A bit strange to find my son's Facebook page, I didn't know he had one. I knew he had Myspace and other stuff, but not FB. I just read a news article online a few days ago about kids departing post-haste from Myspace and hooking up on FB, though.

Well, you go on someone's FB page and you can find out a lot of things about that person. Mainly, who that person's friends are. I already knew many of them from my Little League coaching days, to see them graduating High School and going off to the various things they are doing is trippy. That is not proper English and frankly, I don't care. Comes from MY teenaged days, and teenaged is not proper English, either, lol.

In one case, one of my assistant coaches son's is one of my son's best friends. That kid is going off to the Army.

I coached a lot of kids in Little League. Beyond that, I was an umpire for 10 years plus was on the Board of Directors. Occasionally, I get called out. "Coach"?!! You see a kid that was a complete - well anyway, a person that needed something more than their parents were giving them in life, putting it mildly, that has somehow at least partially transformed into a normal human being talking to you as if they were your best friend.

Perhaps a person, in some cases anyway, remembers a person that was influential in their life. One such case is the kid working at the theater. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He was a cry-baby and would throw temper tantrums in the dugout and on the field. I would make him go sit down in the dugout in any such endeavors and I would not cave in. This went on for quite some time. In fact, the entire season. His parents came up to me at one point and asked why I wasn't putting him at such and such a position.

I am usually brutally honest about things, rather blunt as well, when confronted by people in a hostile or otherwise non-civil manner. I mean, did you see your son throwing a tantrum in the dugout yesterday? Are you saying you didn't HEAR that nonsense going on? The kid, I thought, hated me. But when he called me out by name - baseball name/coach - at the theatre, I didn't even recognize him. He had a huge smile on his face and he had a confidence I certainly didn't recognize, either.

Umm, well this kid going to the Army wasn't a cry-baby, that's for sure. His parents eventually opted out of Little League baseball and became the leaders of the group that supports the JROTC in the High School that their son was going to. JROTC has a lot of activities and necessitates the participation of enough parents to oversee such.

I........uhhhhh............can say that volunteering is a great thing, but, after I got divorced it became a thing of the past. I can honestly say that I have spent tens of thousands of hours of my life in volunteering (that is not an error, I spent 5 years as a full-time missionary, that alone is over 40,000 hours worth if you count it in 24 hours days) in various things that I thought worthwhile and some of it certainly has vivid memories. I am not saying my days as a volunteer are over, hardly the case. Case in point it the neighborhood I am living in. But I have gone into that in the past and not worth going into again, at least not until/if/ever I attempt such.

It's occurred to me that success in life is hardly about money. Or fame. The saying that success is what you define it be is well and fine, but not conclusive. Did you live your life WELL? Regardless of whether you were broke or rich. Did you make the right choices? When it counted, did you do the right thing? At the end of the day, can you live with yourself in the life that you have led? You made mistakes. Of course. Sometimes, you outright decided to do the wrong thing. Granted.

This is a release type of blog entry. I must admit that I was not prepared for the complexity of emotion that I have experienced since my son went "off on his own". If you want to talk about a mid-life crisis, this would be the thing that has affected me the most. I have not cared, one iota, about my brothers and their "success" in financial terms. To find wealth and eliminate your family is not success in my book, it is total failure. The end of that line is emptiness.

Probably why I am going back to church is to find myself again. I lost it in divorce and pastoral shunning, but I refuse to let it affect me the rest of my life. I am not going to tell those people, at the church I am trying to get myself into, of my missionary past. I am not going to recount the days of volunteering in the church. I don't want to be pressed for the information, either. It isn't relevant to anyone but, perhaps, the Lord.

Ohhh, I could go on with this, but it is far past my bedtime, almost 11:00pm and I am fully intent on going to church tomorrow. Thankfully, it doesn't start until 10:00am and I did the wash today, clothes are ready.