Dear Jimmy

My youngest child recently had a birthday that took him beyond his twenty-first year. Now it is time for my children to contact me, if they ever care to, rather than for me to always be fruitlessly reaching out to them on every major holiday. They know where I live. (Their Mother refuses to give me their addresses, or indeed, any information at all about them.)

I last heard from any of them in 2007. I last saw any of them in 2006. That's PAS in the West.

Losing your children is devastating. The only thing that has allowed me to move on after years of personal devastation is a growing Christian belief. I attend church now frequently and reflect upon the inscrutable nature of faith.

I forgive them all, even the scumbag divorce lawyers who, in my opinion, preyed upon children and were the enablers of this family-wrecking.

Last month my oldest child had a birthday and I published the following fare-thee-well to him on FB. Those posts, limited to 220 characters, are necessarily short.

I remember Jimmy Lamberton dribbling down the pitch with two minutes to go in a scoreless championship game while being jostled by a midfielder, juking around a sweeper and scoring upon the previously unbeaten goalie. It was a beautiful run. He had just joined the McLean Sting, a select soccer team, which thus won the tourney. Happy birthday Jimmy Rogers and have a good and prosperous life. I'm going to miss you but I was blessed to be your father.

Love Dad.

Dear Family

Never say never. This date is my middle child's birthday. As usual I invited him to lunch but as usual he ignored me and I ate alone, for two.

In December I sent out a summation of 2010 to my 5 siblings, enclosed in my holiday greeting card. Three responded with Christmas cards (up from none in 2009).

There is little to report from VA for 2010. Jimmy Rogers apparently lives somewhere in Arlington. Johnny apparently graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University. Danny apparently dropped out of Virginia Commonwealth University. Their Mother apparently lives in a first grade classroom in Falls Church, perhaps with her 2d husband, although I doubt he lives in a first grade classroom.

On my third annual Bucket Trip with my college buddies, this time rafting down the Dolores River out west, I apparently came within a few seconds of drowning under a wrapped boat in a rapids in UT. Once I got out from under the overturned raft I was washed down the rapids on a hair-raising ride. I went in seconds from knowing that I was going to die to thinking that I might live, which obviously I did.

It was an interesting couple of minutes in my life. Yet still, in the half-year since then, I haven’t bought a M/C, started practicing karate or moved to Key West. However, I did take a retirement seminar and have started clearing out my house, which is a slow process.

Does anybody want a WWII Marine Corps uniform [my Dad's dress uniform]? I left off a USMC flak jacket, some Marine medals and a New Jersey state wrestling championship pin at [my sister] Kate’s. [My younger brother's effects--he no longer speaks w/ me.]

Since I’m not running or volunteering my time currently, I have been going to the Falls Church-Episcopal church services a little and reading a lot. The Episcopalians attend mass in the loft of the Presbyterian Church because they were kicked out of their property by the homophobic members within their midst who illegally took over the historic church building and joined a Nigerian bishop who advocates stoning sinners, as near as I can figure. That property/contract dispute is dragging its way through the state court system.

My 12 favorite books I read this year were Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill, Shane by Jack Shaeffer, Never Enough by Joe McGinniss, The Stranger by Albert Camus, We Are Soldiers Still by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen, Collapse by Jared Diamond, If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne, Islands of the Damned by R.V. Burgin with Bill Marvel, Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh and Banners at Shenandoah by Bruce Catton.

I saw Kate twice, on a car baseball trip to the Mississippi River and at Thanksgiving. I saw Melissa in CO and spoke with Abby several times. I spoke with Hilary and Jack for the first time in a long time. I visited Zanesville OH, Johnstown PA, Shanksville PA and the federal courthouse in MO where the Dred Scott trials were held. I had breakfast with Erik [a childhood friend]. I saw 42 Boulevard [the house I grew up in on Staten Island], restored after the fire, and stopped in to see Mr. & Mrs. Murray on Staten Island.

I achieved the twenty year benchmark at my work and conducted my second trial, in Tampa. I stopped blogging and started face-booking. I discarded my laptop for a netbook. I got cable TV and now have access to two thousand channels of crap.

My unlocked car was burgled in my driveway while I slept. A friend of mine was killed in Afghanistan and I attended his funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. I am using my 7 1/2 foot artificial Xmas tree for the last time and will switch to a 5 1/2 foot model next year. My car gets 22 MPH on highway trips, turns 10 within a month and has 72K miles on it. I have attended games at 41 MLB parks and have 3 to go, knocking off KC, CWS, StL and the NYM this year. That’s all. So it goes.

PL

[Next I say goodbye to my kids, now adults, and hope they have long and prosperous lives.]

Green Pastures and Still Waters

I cried this morning when I found out. Alone in my house, I cried.

I stopped blogging earlier this year when I figured that I’d said everything my estranged kids should know about the father they cast out years ago when they were children. Since then I have posted on facebook, although it is so much less satisfying than blogging.

Facebook is informative, however, sort of like wandering by a public bulletin board. When you glance over the tiny posts your friends publish, occasionally something will absolutely rivet you.

This morning while scrolling down the long list of all my friends, I lazily clicked onto the profile picture of someone whose page I hadn’t visited lately, a woman who participated in several of the running programs I directed in the past for my former running club. As a coach, I ran with her on Saturday long runs occasionally, and became friendly with her.

Her portrait showed a happy smiling woman standing next to a handsome virile man in uniform, her husband, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division. I ran with him a few times, doing repeats on the track whenever he accompanied his wife on program speed workouts.

She ran 400s with the other coaches and the rest of the trainees while he did his own repeats, rushing around the track at a much faster pace. Being competitive, and a better runner than most of the others in the program, I tried to run with him.

Only I couldn’t keep up. He was young, tough and strong.

Army strong. Later that year he ran the Army Ten Miler with a stress fracture and still beat my time.

This morning I looked at the picture of the winsome couple on her FB page, then glanced nonchalantly at the opening lines of recent posts on her wall. Horror instantly assailed me.

"I am sorry for your loss... ." "Your husband was... ." "Although I can’t know how you feel... ."

I knew from a post on her FB page last year that her husband had been deployed to Afghanistan. She left the area around the same time and I hadn’t seen nor heard from her her since.

The long string of posts from her friends were all dated within the last few days. With my heart pounding, I googled his name.

The search result was instantaneous. He was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on Thursday.

I knew him and had run with him, and now he was gone. I cried, yes I did, for him and for her, and for all the rest.

A Dark Passage to Light

He plunged into the dark, cold water and drifted easily downward while he considered the situation. He was in a canal filled with water that was over his head and he must be near the bottom now.

His lower hand reached out and touched the mud at the bottom. It was time to go to the surface now but he didn't want to suddenly thrust up in the water and get his feet mired in the muck.

He rolled over and tried to orientate himself so that he could propel himself upwards without having to kick out behind him. Although he was relaxed, it was definitely time to get to the surface.

But the coldness of the water and the slow turning of his body had disoriented him and he was suddenly acutely aware that he had only a single breath of air. An urgent note of finality characterized his actions.

He felt that he had only one chance to attain the surface now. He hoped that he was pointed upwards because he didn't want to dive headfirst into the bottom mud and have to wrestle around down there getting reoriented while his single breath waned.

He pushed off and his eyes opened to light and he sucked in a breath. The dim luminescence of dawn was filling his bedroom.

He lay under the sheet considering. He'd been dreaming, and perhaps a little bit of acute sleep apnea was involved.

His dream sequence was eerily similar to being trapped under the boat in the rapids last month. He remembered that when he'd described his near-death experience then to his sister afterwards, she'd used the word reborn to characterize his escape.

He thought about the dark, lonely place under the boat, with nothing but fluid surrounding him in his confined space. Then he had pushed off downwards to launch his journey into the unknown, which he feared might lead to him being pinned by the current against the rock that the capsized raft was wrapped around.

But there had been no other choice then because it was time to leave, and he had traveled under the stern of the boat and come out into light and air, before being plunged down the rapids in a wild ride where he had to fight for his life. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

Parking enforcement in the District

The District has expanded its metered parking exponentially and enforces the restrictions aggressively in its desperation to garner revenues. Parking at any meter citywide costs $2 an hour from 6 am to 10 pm Monday through Saturday.

Personally, it just means that I actively stay out of the District on Saturdays. I reckon that attitude represnts a loss to the city in the form of potential lost sales tax revenue.

The city is very efficient at dispensing parking tickets, having its uniformed meter-maids zip up and down the sidewalks trolling for expired meters on Segways. With a couple of taps on his or her hand-held computer, the officer prints out a $60 ticket, slaps it on the windshield and is speedily off looking for other miscreants.

Going to lunch the other day, I observed one of these hard working parking enforcement officials during a few seconds of downtime from revenue enhancement. He was cruising hands-free on his two-wheeled vehicle in the middle of the street alongside a slow moving Metropolitan Police patrol car with its driver's window rolled down, engaged in a discussion with the pretty officer inside while he smoked a cigarette with one hand and held a cell phone to his ear with the other hand, conducting yet another conversation.

Got soccer redux?

Boo hoo, America lost in the knockout round of the World Cup. Yawn. We scored once all game, on a penalty kick.

Ghana's second goal was a wicked shot, the best I've seen in the tourney so far. Beautiful kicks like that are few and far between because scoring in soccer is so hard, especially with defenders hanging on you every step.

It's almost impossible to get "space" in the box. The scorer in overtime created a tiny bit of space and made a superb shot.

If you get a step on the defenders, they'll take you down. And half the strikers cowardly take a dive in traffic trying to get a free kick.

Soccer needs scoring. It needs fixing.

The Americans could help out here. FIFA should borrow rules and procedures from the NHL, NBA and NFL.

Every goal in soccer is suspect because of the archaic, stifling offsides rule. Make offsides only be dependent upon no one being offsides when the ball first crosses midfield (the blue line in hockey).

Then strikers could spread out and get open. Teams would have to make choices in defending their end.

To ensure that two strikers don't hang out bracketing the goalie, have a three second rule in the box like in the NBA. We love those riveting nil-nil games after all.

Soccer is so boring because of all that backwards passing, often all the way back to the goalie. The rest of the world slowly passes the ball back 75 yards to try to advance it 90 yards into the scoring zone.

This is trying to get a head start, I guess. You know, like a quarterback taking a snap at midfield and running back to the 10 to try to throw a bomb.

To keep movement mostly being progressive, institute the backcourt and icing rules from basketball and hockey. No passes backwards past midfield once the ball on offense has entered the box unless it has been lost in the interim, or else the other team gets a free kick at the spot the ball was touched by the offending team (always at least 10 yards outside the penalty area regardless). No backwards passing series past two lines anyways, to eliminate all that boring back-to-the-goalie stuff.

When a player gets fouled, give a free kick from there but tack on 15 yards (move the ball closer). Why let the defense use fouling, and the resultant free kicks from the point of the foul, as a chance for the defense to catch up and reset.

Keep the game time on the scoreboard clock, and have it stop during all that "stoppage" time when players are writhing on the ground after receiving phantom hits. When the period is over, that's it.

This will give sponsors the ability to have TV timeouts. There is no 45-minute-long continuous flow to soccer, that's a ridiculous notion.

Change the asinine rule (which is hard to determine) that the ball is scored, or dead, only when it completely crosses the line. Adopt the NFL's break-the-plane rule.

And for sure, have the FIFA commish assess fines each week after reviewing game tapes for flopping, unseemly unwarranted writhing, peacock strutting after gooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaals, clothes-grabbing and bad fouling. Soccer sucks the way it is now.

Goodbye Melvin Dean, I hardly knew ye!

I'm still in spring cleaning mode although summer has arrived. Now that I no longer do any coaching or administration because my running club and I are no longer an item, I've got lots of time on my hands on weekends.

After ordering cable TV over the winter and having the novelty of channel-surfing 500 vacuous channels wear off, I looked around my house and noticed all the neglected tasks. In the basement are about a dozen boxes I packed a few years ago, labeled with the initials of my three sons.

Since none of my now-adult children has responded to any of my entreaties for years, on trash day this week I brought one of the boxes, labeled "JBL-bed buddies," to the curb and left it for the garbage truck to haul away to the dump. First, I looked inside and said goodbye to the box's contents of the Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy, the Cabbage Patch kid Melvin Dean clutching his "birth certificate," the Wild Thing that made my oldest child shiver when he opened it one Christmas, and the Daffy Duck doll which my mother sent him two decades ago.

The box was gone when I came home from work. I'm moving on, and will throw out another box each week until they're all cleared out.