Veteran's Day 2020

 On Veteran's Day earlier this month I went to see my main street corner man, Trevor, who holds down the intersection of Route 29 and I-66 while wearing a sign declaring himself a combat vet and asking God to bless America. I hadn't seen him in months because I don't hardly ever go by there anymore since since the pandemic began, I only go to Merrifield sometimes in the other direction from my house, which has a Home Depot, and to the grocery store a couple of miles away. He had been sitting on some intel for me for months he said when he saw me. Sharon, the mother of my three estranged children, a heartless covert narcissist (in my opinion) who turned all three boys against me by using the form of child abuse (in some people's opinion including mine) known as PAS, had been in a red car driving by weeks earlier.

Sharon, who has stonily refused to tell me anything about any of my children (even whether they're all still alive--this is a very abnormal woman), is the only link I have with any of my children, since in the consuming hatred she harbors in her flinty soul towards me she influenced our children not to communicate with a single relative on my side of the family for over 15 years. Now that's abnormal! She used to live two miles from me, a block away from Trevor's intersection, and she used to use her phony concerned Christian blather on him whenever she walked by him with her most recent husband Jim.  A couple of years ago she moved away for parts unknown, thus severing my only link to my children.  

Trevor knows cars as well as people.  Whenever I drive by, even if I'm three lanes over, he'll shout out to me, "Hey, lawyer man!"  He knows Jim drives a Jeep.  He knows Sharon drives a red convertible Mustang. The car he saw her in was red but not a Mustang nor a convertible nor a Jeep.  But he said it had North Carolina tags.  Thanks Trevor!

Then since it was almost noon and a federal holiday, I went over to Westover and went into the Lost Dog pizzeria and looked around but didn't see anyone I recognized so I left and hung out outside for awhile watching the comings and goings at the restaurant, which has limited seating inside as well as takeout.  It felt like I used to feel every holiday when I went to Sharon's residence until the youngest one turned 18 to execute upon my plain vanilla visitation, but she never cooperated with the court order; the house was always dark, the phone was never answered and no children ever came out.  For a few months initially when the children were learning under her tutelage how to become scofflaws and that court orders meant nothing (there wasn't enough money in my world to go running to court to get a hearing 6 weeks later every time this happened), the kids would come out in their stockinged feet, even in cold weather, to brightly recite, "Mom sent us out ready to go but we don't want to go with you so we're not."  And then they would skip back into her house, close the door and that was my visitation for those two weeks.  After a period of time they even abandoned that charade.  You see, research shows that children would rather keep the parent happy with whom they spend the most amount of time (she had them 83% of the time to my 17% of the time under the visitation order) and who puts the most amount of stress upon them through manipulation, oftentimes unrelenting in the case of an alienating parent, to the point where they abandon or start to hate the other parent to keep the grotesque manipulator happy.  

Anyway, I went home from the Lost Dog this Veteran's Day and cooked myself a frozen Stouffers Pizza on French Bread for lunch.  The holiday season is coming up fast so I'm starting to get sad again.  Then the three children, now all adults in their 30s, all have birthdays in January or February.  The middle child, whose birthday is next, registered to vote in Seattle a few years back, as I discovered poking around on the internet, the only child who ever moved any distance away from her.  I thought he might be trying to break her unnatural influence upon him as he started to fully mature in adulthood.  Since she's now in North Carolina, I wonder if he'll move back east and maybe follow her there.

Dreams of My Children, or Why I Hate Holidays.

Besides Christmas or Thanksgiving, which cause the heart to bring forth images of family and longing memories of missing loved ones, Columbus Day is the holiday I most dislike.  Nineteen years ago during The Divorce  I brought my children back from a lovely trip to Ohio to visit their cousins and aunt and uncle and that night their mother called Dr. Victor Elion, a charlatan court-house-lounging psychologist who acquired visitation overseeing powers over my visitation thanks to the careless writing of an order by my dreadful then-divorce attorney, to complain that I had brought the children home "tired."  He completely suspended my visitation privileges that night, ex parte, and I wasn't able to restore my rights until after a hearing scheduled two months later and by then, the children had turned against me by application of PAS, a form of brainwashing which immature tender children are especially sensitive to, by their mother and her coterie of agenda-driven hired gun social services "professionals" no better than Dr. Elion.  I remember thinking at the time that 60 days of no communication with my children was heartbreakingly cruel and painful.  What did I know then in my ignorance, I haven't seen nor heard from any of my children in 15 years.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  You could google my name and the name of my oldest son, James Bradley Lamberton, before he changed his name to her name on his eighteenth birthday, and find an opinion by the Virginia appellate court on how that divorce went, which contains phrases like "reprehensible." a "harassment petition" and "unjustified" in describing the actions of the mother during the litigation.  She was assessed sanctions and my costs of just under $50,000 finally which ended the litigation finally after several dreadful soul and money sucking years.

So I hate Columbus Day, it immediately conjures up memories of my lost children and the unfairness men mostly face these days in heartless domestic law courts.  For years I have maintained a public outreach to my children on this very venue, letting them know that on any holiday during which I am home that I would be at a nearby pizzeria to where they grew up during the noon hour and inviting any or all of them to join me so we could, as adults in a loving family, could pick up the threads from this day going forward.  After all, until each one turned 18, I was always at their curbside every other holiday or Friday at 5 pm to undertake my court-ordered visitation and partake in the custody order (full joint legal custody), although they (nor their mother) never answered my cellphone calls to the house and after ten minutes I would drive away to return on the next holiday or twice-monthly Friday.

No one besides a forlorn fellow sufferer in the Arlington Court who I didn't know (I thought she was serving me a subpoena when she approached me in the restaurant as I ate) who was undergoing the very same PAS applications that I suffered from.  She described the same unfair and dreadful undertakings  by the same cast of characters in the case she was associated with, like, in my opinion, the odious and unprofessional Meg Sullivan, LPSW, that in my opinion in conjunction with other hired whore "professionals" extrajudicially cost me my fatherhood.  But I persevere.  Today, even during the pandemic, I parked at noon within sight of the front door of the Lost Dog Restaurant in Westover, donned my mask and checked out the inside quickly and ordered a Polynesian Pie, spent the time it was cooking in my car watching people entering or leaving the front door of the premises, received a text at 12:33 that my pie was ready, watched for a few minutes more then picked up my pie and a few minutes later drove home to enjoy it.  I am sorry for those three, as the fatuous Dr. Elion used to refer to them as, lads, now all adults in their thirties.  What men they should be, that they so easily cast family members out on temptations offered to them by others, even though as young children but now mature adults! 

Happy Birthday, Jim

July always makes me think of my 4 or 5 year divorce, that cost me a quarter million dollars.  What I got out of it beyond becoming thankfully clear of Sharon who is, in my opinion, a destructive covert narcissist, was the extra-judicial extinguishment of my fatherhood of my three minor sons though extreme Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS") perpetrated by Sharon, a form of child abuse in the opinion of many including me, and, get this, lifetime alimony.

Lifetime alimony exists pretty much only in Virginia, a state that still clings to contributory negligence, versus the modern doctrine of comparative negligence in the courtroom which effectively ensures some form of righteous compensation from wrongdoers for injured persons.  The reason July makes me think about this stuff is because Jim, her older second husband (I am younger than Sharon--she didn't age well--but Jim is many years older than her), was born in July and after many years of me paying her alimony, he married her and thus ended my lifetime alimony.

She sent me a certified letter to notify me of her remarriage (although even so, per usual, she didn't fully comply with the information required by the divorce decree) but what my corrosive, expensive divorce taught me was never present yourself to receive an unknown certified letter.  You see, I was litigating for years against low-down dirty-lawsuit experts and that's what they did; yes, those scumbags she surrounded herself and our children with taught me a lot.  But eventually my agency accepted her letter notifying me that she had re-married (she always needs someone around to do her manipulative drama on) and I found out on my own what county in North Carolina the happy event took place in and sent away for a certified copy of her latest marriage certificate so that, many weeks later, I could send it to my payroll office to get rid of my lifetime alimony.

That certificate, a public document, was a thing of beauty, giving the full names (including mother's maiden name, if I remember correctly), dates of birth, social security numbers and current addresses of everyone involved, including witnesses.  All that PI stuff in the public domain is good to know, I guess.  I know exactly how old old Jim is.

I wish I could meet Jim so I could thank him for saving me hundreds of thousands of dollars over my lifetime by taking this economic sponge off my books.  She was costing me $18,000 a year and I still wasn't seeing my kids.  How does that work?  Only in current America.

I've seen Jim, I believe, at least three times but I have never met him.  I believe he was the date of Sharon when both came out of her house one Friday evening while I was on the sidewalk calling her number on my cellphone (my calls to her house asking for the children to be sent out for court-ordered visitation were never answered) to say that I was there at the appropriate time for my visitation of my minor sons.  While the wimpy-looking male hung back, she asked what I was doing there and I told her that it was Friday at 5 pm and I was here to pick up my children for my visitation as required by court order.  She dismissively told me that they weren't there (that's "cooperation" in encouraging the children in visitation, as required by the court order, for you) and she ordered the male standing back in the shadows to get in the jeep at the curb so they could depart.  As she came down the steps to the sidewalk to get in the passenger side, I retreated off the sidewalk into the street 15 feet behind the jeep in observation of the learned, unwritten rule that if you hold your ground during an encounter relating to a divorce, and anyone in her camp comes too close to you, they're likely to later claim that you were "menacing" somehow.  Yeah, that's how bad divorces go, and how females can play the Fright card which is a close cousin to, and enhances, the Victim card.

The male got behind the wheel and started up the jeep.  There was plenty room to pull forward out into the travel lane (there was no traffic on this residential street) but suddenly the back-up lights came on and the jeep lurched backwards rapidly maybe a dozen feet and I was frozen in fear that I was about to be struck by it when the gears clunked and the jeep changed course and pulled forward and away.  I've described this encounter in a past blog entry.

Whether the male was ordered to back up by Sharon or he did it on his own, to scare me, or it was a mistake, it left me shaking but I think that was Jim behind the wheel.  It might not have been him though, maybe it was some other older loser.  After all, I've never been introduced to Jim, "dad" to my youngest child at least (Danny so loves being in Jim's summer house on the Outer Banks, that's where he proposed to his wife, at his "dad's" house on the beach, as I learned a couple of years later from reading the wedding book on the Internet to my child's wedding that I was never invited to nor told about until a neighbor mentioned it to me).

I did see Jim once trying to use an ATM outside a bank as I drove home from work one Saturday after they were married.  They lived two miles from me and I was driving past going home when I saw Sharon on the sidewalk by the bank near her townhouse.  Of course I scrutinized the scene as I drove by and there was this poor man trying to get money out of an ATM as she supervised his efforts.  Sharon had her mouth working in a fury, and her visage was as I remembered it, typically furious and impatient when not in the the sight of others.  After all, if she thought people were around when she was haranguing someone close to her she wouldn't want to besmirch her phony image of sweetness and reveal her true character of being a user of all those around her, in my opinion.  Poor guy, but better him than me.

The next time I saw Jim has also been mentioned in a past blog post or posts. I was once again driving home on a public street from work on a weekend, and I saw a large knot of people walking a large German Shepherd dog on the sidewalk not far from where she lived.  I recognized Sharon and I, missing my children as the years dragged by with no communication from these ruined now-adults (PAS is essentially a form of brainwashing immature minds and can have a lifetime effect, especially upon young, susceptible children), parked at my first opportunity on this street so I could ask Sharon, on this public street, how my children, our children, were.

I walked up to the group of people which included Sharon, with Jim next to her, and a few other adults including other men, the large dog, a teen or two and maybe a pre-teen.  I maintained proper social distance, as we would call it these days, didn't impede, block or confront them in any way and asked, taking less than a minute total since I received nary word in reply from anyone, these five simple questions for each child of mine (and hers): Is he alive. Is he well? Is he married? Does he have children? Where does he live?  I encountered only stony silence during that minute as they walked along, and I walked away.

Anyway, your birthday was earlier this month, Jim (I know the day), and even if you didn't want to give a distraught father even a trace of information about his sons in response to his desperate questions about them then (not even an encouraging: They're all alive, okay?), Happy Birthday, old feller!  At least you saved me a lot of money!

A Memorial Day for my children to ponder

This post on the day before Memorial Day 2020, the year that wasn't, is for my kids, JJ&D, the "lads," as the fatuous charlatan Dr. Victor Elion (a manipulating and preeningly vain courthouse psychologist in Fairfax), in my opinion, used to call the three minor boys (now fully adult men if they all are still with us, which I wouldn't know since I haven't seen nor heard from any of them in 15 years), the divorce you know.  They all love their mother so, as well they should although in my opinion she is a manipulating covert narcissist; they should have some fealty towards their father too who wiped their bottoms and coached them all in soccer for all those years, it's biblical you know, you could look it up.

There are four pictures (your Grandad my dad) on this Memorial Day weekend of Lambertons (your uncle Jack), our relatives and blood kin, mine and yours, who did their duty (your great-uncle Harry) honorably that you could download (your great-grandfather Lamberton) from the US Navy Log in DC to study and learn from.  For Jimmy, the oldest, now Jim Bradley Rogers, who shocked me when I asked him in 2001 just after 9-11 what he would do if the war of ideologies we were suddenly thrust into spiraled out of control and he answered "Nothing," saying, "That's what we have a professional army for."

For Johnny, the most sober and earnest of the three, who liked playing with little plastic soldiers as I did when I was a child, and who filled me with pride when he came over and took away dozens of my military books from my bookshelf to read, just before he fell prey as a tender boy to the subtle but malicious and vicious adult manipulation of those who traffic in PAS, Parental Alienation Syndrome, a form of child abuse.  He once shouldered his toy wooden rifle in a snowstorm as a pre-adolescent and patrolled our sidewalk at shoulder arms for a half hour, marching back and forth, doing his duty as he saw it as a growing, responsible boy; well my lad, duty includes familial love towards both parents, be it distant or close and loving, because blood is or should be to the fully mature person a paramount passion.

And to Danny, the most abused of the three by those PAS traffickers who sought through grotesque manipulation the pursuit and self-satisfying achievement of gaining their own ends in the divorce wars because he was the youngest and most vulnerable, I'm sorry I couldn't protect you from those who sought to endlessly interrogate you suggestively (unbeknownst to me since I only had you pursuant to plain vanilla visitation 17% of the time) so they could come to court to triumphantly testilie in sonorous voices as to the incredible repressed memories of yours they had fantastically uncovered with their pointed, suggestive questioning, because as a matter of public policy, children can't testify against their parents.  It hurt to read in your on-line wedding book a few years back that you had proposed to your wife at your "father's" house on the Outer Banks; that guy who owns or was willed that house ain't your father and he never wiped your bottom, coached you in soccer or went to bat for you against the school boards in countless Special Ed hearings, nor provided the full funding for your eight semesters at VCU (you're welcome!), I did.

Happy happy, Sharon

Have a happy birthday, mother of my three children. I have nothing good to say about you so I won't say anything further except to say that the last time I went to church I prayed for you.

https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.htmlhttps://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.html

Sorry I missed you, son, and I hope you got my birthday card

Just as the first bell above the Post Office at Westover rang signifying noon, I walked into the Lost Dog Cafe pizzeria for lunch and noticed it was pretty empty.  I was seated at a table by the window where I could see anyone entering or leaving the restaurant and ordered a draft beer and an Italian Pie.

While waiting for my pie to be prepared I walked once through the eatery and saw that there was no one in the sparse crowd of diners who could conceivably be from my immediate family and after availing myself of the men's room (I have three sons), I resumed my place at the table and kept watch on the door.  The beer arrived but I didn't like it, too cloying and sour tasting, so I only sipped it occasionally.

The pie soon arrived and it was cooked just right, with a delicate crust ladled with a savory pizza sauce, with lots of pieces of salty diced or round-cut cold cut meats piled atop crunchy white onion strands basking under a melted mozzarella cheese film.  I cut the four pieces into eight and allowed them to cool, then slowly ate most of the slices while watching out the window to observe the front door and sip my beer sparingly.

At the end of the hour I paid my fare, left a piece of pie and half a beer as a good luck charm for next week when my youngest son has a birthday and I'll return one more time for lunch in the hopes of seeing him and his wife of several years whom I have never met and, who knows who else.  I departed thinking back upon my dad, who for all his faults as a person would never have been cut out from the family by all of his children and left in childless loneliness for the rest of his life by those offspring; such an action would seem to the ordinary person to be a pretty damning indictment of an unnatural cruelty imparted to those children by one of of their primary caregivers and her coterie of soulless enablers, children now grown up to be fully mature adults by the passage of an ensuing decade and a half, having seemingly incorporated those same characteristics of immutable cruelty into their very beings.

Later this month

Many years ago one February, my mother said wryly to me in a note accompanying yet another arriving birthday gift that birthdays come fast and furious in my household after the turn of each year because one of my sons was born in January, the other two were born in February and their mother had a birthday in March and mine is in April.  Then, relief till Christmas.

Next up a few days from now is my oldest child's birthday, and I hope to see him during the lunch hour at the local gourmet pizzeria after all these years of him being away, apparently getting over the fiduciary suit he and his brothers (and mother, who stood in for the youngest child who was too young to be on the papers) brought against me during the divorce, a case of not-so-subtle coercion of these tender children by overbearing adults supposedly caring for them, that was tossed out by the judge as being a "harassment petition;" which ultimately incurred almost $50,000 in sanctions and costs assessed against their mother.  Yesterday was a holiday and I didn't see anyone I recognized at that restaurant during the lunch hour, but I am hopeful that it will be different on Jimmy's birthday.

Actually on that morning I am slated to have yet more work done on my damaged eye that has bedeviled me through four eye operations and I'll tell him how I am doing as I get older; I am sure he is concerned.  Also a cousin of his is getting married, I'm sure he'll want to know those particulars, one of his aunts has much worse ailments than me and I'm sure he'll want to know about that, and a great aunt who used to often take care of him when he was a baby passed away and I'm sure as a normal human being, he'll want to know that sad fact.

I sent him a birthday card in care of his mother at her address, with a birthday gift inside the card as it's my belief that he lives sometimes at her house, at least when she lived in the area and he used to park his car outside her house in the adjacent bank's parking lot for extended periods.  Being my first-born I of course love him and have many happy memories of him (enjoy these old snapshots of a dad's oldest son) and I hope that after about 15 years I'll see him later this week; I trust that he is alive and well although his mother stonily refuses even to tell me these simple things about the wellbeing of our oldest child, or any of our children.

MLK holiday.

The Martin Luther King weekend holiday this year was pretty eventful.  The weather turned bitterly cold and it snowed briefly after a spate of unusually warm weather.

 On Sunday I went to the evening wedding of the daughter of a friend and former colleague of mine down on the new DC waterfront on the Anacostia River. The bride and groom made for a handsome couple, and we danced into the night and I made the last Metro train for the night back to Virginia by a bare 4 minutes.

On Monday, being the actual holiday, I went to the local gourmet pizzeria for lunch, where I had a tasty Cheese Steak pizza, which tasted much like a Philly cheese steak sandwich, and enjoyed an excellent Allagash Curieux draft, brewed by a Portland (ME) brewery in a process that ages the beer for eight weeks in barrels formerly used to age bourbon.  The place was busy so I ate at the bar and planned my next three lunches there next month, on President's Day and the two birthdays of my February babies.

After lunch I went down the street a short way to the Stray Cat Cafe, a sandwich, draft and hamburger place that had recently undergone a makeover to add all-day breakfast, Mexican food and shakes and floats to its menu and renovated its interior.  Inside I made the acquaintance of a retired scientist and we had a fascinating conversation about sound waves, mudslides, political assassinations, reading and writing, GIFs and, wait for it, divorce and its deleterious long-lasting effect upon children deeply affected by a parent suffering from a narcissistic personalty disorder (NPD).

Reflections

Last week I had lunch at my favorite local pizzeria, the Lost Dog Cafe.  Being a weekday, the premises weren't crowded and I settled into a booth by the windows where I could observe the world going by outside as I sipped my Port City German Pilsner Lager draft and waited for my pizza to arrive.

The pizza was a delicious Italian Pie, made of pasta sauce, cheeses and genoa ham and other cold-cut meats.  I ate much of it but as usual, left some behind as a portend of better luck next time.  Perhaps one of these birthday or  holiday celebratory lunches I'll have a visitor or two or three to share my meal with.

Or not.  After an idle hour enjoying my repast, I paid and left, wandering down the street to amble through the Italian Store, a bustling community hub of Westover, chock-filled with Italian foodstuffs including pizza by the slice, starting at $2.29 for a three-cheese slice.

It was an idyllic, unusually warm midday, with echoes from the now-distant past tugging at forward-looking determinations for the future as I face up to the new decade and my passage in a few short years into being a septuagenarian.  I was bemoaning over the phone recently with a divorced friend of mine from childhood who lives alone, childless because he, like me (threefold in my case), lost his only child many years ago to the pernicious scourge of Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS"), a very real phenomenon in Western culture where usually the mother, typically the primary caregiver as granted by our shortsighted and lazy Mother-knows-best domestic-law courts, brainwashes through grotesque manipulation the impressionable minor children into lifelong patricide.  A message to my sons, all now well over thirty, I still get pieces of mail occasionally for you here at my house, please make arrangements to pick up your stuff by the end of this month or I am likely to dispose of it all, including your 30-year first-year boxes.

Johnny, I Hardly Know You

My sweet middle boy, John Henry Lamberton, or Johnny, at age 1 1/2 on Nantucket at a photo shoot paid for by his grandmother, my mother. This boy, a victim as a tender minor of the form of child abuse known as Parental Alienation Syndrome perpetrated by his mother and her mercenary coterie of "professionals" here in NoVa during the Divorce, has not communicated with me in 14 years or any Lamberton in 18 years, a classic hallmark of PAS. He has a birthday this month; Johnny, if you are alive and well (your mother stonily refused to answer those questions about your condition put to her by me when I last saw her in a public venue about four years ago), know that on your birthday I'll be at the Lost Dog in Westover for lunch, come and we'll start our lifetime going forward, a boy (now adult) and his dad, one day at a time.

Odes to the boys

Holidays are always hard times for me ever since I lost my three boys almost two decades ago as tender young children to PAS during my multi-year quarter-million dollar divorce (only the best for my ex-wife Sharon). I think about them practically every day and miss them especially during the end of the year, just before their birthday season starts, when all three have birthdays within the next 60 days.  I hope all three are well and happy, although if any of them weren't well or suffered some tragedy, their mother would never inform me.  Sharon had plenty of help in her successful extra-judicial patricide through Parental Alienation Syndrome, which some refer to as child abuse, which she foisted upon these three tender lads, all impressionable adolescents, abetted in the deed by her coterie of family wrecking "professionals" like Meg, Joe, Victor, Bill, Van Sicko, Meg's putative lover, and the rest of her mercenary adults whose profession is murdering the childhoods of children.

 I remember my oldest boy Jimmy whenever I hear this song that came out around the time he was born.  Jimmy had such promise, and tragically his mother, and Meg as the enabler, in my opinion put stoking her covert narcissism above his well-being as a child during the years-long divorce wars.  I miss and love you, Jimmy, no matter what easy-money scheme you're currently engaged in.

This is the pop song that played incessantly during the time my middle son was born.  I love you, Johnny, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

This song always brings back bittersweet memories of my youngest child Danny.  He was the most vulnerable child, being the youngest and the one most in need of special care, and he was therefore the victim of all the hidden-memories-recalled schemes of the charlatan Victor and the rest of the mental health "professionals" that his mother surreptitiously took him off to during the divorce wars, known and unknown to me, to the point where he expressed troublesome ideation, a child's cry for help, that the adults in the form of the GAL finally took note of and forced Sharon to tell me about.  I am sorry I was unable to protect you, Danny, as these adults ravaged you as a child and I love you and hope you are well.

Have a healthy and Happy New Year, JJ&D and families.

Merry Christmas 2019

Merry Christmas to all.  The most beautiful tree I came across this year on my annual Holiday Lights run is the Library of Congress tree.

Season's Greetings from my house to yours, especially to my long-estranged children.  Today I'll stop by Westover to see if those bad boys of mine have finally gotten over their brainwashing during the divorce by their mother and her cadre of wicked, well, evil courthouse riff-raff like Meg (who is still destroying other families with cold aplomb), charlatan Victor, scumbag Joe, unethical or worse Bill, and all the other divorce lawyers (spots reserved for y'all on the lowest rung of hell) and mental health "professionals" who, as mature mercenary adults, knowingly helped to murder the childhoods of my children at their oh-so tender ages back then, scarring them for life.

The National Tree from a few years ago.  I led a group of runners out at noon from work to run by it.

The National Tree this year.  Here's to a better next year, when we can start restoring America's greatness after three years of wallowing in the sewer due to ignorance, myopia, perceived victimhood and desperate false hope leading to blind unthinking cult worship.

Columbus Day, er, Indigenous People Day 2019

Earlier this month on the Columbus Day holiday I went for lunch during the noon hour to the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover, as was formerly my wont for many years on all holidays and special days when I was around, ever since my youngest child turned 18.  It was crowded when I arrived and I went around the establishment but I didn't see anyone I recognized.  I took a seat at the bar, which was wide open, where I could see anyone entering or leaving the premises, but during the ensuing hour I still didn't see anyone I recognized.

Columbus Day, or I guess some people insist it's Indigenous People Day now, has been a sad day for me for almost two decades.  When my quarter-million-dollar four-years-of-litigation divorce was just getting started, I was at an extreme (or fatal as it turned out) disadvantage because my wife and mother of my three children, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, had taken the children out of the house on a holiday ruse to her parents compound in Cleveland, filed a stealth divorce petition, and refused to bring them back to Arlington unless I vacated the house, which I did so they could come back home and return to school.  Of course, I was then accused in court subsequently of "abandoning" the family.  Welcome to the divorce wars, where you'll meet the White Queen soon enough.

In the meantime, Sharon busily started instilling in these three tender minors an us-against-him mentality and a we-have-to-stay-strong-and-stick-together mantra, which took flourishing root in their immature minds as this insidious and relentlessly motivated manipulator, driven by what I believe to be her covert narcissistic personality, overbore their wills by withholding and then giving back her love in a cold calculation, centered upon herself as the victim here and immersing them up to their armpits in the exciting litigation.  (We're suing dad!  For mom!).  Do a little research on covert narcissism, drop the term into a google search and it will make your hair stand on end, and this disorder is viewed by many as exceedingly manipulative and destructive, for which about the only ameliorating action one can take when closely associated with such a person is to literally flee him or her before he or she ruins your life by adversely affecting all your loved ones.  Although I received visitation in court that gave me about 22% of the time with the children, the approximately 78% of their other time was filled with rigorous debriefings by her of every minute of our time together, many secret trips to many different psychologists, complex plans devised by her for them to execute in case I got "mad," secret cell phones they brought over and hid that I didn't know about, her disregard for sending over the children's medication with them (thus their claim that I was a poor parent for not keeping them on their prescription schedule which I didn't even know about), and all kinds of other malicious mischief.  Meanwhile she allied herself with family-wrecking courthouse "professionals" who busily tore the family unit apart in complicity with the serial-suer attitude she brought to bear upon their father, sharing draft court pleadings with these pre or barely pubescent children contrary to settled public policy.

Eighteen years ago this month I took the children to Columbus on the Columbus Day weekend to visit their aunt and uncle (an OSU professor) and their three cousins (all boys roughly the same age as my three sons).  We had a wonderful time.  We wandered around the Ohio State campus, conducted a fun experiment in their uncle's lab under his supervision, went sightseeing around this state capital, and the boys romped, played and watched movies.  Then I brought my charges back to their mother's house on time.  The next morning my lawyer called and told me that she had called up the court-appointed "psychologist," Victor Elion, the night before to complain that I had brought the youngest boy home "tired" and beseech him what she should do about the lad's homework.  (She had not communicated to me that he had any homework, and my son had said he didn't have any homework when I asked him if he had any.  It was, dear reader, a set-up.)

The charlatan Ph'D appointee, who hung around the courthouse to get work, suspended my visitation sua sponte and ex-parte, without even a hearing.  Suspiciously to me, this charlatan had billed a four-hour session with Sharon earlier on the day I left with the children for a trip to Colorado during the summertime.

The first hearing I was able to schedule, at which my visitation was restored, was over two months later and I spent a lonely ten weeks without seeing or even speaking to my children (they never answered their phone, which had caller ID, when I called), or even knowing where they went for Thanksgiving.  My fatherhood was effectively over as by then, it is my opinion that the children had been brainwashed by Sharon and her coterie of what I consider to be childhood wreckers in a stark example of PAS, abetted by our slow and unresponsive domestic law system.  Although I received full joint legal custody of the children, patricide had been completed already, and the children soon stopped coming for court-ordered visitation (discovering how easy it is to be a scofflaw following their mother's example, in my opinion).  I haven't seen nor even spoken with any of my children (now all adults) in over a dozen years.

These dolorous recollections flooded through my mind as I sat alone in the Lost Dog Cafe earlier this month.  I ordered the New York Giant sandwich, a delicious contraption of hot pastrami, creamy coleslaw and melted cheese, and a draft.  I enjoyed it in quiet solitude, reflecting upon the countless hours of changing diapers, attending parent-teacher meetings, preparing for special-ed appeals, taking them to doctor visits, nursing sick children, hurrying them to ERs when they had standard childhood accidents, coaching them and earning coaching licenses for their and their teammates' betterment, taking vacations with them, spending time building leggo ships and helping them with homework, driving them to school when they were late for the bus, planning for their financial futures (each of the three children already had a Roth IRA set up by me, funded with money earned by "lawn mowing" for neighbors that coincidentally matched their annual allowances); all these childhood memories dissipating in an obscene orgy of bogus recriminations hurled at me in public court hearings, kow-towing to phony or agenda-driven "professionals" like Victor or Meg who were in effect controlling (ruining, in my opinion) their childhoods now, absorbing $15,000 legal bills each month plus enduring a fiduciary lawsuit from my very own children (yeah, these minors brought the suit, sure).

Sharon was sanctioned and assessed costs of almost $50,000 ultimately for her "harassment petition."  That in no measure made up for having her scummy divorce lawyers, Bill and Joe, stand between me and my children during this time in their development, resulting ultimately in a thoroughly destroyed family unit at any level, an extra-judicially killed parenthood and three children having their childhoods murdered by those adult "professionals;" it would make angels cry and makes me weary and heartsick to even think about.

I miss my children.  The last time I spoke to my wife, when I encountered her on a public street, I asked her about each child:  Is he alive? Is he well? Is he married? Does he have children? Where does he live?  Her non-answer to these questions that any normal parent would answer for the other  reflected her granite heart.  Stony silence.

At the Lost Dog my memories vanished in a swirl of regret and wonder at the inscrutability of life.  I finished my meal, leaving a part of my sandwich and draft behind as a talisman for if I ever come back there in a rapprochement attempt again, paid, and left.

Ruminations of a sad man

We moved into 42 Boulevard in Westerleigh, Staten Island, NY in 1964 where in the attic of this 3-story house, left behind by the former owners, was a treasure trove of American history, which I as a 12-year-old happily delved into.  Many an idle hour was spent by me in that dusty old attic going through boxes there. 

Jim Lovett was a WWI vet who had left behind his experience Over There in those boxes (maybe he was dead by then and nobody in his family thought there was anything of value in those boxes of books and clothes).  There were several WWI battle books, all with brittle pages that crumbled as I turned the pages through acid leaching, because then paper was processed with no regard to posterity. I remember one title called Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, and several books on WWI arial combat.  

I also secured a campaign DI hat, and a German sawtooth 18 inch bayonet in a sheath that was straight out of Erich Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front.  I had that bayonet, truly a war trophy, till I gave it to my middle child, Johnny, when he was 12. because he was the most like me in growing up, fascinated by the wartime experiences of men at arms.

Don't you know that the German bayonet commanded center-stage in a hearing in my quarter million dollar divorce from my, in my opinion, covert narcissistic wife because their point was that this showed how unfit I was to be a father.  After almost twenty years of not seeing any of my children through the extrajudicial but real process of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), this post reflects on my middle child Johnny, a most somber and sober child who would have turned his parents in to the Gestapo if they were reading banned books.

Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month . . . .

Hey birthday boy!  Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month, but I was busy driving around towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia on a big car trip for my vacation.

I forgive you for almost backing over me years ago, if that was you dating my ex-wife last decade, in your big jeep with its ever present Life Is Good spare tire cover.  After all, you are now married to her and I wish you all the luck in the world; if the scales ever fall from your eyes you will need it.

There is one psychological condition you should research, that of the covert narcissist.  Just sayin'.

But I am sorry to say that you revealed to me a hard, inhuman side to your character, in my opinion, that puts you in proper company in your latest marriage.  You see, I haven't had a word of communication from any of my three children in over a decade and have repeatedly tried to ascertain if they are well or indeed, even alive.

The last time I saw the mother of my children on a public street in Arlington, very near where I live, I happened to drive by while coming home from work and you, an adult man and woman, some teenagers and a German Shepherd were on a walk with her on the public sidewalk and I parked and walked past the large group and asked her, regarding each of my three children, five questions for each that represent the bare minimum that any parent would tell another parent, no matter how estranged or outlandishly inimical that person was to the other.  After all, I love my children and worry about their wellbeing and you, since you were there, could have at any time during that single minute, allayed my fears by interjecting, as any human being would to another, that my three children are well, or not well because of [this happenstance].

After all, you obviously know them all; my youngest son speciously referred to you as "Dad" in his marriage book, my middle child has used your address as his address, I believe, and my oldest son has parked his vehicle for extended periods outside your abode and does or has, I think, lived there or caretaken your dwelling.  The five basic questions of anxious parents?

Is he alive. Is he well. Is he married.  Does he have children.  Where does he live.

Your current wife has had this pressed-lip, fallacious and self-serving (to feed her implacable, absurdly oversized rage against the father of her children) narrative to answer my former written inquiries about my children, limited though they were, of:  The children will give you any information they see fit to.  This is an outlandish wild-eyed attitude of parenthood that represents the fringe far end of the PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome) spectrum, a Western phenomenon fueled by the Mother Knows Best bias of domestic law courts that Sharon played masterfully with her coterie of divorce lawyers and "professionals" until the Arlington court and Appellate courts woke up to her harassing litigiousness, using our minor children as her lawsuit cut-outs, and penalized her almost $50,000 for it.

I don't agree with her parenthood-wrecking attitude and actions but I understand them because she is, in my opinion, a covert narcissist and they only think of themselves.  Your attitude I don't understand, unless you are a terribly cowed husband or you didn't want to, in fact, impart terrible, distressing information to me in a brief interlude.

Indeed, are they all alive?  Well?

There was no answer from her to any of my five simple questions about each one's current well-being (see above).  Nor from you.

A belated happy birthday, Jim.  Life is good, eh?

A belated birthday wish

The mother of my children had a birthday while I was in Europe, she is far closer to 70 now than 60.  I hope she's happy with her new husband, she's not the type of person who feels complete unless she has a person she can subtly and totally control; I am far happier without her although I grieve over the de facto loss of my three children, now mature adults, whom she totally turned against me as tender children during the divorce in my opinion with her insidious and invidious ways of control.

They are the true victims, as studies show that the children of a parent who introduced hatred against the other parent into their hearts grow up depressed, lacking confidence and unable to form emotional bonds, even with their own children.  I haven't received much information about my children since their early teen or pre-teen years when she secretly initiated the divorce by taking them out of state on false pretenses and started their total inclusion in her camp by subtly imploring them, while she was in control, to be in solidarity all together with her against their father who was according to her of an overbearing or dissolute character.

Unfortunately from what little I do know, now one seems to be a grifter, one a drifter and one a hanger-on.  And they had such potential, absent, in my opinion, her ruinous, self-centered influence in having them sue me as children during the pendency of the divorce.

I am afraid of one, who was manipulated to threaten me during the divorce, have received virtually zero information about and upon another for over a decade, and know the third is doing his best to subtly manipulate me, in his best impersonation of her, by doing things like visiting adults he knew growing up in the immediate neighborhood but not me in the sure knowledge that this potentially hurtful activity will get back to me later in idle conversations with neighbors.  I hope your special day was truly special, as befits you, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne.

Returning home... .

I spotted it yesterday in the dirt along the edge of the driveway, a small green glint in the broken particles of asphalt, small pebbles and loose earth over by the fence. A little plastic green army man brought out of the compacted dirt by the recent hard rain, returning home after being absent for two decades, buried out of sight but not out of mind.

These toys have returned home before, about a dozen over the years since my middle child Johnny, now in his thirties, put away his toy soldiers as he grew into an adolescent and ceased having backyard battles with these tiny warriors arrayed in long battle lines of good versus evil. I haven't seen Johnny since he was 16 nor  heard from him since he was 18 and wrote me a letter asking me to provide full funding for his college tuition and fees, which I did. (No, no letter of thanks afterwards nor any invitation to his graduation.)

Whenever one of these soldiers returns, I feel a tug at my heart and lament the extrajudicial and apparently permanent loss of any natural affection for his father by this somber, serious and very smart boy, who loves his mother so and had his will overborne as an impressionable adolescent by her and her coterie of "professionals" through the pernicious application of PAS. I took the broken little man upstairs to the bedroom Johnny used to occupy and laid it on the shelf next to the other broken soldiers who have also returned home.

Someday, maybe, Johnny'll come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. Till then, or if never, I'll have to assuage my continuing grief with these sudden reminders of his and his brothers' presence still in the yard, where he and his brothers used to play, and wish him and them all the best.

Goodbye to the Empty Chair

For six years I appeared every other Friday, and on the eve of all Federal holidays, at 6 p.m. at the curb of the house occupied by the mother of my three minor children to execute on the plain vanilla visitation order decreed by the Arlington County court as part of its ruling in the divorce decree brought by Sharon Rogers (now Sharon Lightbourne) against me, and called the house on my cell phone.  (As a practical matter, you cannot go on the porch to knock on the door lest you expose yourself to spurious charges of beating in a rage on the door and a specious arrest.)  For the last four years the phone was never answered and not a person came out as my ex-wife, in addition to not fully cooperating with the visitation order as required by law and by family values, taught my adolescent children to be scofflaws in their own right.

Once my youngest child graduated from high school (I was told that he did), I appeared for the next 12 years at the Lost Dog Cafe, a local restaurant in Westover in Arlington, Virginia, to have lunch at noon on almost every birthday of my children and almost every Federal Holiday, constantly issuing public invitations to come to start a rapprochement with any or all of them via this blog, my facebook page and in letters and cards (all unanswered, none returned to sender) sent to Sharon's address, as she wouldn't tell me where any of them lived.  Always I dined with the Empty Chair during that hour, except for the time a "Jane Doe" appeared to ask my advice on how to deal with the local LCSW who was irrevocably ruining her and her husband's relationship with her step-daughter (his daughter) by aiding in the odious application of PAS by the girl's mother, just as this same man-hating "professional" helped immeasurably to irrevocably ruin, in my opinion, my relationships with my three children via her despicably abetting my ex-wife's pernicious application of PAS, which is seen by some (myself included) as a form of child abuse .

Last month my youngest child entered his thirties and on that day I went one last time to the Lost Dog.  I enjoyed a Dominion Ale (a root beer) and a Kujo Pie, made up of fresh marinara sauce, artichoke hearts and garlic chicken pieces.

At the end of the noon hour I bid a final adieu to the faithful Empty Chair and left, not intending to return to the establishment on any regular schedule anymore.  I wish my three sons (all undoubtedly fully mature adults now, at least physically) the best.

Hey Danny

Later this month my youngest child, Danny, will have a birthday.  He'll be entering his fourth decade, certainly a fully mature adult now in terms of physical and brain development, although psychologically he might be far short of that as a result of the stunting mental debility his mother forced upon him and his two older brothers when all three were tender minors during the long divorce, when she and her two family-wrecking divorce lawyers thrust these three children smack into the middle of the litigation maelstorm by filing an "unconscionable" subsidiary lawsuit in their names, later labeled a "harassment petition" by the court when it sanctioned her and threw it out.  (A good linebacker and an excellent fullback, he claimed during the divorce that I "crushed [his] spirit" because I didn't celebrate a TD he scored well enough and so he would never play football again; do you think those were his words, or the phrasing of his mother's and his oldest brother's counselor, the deeply conflicted and court-barred Meg Sullivan, LCSW?)

This is termed Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), the overbearing of a not-fully-developed childish mind via emotional pressure applied to minors to induce them to reject permanently the other parent by a short-sighted needy parent, often as in this case with the help of a large coterie of so-called professionals who engage in quackery and hang out at the courthouse seeking paid work.  It is often termed child abuse, and it is alive and well, though largely hidden, in the American domestic law system perpetrated by the governing rubric of "best interests of the child" in our "mother knows best" biased courts wherein the woman's word is always taken at face value and the man's word is always suspect until finally, as in my case after years of litigation costing me a quarter million dollars (I couldn't get out of the endless litigation), the woman badly overplays her hand and gets sanctioned or assessed costs.  (We generally had fun on our court-ordered visitation but then I would be accused of bringing him home on time but "too tired" to finish his homework, or doing what I wanted to do instead of what they wanted to do, or letting him burn off a sparkler while supervised in the driveway on July 4th when didn't I know that months earlier he'd had a pyromaniac incident in an Arlington park with a friend?--No, because his mother never told me--and we'd be off on another expensive, time-consuming round of hearings over whether I was a properly fit parent; eventually I ran out of money, the children stopped coming in violation of the court visitation order, and that was that.)

I haven't laid eyes on Danny in a decade and a half, nor heard from him since the summer he was eighteen, when he sent me a letter (which endearingly or sneeringly, depending upon your point of view, began with "Dear Peter") asking me to provide for full payment of his college tuition and fees, which I did.  I haven't heard from him or his two older brothers since, I don't even know for certain if he graduated although I know that eight semesters of college were paid for by the funds I provided; I certainly wasn't invited to his graduation, or his wedding which I heard about long afterwards from a  person in town who I ran into.  (Such a lovely couple, I'm sure it was a lovely wedding, welcome to the family, Laura, I wish you two long and happy lives, and congratulations on your many notable job advancements.)

I have always made myself available to these three boys, and now the time is at hand to bow to the sad permanency of the horrible infliction of the scourge of PAS upon my three sons by, in my opinion, their covert-narcistic mother; once Jimmy, Johnny and Danny become Jim, John and Dan after this month, since they will all be over thirty by then.  Danny, (and Jim, John and Laura), for the last time I will be at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover (Arlington, VA) at noon for lunch on your birthday, please come join me.  (Jim Lightboune's not your dad, I am.)