The most horrid message I’ve received

It came from my oldest son.

These days I travel a lot. Most of my family is in Florida. Last year we got kicked out of our lease in California. We found ourselves in a difficult situation but decided to use this window to move to Florida, which is good for our kids’ tennis. We’re a tennis family!

My wife and our three kids moved to Florida. My oldest son stayed behind in California. He’s a junior at high school and a passionate runner, hoping to run for college. We didn’t want to create a disruption for him and decided he’d stay in California. We rented a small place next to his school and now I “commute” between California and Florida.

Lots of challenges of all kinds but, after all, commuting between two sunny states isn’t that awful!

Then, to make things more complicated, I accepted a project in … West Virginia.

So I left my son in California and traveled to West Virginia.

It was my first or second day there. I was very tired and went to sleep extremely early — like 7 in the evening, which was 4 in California.

In our family we all use iPhones but I don’t iMessage my oldest son: because of some Apple glitch that we haven’t been able to resolve, he doesn’t get push notifications from my messages. So we use Whatsapp.

Before going to sleep, I texted Maxim about a couple of things I owned him: he’d just switched schools (to be with a better running team!) and there was…