On my sixty-sixth birthday, my son and his wife handed me a list of house chores for twelve days, kissed the grandchildren goodbye in the glow of our old Virginia driveway lights, and flew off on an eleven‑thousand‑two‑hundred‑dollar Mediterranean cruise. No card. No cake.
Not a single greeting.
I watched their black BMW roll down the gravel drive I’d patched a hundred times with my own hands, taillights disappearing toward the two‑lane blacktop that leads back to Route 7 and, eventually, to I‑66 and Dulles. The air smelled like cut hay and gasoline.
Somewhere down the road a dog barked. In the garage apartment above my head, the window I slept behind reflected back an old man’s silhouette.
That night, in that same cramped apartment, I accidentally saw an email my son had sent his wife about an “assisted living facility for the elderly.”
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t make a scene. I didn’t storm into their perfect granite‑and‑stainless kitchen and shout. I picked up my phone.
I called a lawyer.
When they came back, everything was gone. They left for Europe on my birthday.
My name is Lawrence Henderson. I’m sixty‑six years old.
For nearly four decades I taught American history in public high schools across northern Virginia—Loudoun, Fairfax, little pockets of rural schools that suburbia swallowed over the years.
My classrooms smelled like dry erase markers, teenage sweat, and cafeteria pizza. I wore out chalkboards before the county finally gave in and installed smart boards. I watched kids grow up, graduate, join the Army, become nurses, open auto shops, take jobs in glass towers in D.C.
For thirty‑eight years, I taught other people’s children about revolutions, about quiet acts of defiance, about how sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is simply say, “No more.”
And yet, in my own home, I’d forgotten how.
For twelve days, while my son and his wife were drinking champagne somewhere between Rome and Santorini, sending hashtags into the digital void, they left me with a two‑page chore list: color‑coded, timestamped, laminated. No birthday cake.
No card. No acknowledgment that it was my birthday too—the first since my wife died.
It was also Eleanor’s birthday.
We’d shared the same day for forty‑four years. Every September in that old farmhouse in Loudoun County, Virginia, we’d celebrate together. Breakfast in bed.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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