Happy Birthday. You know who you are.

Late 60s! The years rush by when you get as old as you are now, don't they?

I hope you find that Mr. Goldmine you're searching for, as you chose and choose money over love. But money can't buy love, and although you believe it will propel persons close to you to do what you want them to do and to be who you think they should be, that's not love.

But for whatever reason, I still love you and wish you the best. We had a great time, always, didn't we.

The Virginia529 account which I own to be used for your benefit "will be closed" by the end of this month.

James Bradley Rogers, formerly James Bradley Lamberton, wherever you are, if you're still with us, the Virginia529 prepaid college tuition plan which I own and of which you are the beneficiary, is going to "be closed" 30 days from March 31, 2022, the date on the letter I received from Virginia529 yesterday. It was (the funds were) supposed to be "exhausted" by 2014 according to the Master Agreement, unless you were "an active-duty member of any branch of the United States Armed Forces after (your) high school graduation," which "time will not be counted toward the 10-year period."

From what little I have gleaned from the Internet about your life since 2004 when you changed your name, this active-duty exemption does not apply to you. In fact, I don't even know if you graduated from high school. I have put off the plan's termination for as long I could in past phone calls and letters to the Plan's administrators, including sending them a copy of the Divorce Order, in accordance with the litigated divorce settlement but the Virginia officials show very little if any respect for the Arlington County court order for the Plan which I own to remain in effect to be used for your benefit "if practicable."

I have repeatedly asked you via Internet postings to contact me about this matter over the years. If you don't contact me within the 30-day period outlined above, so we can act in concert upon it in some fashion, the "account will be closed" and put firmly in the past and be discharged to me as owner in due course, I suppose. I look forward to hearing from you about this within the month.

"Is he alive"

About eight yerars ago, I happened by the mother of my children on a public street and in the course of the next minute I asked her fifteen very specific questions about them, not one of which was answered by her. She was in the company at the time of her current husband, his adult son and daughter-in-law, several twenty-something persons, a couple of younger persons and an adult German Shepard. All were deaf, dumb and mute during this 60-second encounter, although most or all of them knew the answers to all of the brief questions. I had not spoken with her for several years before this encounter, nor have I spoken with her since. I have not spoken with any of my children, nor received any meaningful information about them from her in about a decade and a half. She poisoned the minds of these three tender minors (now full-grown adults, at least one who is or was married and reputedly there are at least two grandchildren of mine now in the mix) during the multi-year quarter-million dollar divorce through the phenomenon of Parental Alienation Syndrome, a public scourge perpetrated and perpetuated by persons of the basest of human nature (usually women in our judicial system's Mother Knows Best extreme bias, but men can effect this childhood-wrecking family-killing horror-show too).

"Hello, Sharon. Regarding Jimmy, our oldest child, is he alive?" Brief pause, during which there is no answer. "Is he well?" No answer. "Is he married?" No answer. "Does he have any children?" No answer. "Where does he live?" No answer.

Regarding Johnny, our middle child, is he alive?" Brief pause, during which there is no answer. "Is he well?" No answer. "Is he married?" No answer. "Does he have any children?" No answer. "Where does he live?" No answer.

Regarding Danny, our youngest child, is he alive?" Brief pause, during which there is no answer. "Is he well?" No answer. "Is he married?" No answer. "Does he have any children?" No answer. "Where does he live?" No answer.

I stopped walking alongside the group of people as they continued their walk along the public street, saying, "That's information any parent would tell the other parent." Brief pause. "I'm sorry for you." Then they were gone. That's the sort of person she is, and the Lightbournes apparently are.

Happy seventieth, Sharon. I hope you have a wonderful day in your special way.

"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"

 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.

And then there was . . . .

 Hey youngest child of mine, I'm sorry that neither you or your brothers could make it yesterday (a holiday) to the Lost Dog at noon but you've got a birthday coming up this month! Maybe I'll see you at noon at the Lost Dog then ;-) and you can fill me in on your doin's for the last decade and a half; whether you graduated finally from that safety school you went to that you asked me in your last communication fifteen years ago to provide full payment for tuition and fees for, which I did, and how your wedding was and whether you're still married to that same ambitious lady Laura (whom I have never met), and how it's going being a sales clerk at that lightbulb store you work in, and whether you sired one or both of the grandchildren I reputedly have and how they're doing. You know, basic stuff like what their names are, when they were born and to whom, what sex they are, normal stuff that any parent would tell a child's grandparent about.

And I can fill you in on what's going on in the Lamberton world, not that you or your brothers have ever expressed a scintilla of basic human concern or even curiosity about your close kin for the last two decades. Come on, we'll party hardy for an hour!

Hope springs . . . away?

 After church and then an enjoyable lunch with a friend yesterday at the Lost Dog pizzeria, where we hoisted a toast to the always empty chair, I went to drop-in pickleball in my town and in very tricky windy conditions had about a break-even day on the court.

My breathing was labored due to my rib injury but my game apparently finally is getting better and I sat out every other game, win or lose.

Overall it was an enjoyable day even though I missed having my oldest son finally appear for his birthday party after all these years.

But today is a holiday, Presidents Day, so it is another chance for that rascal oldest child of mine, and any or all of his brothers, all of whom are in their thirties and apparently all very hateful men, to appear for lunch finally. ;-)

The Prodigal Son

Hey oldest son of mine, you've got a birthday coming up soon as you blaze your way through your mid-thirties! Come join me for lunch at noon on that day at the Lost Dog and you can tell me all about what you've been up to for the last 15 years, beyond changing your name on your 18th birthday, barely making it out of your magnet nationally esteemed public high school with a third-tier showing-you-the-door state diploma (not a TJ diploma), eschewing going to college which I would have provided full payment for in-state tuition and fees for, being an office boy at the divorce law firm you hired to baselessly and incompetently sue me (for which your mother was assessed almost $50,000 in costs and sanctions years later when the unjustified harassment petition got tossed out), launching a Go-Fund-Me campaign which collected its full allotment of money but accomplished nothing else of note, and engaging in gambling both on the internet and in Vegas. I can't wait to hear about all the other stuff you've been up to. I'll see you there then!

The Past Year VIII: Last winter.

 Last winter, I spent a lot of time on my porch, oftentimes with a friend, watching the world go by, eating and drinking a little, while I waited for my vaccination date to come around, which finally arrived in March for my first and second doses.  January and February were filled with fruitless 6 am computer searches for vaccine appointments which was supposedly the time that new appointment dates were uploaded.  My friend stumbled upon an appointment date for me because she would get up early every day and spend a couple of hours hitting refresh refresh refresh, trying secure appointments for herself, me and a couple of other friends.  She was like a saint because she found appointments finally for us all, although she had to drive one friend to York, PA for his appointment--twice.

I tried my hand at some political cartoons on Facebook.  I also read a lot, about the Revolutionary War and World War II..

Occasionally I went to have lunch at restaurants with outdoor seating.  I remember I was cold a lot last winter. With my covid beard, I looked like a real good Amurican, you know, like the type that would stroll by the Capitol and find the windows and doors smashed in and just go in to look around peaceful like, never looking for "Naaaanceee. Oh, Naaanceee, where are you?" or to "hang Mike Pence." Scum sucking bastards, those January 6th murderous miscreants. 

On January 6th I had lunch at the Lost Dog, it being the birthday of one of my boys, then went home to watch on TV the jaw-dropping spectacle that was unfolding a mere ten miles away as a band of seditionist white supremacists ransacked our two and a half century Republic and impugned our standing in the world as the beacon of democracy to the world. Traitorous bastards.

There were plenty of TV spectacles last winter.  The Trump era seemed to be full of them, like the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi riot and the brutal clearing of Lafayette Park by the police so Trump could have a photo-op. Not the least of them was the second trial of our disgraced, incompetent, antidemocratic president. Who ever voted for this boob even once, much less twice?

As the spring approached, I started to do yard work, building a berm, planting flowers, etc. I found a veritable platoon of my middle child's toy plastic soldiers, lost in the yard after he played with them outside during the last decade of the last century. A sign of a return to normalcy or of dreams forever lost? Goodbye and good riddance to 2021.

The Past Year VII: Spring

 The pandemic grinds on and grinds us down. Last spring was no exception, except that it offered us some false hope of respite with the competent vaccination program rolled out by president Biden as soon as he took charge from the prior usurper clown and before we learned of the ridiculous anti-vax attitude (antidemocratic selfish individualism run amuck) of the the ignoramus 40% who control the 60%. These perpetual victims and tit-sucking users inhabiting the hinterland keep the populous, affluent and educated majority on the three coasts under their thumbs through the poison pills sewn into our constitution by the slaveowning plantation owning founding fathers, such as the oppressively unbalanced senate representation and the electoral college,   and they will keep us in this primordial covid soup to some degree for the rest of our lives. (Twice I stood on line for an hour in a crowded CVS in South Arlington to get my shots.)

The spring was a time when I laid low waiting for my two Moderna shots to be administered and take effect because I didn't want to stumble and fall on the four-yard line before I carried the ball over the goal line to personal freedom. Ha! I'm scarcely more free now than I was last spring, still wearing masks, still avoiding passing by strangers outside, still hardly traveling except on limited occasions (short trips to NC in June and OH for Thanksgiving and a week-long business trip to CO in August) and still hanging out in my house, on my porch or in the yard. (In the springtime, when I was hauling dirt to build a berm to protect my holly trees from excessive water runoff caused by poorly permitted construction slightly uphill from my yard, some toy plastic soldiers, played with outside long ago by my middle son Johnny, surfaced in the yard, an occasion which is always a lugubrious discovery as it reminds me anew of the children who were torn away from me extrajudicially two decades ago through the scourge of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) during the multi-year quarter-million dollar sneak attack divorce launched upon me by the (in my opinion) covert narcissistic mother of my three boys as she set about wrecking their childhoods, and impermissibly skewering their lives, in order to despicably use them as her personal pawns in the endless lawsuits she hatched that only ceased when the Virginia courts finally fined or assessed her costs of almost $50,000 for harassing and baseless litigation.)

I returned to church services in the spring, to the extent that I customarily attend them (more than a dozen times each year but usually less than a score), outside in the open air in the cathedral roofed by God's sky overhead.  The last service I had attended prior to that was on Ash Wednesday in 2020, just before services, and society, shut down tight. (The pew, outlined with white lime, where I always stood--most everyone else brought folding chairs and sat closer to the action but I really liked my spot, away from most everyone else in a position by a tree that afforded shade and left me with the freedom to be pensive in my reflections as I listened to watched the ongoings.) 

During the first covid summer I had planted many perennials in my yard and some came up, like these bluebell flowers, although disappointingly, many others did not.  As during the previous three-quarters of a year, I spent much time last spring on my porch or taking walks, especially with my friend Sien, whose company I always enjoy, and to a limited degree, we ate out some. (A paltry, but still gratifying, return in the spring on all the planting of flowers I did during the summer of 2020.)

Social Security

Bureaucracy. I'll be reaching the maximum aggrandizement age of my Social Security benefits within 90 days (after you reach your full retirement date, every year you prolong taking benefits increases your ultimate benefit by 8 percent, up until a certain age when the increase stops, so you want to start receiving your benefits immediately upon that date without any delay) so last week I dialed the SS number, to give myself plenty of time (3 whole months) to set this well-earned and long-delayed lifetime train in motion.

Good thing I started early in the morning, with a fully charged phone. I called and was greeted by a phone menu which took four whole minutes to complete, whereupon the machine prompted me, "In a few words, describe what it is you want, such as the location of my nearest office or an explanation of my benefits."

"I want to start receiving my full benefits," I announced.

The machine intoned, "You must speak with an agent about this. All agents are currently busy. Please call back later." Whereupon the malicious robot dumped me out of the system and the connection went dead.

I hit the Most Recent Call button on my cell phone and dialed back. After sitting through the same 4 minute phone menu again, I was prompted to speak about what I wanted and I slightly changed my phraseology but I received the same curt Busy reply and I was dumped out of the system again.

This same exact sequence happened two more times, with me subtly changing my "few words" of describing what it was that I wanted, with the same hangup result.

The fifth time, almost half an hour after I started this ordeal of trying to contact the SS administration, I broke through the menu because that time, my short statement of desire seemed to resonate with the machine (we connected finally) and it announced that I would have to speak with an agent about that and the sentient idiot said, "Please hold. An agent will be with you shortly. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. We are sorry for the delay."

Thus started an interminable period of listening on my speaker phone to annoying phone music, punctuated every three minutes by interjections of how important my call was to them, or how sorry they were for the delay, or how I could go to www.socialsecurity.gov and enter that on-line moraass instead (go solo), or that I should have my SS number "handy" (as if after decades of life I didn't have that number imprinted on my brain) or that an agent would be with me "momentarily."

I wondered how I could send out for pizza while my phone was otherwise occupied. Then I started worrying that my battery would run out before a real person picked up.  

Almost two hours after I started this project, a nice agent came on the line and listened to me express my heartfelt desire (I want my money!) and she said that I would have to speak to an agent from my "local office" about that. She stated that she would set up an appointment for an interview.

"In person or on the phone," I inquired. "On the phone of course," she said and she put me on hold for ten minutes during which time I wondered why I had to speak to a "local" agent on the phone instead of any old agent anywhere who was in front of a computer.

The nice agent came back finally and told me to write this down. "I have scheduled you for an appointment with someone from your local office," she said.

"It will be on Monday at 11 am . . . ," she continued and then paused, for dramatic effect, I guess. Or maybe she thought I was slow with my pencil or my hand was shaking.

Meanwhile I was thinking, Hot Damn! This is Thursday and I can wrap this up by early next week. Or maybe it'll be some Monday early next month in February, which will still leave me plenty of time in case I have to show a document like a birth certificate or maybe some sort of proof of citizenship like my old, tattered draft card. Then the nice agent, seemingly enjoying her pause, dropped the other shoe.

". . . on March 14th," she continued. "Make sure you're available on the phone at that time and on that date."

I hope she didn't heard my jaw drop. Two months hence. The agency had just used up two months of the three month lead time that I had given myself to undertake this signup procedure, which I thought was wildly excessive but I guess not. I thanked her, leafed ahead two months in my weekly calendar book and carefully wrote down the appointment in red ink, one which I shall be sure not to miss.

The Past Year VI: Summer

2021 was an epic failure--the worst year I have experienced except for the half decade at the start of this sorry century when that covert narcissist, in my opinion, my former wife Sharon Rogers Lightbourne  harassed me with lawsuits to divorce me which used every dirty scumbag scheme her unscrupulous or worse divorce lawyers and enablers could conjure up to murder the childhoods of my children in their avarice and zealotry to destroy me psychologically and financially including directing my then-minor children to sue me over a "fiduciary" matter and turned my children irrevocably against me (which was classic PAS--a form of child abuse).  She was assessed almost $50,000 in penalties and costs ultimately by the courts which turned off the litigation spigot finally.  (This is the last page conclusion of the appellate decision years later which finally ended the litigation where my ex-wife with her coterie of "professionals" tried to throttle the life out of me by "unjustified" and meritless appellate litigation using our minor children as surrogates in James B. Lamberton et al vs. Peter W. Lamberton.  No wonder the boy changed his last name to hers on his 18th birthday, to get rid of the stigma of such an unfavorable decision.)

This past summer was the best of a miserable year, or at least the least bad part of a terrible year.  I went to Colorado on a business trip for a week which I enjoyed as I was able to see a couple of freshman dorm mates and meet my grand niece whom I had never seen.  Since I was in Louisville for my business, I went on a short journey down memory lane looking at some of the houses we had lived in.  (In Louisville I drove past the house we brought our oldest child, James B. Rogers, home to from the birthing hospital in Denver in the eighties. I planted every green thing you see in the yard. On December 30th it survived the massive conflagration which burned down a third of the town and most of the adjacent town to the south, Superior, although it obviously would have suffered insidious and thoroughly impregnating smoke damage like all the other houses in town west of Main Street.)

I went on a trip to North Carolina to see another dorm mate where I attended a service at a Black evangelical church which was very uplifting to me, witnessing such wholly pious and fervently religious believers.  We also went sailing, serving as crew in the harbormaster's boat judging racing sailboats in a series of races in the harbor.  (And the winner is . . .  the boat with white sails.)

I visited the USMC museum a few miles south of here in Quantico, which I had not been to before and is well worth seeing.  (The Douglas SBD Dauntless Dive-bomber, the American carrier bomber which sunk all four Japanese carriers it encountered at the Battle of Midway.  This plane, hanging from the museum's ceiling with its speed-dampening perforated air brakes deployed, in effect turned the tide in the Pacific War on that day in June, 1942 and doomed the Japanese empire.)

I visited the spectacular Glenstone Gardens in Maryland, scoring a scarce ticket largely by luck.  (Check out the giant horse's head statue behind me on the hilltop made out of flowers growing out of a hollow steel trestle.)

I attended a minor league baseball game in Maryland which was relaxing and fun, especially after a year when there was no minor league baseball whatsoever.  It cost $8 for a ticket and we could sit wherever we wanted to.  (The Regency Furniture Stadium in Waldorf, home to the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, is a pleasure to watch a baseball game in.)

A friend and I spent a lot of time hanging out on my porch feeding the birds and eating and occasionally having an afternoon drink, just as we had done the summer before, and also taking walks.  The pandemic never seemed to get better despite the ready availability of free vaccinations, thanks largely to the selfish, unpatriotic 40% of Americans who refused to help us all out by getting vaccinated, ensuring that America could never get to herd immunity and leaving us all at risk of disease and possibly death.  (Pizza, a little bourbon and birds to feed.  How idyllic, eh?)

I took up tennis again after an absence of four decades.  It wasn't pretty but it's getting better.  And I jumped cold into pickle ball in a big way, which is both fun and frustrating.  The only people I can play with are seniors who are all better than me, having played together for several years. I lose a lot, a whole lot, which doesn't improve my forever pandemic and soon to be post-democracy gathering gloom.  (I cold-turkey one day ditched the ping pong grip and went to a continental grip.  It helped.  And just this week I received a composite touch paddle as a gift from a friend so I could ditch my wooden paddle and hopefully improve some more.)