His school looks like a Home Depot

"No wonder Paul is depressed," my daughter Natasha exclaimed, "his school looks like a Home Depot!"

Natasha was in the car when I took Paul to his then new school in Las Vegas in 2007 - the Forbuss Elementary School - shortly after our family's move from New Jersey to Nevada. From the red brick and ivy school buildings in New Jersey to the ground-hugging school building in Las Vegas that looked more like a light-industrial pre-fab building.

But no, Paul was not depressed because his school looked like Home Depot. He missed the friends he had left behind in New Jersey and vowed never to forgive me for moving him away from his friends.

I did not like the house in Jersey even though our family received a lot of congratulatory winks for having restored that all-brick English Tudor house and its 100% gleaming hardwood floors. It was an old house, built in 1931, and my repair and maintenance bills each year were atrociously high. The property tax was way too much - New Jersey has some of the highest property tax rates in the country.

Some who visited the house commented that we had a nice house but people had to drive through hell (Newark, New Jersey) to get to it.

I had retired and didn't want to pay the high maintenance expenses and the property tax. I knew, however, that I would be abandoning that slice of heaven - from son Paul's perspective. South Orange, New Jersey is made up of professionals, business people, educators, artists, actors, writers, government officials and the like. Their children are some of the most cosmopolitan and smartest in the country.

A few of those were kids Paul was growing up with.

We snatched Paul away from that environment and placed him right smack in the Las Vegas desert, where people have no sense of neighborhood. People in Vegas come from everywhere. None of us know our next-door neighbors. We don't know their backgrounds, whether they are good or bad people, whether they have good personal histories, whether they've ever been arrested, whether they are registered sex offenders, whether they are running from a criminal record in their previous home towns. The net result is we are very stingy with the smiles we flash at our next-door neighbors.

Paul still blames me for bringing him to Las Vegas.

Not so much lately, because he belongs to a school "gang" and one senses that he has forged a deep friendship with his gang-mates. They are on the verge of graduating from elementary school and entering middle school - grades 6, 7 and 8 - and he and his friends have sworn to stay together at that next level.

Paulita wants to put Paul in a Catholic school next year but I don't think it's going to happen because Paul threatens to jump from the car if we do not enroll him at the middle school that all his friends will go to next school year, which starts in late August.

"Well, OK," Paulita bargains with Paul, "but you have to go to Komun on Saturdays for extra math and English training." Paul agrees.

I had no idea it was going to be like this. My plan all along was for our whole family to live my retirement years in the Philippines and for Paul to go to La Salle, or Xavier, or the International School and then eventually to La Salle, Xavier or U.P. Prep for high school. He would then be attending a top-notch school where children of the most prosperous and influential people in the country study.

It was not meant to be. Natasha, who is still in college in Los Angeles, is not as independent as Paulita and I had hoped she would be, so it looks like we're stuck in the U.S. for a while. This is why we moved to Las Vegas in 2007, when we could have moved to the Philippines after we sold our house in South Orange, New Jersey.

I love Las Vegas. The sun always shines in Vegas. It's impossible to be depressed in Vegas. There are so many things to do if you're retired. There are the casinos, the shows, the dance academies, the people who come from all over the world to play and cavort. There are the beautiful people who descend on the Wynn, the Palms, the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, City Center's Aria and the other 5-star hotel-casinos on the Strip. There is the constant stream of out-of-town visitors who call you to say that they will be visiting Vegas and they'd like to get together with you.

But Paul is too young to appreciate all the fun places and activities here. And he knows how to exact revenge on me for uprooting him from South Orange. He reminds me from time to time that it was because of me that he was forced to abandon his New Jersey friends. He's got me by the balls.

He decides what schools he will go to from now on. He has the final word on the subject. I sometimes wonder if Paul is a prototype for American kids, that the kids born in the U.S. in the future will all be like Paul. I wonder if kids will all feel that they must make the decisions that will affect their lives and not their parents, who may not have their interests in mind.

This may be an important logical development because parents here in the U.S. have often made decisions - divorce, separation, new surroundings, new digs - that impact their children's lives greatly without consulting their children. Future American children may be rebelling and telling their parents that from now on they will make the important decisions that affect their lives and demand that their parents set aside money to sustain them at the place of their choice.

I have not had a bloody-nose nightmare with such a scenario, but it may be just a matter of time before I do.

I cannot, for example, convince Paul that if he spends four years in the Philippines he will go to one of the country's best schools and learn so much more than he would if he stays on track to attend one of the public high schools in Las Vegas. The Clark County school system in Nevada has never had pretensions, but now that tax receipts are down and school boards and local governments are all scrambling to plug huge budgetary gaps, the situation has gotten worse for public school students in Vegas.

Paul doesn't care about the quality of education, he has decided that I will not separate him from his friends again. Not ever.

I did not know, when I was planning my retirement, that retirement could be as complicated as mine. I had an inkling, because I still have a daughter in college and an 11-year-old son. But I did not know it was going to be this difficult.

It's time for Plan B. Paulita and I are now convinced that Paul must attend high school in the Philippines. The quality of high school education at La Salle, Xavier, U.P. Prep - over that of Las Vegas high schools, or many of the high schools in America - is the main reason. But there's also the cultural advantage of growing up in a society where kids appreciate what their parents do for them, where kids still say "opo" when they talk to their elders, where kids look to their parents as gods.

I will know over the next three years if Paul's aversion to living in the Philippines and his phobia for losing contact with his friends will mellow enough to allow for his academic expatriation to the Philippines.

If he gets a girl friend by eighth grade, then all bets will be off.