Sharon Rogers Lightbourne

 Happy Passover to my love, I love you forever because you are the one woman I trust absolutely.

It's also the birthday of the mother of my 3 children, and I've forgiven you, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, for ruining the lives of our three children, which grieves me to the depths of my soul because their childhoods were destroyed by you and your coterie of paid mercenaries like Joe Condom, Bill Reichardt, Meg Sullivan, Victor Elion and others I still don't know about, during the multi-year quarter-million dollar divorce during which their immature wills were overborne by you and your minions as stated.

You always implied or pleaded in your lying sworn representations in court, in my opinion, that I would go to hell, and if so I'll see you there.

The New Way To Donate Blood

This week I donated blood at INOVA, for the 130th time lifetime but it was more difficult than normal. When I arrived for my appointment I was asked to sign in and then directed to a bar code placard on the counter and told to use my phone to download the questionnaire and fill it out.

After I stood stupidly before the cardboard cutout design for a minute waving my phone around in front of it, a technician came over and told me to take a picture of it. I snapped a picture of it. Shaking her head she took my phone, did something with it and handed it back to me with a questionnaire pulled up on it.

I laboriously answered the 80 questions on my tiny screen with my fat fingers, taking much more time than using the old pen and paper method. When I finished I pressed Continue and the screen asked if I wanted to Print It. Since I don't have a printer currently and I already know the answers, I pressed the Done button. That caused the entire questionnaire to vanish and I couldn't get it back.

I was called into the exam room and the tech tapped around on her computer for while, obviously searching. She asked, Where is your completed survey? I shrugged and showed her the picture on my phone, below. Shaking her head, she started asking the questions one-by-one and entering them, saying that it was a new system and confusing for some in order to mollify my increasing mortification. She didn't look anything like my 3d grade teacher trying to teach me cursive writing, maybe it was the facemark that ruined this mental image for me.

When we got to the exciting section of the survey, Have I paid for sex lately, slept with a man ever or gotten a tattoo recently, she looked tentatively at the open door and asked if I wanted her to close it before I answered further.

I assured her that my life was so humdrum that all the answers to the entire survey were typically normal except that I had been abroad in the last three years (England, Fance and Eire for 10 days in 2019) and I had received a vaccination in the last 8 weeks (dose #1 of Moderna a fortnight ago). So I passed and a finger pricking and an arm piercing later, I departed leaving a bag of crimson gold behind.

O+ blood, very desirable since it is the universal donor type. I get blood donation solicitation calls weekly from the Red Cross and monthly from the Cincinnati Chapter of Blood Support, the latter because I donated blood in the Cincinnati airport once during a layover over a decade ago. No matter how many times I assure these phone volunteers that I will not come to Cincinnati to donate there again since I live a thousand miles away, I can't get off their Call list.

Now to learn how to download a survey (or a menu) on my phone when presented with bar code and how to save it when necessary. 

The lost platoon

I was perambulating around my backyard today, looking to see if any of my springtime perennials were poking up, when I noticed a small flash of bluegreen resting flush amidst the grassy stubble and dead leaves. Knowing it had rained recently, I suspected it might be a small upheaval surfacing from twenty or thirty years past. This had happened before and it always saddened me when it did.

You might know that I haven't heard from any of my three boys in about 15 years, the divorce you know. I used to have on a shelf a half dozen weatherworn little green army men, a leggo piece and a small child's toy plastic grenade that had been buried or lost in the yard and surfaced after hard rains. My middle child's toy pieces from long ago, Johnny's, now 34; he loved to conduct army battles with toy figures in the yard digging little trenches and riverbeds for the opposing troops. I hadn't recovered a returning missing toy soldier for a couple of years now. There in the backyard was a missing warrior returning to base decades later. This breaks my heart each time.

I'll wash this little trooper off, missing a limb and with his rifle broken, allow him to dry and then put him in Johnny's Box in the basement where he can rejoin the rest of the lost platoon. I placed the rest of these found little toy pieces in that box a year or two back, all that's left of Johnny's presence in my house now, having taken them off their shelf of remembrance as I moved on in not having any children anymore. The three of them as good as died twenty years ago when their mother drove them away to her father's compound in Cleveland during spring break under false pretenses, so she could file divorce papers and achieve first, and ultimate, as it turned out, possession of our three children despite the full joint legal custody our divorce decree ordered after several years of litigation. Their immature minds had long since been turned against me by her by then.  It's called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) and it's real and pernicious, ruining lives.

I hope Johnny, and Jimmy and Danny, are well.