Dorian and Maya, who are now fifteen and twelve, have not written to me for more than three months. Our last exchange ended a bit awkwardly, as I noted in writing (“My Whole Personality,” October 25, 2007), but I am nonetheless stumped. Neither of them is responding to my many electronic-mail messages, all of which end with the same tender line: “Daddy loves you very much.” The last time I pleaded with them was only a couple of days ago, when I resent them a message from a week ago, but there has been no reply so far. Are my messages not reaching them? Has their electronic-mail access been blocked in some way? If so, is my ex-wife behind it? She stopped responding to my messages a few years ago, but I cannot imagine she would push the children in the same horrible direction. In short, I am stumped. My only hope at present is that Dorian or Maya will discover this piece on the World Wide Web as the proverbial message in a bottle cast into the ocean. Thus the pitiful title.