Dear Denise27

 Dear Denise,

35 minutes on the treadmill… Good for you!

We sold our treadmill and I bought this mini trampoline they call it Rebounding… so I do that in between bike or hikes… my friend Chip is still doing huge hikes that we used to do together, but my sciatica and laminectomy have weakened my hiking abilities, so I don’t do the 15 miles anymore, but I can jump on the rebounder and watch YouTube videos of great music so one of my favorites is the sultans of swing, which is just outstanding on all levels. Mark Knopfler is probably one of the greatest guitarist of all time and I can use my fantasy world to play along... so anyway 30 minutes is a good long time running in place or jumping in place… when you can’t get out.

So yeah, I canceled my subscription and since it went through Apple play store I’m hoping that they’ll be no attempts to keep billing me. I’ve been through that and I’ve been through canceling credit cards.

I went ahead and subscribed to Final Cut Pro and I’m gonna work my way through the training videos. I have a bad tendency to want to figure out myself. Through trial and error, but I’m gonna give them a chance to see what this thing is supposed to be able to do. I am dictating to you and it is spelling out my words as I speak. This is called captioning in videos and it’s become a very standard feature of most videos you put tube actually does this for you if you upload a short with dialogue, but I want to be able to do it before I upload so that I can work with it and edit it if needed so this last one that I uploaded the Corinthians with the dogs is I guess the last one that I’m gonna do on CapCut so I’m glad I got that one done.

I can get so absorbed in doing whatever I’m doing that the time just melts away and I guess I’m kind of a perfectionist or obsessionist. I just don’t wanna quit until I get it the way I want it with videos with music and all that stuff and now with dialogue and captions.

So last night ended up being eaten up by doing that Corinthians, and then the Wordle short.

I might send you the Wordle short link just to see if it works on your end. 

It was Lauren that turned me onto this probably a year or more ago but I just do it every morning. I’ll call a part of my wake up commute and you know it’s just a little something to do and if this works when you click on it I’m trying to tell you or tell the viewer. Method I used to figure it out and I would say it works about 98% of the time sometimes you’ll get a word where there’s so many possible options that you can’t know which one it is until you try it and that’s when I generally lose. 

Your emails are so engaging and you raise so many topics that I wanna respond to adequately… I was gonna stop here but I’m telling you this whole thing of blaming yourself when you are the target when you are the victim, maybe even victim is the wrong word let’s stick with when you are the target… when you or when I am the target of meanness on any level verbal physical emotional I guess in other words if somebody else takes advantage of you or ask out there meanness on you it hurts…. It hurts you. Now we can analyze it and step back and say oh that person is acting out their own internal pain well OK fine and dandy, but don’t act it out on me. And it can happen on a micro level between two people and then I believe it happens when these mass shootings occur. These people who act out have somehow convinced themselves that they have a worthy cause that somehow their target deserves what’s coming to them… and I can tell you they are wrong wrong wrong…

Maybe it’s best if I tell you my own little story and just the fact that the letter is gonna be too long, you can read it in chapters I guess…

OK, so I’ve been riding my bike for a few years now with different friends and groups of people Men, and women together>.. most drivers car drivers are respectful and give you a wide birth and I intern try to be very respectful and pull over and let them get by… I say that because there are arrogant bikers who think they own the road and they can really be aggravating so I’ve seen it both as a card driver and as a bicyclist point of view…..

Anyway, there was this guy who was buzzing a couple of the ladies in our group and they mentioned it to me and we talked about it and you know what does he do and you know how does he do it and what what it what these people do what this guy did was he would just drive real close to you and it scares you… anyway one morning ironically while my sister is visiting from New Jersey and I got plenty of stuff going on my neighbor friend that I was doing a lot of biking with said hey Pete, let’s ride up to jump off rock… so I said OK and off we went… well we weren’t on the road 10 minutes when this guy that I’m talking about buzzed me and man I let the buzz words fly…. ZXSW###%^%

Well, the guy pulls over jumps out of his car and comes running at me and I just kind of duck to the side, but he caught me on the side of the lip. I think he fell on the ground when he got up we just stood there. I said I’m calling the cops and he said go ahead and I said fine. Wait for a minute Anyway it was early in the morning. I didn’t call the cops. He just went back to his car and left and Brian and I you know rode to the top of the jump off which I’ll send you a video on that. See, you’re always inspiring me.

So anyway, we did the ride I went home. Continue getting ready to go visit Lauren with Linda and Tess and just you know have a great day visiting the kids in Charlotte. I didn’t tell buddy about it and my lip bruise wasn’t enough to bring much attention.

Anyway, I did go back to the police and filed a report and as soon as I describe this guy, they knew who he was, and he was a problem in the neighborhood and quite honestly because Because I knew he had been harassing some of the people in my Bike group 

So anyway, we went to court I filed what do you called an assault charge and because he hit me was actually assault and battery his defense was he didn’t hit me he just I forget his word like shove me or something so the irony was that his confession of minimizing it Was a confession of assault.

Now there were weeks between my and And actually going into court and during that time, my great friend and bike riding partner Brian seemed to be kind of out of sight>… on that day when the incident occurred he just stood back and watched and then after we finished our ride, he was all about going to the police. We need to go to the police. We need to report this….. but then after I made the report, he seemed to kind of disappear… and suddenly I felt very alone sudden I don’t know like I had to prove that I was assaulted that I somehow had become the perpetrator…. It was a very odd and lonely feeling.

Now I admit that part of that is probably being a guy and you don’t want to admit that you were a victim of any sort just fight it out with a son of a bitch and you know let it be, but I was trying to turn the other cheek Approach. I purposely didn’t hit the guy, but I didn’t want him to get away with it primarily, I didn’t want him doing this to other bike riders and when I went to make the report, they said that he has been harassing people you know on a regular basis so I felt justified in taking it to court> so in the court session, he essentially admitted he had done wrong and his punishment was to write a letter of apology and then as his attorney told me this incident would be on record so that if he did anything of this nature again, it would be a second count of assault, which would be much more serious …

Now, why am I telling this to you my daughter doesn’t know nobody else really knows. I think my sister knows and I think Tess knew she had to know after a point but the reason I’m telling you is because I went through this whole thing of feeling guilty for being in the situation Did I cause the situation on myself by yelling at this guy by telling him I’m calling the police when he buzz me in his car was I making too big a deal of it and why all of a sudden that I feel so alone???

But you know I followed through. I went into court. It was all over in about 20 minutes. This guy buttoned up and eventually he just moved to we don’t who knows where

So I’m telling you this Denise because there is a tendency to blame the victim… I’ll go ahead and use that word. There is a tendency to blame the victim. What did she say? What did she do? How did she provoke this guy to act out on her?

And everybody’s gonna pile on, especially if this guy does have a good reputation there’s there’s gonna be all you know. He’s such Fred is such a great guy. Oh you know he’s so much fun. He’s such a good guy. I don’t know you know she’s probably just making it up or you know she’s kind of a bitch anyway…

So it’s hard not to blame yourself because other people are pretty quick to do it and from what you told me you were protecting your kids and from what I learned in to Protective Services is yeah I’m protecting the kids but often times the kids are clinging to their abuser And there’s a lot of reasons for that. Maybe some of the ones I just mentioned they don’t wanna lose what they know they don’t wanna lose the parent that they know that OK here she hits me or yells at me, but I still love him. I still need him.

So I became a social worker with this highly idealistic view that I was gonna help people and I’m glad I did have that sense of wanting to help people even though looking back I realized I was incredibly naïve… one little family of kids actually wrote me a thank you note. It was the sweetest nicest thing that ever happened in 30 years of social work and that’s I think partly because they were knowledgeable enough to understand that I was trying to do the right thing and then I always approached the family situation that way. I had to make decisions I had to go to court improve my case and take custody of children, but I don’t know. We always try to do what was really best for the kids, including sending them home and including more or less trying to understand the parents point of view…

When Tess divorced her husband and drove with her son home to South Carolina she said he stood in the backseat yelling. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you all the way home. 

There was no explaining or justifying to him why she had to do what was best for both of them as a kid. All he knew was mommy and daddy should stay together and I love my daddy. I think often times the good parent takes the heat primarily because they are the good parent and doing the right thing. Kids are often times just not ready to understand the complexities of the relationships and that they themselves. Are the reason that the good parent is doing this very tough thing of leaving the person the situation.

So when I met Tess, yeah she was beautiful to me and her whole situation was heart wrenching in a way and all I wanted to do was jump in and save the day and be a good daddy and basically I was… basically we were and basically we had a great life as I think you see glimpses of it in that video but that’s a varnished version. It wasn’t that easy or that way every day…. Eric was very troubled. He was very, very smart. He was very athletic and very health conscious, but he never really adjusted and when he went out on his own and even when he married. He had a lot of issues going on. Ultimately Eric took his own life at the at the age of 44. So he had made it through childhood. He had made it through teen hood, but he just couldn’t hang on through adulthood…. So Tess and I dealt with it in her own way we didn’t point fingers or blame each other at all. Tess explained it by saying that Ericka had become mentally ill that his father was bipolar and had a lot of issues and they eventually took Hold in Eric..

When someone commit suicide, it has a ripple effect through the lives of many many other people, including myself… so yes I felt guilty. Not because I did or didn’t do anything specifically obviously, I tried to do my best but I guess my best wasn’t good enough (words from a song)

You know, but I’m gonna end this letter on a positive note because I’m telling you something really you’re the only person where I’ve actually talked it out like this although it is getting easier because I am more aware that people make their own decisions within their own life experience … and people from all walks of life and circumstances make decisions and choices that we perhaps don’t or can’t understand. As I spoke these words at Eric’s service, he was bigger than me, stronger, smarter and better looking… actually I’m going to send you the service eulogy.

Well, who knew this was gonna happen. This is a heck of a way to spend a Sunday morning but now I’ve pretty much told you a lot of what there is to know about me for my life and I did this because you were that way with me. I’m going to put this in my Suddenly Single Blog because I want to preserve it. I wanna share it with you in that format so I’ll send you a link. 

https://suddenlysingleinfo.blogspot.com/2025/01/in-loving-memory-of-eric-train.html

Hey Denise27, I have poured out a whole lot this morning and believe me I had no idea that your letter would prompt such a response… but you have a knowledge and depth about you and inspire a level of trust because you had the courage to trust me with your more private experiences. You can say as much or as little as you want in your next email. You have no obligation or responsibility. I just enjoyed telling all this and Mainly I want you to know that I feel very whole and very happy that I am having this life experience and sharing parts of it with you. So I 

Thank you for being you,

Pete