Time for work.  Tired today.

I have neglected the Dharma.  That's an easy thing to do here in the USA.

What have I missed, what have I missed.

A thousand million thoughts, even in a single day, carried on the blood.


So I went out for a walk, heeding the advice given to Type O people, aerobic exercise.  I'm weary, still feeling the wear and tear from the week.  Evening rush hour traffic along the avenue, headlamps, taillights, noise, the Cameroon Embassy receiving finishing polish after a long vacancy and long construction period, past the Irish Patriot statue, Chinese diplomat staff walking up alongside, I take the quiet route, up 24th Street, which has a nice dark quietness to it, angling away from Mass. Ave. into the finer homes of Kalorama, then up the hill, past Tracy Place, past the corner garden, up past the Sultanate of Oman, unprepared to see a Halloween skeleton hanging from its flagpole, a little much I think, then to the road that goes past the New England sea captain house, down past Ivanka's house, then down to the EU Embassy and the road block, then the mighty tree and the mosque lit for evening prayer.  I am walking slowly.  I hate to walk past any house of religious or spiritual service or house of prayer, but I am out following doctor's orders, and off over the bridge, crossing it, then down onto a patch of grass that drops down into the park's woodlands along the streams.  Ten yards away from the street, a safe feeling, the road's jumble hushed and forgotten behind me as I walk on grass.

In the darkness to my right, above the drop off down to the creek flats, in a sort of clearing beneath the edge of the rising forest, a lone deer, lying down in the tall grasses, her head up, looking at me, ears picking up the broadcast, motionless.  But not for the light color of her face I might not have noticed her.  I stop, and sit down, and she remains there, looking at me, still.  Hello.  I sit there a few minutes, and then I carefully rise and go about my walk.  Down the hill, and onto the sidewalk, then crossing the street before I shall turn around and head back.  There is a Washington party in a grand house with a big picture window revealing an oil painting, and the party is just breaking up, an elderly couple waiting for the Uber, a black Camry, the old lady, hunched over with a cane, announces to her gentleman.

The street rises to the corner, large mansions now, behind fences, and then down into the woods below Woodlawn Terrace, a street closed off for construction.  I've made it further than I might have expected, and now it's time to head back.  I used to bike a lot down here on my road bike, even at night with my flashing lights and headlamp, taking the steep hills ion repeat under the street lamps, not much traffic down here.   Up I come, quietly up the long meadow by the tree line, here and there a good sized stand of trees where the lawn is mowed.

The deer is still in her spot, just as I left her.  Facing to the side, up the slight slope, I sit down on the grass.  I whistle the theme from High Noon, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, to her and she remains still.  Then I give her a little Ode to Joy.  A man I see in the woods as I go to work, on the other side of the great avenue, who had never said a word or acknowledged me in anyway, hat and gloves, shorts in the cool weather, once responded to a benign comment that there was a deer who did not mind if you sang to her, close, not far from the path, and I took that to heart.

I lie back on the grass, looking up at a milky sky, and even with the sound of the rush hour and the road, oddly I smell the earth in a way I have not upon my evening walk seeing how far humanity has come and how still there are the woods and the sounds of the night, the call of the bat, a distant owl.  And when I rise, I get up slowly, nodding to the lone deer.  And I walk away, back toward my life, and the avenue and the light from headlamps approaching me.  Before the sidewalk, I turn back.  The deer has come out, stepping slowly, and she bows her head, to sniff the earth where I lay.  And I wish I'd brought an apple or something to offer her, next time.  I stand watching her, and she raises her head to scratch her flank with her nuzzle.  I walk down a few steps toward her, then stop.  She tiptoes slowly back to her bedding place, having to point her legs to accomplish the necessary gangly motions, curling back down.

The full moon has come out low in the sky as I walk back along the high bridge, poking up from behind the damp curtain of cloud.  I walk back to the quiet street.

Where to start, where to start.

It was all about the adrenaline.  He'd fallen for the job, because it kept him active.  Continuous motion for eight hours plus.  And the adrenaline always fired, even as he groaned his way to walk and through the mis-en-place crucial set-up, always extensive, the building of castle walls to last through the evening through the last wave of invaders.  The adrenaline always fired, just about when the first customer came in, and hopefully he'd gone through his list and gotten everything in place down the last extra lemons and limes, the hot water for tea, folded cloth napkins for the glassware, terrycloth towel bar rags to wipe down and also to keep his hands dry, one through his belt worn behind him, as he often washed his hands.

And when they were all gone, after the busy hectic night, controlling what could be controlled, toward the end, the glass of wine tasted pretty good, particularly by the end of the week as he completed his last duties, the cash-out report, the last wipe-down of the slate bar top that had born his hands and the work of his hands for fourteen years now, he could have a moment of perfect peace, the top of the mountain finally reached, and no particular need to leave after clocking out, but to enjoy, even alone, the view from the summit.


The adrenaline.  As a Type O blood type, he had come to realize the need was not for stimulants, like caffeine, nor alcohol, but for ways to naturally harness the flame of the blood lest it push his mind too much, to walk it all off at the end of the night.   Emphasis on the importance of aerobic exercise, the calming influence of yoga...

After four nights of it, the human being was tired.    The throat was dry, and lethargy had set in.  Bed was a nice warm cave, extremely comfortable for the old body that had done so much without so much realizing it.  The hunt, just like a big cat, the stalking, the movements of stealth, and then the attack, the lunge, the wild chase, the final closing the distance and the take down.  The big cat needed rest.

It was hard enough, hard enough even understanding this about himself.  Who could blame the non-type Os, the officious farmer type As, the Mongol horde city dweller omnivore running roughshod, no real issues to deal with, a vinegar eater, for not intuitively getting it...  An A would be perfectly happy eating legumes and being a vegetarian.  The Mongol B was too ruthless to worry about his own body.  Such strategies would not work for an O, not for a day, not for a momentary lapse.

High strung nature itself, to blame...

Washed up upon this alien shore of modern life.  The body craved physical activity, projects for the hands.  Even reading could be difficult.

He had read voraciously as a child.  But then, somewhere in college, to his surprise and consternation, it suddenly became hard to read, and hard to read quickly.  He wished to physically feel, to sense each word, and it was this that caused him to leap up at the art of the early Hemingway short stories, boyhood up in a vanishing Michigan of Twain dreams and nature writing.  The physicality, jumping up off the page...  A museum rendered in words, a safari in an Eliot poem hiding in plain sight...

The body.  That is all we know.  The body.  Its ways of motion.  And thus each living being able to take somewhat decent care of himself is, by wits, a doctor.  And perhaps when you are such a doctor, for your own make-up, your year and model number, then you are adapted to render forth from it, out of the inner glow, the inner light, the engine room, the furnace, the invisible agreements that keep the blood flowing, a doctor of your own, if you will, your own church.


He woke with an uneasy memory.  A memory of drinking days, wasted years.  The Austin Grill.   A wild man, unsupervised but by other restaurant people and barkeeps.  A man craves for his tribe, and at the end of the dayshift, grab a bite to eat, and then friends come in, a tribe, and so you stay and have a beer.

Now such days made him sad.  Wasted years now witnessed by this career, or rather lack of one.  It did not help the big cats to hang out so, in such company of such a tribe.



It occurs to him, a continuous sense of it running all through his adult life, that the judgments rendered against him were essentially unfair.  Those who judged him, one way or another, were not taking the larger more intimate full picture of this human being washed up upon an alien shore.  And their habits of judgment were set within a group of behavior that had created notions of property, mine, not yours, my land, not yours, my wealth, not yours, that had created things like the Nazi, the Stassi, the Gestapo, the KGB.  There simply exist people who take great relish in the power trip of calling out other people for their sins, finger pointers, accusers, the mis-intrepters of the fundamentally well-intentioned kind generous healthy human being.  The human being is au fond an animal, thus prone to hi-jinx, to getting into places and situations, perhaps out of boredom, where it is not always best for him to be.  But can you blame the individual for that?  Can you blame the animal for that longing need to pace for miles and miles in the jungle of the night, indeed burning very bright...

We give the animal who would naturally roam unencumbered a key to a certain set of things given financial value in society, allowing the beast to participate in trade, quite blindly, but for the very shrewd and the accusative types, the cop mentality.  The proverbial fox in a henhouse... what to do?  A very sad situation.


How else could you explain the harshness in the air, the electricity of hatred and charges...


What is it that ails you, O Lazarus?

I am man of cravings, O Lord.  I crave death.

No, you don't.  That's nonsense, Lazarus.  You're  a good man.  It's just your blood type.  And who can help that, my friend...  Go howl at the moon.  In good health.

But of my literary career, O Lord, what should I do...

Eh.  Don't worry about it.  Less worry the better.  As with all things, as with the bird and the bird's nest, nature takes care of itself, knowing what to do in time.  Rely upon thy natural sense to figure things out.  In the meantime, what can you do but go for a walk, underneath the stars, which also take care of themselves.  I went out to the desert for forty days, knowing nature would take care of everything.

And Jesus, and within him all the other prophets, their spirits and their history, came up out of the woods, wearily walking up the steep paved road and out onto the bricked sidewalk in front of the mansion with its gardens.  With all his concerns and having to go to work, distracted, bored by the continuous pressure, he saw a fancy woman up ahead, with her hat and her coat, clever style, and her brindle brown dog.  And Jesus sayeth unto himself as he saw the dog, and the sun on the grass between the brick sidewalk and the road, commanded the dog, please, oh yes, yes, that's it, take a nice shit, dog, yes....  And Jesus looked at the dog, and began to smile, and the dog walked up past one small planted tree, and then drew himself down, the dog, haunched down and the lady and the dog and Jesus knew what was coming, and indeed soon in a few steps there was that volcanic warm turd smell of bound weeds, dirt, warm mud decay, jungle and earth, and the lady was now reaching down, her hat with a fancy visor that was a sort of trademark for the fancy ladies of such a neighborhood, with a plastic bag to contain such a warm loaf little log of differing soft textures of hot poop dog shit.  And Jesus knew he had commanded it.


And Jesus smiled.  His first real miracle of will.  He'd never really tried it before.  But, it was a bit fun, actually.



And then, later at work, they had figured a way to staff the evening so that he didn't have to close.  He stayed at the bar, after clocking out, eating his salmon tartar.  There was a couple at the bar, he was friendly with, and an older couple.  He gave them each a copy of his book, the roman a clef.


As he was about to leave, changing out of his work shirt and shoes in the office at the end of the restroom hallway, he heard the old busboy Simon Peter talking shit about him...  "Why he don't go home right away."  And Jesus felt a need to explain, as he came out of hiding, why he'd lingered, having a friendly conversation with his old friend, the 87 year old gentleman of Nubian color skin, who had sat with a fun elderly woman with whom Jesus flirted with, "I've know that guy for 25 years....  Maybe thirty..."  And then he left, down the stairs, out the door, across the avenue, and into the  night.  And how many times had he closed the place so that the others could go home earlier than he, unselfishly.

He walked home, along the mansion walls, along the park where the light pollution was less, then by the cemetery gates and the iron fence along the brick sidewalk from which he could look down and see the still tombstones guarding the memory of the dead at night, perfectly quiet, and before he knew it, he was crossing the curved bridge with the Buffalo at both ends and up past the Turks and up past the circle with the general on horseback, holding his hat back, immortalized in a moment of calling forward, leading his troops.  And then the quiet street, and up the steps, quietly unlocking the door.


Walking the same path to work, coming through the woods from Massachusetts Avenue down to the stream and then up the long paved steep road with the garden wall above the stones of a drainage path where chipmunks lit about into holes in the stone's mortar, out onto the brick sidewalk, past the famous miracle of the shitting dog, he stopped for a moment, the afternoon sun over the big houses of Upper Georgetown, looked down and saw something that looked like a hair clip.  He reached down to it, and there it was, the silver tie clasp his mother had given him for Christmas a few years before, upside down against the brick wall, waiting for him, and how it got there, who knows, but that the man went past there going both to and fro, to work, back home.

This Be Fiction.


First of All.

First of all, first of all, let me tell you, that indeed, I am a momma's boy.  At this late age, late in the game, I'm coming to grips with that, and of how I've spent my life.  The problem is, you see, that she was the one who taught me to read, even when I was four and didn't want to read, there with Richard Scarry and the help of drawings I liked and Huckleberry, the cat, who was me.  And then I got it, and reading what not so bad after all.

Drew I did, a lot.  But eventually, the words themselves came to replace the drawing, after they had trained my eye, to awkwardly pick up what there is in writing.

Mom's home has always been a pile of books, everywhere, and my own disheveled piles of books, glorious as they are, are getting to be the thirty-years-earlier version, even creeping on my bed now, as her bed has been overrun.



And so, and so...  my problem is one of self-acceptance, and perhaps it always has.  I go do yoga out with my mat in a garden on top the flag stones warmed by the October sun.  My guts groan.   My lower back is sore still, but a shoulder stand and a better plough today than yesterday.  I am off today.  I do not wish the phone to ring.  I enjoy the peace found in yoking the body and the self within to yoga.

Light layer of cotton clouds move in on the sunshine, and I go back inside with my mat, to refresh my cup of muddled lime, turmeric and sea salt, hot water.

Self-acceptance...  what does that look like?  What does that mean for an old mamma's boy who can't keep up with the silverback gorillas, male and husbands, providers, neat lives, striving men and women adapted to the city and the information age, to the subtle call-out of the little guy on his falsehoods of livelihoods and career self-lies...

What does that mean as one works himself, his body, limbs, chakras, spine into better balance and tune...  What do all these books about mean, if I had the clarity that has to be reinforced somehow has a habit, in quietude, peace and quiet...

What if... what if I were allow myself the space to be myself, to not try to fit in with places and people with whom I don't belong, trying half-heartedly, knowing subconsciously that the act is not me, and no wonder they keep the illusion that is me at a distance, not seeing the deeply sensitive god-forbid-male and the spirit within the act.

Fitting in, is so automatic, of course, these days, the culture wars, the culture police...

How to admit after years and years of act, hey, friends, this isn't really me.

Yes, one day with my mother old I went and did yoga in the back in the garden and saw fresh inner life wanting finally to come out.  I remembered being comfortable as I had been when I was a kid, reading, drawing....


There is something about that old pose, the Lotus.  Strength is a good word for it.   Personal, inner, steady in the flux of the world.  Not pandering to a crowd.



I have always trusted my mother.  But she, because of her childhood and what she saw, her parents coming home from the restaurants, drinking and fighting, is anxious, hard to work with, questioning the motives of others, even as she is politically astute.  High strung.

Immediately after college, I was just about her only help, when she went off to grad school, out on her own.  And without knowing it, this troubled me, depressed me some, enough so that I never really had the energy to start my own career or life.  There was Hilde from my hometown, who I was in bed with at my father's, but I had to go help my mom move from one apartment to another in a different town, showing up late, with her crying over the kitchen sink.

"She's sucking the life out of you," my brother would tell me.

And indeed, psychologically I go around with a caution toward engaging with women.  And if that is so, then the rewards for being an adult, if you don't find a mate, for love and comfort, are decreased, and so the desire to get the grown-up professional life that goes along with that.


Work then becomes like the carrying of the Cross, or a retreat into the Buddhist monastery.  And along with that a sense, the inevitable spirituality, at least in the effort to find something worthy of it all far beyond financial renumeration.

In the old days, people grew up together, in lives that had traumatic things seen up close.  Death was seen up close.  19th Century stuff.  Reflect on Kerouac's life, poor little Gerard, the Merrimac flood that took his father's printing business, his father's illness, death lived up close, as it was for my own father whose mother died of consumption in an upstairs room.

So do authors retreat into childhood and adolescence...  And thus were generations upon generations of us susceptible to the joys of literature, Biblical stories, novels, stories.

Whereas now one wonders if we don't rather tend to put a clean hands-off electronic distance between ourselves and stories of note and sad immeasurable things.  Life prepared us for the great irrationalities known through myth and retold.  And now our myths are Apple, Google, Amazon, robots, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and checkout stands.

And things written down, in the effort of clarity, are laughable pursuits these days, like this.


I get home, first night of a new week.  I read Larkin poems.



But what can you do?  Try to find some meaning in life...

Poor old dreary O'Leary...

My mind is shit as I wake.  Have to go rent the car for the trip up to mom.

What are these stones, these bones
Of which I am built...  are they alive
As much as me?
Just as I am, too?
Wise enough men tell me it is so,
That even the atoms of the deepest
thickness of our bones
change themselves out for
Fresh ones,
As if ordering carry out.
New, no need to do dishes.
One more thing we exchange,
in constant flux,
with the world,
the universe, the stardust around us.
But in my hand, even,
along the knuckle,
here they are, old high crags
And mountain tops,
And undersea continental shelves,
Or old plateaus pushed upward, left
There when all else got washed away.

I went and did some yoga in the backyard.  Mid-October.  Sunny.  Blue sky.  My lower back stiff and compressed, slowly going into the simple basic easy poses to take at one's own pace...  the satisfaction of receiving the sun's rays and the beauty of daylight.  Back too tight for a fully reaching Plow pose, but a good headstand.  Muscles work together, though for the practitioner yoga is always a welcome mystery.


Of many yoga poses one feels strong in the Lotus.  The back is straight, chakras aligned.  A warmth going through the pelvis and gluteus.  The torso has a sudden fresh strong feeling brought over from Warrior Pose and Tree.    The serpent flame is lit, keeping the nervous system invigorated, as it can only be by motion and body alignment and bodily activity.


The lotus flower of translucent reality shines through.  Perhaps there is no God, a personal bearded guy in the sky, in particular, but yet still, and always, there are wise people, ones who can express that which seems fictional, is like a fiction, like all things human beings must believe in to cooperate in systems, religion, government, banking, tribe, nation, but which is in keeping with the deepest and truest understandings we are capable of in considering our greater reality as living in this existence we share.

To tell, to speak of, deeper reality, one will never be paid, never be rich upon financial terms for doing such work, but yet will be rewarded, in kind, only asking for a modest occasional understanding, along with a basic sense of what is right and true and good.


Tending bar, aside from its physical delivery of all things of a good dinner, had the deeper, the spiritual element, the serving of a fundamental need we must include in all standards of life.

Tending bar was a good thing.  A thing of the Mohammed's welcoming and inclusive community Mosque as originally intended, no judgement, no requirement of particular belief in order to find belonging.

Tending bar might have even been exactly what I'd been looking for in life, though, like yoga, it remained strange and refreshing.


In a way it was gratuitously easy to be nice to people, to smile and have fun with them, to allow for some irreverent humor.  The old Dying Gaul was the perfect place for it.  In that I always had great faith in.  John F. Kennedy's a place to go to every day, to not go crazy.

The humor and hospitality combined with the precise motions and movements of keeping bar, of keeping water glasses filled on the tables, clearing plates, pouring wine, making the occasional gimlet or martini, comedy of physical and verbal kinds mixed with a mild non-violent martial art...  Only the tediousness of trying to get everyone in and out of the bar's mouth, its opening out on the dining room, complicated by the passing on of dirty plates and the dishwasher needing to be door down and open to clean the next load of glassware coming out warm and in need of being wiped with cloth napkins.

At the end of the night dodging the busboy as he huffed and puffed, sweeping up, taking out the bottles in the recycling bin, the trash bag, the dirty linens, as quickly as he could.  Included in the list that things that made me nervous, as nervous as the arrival of the late night people...


Growth in anything has the potential to be of the organic kind, the growth of a sapling into a tree.  I figured so when I left one restaurant life and moved on to another more personal one.   Does the living being in the state of evolving through growth and increasing in maturity know particularly where that might take him?



The original homo sapien, a forager, had many talents, much expertise, great dexterity, knowledge of his world on an intimate basis.   On top of that, he was in decent shape, and nor did he have too many possessions to weigh himself down.

The restaurant was the closest kind of a life to that, that I could find, for better or worse.  I found this inherent honesty toward the original and still living creature that had evolved, having evolved in a natural setting.

I'd say by my birth, in 1965, this original creature was about to go through changes to the world which would bring great stress to him.  That's why I looked up to Shane MacGowsn, as a vestige, a surviving member of those original talented human creatures, before we all got industrialized..:

Crap:

I guess some days you write in a state of uncertainty as to whether or not you've said the thoughts that pass through the brain.  Did I say that, or maybe I didn't...

Perhaps some day one will look back at their work and see it as a state of being "on the road."

The bar is like a river.  It's never the same, always flowing.  You put your foot in it, but it is change as much as it is the same.  No mood is the same.  No conversation, no spark of hospitality is ever the same.

I have an affection for restaurant people.  Chefs.  The front of the house people.  I felt a need;  I wanted to help them out.  And I thought, perhaps in being able to help them out, in whatever small way  I could, I would be then closer to discovering the things of deeper meaning and that sort of a thing.


After work I went to the Safeway.  I'd been on the road for a week, visiting with mom, helping her out.  The downstairs server had told me she would be floating between to the two floors, and I was busy from the moment the door opened, and held back from doing certain last minute things on account of being bitched at by the boss for getting frustrated one night and lightly punching the door to the bar closet a week or so before toward the end of the shift, the downstairs person leaving me to be.  She took it upon herself to tell the boss of my failings.  We were short staffed that night.  And then here we are, again, unprepared for the surprises of a night, the walk-ins, and the place is filling up and it's jazz night.  My back is sore from being compressed in the car, and too many potatoes.  My server helper is gone, from what I can tell, about 9:30, at which point my credit card tips haven't been entered and there is everything left to clean and still miles of glassware.  I'm there 'til 3:00 AM putting the bar back together after my week away,

My Uber friend turned out to be Liberian.  We have a good chat.

Somewhere along the line I've learned that some people take to being helped out.  And there are other people who are less gracious, more expectant perhaps.  And who knows which kind of person one is himself.  Perhaps there are people, perhaps like me, who are so intent on helping other people out that they are so stubbornly independent that they have a hard time asking.  Thinking, I mean, it's a given.  Of course people need to be helped out!  Don't be so selfish...

To paraphrase Wilde, no great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

When the barman needs it, his friends come to him to support him.

The chef's friend, lovely lady from Cote D'Ivoire, an artist, comes to help me mourn the sudden passing away of the long time regular.  She reinforces the support the chef has for my place at the old bistrot.  We talk about reading the Old Testament.

The moral support of work shines on me again.  You put so much into it, she tells me.  It's your bar. Give the chef a call.

And I feel better about things, having found the Biblical dignity of working the God's vineyard, administering to His vines.

I turn on the Bose to listen to the radio for work, news on Trump's politics, winning the next battle, his focus, and it is all bad parenting, very bad.


With Carman, late at night, playing guitar as a tribute to Uli, I returned, in the Fall, to the Bible.  To the spirituality of work, by which I mean.  And for the first time in a long time, I took breaths without as much fear and generalized anxiety.  I had found the essence of my job, and as I say, it was one hundred percent a spiritual practice, which sometimes, blinded by concerns, we do not see.

I suppose such things can only come through stress and journeys...

Dear Lord, one true sentence.


It is raining, lighter now, and over the hills with orange and yellow and still some green in the trees, I can hear a football game announcer, and then as I walk in the parking lot, The National Anthem.  It's roughly one thirty in the afternoon, and I've been trying to get on the road, leaving my mother's town home apartment, to drive back to Washington, D.C.  In my own clutter and hers, I cannot find my second pair of eyeglasses, the ones with the James Dean clip-on sunglass lenses, horn-rimmed, the black RayBan case my heavier pair, graduated distance to reading, came in.  I have to drive south, a long ways, the highway.  Into the sun as it lowers in the afternoon sky as I race toward Harrisburg,

I went back into the house several times, mom telling me, get on the road already.  I'm better at packing now, an LL Bean canvas large tote bag, a rolling suitcase, my green air mattress, a backpack. I have it all, but when I look through the rental white Malibu I cannot confirm I have this pair of glasses.  My lower back hurts.  I'm not looking forward to being on the road seven hours.  I was thinking of driving back yesterday.

The day before, as the doctor recommended, I took mom down to Wayne's drugstore to get her a flu shot.  The local Rite Aid was out of the Shingrex vaccine, and I needed the second part of it, and so I asked, and they said, at the counter, sure, no problem.  Mom was in the room getting her flu shot, then the guy asked me in.  He loaded up the needle, mixing two liquids from small vials.  "You're going to be feeling flu-like symptoms," he said.  My arm hurt the first time around.  The second one is different, he explained, as far as the body's reaction, having been primed by the first part of the vaccine.

We walked out into the day and continued on to the Port City Deli there on the main street, the wind gusting off the lake.

And the next day, I woke up aching all over and not wanting to move.  Not the day to be driving.  One more day with Mom, why not.  She kindly lets me retreat to my air mattress, my coat over me, after lunch, and I fall asleep.  Sleep has not been easy up here.


In helping me look for my eyeglasses case, Mom, coming over to the car in her bathrobe as the rain started up again, was bent over going through my thitngs.  "Oww!   God damn it"  Her finger tip is bleeding.  I feel my posture sag.   Yes, I know what had happened. my toilet kit, my Harry's razor.

Back in the house, a paper towel over her index finger.  At the sink.  I pour some rubbing alcohol on another paper towel, and this hurts her.    Oww ow, ouch!  And the blood is still coming, not dramatically, but enough to make a presentation.

Somewhere in all of this, as I go out to walk it off, as she tells me, as I am about to yell out something, as she sits in her old Eames chair... Mom, keep it elevated.  Keep the pressure on...  I find my glasses case, hiding in the side door low compartment underneath the driver's armrest.   Yes, of course.  Found it.  I bring some witch hazel over with the roll of paper towels.  It still hurts her fingertip to the touch, but not as much.  Her eyes still widen.  She has a book of Seamus Heaney in her lap, spirited to her, along with the long thin tortoiseshell calico part siamese cat.  I administer a small glass of chardonnay in a tumbler.  You're right mom, you are taking this all very well.  And the walk helped, even if it was a sad one in a sad parking lot in October with the rain and the sound of local football game.

Look on the bright side, we got a lot done.  But I feel sad, the first time she's not coming out to wave to me good bye as I drive away, waving back, eyes filling up.  She is, after all, a lovely person, even as she is.


An hour later, I am out of the rain, driving, listening to NPR, about illegal shark fishing in El Salvador and the related human trafficking...  pulling into the rest stop over looking a beautiful valley parallel to the highway.  Stiffly, getting out of the car.   I call her, on her cell, she picks up.  It's better, but still oozing.   Shit.  I go in and use the restroom.  There are two young African American woman behind a folding table, raising money for the local cross country team.  I put a dollar bill in the cup, say thanks, go look at the large map with the you are here.  Beautiful part of New York State.  Beautiful streams and rivers, the Otselic...  I look back over to the young ladies, as them where their meets are.  Johnson City...  I ask them about the river valley I saw once, and yes, they ran at Whitney Point recently.   "Yeah, I ran cross country...  Meet days made me very nervous.  Just wanted to hide at in the back of the bus and vomit..."   "Yes, the competitions are fast!"  and we all laugh.



At fifty three, 
no more winning for me.
A conscientious objector to the race,
one who'd rather just run, as he did as a kid,
over the high and rolling hills of farm country.
I'm one who'll never catch up, too far behind,
even at such pace.

I'm sure somewhere,
it's written in the genes, in code.
The younger brother goes behind to take care
of mom.  Intrinsically, he values hers,
the books upon the shelf, the cat,
the clutter, the attempt at writing,
a life of letters.
The older brother, far far ahead now.
Your own fault, or flaw,
and now it's come to this.