Okay, the Grateful Dead lyrics have been overused. But what are you gonna do? Difficult, sometimes, to find something more appropriate. For the second and third times in the last couple of weeks, I left the Boro and headed to the Sunshine State.
On Christmas' Eve, I headed to Tampa to hang out with my brother, AndyMan. We stopped by his Baby-Mama house first, sampled the very fine appetizers set out by his ex's current husband, then off for more excellent food at Bonefish Grille. On Christmas Morning, I ventured into the lair of my ex's (and her husband's) Orlando timeshare to see my four children. This is clearly not how Norman Rockwell painted it on the Saturday Evening Post around mid-Century. Does anyone stay married to their first spouse anymore? The nuclear family seems to have gone the way of Dick Cheney's hair. I'm divorced, and, personally, much happier than when I was married. I was also a general practice lawyer for years before going back to the public defender's office, and I got a lot of people divorced. Still, did I, did any of those people I got divorced, did we try hard enough?
I remember my friends John and Sam from Leto High School. Their parents were of Croatian Catholic stock- not the types to embrace divorce. I stopped by their house one day to let them (John and Sam, not their parents) kick my butt in ping-pong, and stayed for supper. Their parents didn't speak to each other at all. I'd hear the highly accented, "Would you tell your father to pass me the bread", or something to that effect (I'm not sure I heard their father say anything to anyone). Apparently, they'd lived that way for years. Years. It puzzled me how- or why- they could still be married, because my parents, like so many others, had divorced. I've seen various studies on the effect that divorce has on children (Divorce is terrible for kids. Don't get divorced. Kids are resilient. Go ahead and get divorced). I'm not sure what the divorce statistics are for children from "broken" homes, but I'd bet they're not great. Even if those stats are not greatly out of line with the divorce rates from unbroken homes, the one thing that the statistics can't show is the foundation that kids whose parents haven't divorced have that kids from broken home don't seem to have. John and Sam seemed more trusting, somehow. Sure, their parents didn't get along, but they were there- both of them. They could count on that. And, there was a light that John and Sam had in their eyes that seemed only vaguely familiar to me.
Got some cool pictures from the trip, but got lost along the way. Maybe tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Dude, lighten up ... the moral here is "don't have children"
Wife and I, no kids, seen the world, livin' the dream ... still married.
I blame the kids.
A cartoon from a book (a gift from AndyMan) of rejected New Yorker magazine cartoons called "Cream of the Crap" shows two witches in a restaurant. One witch, perusing a menu, says, "I think I'll have a baby". Oh, that's rich!
Hey, I agree with Chase, wow, lighten up. Nah, don't lighten up, when you gotta let the wolf howl, let him howl, that's what makes blogging great! OoooooWWWWWWw
ps, Nancy's hubby is a great cook, but try to talk to him, Bizzaro-Andy. And can you get rid of the word verification? I don't like em that much.
Post a Comment