The Cram Down Myth

*Disclaimer: nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. If you think bankruptcy might be right for you, you should consult with an attorney. Your state bar association will be able to refer you to an attorney licensed to practice law in your state.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

The image of the irresponsible debtor dripping in diamonds, driving around in a flashy car and burning money while nonchalantly filing bankruptcy is a stereotype created by the credit card and banking industries to guilt middle class Americans into thinking of bankruptcy as some shameful act to be avoided on pain of death instead of what it is: a financial planning tool. The vast majority of people who file bankruptcy are honest, hard-working people who paid their bills on time and never dreamed of filing bankruptcy until . . . until that devastating illness kept them out of work for 6 months, until the insurance coverage turned out to be inadequate, until the divorce, until the factory closed, until, until, until. No one is immune.

The law recognizes that sometimes unforeseen, uncontrollable events can lead a consumer to accumulate unmanageable debt that can ruin their lives. For this reason, the Bankruptcy Code was written: to provide the honest but unfortunate debtor with a fresh start. Yet, every single person who walks through my door for a consultation ends up crying in my office. They have spent months without sleep stressing out about how in the world they will ever pay down their overwhelming, soul-crushing debt. Often they have been working two jobs trying to make ends meet. They have been robbing Peter to pay Paul in the hope that something will turn up to enable them to catch up on their bills. I am their last resort and they know it, or they would not have come to see me.

And still they do not want to file bankruptcy. Still they hope against hope that I will be able to tell them that that there is something (anything! can I sell my kidney?) else they can do other than filing bankruptcy. Anyone who expects me to tell the 60 year old hair dresser with no insurance and $100,000 in medical bills from her double-mastectomy who walked into my office a year ago to work until she is 90 and go without “luxuries” (like food) so that she can pay that debt because it is the “responsible” thing to do can just stop reading now. And I suggest you avoid my future posts as well.

MIMOSAS AND ME….

Let me preface this by saying that all this started when I received an invitation from a neighbor to attend a bridal brunch for her daughter who was getting married in May. Like a good invitee, I RSVP’d and also mentioned that “if there was anything I can do, please do not hesitate to let me know”.

She indicated that Mrs. A and Mrs. B had volunteered to do the token table gifts for each attendee and would welcome the additional help! She had sent out over 120 invitations but was looking at a number of 100 who she expected to be there and my assistance would be well received. Dutifully, I contacted the two ladies, who indeed seemed thrilled by another pair of hands, and we agreed to get together “soon” to coordinate the arrangements. They felt that a candle in a glass holder with “cupid” stickers attached and bound up in netting and ribbon would be the ideal offering. Sounded good to me and we were off to the races!

Time was slipping by and each time I made the effort to get us together I was met with more excuses than those offered up by A-Rod! Gym, hairdresser, doctor appointments, food shopping, guests, babysitting, cable man, nail salons, after school programs, the weather, all stood in the way of nailing this baby down. Time was running short and I offered to pick up the supplies at least which was greeted with a resounding “yes” by these two overbooked ladies. So off I set with another friend which ended up at a craft shop where I purchased the necessary supplies to get us going. And there they sat in my dining room for almost a week.

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WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?

Madoff's Palm Beach home

Bernie Madoff was tucked into his jail cell bed the other night for what could be his home for the next 150 years. For a guy who once “had it all” this comedown must be pretty harsh to say the least. Bet that was no Posturepedic mattress that waited to embrace his cheating bones or someone willing to turn down those 800 thread sheets he was so accustomed to.  Oh well!

Bernie had it all. But “all” just wasn’t enough. I often wonder what a 7 million dollar penthouse gets you other than a panoramic view of NYC and beyond. I mean, how important does this make you feel just knowing that from that height you are able to look down on all those peons scurrying hither and yon trying to be just like you?

I read an article in Vanity Fair about Bernie. He owns 4 or 5 different mansions scattered around the globe. But just how much time does one expect to stay in one of those palaces of luxury when there are so many to choose from? Most of us would love having a second home as a getaway now and then but Bernie couldn’t seem to satisfy that wish. No, he had to have a handful of  mansions to reinforce the image of a very important personage, an honor bestowed on like minded Greedy Guts who try to outdo one another in their quest for “things”. Bernie just happened to lead the pack.

Sunday: What color is the sky in their world?

So, President Obama, the guy we just had to have thrust upon us by the starry eyed idiots of the Obot Whole Foods Nation is now open to taxing employee health benefits, just like he scorned McCain for considering back in the bad old days of the election.  This is the same man who beat out the woman who was in favor of universal health insurance that would have mandated everyone buy in.  This is the guy whose campaign made a big fricking deal about the fact that everyone would have to chip in part of their salary, adjusted for income, to pay for their coverage.  Back then, it was a terrible idea.  Catastrophe would follow, earthquakes and floods, dogs and cats living together.  Well, why would we want to destroy ourselves with a government mandate to buy insurance so that everyone is covered?  I mean, in the state of NJ alone, the people with jobs and paychecks *already* pay a hidden tax of $700 million to cover the hospital costs of those uninsured who have the misfortune of being sick.  But if everyone were covered, then the cost of health insurance would go down over time because people wouldn’t wait until they were urgently in need of attention before they went to see a doctor.

But no, we had to have Mr. Hopey-Changey.  He was going to be all fuzzy goo-goo and propose new policies that fit the crunchy granola “I’ve got a Prius so I’m more moral than you” lifestyle.  And apparently, those of us with employer based health insurance are benefitting from “gold plated” insurance.  “Oh, we never said *all* of you had gold plated bennies.  Just some of you making nice salaries.”, they’ll say.  Ok, I’ll bite.  I have a good salary.  I have mediocre health insurance.  I have a PPO but it might as well be an HMO.  I have to stay in network if I want to keep it cheap.  If I go out of network to see the doctor I really want, I pay out of pocket and I have to meet a deductible before I see a penny of my money back.  A really high deductible.  I pay for Brook’s coverage as well but with coordination of benefits, MY insurance almost always refuses to pick up the tab for her.  And the local hospital?  Well, our insurance company didn’t come to an amicable arrangement for payment for awhile last year so if anyone from my company went there for treatment, we got stuck with a big fat bill until the parties worked it out to get the hospital onboard.  Yep, if you wanted a mammogram at the local hospital owned radiology unit that was in network, you were just SOL until the bean counters finished negotiating the contract.

That’s why I find this section of the article so incredible:

They, like other proponents, cite evidence that tax-free benefits encourage what Mr. McCain called “gold-plated” policies, resulting in inefficient and costly demands for health care and pressure on employers to hold down workers’ pay as insurance expenses rise. And, they say, the policy discriminates against those — many of whom are low-income workers — who do not have employer-provided coverage.

…

Those who want to tax benefits in whole or in part make two main arguments. They say the tax exclusion is a generous subsidy that insulates employees from the true costs of health care, leading them to demand more of it and driving up overall costs. Critics also say the policy is unfair because it favors higher-income people. “It’s too regressive,” Mr. Baucus said. “It just skews the system.”

Excuse me?  Inefficient and costly demands for health care?  Oh, I’m sure that there are people who are attention seekers and go to the doctor for every little thing.  But those people are exceptions.  Most people I know don’t go to the doctor unless they can afford to pay for the inevitably rejected claim. And don’t even get me started about regressive taxation.  I live in NJ where homeowners foot the bill for the entire state.  You could be tecnically well off in Alabama on our salaries and barely afford a modest townhouse here.  And what’s this nonsense about employers holding down workers’ pay?  Please.  Employers will always find an excuse to hold down workers’ pay.  Remember how they always told us how rich stockholders had to have massive taxbreaks or they couldn’t create jobs?  And then they took the money they saved from the IRS and bought credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations?  Did any of us see an increase in jobs?  I’ll answer that for you.  No.  We did not.  What we saw were a lot of jobs being outsourced because American workers were so expensive, yada-yada-yada.

Helping out your fellow citizen is admirable and if we were talking about universal health insurance or single payer health insurance, I’d be all over that.  Getting more people in the system, especially the young and healthy who are convinced they are going to live forever, would help to bring cost down by spreading the risk and cost among all demographic groups.  But adding a new tax on top of the hidden tax we all pay without coming up with a plan that will cover all of us?  I’m sorry, I can’t get aboard that train.  The middle class is already subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich middle men who are the insurance industry.  And I’m not talking about the hapless claim reviewers who work in cube farms.  I’m talking about the stingy fat cat capitalists who run UnitedHealthCare and Aetna and the rest.  These people need to be reined in.  The gravy train has to stop for those people who always seem to get a piece of the action and produce nothing of value before I sign on to a new tax.

I wouldn’t hold my breath on that though.  It turns out that hundreds of millions of that money we just gave to AIG went into the pockets of management who were due “retention bonuses”.  {{snort!}}  AIG had a legal obligation to pay them but the taxpayer didn’t.  Chalk it up to Geithner for not figuring out a way to keep taxpayer money out of the bonus pool.  And all you congresscritters mulling over this latest health insurance tax, take this down: Fix the system before you ask for another dime.  We are watching and 2010 comes sooner than you think.

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Cannon Fodder

This is a very difficult post to write.  I was hoping that the recent incident that resulted in taking Cannonfire off of our blogroll would go undetected.  But some of our readers, including Joseph Cannon himself, have quickly called attention to the deletion so some of us frontpagers feel we owe our readers an explanation.

First of all, I’d just like to say that as difficult as it is to do this, it is even harder to do it without pointing fingers at anyone.  We don’t want to assign blame or point fingers.  We don’t want to make enemies and we certainly do not wish to further alienate some of our friends who are protesting the frontpage by their absence.  The majority of the frontpagers met online and decided that in spite of the hurt feelings on both sides, we would like to forgive and forget and put the whole incident behind us.  The door is always open to all of our colleagues.  We feel like family who just had a bit of a falling out.

Here’s what happened:  A couple of weeks ago, Joseph Cannon posted on the Israel/Palestinian issue.  His position appears to be very favorable to Palestinians to the point of regretting the creation of the state of Israel.  I confess that on occasion, I too wish that God had chosen a different part of the world for his holy land but usually, I’m just joking when I say it.  Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk this way about the issue without being accused of anti-Semitism.  For the record, those of us who met to discuss the issue have decided that for our purposes, the definition of anti-Semitism that makes most sense to The Confluence is the irrational hatred of Jewish people and their culture which may be expressed as discrimination and violent acts.  When discussing the viability of the state of Israel, a person may or may not be expressing an anti-Semitic opinion.  He or she may be making a political comment.  We are aware that there are some groups, even some Christian groups, that would consider such sentiments anti-Semitic.  These groups may hope to squelch conversation on the subject by claiming political opinions to be anti-Semitic in nature in a manner that is reminiscent of the Obots calling us racists last year because we saw through Obama.  It is a very effective way of silencing one’s critics.

We got ensnared in that problem.  Some of the frontpagers of The Confluence have a very broad definition of anti-Semitism and as a result, they felt that the inclusion of Cannonfire on the blogroll marked The Confluence as being sympathethic to snti-Semitic views.  Some other commenters felt that this opinion was unfair and painted us all with a guilt by association to an accusation that was not proven.  Unfortunately, I did not read Joseph Cannon’s post.  Most of the day I am behind a corporate firewall and all most blogs are off limits to me.  I have read Cannon on occasion and found some of his posts to be well reasoned and insightful and some of his posts to be a little tin-foily for my tastes.  But I really don’t have an opinion on his I/P position except to say that anyone who posts on the topic has got to have balls of steel.  Both sides have legitimate points.  Both have behaved badly.  It is an intractable problem and no one is above criticism.  But if criticizing or losing patience with one side or the other makes us anti-Semitic, then I suppose the whole world is anti-Semitic.  I believe LadyBoomerNYC, our voice of Sophia Wisdom, calmed the waters about the whole problem and said politics is one of the reasons why she became a hippy- it’s a lot less stressful.

Well, the long and the short of it is that some of our frontpagers wanted Cannonfire off of the blogroll.  Normally, I would tell them to take a hike and stop bullying the rest of us.  But seeing as Joseph has asked that other blogs not link to him in the first place, it gave us a cowardly way to put the issue to rest.  Or so we thought.  Unfortunately, that action wasn’t sufficient for some of our frontpagers.  In not so subtle ways, they asked us to denounce Cannon and agree that his posts were anti-Semitic.  This was too much for many of us because it implied that if we like Cannon for other reasons we must be guilty.  Many of us were hurt on both sides and tears were shed by those who were accused.  I don’t think I can adequately express the pain.  It feels like betrayal by people you most cared about and who you would never dream of hurting.  Nevertheless, it is what it is and some of our frontpagers have left for greener pastures.  We wish them well and hope that someday we can get back togehter.  But in the meantime, we just need to let the dust settle and tempers cool.

As to Joseph Cannon, he is free to write what he wants.  I think I speak for everyone who writes for The Confluence that we do not approve of anti-Semitism.  We support the state of Israel but we do hold both sides responsible for the turmoil and unrest in the Levant.  The end doesn’t justify the means for either party.  We would not go so far as to say that we wish the state of Israel did not exist because we believe that the state has done much good that outweighs whatever bad it has done.  But it is time to get its house in order and it is time for the Palestinians to disavow terrorism.  People who have stronger opinions have the obligation to back them up with solutions that will defuse the inevitable conflict that results from implementation.

So, that’s the whole sordid story.  I’d like to thank everyone who has written for The Confluence in the past year.  I have enjoyed all of the posts from each one of those truly talented individuals.  We have removed Cannonfire but may occasionally link to him as the occasion arises.  The persons offended by having him in the blogroll in the first place, however, should not expect an apology.  At this point, the damage is too extensive on both sides of the divide.  We either learn to tolerate each other, respecting our differences in opinion and write together or we go our separate ways.

Saturday: Jon Stewart, heal thyself

Jon Stewart took on Jim Cramer of Mad Money a couple of nights ago and raked him over the coals about the uncritical journalism of the press that failed to uncover the chicanery of the financial giants.  From the interview, we get this exchange (from Glenn Greenwald, who I’ll get to in a second):

STEWART:  This thing was 10 years in the making . . . . The idea that you could have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that had leveraged 35-1 and then blame mortgage holders, that’s insane. . . .

CRAMER:  I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show.  I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show.  It’s very painful. I don’t have subpoena power. . . .

STEWART:  You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months.  The entire network was.

CRAMER:  But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, called me in – he called me in when the stock was at 40 — because I was saying: “look, I thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the wrong place” – he brings me in and lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.

STEWART [feigning shock]:  The CEO of a company lied to you?

CRAMER:  Shocking.

STEWART:  But isn’t that financial reporting?  What do you think is the role of CNBC? . . . .

CRAMER:  I didn’t think that Bear Stearns would evaporate overnight.  I knew the people who ran it.  I thought they were honest. That was my mistake.  I really did.  I thought they were honest.  Did I get taken in because I knew them before?  Maybe, to some degree. . . .

It’s difficult to have a reporter say:  “I just came from an interview with Hank Paulson and he lied his darn-fool head off.”  It’s difficult.  I think it challenges the boundaries.

STEWART:   But what is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street?  . . . . I’m under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I’m under the assumption that you don’t just take their word at face value.  That you actually then go around and try to figure it out (applause).

Here’s my problem with this exchange: About a year and a half ago, I *loved* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I had Colbert’s devastating take down of the press at the WH Correspondents dinner on my DVR for a long time. And I still have the interview that Jon gave Bill Moyer’s Journal on my iPod. Back then, Jon Stewart was one of us. He was fighting the consensus reality in the only way he could- with humor and wit. He was the jester who could get away with murder in the court of a murderous king. I faithfully recorded The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every night on my DVR.

Then, primary season started. I don’t know if Viacom decided it was going to go for a much younger demographic or what but Jon Stewart left me behind. I have often heard it said that Stewart was initially a Hillary Clinton fan but I couldn’t tell. It would have been nice if he had just remained neutral. That I could have taken. But night after night, it seemed to *this* viewer that he was falling for the same crazy crap that everyone else was hearing. His dings on Hillary took on the same general flavor of rest of the news media that decided that Clinton was the old regime and was running a ridiculous campaign. Those of us who were paying attention know that it was the Obama campaign that was poorly executed, so poorly in fact that it required the assistance of the RBC to gift him with 59 delegates from MI, including 4 of his opponent’s delegates.

Back in the day, that RBC hearing would have been comedy gold for Stewart. Think of it: the candidates are pretty much even with the older, more experienced female candidate having the edge for actually participating in the primaries which conveeeeeniently don’t count (except that everyone knows that this is really Kabuki because they will *have* to count before it’s all over). And what does the RBC do? It takes delegates away from the real winner and gives them to the loser and gives him 59 delegates from a state where he wasn’t even on the ballot, so that he will beat her by a mere 17 delegates when the primaries finally end a few days later. Then, they make it sound like it’s a big landslide, giving him the edge all the way to the convention.  She *should* have taken it to the convention floor and had a knock down, drag out fight for the nomination.  But how could she do it if the one guy she really needed to be critical, Jon Stewart, was out to lunch?

How could you miss that, Jon? That was the epitome of ‘fuzzy math’. You should have been rolling your eyes and should have gotten someone like the RBC’s Allen “this is the thing I am most proud of” Katz or Alexis Herman on your show to eviscerate them, just like you did to countless others. This committee should have been the butt of ridicule for at least a week.  Think about what an incredibly UNdemocratic thing that was for the Democrats to do to their voters. But you said nothing. And why was that, Jon? Were we old, uneducated, working class, sino-peruvian lesbians no longer in the target demographic? Or is it the case that when women are represented by only one member in the ensemble, Samantha Bee, it’s easy to forget that they might have their own sense of honor and fair play?

Whatever. That’s when I removed TDS from my DVR and erased all old episodes. I, and the rest of my demographic, were no longer cool enough to be respected. Not only that but we kept saying over and over again that what we objected to with Obama was that he was inexperienced and unready to be president. But consensus reality said that we were ‘racists’ and ‘Reagan Democrats’, not the smart and professional, thinking liberals we actually are. Jon, the psychology major, should have known better. He should have seen the peer pressure, psychological warfare, and the pandering and flattery frenzy of the Whole Foods Nation, his own audience, and tried to rebalance their perspective. That was what he tried to do with Bush and Cheney and we admired him for it. But when it came to Obama and Hillary, Jon had a blind spot.

Well, thanks, in part, to the effort of Stewart and Colbert, we now have President Obama, a man who never met a multimillionaire, finance guy, banker campaign donor he didn’t like. We now have former Senator Obama, a man who ran and hid any time there was a difficult decision to make or a political controversy to avoid, in the midst of a financial maelstrom where he is dithering, afraid to commit. He appointed finance guys who were insiders, or at least passive observers of the fraud, who are trying to navigate their way out of the problem without upsetting the very guys who were responsible for it. And they are failing.  Who would have thought?  Their anti-Change!™, cautious approach and inexperience are taking the country and the world to the very brink of disaster with economist after economist screaming for them to change course and do something. We have a major catastrophe on our hands and it was all entirely predictable. WE predicted it. But last year, we were the losers and the stupid racists. No one was listening to us, least of all Jon Stewart.

It is all Jon Stewart’s fault?  No, but he’s too smart a guy to not understand what part he played in the nomination of Barack Obama last year.  Glenn Greenwald is just as guilty.  He suffered from a similar blindspot.  Glenn carried a snobby assumption that Hillary was just not viable.  He didn’t really bother to spell it all out so that the rest of us would understand what it was that made Hillary so objectionable.  I never bought the argument of ‘corporatism’ since there wasn’t anything in Hillary’s voting record to suggest that she could be bought.  Obama, however, almost immediately showed us his true colors when he reversed his promise regarding the FISA bill.  Sorry, Glenn, you should have seen that coming.  Obama is not a boat rocker and he demonstrated that over and ovcr with his “present” votes and abstentions.  Once the nomination was cinched, there wasn’t anything you could do to stop him.  His accountability moment had passed.

The idea that now Jon Stewart and Glenn Greenwald are going to start taking on the press again is laughable.  They had their chance last year and they blew it.  They challenged nothing.  They are now as responsible for what plays out as the Jim Cramers, David Gregorys and Brian Willams’s they now decry.  It’s time they spent some time thinking about why they so quickly abandoned intelligence, competence and experience for an empty suit.  For Stewart, maybe it was pressure from Viacom, which makes him no better than his targets.  For Glenn, it may have been part of the pressure of being an A list blogger.  For both, maybe there was a touch of unacknowledged sexism.  But whatever reason, they should know that whatever happens from here on out is partially *their* responsibility for failing to be sufficiently critical.  And we Conflucians and PUMAs, who have been critical of the press since our inception, will hold them accountable for it.

(I’m back.  Thanks for your thoughts and prayers.  We survived the night.  We had cabin 14, right on the other side of the wall from cabin *13*, on the eve of Friday the 13th, at a campsite, on a lake.  Cue the theremin music.  Three of the giggly girls in my charge stayed up half the night communicating with cabin 13 through Morris code and screaming periodically at every bump in the night.  Happily, Jason passed us by.  Anyway, the temperature never got above freezing the whole time and, as a chaperone, I was forced to participate in every activity that the kids did.  When I got home late yesterday afternoon, my entire body was exhausted and frozen.  I’m now thawed out and just stiff in every muscle.  It was a lot of fun but thank gawd it’s over. )

Another one bites the dust during Pod 7C's great Into the Wild 2-day fieldtrip

Obama Administration Continues to Defend Bush Torture Policies

This is not unexpected, but still very dispiriting.

The Obama administration argued in court documents filed today that four former detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp who have sued over their treatment have no constitutional rights.

The suit was brought by four British men who say they were beaten, shackled in painful stress positions, threatened by dogs and subjected to extreme medical care during their time in the lockup at the US naval base in Cuba.

They also say they were harassed while practicing their religion, including forced shaving of their beards, banning or interrupting their prayers, denying them prayer mats and copies of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, and throwing a copy of the Qur’an in a toilet.

Donald Rumsfeld, war criminal

Daphne Eviatar briefly summarized the case, Rasul vs. Rumsfeld, in the Washington Independent.

According to their legal complaint, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed claim they traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 to offer humanitarian relief to civilians. In late November, they were kidnapped by Rashid Dostum, the Uzbeki warlord and leader of the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance. He turned them over to U.S. custody – apparently for bounty money that American officials were paying for suspected terrorists. In December, without any independent evidence that the men had engaged in hostilities against the United States, U.S. officials sent them to Guantanamo Bay.

Unemployed Chronicles – the saga continues: a rant with sprinklings of joy

Frida Kahlo - Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (and a black PUMA too!)

Here I am – and one million apologies to my fellow Conflucians.  I’ve been a gawd-damn mess the past couple of weeks.  Our dearest Katiebird told me that everything that I’m going through healthwise is actually stress.  I didn’t follow her words – but being the enlightened sage that she is, I have to finally admit she is right.   I’ve felt defeated, depressed dehumanized and demoralized.  I’ve stayed away from writing because I don’t want to project this ickiness to everyone.  There was a particular episode that brought me to that point – but there are some warm happy highlights despite the crap that is being me right now.  Be forewarned, this a rant.  Here goes:

FOR RANDY ON HIS 38TH!

Tomorrow is the 38th birthday of my youngest child…”my baby”..How he hates to hear me refer to him in that way.  It is amazing to me that time has gone by so rapidly.  At 24 I was the mother of 4 kids under the age of 5!  And to think I survived those years is amazing.

As the youngest, he was also the “feistiest” of the bunch.  You had to be if you wanted to be heard.  He spent the first 12 months basically attached to my hip while I wiped peanut butter and jelly from upturned  faces, changed diapers, loaded the washing machine,  mediated arguments, picked up toys, made beds,  read stories,  and tried to keep a semblance of order in our little corner of the world.

At 13 months he learned to escape his playpen and get out of his crib.  He was showing us early on that he was not to be restricted by boundaries, real or imagined.  He taught himself how to swim at 3 and learned to ride a two wheel bike by the age of 4.  His vocabulary mirrored mine although he spoke with a lisp and had trouble with his R’s and W’s.  “Fucky Fwied Chicken” was his special treat and he was not shy about screeching his pleasures from the top of his lungs.

He learned to read before going to school and could do his numbers and letters with ease since he copied the older kids’ work.  For awhile he insisted on wearing his red “popcorn” sweater even in the sweltering heat.    To this day there is still no adequate explanation.

He would get on his Big Wheel every morning and pay visits to the neighbors out doing yard work.  Apparently he loved nothing more than to repeat everything I said for their amusement.  In his baby world, I was without peer!

They had to drag him off me the first day of Kindergarten.    Our mutual time together had come to a fork in the road.    He and I both knew that he was no longer my “baby” but a boy on his way to adulthood where “ Mommy” was transformed into “Mom” and our roles were slowly evolving.

He played sports but was never spectacular.  He was dutiful and earnest, but he was never going to set the world on fire through athletics.  He accompanied me to polling booths and learned how to move the lever for the Democrats.    In school they wanted to move him up a grade because he was bright but I resisted since I knew he was not emotionally ready and he never knew that.  He loved to read and his favorite was the “Little House on the Prairie” set he borrowed from his sister.    He denies that today but it is a fact.

I can still see him in his soccer or baseball uniforms.  His layers of winter clothes.  His altar boy garb.  His Cub Scout attire.  His cowboy outfit and little boots.  His silly school pictures.    His Halloween costumes.  His graduation pictures.  His wedding day.  All memories tucked away in the “Randy file”.

His world was torn apart when his father left.  The grief was evident on his face.  A child of 12 whose sense of security was being yanked from his hands and out of his control had to hurt.  A wound was formed but not ever completely cauterized.    I wish I could restore that but I am unable to bring it back.

At 16 he was hired into his first job as a “bag boy” in a local market.  He learned how to manage money and saved up for his first car.  He bought his own clothes and put money away for college.  At 18 he left home and joined the ranks of many other undergrads just feeling their own way for the first time.    Weekend visits consisted mostly of laundry and time for friends.    Mom was just someone who occupied the homestead during his absence.   At 24 he left for Boston, basically never to return.  He met a nice girl from Lexington and a few years later they were married.  His home was elsewhere now and I accepted it, although bittersweet.  My son is now a Vice President of a fine company with a nice wife, children, home, friends.    And I know he is no longer mine.

It took him awhile to see that the world is not black and white but more gray than he realized.  It took him awhile to understand that life is not always played to a script but has a way of reaching out and biting you in the butt when you least expect it.  It took him awhile to understand that sacrifice has its place and having it all is just a saying.  It took him awhile.

He hates reminiscence.    Did not like to be reminded that he was once a child who did childish things.  But I could always pull from my “Randy file” the things that made him who he was and is.  He never gave me any trouble and I was always proud of him but he viewed these episodes as “sudsy”.  That is until he had his own children.

He wept the day his first daughter was born.  The weight of her melted his heart.  Her every thought, word, deed was recorded in his mind.  The reaction to his second daughter was the same.  No amount of pictures or videos was too much for him.  He dotes!

On his 38th birthday I wish him to be able to live to see a healthy 100!  Gathering and filing the data that is his life.  His children, his grandchildren, his dreams fulfilled!    And though I will not be here to continue the “Randy file” that started on the day of his birth, it will always be a part of who he is and what he has become.Happy Birthday, my once little boy!    My heart is full.