"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.

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.)

Hauling the tank in . . .

They're still drifting back in, battered and worn, two decades after they went missing. The little green army men, played with last by my middle son Johnny in huge battlefields ranging across the back yard and beyond, before the long, bitter divorce and the long, tragic estrangement.

 

I found a wasted, kneeling sharpshooter in March, washed to the surface by a heavy rain. Sitting on my iron chair in the back yard, I lazily looked across the lawn and noticed a small splash of greenish blue color at odds with the verdant hue of the lawn. The maimed soldier, missing his right leg at the knee and a hand, was recovered and brought home again, washed off carefully and placed in Johnny's box in the basement, my last remembrance of the sweet lad (now an apparently hate-filled man in his thirties).

Last week I found his battle mate, a grenadier, where he was making his last stand out beyond the back gate in the area we used for a garden, buried under a compost heap for twenty years which I am currently digging up. It's bittersweet to welcome these long-lost troopers home, because their commander and his progeny are forever gone.

Over the weekend I came across debris from the desperate battle, an olive-green side panel of a little green army men tank consisting of sprockets and a partial tank tread, blown apart during the battle and degraded further by the forces of time and space during the long years following the fracas. This detritus was also recovered and brought home, too far gone to be useful even to be cannibalized for spare parts but turned into a memorial to long-past battles that forever reside in the memories and psyches of the participants. Some affected persons never fully heal, like the mother who won't even tell the other parent if the three children are well, have wives or children or are even alive, the children who nourish hatred in their stony hearts for the father and his entire family, or the father who has no progeny as he ages into his seventies and wonders what was the point of marriage and fatherhood or even life; all those years changing diapers, watching perambulating youngsters, coaching even soccer, working decades to bring money home to the family; mostly pointless apparently.

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 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.

MLK, Jr. day

 Two holidays and a birthday in January; two birthdays and a holiday in February.  No luck in January but I'll keep trying at least through next month.

Yesterday on the MLK, Jr. holiday I went at noon to the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover where I parked right in front of the door to the gourmet pizzeria, went in and ordered a Greek Pizza to go and when it was ready, took it out to my car to enjoy it in it as I listened to a rock station on Sirius radio.  It is the pandemic after all and I didn't want to eat inside the restaurant, although it offers limited indoor dining.

I ate a slice of the pie, a delicious mixture of fresh tomato slices, marinara sauce, feta cheese, onions and olives, a vegetarian's delight, as I watched the people going in and out of the eatery for the hour I was there.  I didn't see anyone I recognized, although since I haven't seen any of my three children since they were minors (they're all in their thirties now) I might be hard-pressed to know them if I saw them, but they surely could recognize me and in any case no likely candidates age-wise passed through the door of the restaurant.

Leaving some uneaten as a talisman for their hoped for appearance at one of the holiday/birthday dates next month, I drove away wondering at the compassion/humanity traits these three boys-turned-men might possess or rather, not possess.  That's not how I was raised by my family.

The Day After Christmas . . .

... was even colder than Christmas day.  But mail resumed today after the holiday (I didn't receive any mail on Thursday, December 24th), and I got a card from my BFF Erik from PS15R (Public School 15 R, R standing for Richmond County, which constitutes Staten Island, the fifth of NYC's five boroughs) in upstate NY, postmarked 12/19/20.  Seven days to travel a few contiguous states down the Northeast coast, a little over 300 miles, to get to me in VA, ain't America been made great by Trump?

I spoke with two of four of my sisters on the phone, leaving VM's for the two who were too busy to answer my Christmas calls.  I didn't call my brother because I don't think I know his latest throw-away cell phone's number and I have been addressed once too often by this conservative of the family in the subject line of an email from him to me as, "Hey Government A**Hole."  He needs help I think, and I particularly didn't appreciate his last email's closing line, "So, how are your kids?"  How wickedly clever of Jack, he knows I haven't had any information about my kids in a long time.  His brilliant Yale and Wharton pedigree shined through on those emails, late night shade thrown, some deep-in-his-cups rumination fer sure, but I found them offensive beyond remediation.

I spoke today with my college roommate who now lives in rural NC, to congratulate him on becoming a grandad this week for the fifth time, courtesy of his two children; we speculated on how many grandchildren I currently have because my three long-estranged kids, all boys, are now men in their thirties.  I have no doubt that my former wife, Sharon R. Lightbourne (nee Rogers), would NOT tell me a single thing about any of them, not even if one of them were to suffer a tragedy, get married or have a child.  The last time I saw Sharon in Virginia on a public street, when I happened to drive by her while she was walking a German Shepherd dog with her latest husband and all of his adult children, I parked, hopped out of my car and as she walked by asked her regarding each of our three children: if he was alive, well, married, a father and where did he live, and she stonily did not answer a single one of the 15 queries.  What kind of a person is she anyway, who wouldn't impart this basic information to the other parent?  This same question goes for her latest husband Jim, who easily could have blurted out to a heartsick father that his three children were all alive, at least.

The Christmas holiday is behind us now in this gruesome year and in a week we'll be in the new year, which surely has to be better.  Within the fortnight my middle child Johnny, the serious, sober one now flashing through his thirties, will have a birthday.  That day I'll be at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover as always at noon to procure lunch; maybe I'll see him then, or another child of mine, for the first time in well over a dozen years.  Although I'm a cynic, I'm also the-glass-is-half-full type of guy, at least until suddenly the glass is not only empty but completely broken into pieces.

Four

 Three kids. Plus at least one is married, or was, several years back, so I guess the number is now four. Jimmy, Johnny, Danny and Laura, JJD&L. (Welcome to the family, Laura.)

JJ&D haven't spoken to a single Lamberton in over 15 years (that is a hallmark of PAS, to smear all the relatives on the side of the cut-out parent with the same lies and notions of unworthiness that the estranged parent has been painted with). These children, when their wills were being overborne as tender minors by their covertly narcissistic mother, in my opinion, a form of child abuse according to some, were not responsible for their actions then but now that they are all in their thirties their continuing actions speak to their characters as the people they are. They take after their mother obviously. (She looks like such a nice person.)

Jimmy is sort of shiftless and unfocused, a bit of a user, he went to the best magnet public high school for science and technology in the country, Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia, but he didn't get their degree, rather after four years they in effect discharged him with the third tier of a Virginia public high school diploma, the equivalent of a shop degree as near as I can figure because he slid through his four years taking advantage of the chaos of my and Sharon's quarter million dollar multi-year divorce. He never went to college. His mind works like this: On his 18th birthday he legally changed his last name from mine to hers knowing that I would eventually find out and be hurt by it he hoped I am sure, and another time he came into the neighborhood and knocked on the neighbor's door to say hello but not on mine, knowing that months or years later it would inadvertently be mentioned to me by them and I would be, he hoped,  hurt by learning that he eschewed to knock on my door when he made a point to come to visit in the 'hood. (He looks like such a nice young man.)

 

What was it that Melania Trump's dumpy jacket said when she went to the southern border a few years back to inform herself on the state of caged children down there--I Just Don't Care? It's been so long since I saw or heard from or about any of my children (over a dozen years) that I  doubt that I'd recognize any of them if I walked past them on the street. Jimmy was the only child of mine that was ever held by my father, just before he died at age 61 of lung cancer in 1986,  and I'm sorry that Johnny and Danny didn't have the honor to feel the embrace even as babies by that once-strong, capable man; I think that probably Jimmy would express Melania's heartless refrain--I Just Don't Care--about having been in his grandfather's arms. (Grandad, Dad, Auntie Kate.)

The old world of blogging . . .

 I hate change but it's as inevitable and immutable as time.  For 14 years, since 2007 till now, I was a blogger as dcspinster commenting upon life and running in DC, especially upon running, my divorce, my three lost children who are (were?) the victims of the form of child abuse known as PAS perpetrated upon them as tender minors by their mother my ex and her coterie of family wreckers known as social "professionals who specialize in destroying families and especially childhoods through the incredibly venal and destructive arena known as domestic law, politics, travel and life in general. But blogger changed to google blogspot I guess and now I can't get into my 1400-plus posts in the past but they're here.

I was relating the year in review since it's December and my last (first) post was discussing the two salient events, beyond my brief car trip in September which I equated to my "vacation," that stick out in my mind in the mind-numbing year that is the Year-That-Wasn't, due to the pandemic and America's incredibly inept, corrupt and deadly non-response to it.  All critically thinking, non-cultish adults know who is responsible for our quarter-million deaths in the last 10 short (long?) months. Two bright memories (a wedding party in January and seeing a B-29 bomber lumber overhead at 500 feet on July 4th) in a long, numbing year of dark dreariness.

I had already in my old blog related the list of the one movie I went to this year, the Academy-Award winning best picture Parasite on Valentine's Day.  That might be the last movie I'll ever see in a movie-theatre, which would be a significant event in itself, since I have vivid memories of contemporaneously watching movies in theaters going back all the way to Shane, the Fall of the Roman Empire, John Wayne's The Alamo, the Longest Day, Goldfinger, the Night of the Living Dead, Morgan--A Suitable Case for Treatment, Zabriskie Point, the Battle of Algiers, 2001 (more than once), Easy Rider, Bad Company, the Godfather, Conan the Barbarian, Gladiator; and Parasite might be a good place to drive a stake through the outlandishly expensive, outmoded form of 90-minute entertainment known as movie-going.  That night I got sick as a dog with racking coughing fits that for a few days made me think I was going to die and that lasted two full weeks and that I still suffer after-effects from, hmmm, I wonder what I had?

The picture of me that I posted in my profile, in the tradition of my old blog, was my most memorable or significant picture of the past year (2019).  I am standing on Omaha Beach in Normandy three-quarters of a century after the history-changing Allied invasion across that beach and four others along that 50-mile coastal stretch in the American-led military expedition that saved the world from a dark new Middle Ages under fascism, at least temporarily, and that launched an era of American exceptionalism that lasted up until 2016 when it all started to come apart quickly and might have been thrown away in the last (current) presidential term irretrievably.  Anyway, being a history major and the son of a WW2 combat vet who saw his share of invasion beaches in the Pacific and was slated to probably be killed in the penultimate invasion of the Japanese home islands except for the use of atomic bombs tom end the war, I was proud and reflective to be upon that beach in March last year in my first-ever overseas trip during the year marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of that stupendous event at that very place, an event that cost our country a huge and sorrowful effusion of blood that day in June 1944, a cost in lives in that tremendous battle that was easily surpassed yesterday alone in covid deaths in the US while our president blathered on in phone calls to Republican supplicants and tweets to his brainwashed masses in his ongoing post-election-loss-by-a landslide coup attempt.