Children & Disappointments

 My dad used to joke that children are an expensive and gut wrenching form of constant entertainment.  As for me, I paid for child support for my three children for more than a decade at a rate that far exceeded my ability to pay given my liquidity and astounding legal bills at the time and expressed my love for them by physically presenting myself at their mother's curb for my court-ordered visitation every other Friday and every holiday only to suffer the humiliation of being met with an unanswered cell phone call during those moments and the regret that my covert narcissist (in my opinion) ex-wife was teaching them as juveniles to be as consumist scofflaws as herself in adhering to judges' orders and the societal norms of humanity in the four of them's disdain and contempt for mandated visitation.

However, love persists.  I had hoped that one or more of the three of them would have showed up to begin the first day of the rest of our lives after all these years of silence and unjustifiable estrangement for lunch today on this Presidents Day holiday, but being under the domineering and destructive thrall, still, of their deeply flawed mother is still too great for these three strapping men in their thirties to have exercised any decency yet towards their other parent and his family.

It was a nice day for being a February day in Virginia in the midst of an historic pandemic and I parked by the front door of the Lost Dog Cafe and at noon entered the premises, looked around but didn't recognize anybody there and ordered an Italian Pie and returned to my vehicle to await its preparation, watching the ingress and egress into and out of the restaurant the whole time.  Around 12:35 the establishment called to report that the pizza was ready and I picked it up, brought it to my car and enjoyed a lunch of a slice of pizza while I listened to the radio and watched the door.

The meal was delicious, marinara sauce and cheese slathered over sliced onion, pepperoni, ham and salami, and at the end of the hour I left three uneaten slices in the box as a talisman for Better Luck Next Time and drove away, disappointed a hundred or more times over.  Two of my boys have birthdays in the upcoming weeks and I'll be there then, again.