John Henry Lamberton, thirty-something, soon to have a birthday. My middle child.
I haven't seen hm since, oh, 2003, maybe. I really don't know when I last laid eyes upon him or heard his voice. When the days stretch to weeks then the weeks stretch to months then the months stretch to years then the years stretch to decades, who's keeping count anymore? The last communication I had from him was a letter I received from him in 2006 asking me to sign the waiver for the prepaid Virginia college tuition plan I paid for and owned to be used for his benefit to pay for his full college tuition and fees for four years, which of course I did. I know he used it all up because the administrators of the plan informed me four years later that its eight semesters payments for VCU (a formerly black university in Richmond that had become a safety school for white students from the much better public high schools in Northern Virginia who couldn't matriculate at UVA or William & Mary or even VT) had been fully exhausted. I assume he graduated although I don't know that for a fact because I never heard from him again after 2006, not even an invite to his graduation or a thank you note. This was the situation created by his mother's multi-year quarter million divorce proceedings against me (my costs, although I did recoup $50,000 in court-ordered sanctions and court costs from her for her "harassment petitions" using our three minor kids as straw men in her litigations against me). Her name now is Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, and you're welcome, Johnny.
I loved Johnny, as I loved all three of my sons. Although I was portrayed in my many years of coaching ,managing and watching them playing youth sports as a sideline tyrant by her and her friends (funny that they all kept their kids on my teams and then represented under oath that the very next season they were going to remove their kids from the team), I enjoyed their growth as boys and noted their unique personalities during those years. I remember Johnny, the least athletic but the most cerebral of my three boys, being a plodding but steadfast fullback in soccer who prevented many goal chances and once, when the goalie was sprawled a dozen feet from the goal mouth after a partial block but the deflected ball was heading inexorably towards the wide open net,Johnny came in from the side, having circled around, and swept the ball away. In football he was an offensive lineman whose coach said at the year-end banquet that Johnny was always at his side whenever he wasn't in and had a question after every play and an answer after every ejaculation the coach shouted out. I don't know Johnny anymore, obviously, now that he is a fully mature adult responsible for his own choices, but I will always regret that Sharon and her paid and craven coterie of enabling family wreckers thoroughly overborned his immature will as a child during the divorce wars.
I'll be at the Lost Dog Cafe at noon on his birthday, as always for the last dozen-plus years, hopeful that he and any of his brothers and other significant others will show up (none ever has). I'll have a presenter him that will be representative of his Lamberton grandfather whom he never met (he died at age 61 before Johnny was born), a man's man, a mensch, who would be a sterling example for my sons if their juvenile minds hadn't been poisoned maliciously against all Lambertons by the childhood wreckers employed by Sharon and her own devious manipulations best described as classic Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which many regard as a form of child abuse.
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