit for lunch, I paid the bill and left.

One of my now-fully mature sons has a birthday later this month.  See you there then, son (hahaha)?

Returning home... .

I spotted it yesterday in the dirt along the edge of the driveway, a small green glint in the broken particles of asphalt, small pebbles and loose earth over by the fence. A little plastic green army man brought out of the compacted dirt by the recent hard rain, returning home after being absent for two decades, buried out of sight but not out of mind.

These toys have returned home before, about a dozen over the years since my middle child Johnny, now in his thirties, put away his toy soldiers as he grew into an adolescent and ceased having backyard battles with these tiny warriors arrayed in long battle lines of good versus evil. I haven't seen Johnny since he was 16 nor  heard from him since he was 18 and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his college tuition and fees, which I did. (No, no letter of thanks afterwards nor any invitation to his graduation.)

Whenever one of these soldiers returns, I feel a tug at my heart and lament the extrajudicial and apparently permanent loss of any natural affection for his father by this somber, serious and very smart boy, who loves his mother so and had his will overborne as an impressionable adolescent by her and her coterie of "professionals" through the pernicious application of PAS. I took the broken little man upstairs to the bedroom Johnny used to occupy and laid it on the shelf next to the other broken soldiers who have also returned home.

Someday, maybe, Johnny'll come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. Till then, or if never, I'll have to assuage my continuing grief with these sudden reminders of his and his brothers' presence still in the yard, where he and his brothers used to play, and wish him and them all the best.

I hardly knew ye, Johnny... . Good luck to you!

My middle child has a birthday this month.  Happy Birthday, Johnny.

The last time I saw Johnny was when he was about sixteen.  Now he's in his thirties.

The child-parent estrangement phenomenon, prevalent almost exclusively in the West, is called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), where one parent, most often the woman, abuses a child by overbearing his or her will as a tender-minded minor, in effect brainwashing him or her against the other parent, and it typically comes to the forefront during a divorce where the manipulating parent suborns the will of a young child for her own short-term benefit (although the effects can, as in the case of Johnny, last decades or forever), abetted by her superior custodial grant of time alone with the child thanks to our mother-knows-best inclined domestic law courts (in my case, I had Johnny and his sibling 19% of the time versus 81% of the time granted to their mother).  My divorce from Sharon Rogers Lightbourne was a doozy, lasting about half a decade and costing me at least a quarter-million dollars, my entire legacy (the litigation stopped only when there was no longer any money her unholy battery of divorce lawyers could rip and tear from my eviscerated estate) and although I still mourn the extrajudicial loss of my three children to this, in my opinion, to this covert narcissist, I don't rue one bit getting free of this woman who is, in my opinion, a totally self-centered, deviously manipulative and deceptively controlling adult female who preys upon innocent children along with her coterie of paid mercenary "professionals" to ruin their lives in pursuit of her selfish goals.

The last time I had any communication from the lad was when he wrote to me upon his graduation from high school asking me to provide full funding for his four years of college tuition and all university fees, which I did, with nary a word of thanks afterwards.  I stumbled on-line across a 2016 voter registration listing for him in a Seattle precinct, so I am glad that he alone of my three sons was able to break free of his, in my opinion, destructively dominating mother and move as far away from her as possible, as she lives across the country from him on the East Coast with her second husband.

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.

New Year's Day

New Year's day was a glorious start to 2018, despite how bitterly cold it was.  There were exciting college bowl games on the telly.

I had a delicious lunch at my favorite local restaurant at noon, dining as usual with the Empty Chair.  Enroute to the Lost Dog, I passed by my man Trevor, out at his usual spot on a street corner, interacting with passing motorists despite the frigid temperatures.

Coming home after lunch I could see in passing by that the mother of my children has her condominium for sale.  My oldest son has, I think, lived there with her and her new husband in the past and so far as I know in the present too, so I suppose he'll be moving on too, perhaps to their new location; I last laid eyes on him and spoke to him in, I think, 2007, so I won't be missing anything, especially as concerns her, who provides me with zero information about our children (even whether or not they're well or even alive) and her stony-hearted new husband.

I miss my children though, as their unjustified and indeed totally gender-driven estrangement from me and the whole rest of my family stretches on absurdly past a decade.  Next up--middle child, I'll be at the Lost Dog at noon on your upcoming birthday for lunch; come on, now that you're a fully-mature adult and responsible for your own actions, give healing a try and join me!

The Frogman

It returned to my world on the day before Father's Day.  A fighting frogman, a black plastic warrior long buried in the mossy gravel of the driveway, hidden away for almost two decades.

My middle son, Johnny, whom I haven't spoken with nor heard from since 2004, used to play with plastic army men in the yard when he was little.  His mother used to say he was the most like me of my 3 sons; I used to play interminably with green (and tan) little plastic army men when I was little.

I ran into his mother, my ex, on a public sidewalk a couple of years ago and asked her if Johnny was alive, well, married, had children, and where he lived, because I don't know the answer to any of those 5 questions.  She stonily refused to answer even a single word, and I walked away having confirmed, in my mind, that she was the destructive covert narcissist I had come to discover her to be, in my opinion.

It's ironic that this soldier returned to the fold on the eve of Father's Day, to be placed on the shelf in Johnny's bedroom with 4 or 5 other toy soldiers who have come home in a similar fashion over the years.  Perhaps someday the prodigal son, his will having been overborne by his mother and her coterie of accomplices during the lengthy divorce when he was a vulnerable minor, in my opinion, will return to the fold also.

A couple of movies, and snow

The first snowfall of the season came today, with bitter cold accompanying it.  I went out for a run as the snow started, but only went a mile as my hands were freezing despite wearing gloves.

Yesterday I went to see a movie at the mall, following a lunch of pizza at noon at the Lost Dog Cafe.  I hadn't been to see a movie at a theatre in over a year.

A Monster Calls was the movie, dealing with a boy's struggles coping with his mother's death to illness, aided or perhaps goaded by the appearance of a spectre in the form of a massive walking tree.  A movie to bring a date to it was not, as it was oppressively overwrought.

But the trip to the cinema was salvaged by seeing a second movie on the same day, Hidden Figures, a film about the incipient American space program as it battled the Russians for celestial ascendency even as it massively handicapped itself by discriminating against brilliant talent readily at hand in the form of capable African-Americans who were denied the opportunity to prove their worth due to the prejudices, customs and laws of the times in the South.  The long-suffering underclass finally overcame the obstacles presented however, a triumph not of the American spirit but of the human spirit in the everlasting struggle against mendacity and evil.

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.)

I hate it when this happens

The ground dispensed a tan plastic army man outside in the back yard by the garage, a radio operator, after it rained for two solid days, a hard rain that dug into the ground as it pelted down.  This caused things to surface, a roofing nail, a gutter spike, a toy soldier lying facedown.

I knew that things often come up from below the surface in pairs and sure enough, around the corner of the garage I found another toy soldier, a green army man wielding a BAR, also lying facedown, washed up from the deep by the deluge.  These tiny toys clinging to the earth were the product of my middle son's playing in the yard with his bag of plastic army men and his leaving a few behind when the battle concluded.

Twenty years had passed since the sounds of the backyard battle faded away, the last ten years in deafening silence from all three little boys, now grown men living somewhere, perhaps with little boys of their own playing in backyards with little green army men, the divorce you know.  It makes me so sad to encounter such sudden, crushing remembrances of a past so long dead and so resoundingly buried, ripped out of the earth by elemental forces.

The two plastic soldiers are washed and dried now, and reverentially placed upon upon a shelf in a little boy's room.  A cry from the past given up to an adult long past crying about his unremitting loss.

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.

Ringing in the New Year

…with lunch at the Lost Dog at noon today.

Perhaps I'll see one or more of you there then.

Or perhaps, some other time then.

Taking Some Time

I'm off for much of December and so far I have stuck at home, running daily in Falls Church.  I'm available for coffee if anyone wants to catch up with me in person for a quarter of an hour, more or less.

Tomorrow morning (Thurs. Dec. 4th) from 9:30 a.m. until 9:45 a.m. I'll be at the Starbucks in Falls Church in the Falls Plaza (see photo) at 1218 West Broad Street (near the intersection of Route 7 and Birch Street).  I would love to have company!

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

ca 1999.

An adolescent's bookshelf

When I was a boy growing up on Staten Island in the sixties, I voraciously read Ballantine War Books, pulp paperbacks with lurid covers detailing combat by World War II veterans, a conflict that wasn't all that far in the past then.  I recently re-read one of those paperbacks plucked off an adolescent boy's bookshelf from 45 years ago, its coarse pages yellowing and brittle but its slick cover just as vivid and vibrant as it was when I saw it on a book display case in a drug store and bought it for seventy-five cents.

Samurai! by Saburo Sakai (copyright 1957) is the memoir of Japan's leading surviving World War II ace, with 64 kills.  Mostly it is a paean to the superiority of the most outstanding fighter plane of the early Pacific War, the Mitsubishi Zero, a plane that easily outclassed all Allied fighter planes (except for perhaps the British Spitfire, but there weren't many of those in the theatre at the time) until the ominous arrival (for the Japanese) of the American Hellcat, a plane specifically designed to counter and better all of the Zero's superior traits.  Practically overnight the Japanese went from practically never losing an even dogfight to almost never winning any and they inexorably lost the war, so dependant was the Pacific conflict upon naval airpower.  The book details Sakai's many triumphant ariel battles early in the war, and his two love interests, and his later struggles in combat and grievous wounding when superior American fighter planes arrived.  Its cover, designed to attract the attention of a hero-worshipping boy, shows a painting of an American P-40 Warhawk (the famous "Flying Tiger" plane with the shark teeth painted on the cowling) engaging a Zero in combat.

Of my three sons, my middle child is (was?) most like me in that he loves (loved?) to read war books.  During the bitter divorce last decade, before his will was overborne and he stopped seeing me when he was 15, one of my proudest moments came when he called me to ask if he could come over to my house and take some war histories off my bookshelf to have and to read.  I dropped him off that night at his Mother's house with a large stack of World War II memoirs that he had picked out.

Those happy moments are but soft whispers way back in the furthest recesses of my mind now ten years later.  But today is his birthday and as is my custom on such days, I'm going to have lunch at noon at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover in Arlington, Virginia, and maybe the birthday boy will show up.  In any case, I'm bringing his present along, a dog-eared paperback book entitled "Samurai!" by Saburo Sakai, bought by a 15-year old boy oh so long ago.

See you then

Relationships are so unfathomable.  We're so forgiving of casual acquaintances, yet so intolerant with intimate relatives.

Life is too short for this attitude.  Driving to New York last fall, I called my only brother, who lives or lived in Queens, only to discover through the impersonal nature of dialing bad numbers that his cell phone number now belongs to a stranger and his home phone number has been disconnected.

"No further information is available."  Nice knowing you, Jack.

My three sons haven't communicated with me in over half a decade.  At noon on Christmas day I'll be at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover in Arlington, Virginia; let's all grab lunch together.

But I shall name you the fisherman three

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe---
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea---
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish---
Never afeard are we";
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam---
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 't was a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea---
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Eugene Field.

(Top photo shot in Denver 2008.
Bottom photo shot in the Shenandoah 1998.)