The most mundane things can lead a writer somewhere necessary.

I move my Thermarest air mattress down to the basement in front of the washer and the dryer.  It's a cold night.

The night before:  Lake effect snow comes early in the night, and I go out walking in it.  Wet.  Tiny globes, soft hail.  I call mom's friend Sharon to update.   I learn that Saturday will be the birthday of Henri Nouwen, S.J.  I learned that Sharon had done a retreat at a monastery south of Rochester, one he'd been to.  His last book, he writes about being there, in fact, from the Genessee Trappist Monastery, Sabbatical Journey. 

Why didn't I think of this earlier, I say, finally getting away from the noise of the blaring television in mom's room, her night wanderings talking to herself, help, help, bastards, where is everybody?  Wallows of self-pity.  And to be trying to hide across the narrow carpeted townhouse hallway, in the clutter of her former office.  I've tried to untangle, sift, toss, but no, useless.

It's the worst thing imaginable as far as people put together to have to deal with each other.   A 56 year old son without a job and "no job prospects" who is looking for a formula, something of Kerouac resting from the great on going road with the crazy roman candle people,  writing in some odd corner, reading his religious books and other books.  

So mom bugs me on Monday, let's go for a ride.  The sun's out, my Portuguese wine headache is gone, after the aspirin and extra rest, mom retrieved the meals on wheels drop off.  What could we do for fun.  Okay.  So, Sterling Nature Center, good bang for the buck as far as driving west out of Oswego on 104, then turning off to the right past Ontario Orchards farm market stand, which is a big affair now, 104 A, the old state road.  We drive into Sterling proper, where there's a waterfall and several grand old houses, then after that northward to Jensvold Road and the Nature Center and up to the parking lot.  Perfectly still.  The sunlight is warm even.  The trees still.  Mom's enjoying it.

Looking back at the old farmhouse with the tall dried grasses brown and tanned in the foreground I'm reminded of Christina's World, Wyeth taking the then 55 year old woman who, suffering from a degenerative muscular condition could only drag herself along the floor to do her chores, placing her outside, down the hill, looking back at the old weathered sea captain's house.  We are all trapped in our conditions, in our bodies, and no one else can really imagine how we ourselves feel and react to things, know what's good for us when they reside in entirely different lives.

The next day:  I've served mom dinner, turkey meatloaf, spinach, mashed potato, and even though I had a break earlier in the day, going out on my own for groceries under the Winter Storm Warning and the sloppy roads under the constant snowfall, canceling the two o'clock eye exam for mom out on 104, even then I can't take another minute more of her around seven now as we finish dinner, and I just want to disappear, she can get herself ice cream if she wants.  Worked called earlier, the boss, as I was driving back.  When the dining restrictions are lifted, would I be able to be back for a couple of days a week.  Doesn't need me right now, but when the city allows the bistrot to have live music again...  "the customers want to see you," as he says.  So put that too into my equation.  

The drive and the afternoon out at the Nature Center was a day of peace for us.   I gave in.  Okay, you want to go for a ride, the sun's out, fine.  And sometimes it's just easier to go along with things when you're stuck with them anyway, know what I mean?  And anyway, capturing mom looking back over the tawny Wyeth grasses at the old white farmhouse that now holds taxidermies of birds and a fox and a coyote, a mink, owls, fish, and other collected samples of nature's great works, closed now during the pandemic, and just like she were some kind of Christina, taken out of the confinement of her mind and body to be freed out here in nature, a natural element, no longer simply a feeble minded case of slow dementia, and all the unpleasantness of personality that comes along with it, through a series of poses I've come up with a composite of the pose the painter gave the original Christina blending the realities he witnessed and studied and the imagination.

And I think too of after having conducted that rather simple math, about a person, me, my mom, becomes free from the weights of all our circumstances and conditions, our health that is sickness and the sickness that is health, both good, tied together, about how outside of ourselves and more often than not let free in nature, we are liberated, in such a way as to free ourselves from that inevitable emptiness, the abyss within, at our core, that we can only fill with the things that are appropriate to our souls.  To bridge that great gap, hard to find a steady way, but yet, we find sketches, activities, taking a walk, the little acts of the day, and even though those times and little habits are not perfect, too self-conscious on our own, so that we seem to be plodding along in some routine that is healthy for us, good for the internal organs or posture or musculature, we place trust in the idea that such things will lead us out of our abyss, closer to the things of God.

My aunt calls just as I'm plating dinner.  I hand the phone over to mom, but mom is too grumpy to want to talk, and I don't have much to add, I've had it.  Now you're mad at me, mom says, after I hang up, not wanting to have a chat now either.  She's been talking to herself all afternoon, and whenever I suggest she call someone if she wants to talk, or starts in with the same repeated stories...  mom, you just told me that five minutes ago.  In her own mind she is a fascinating person.  I see many of my own faults in her.

I let the cat out, after waking up for a bit at 1AM.  Later he comes back, making little noises like an accordion warming up, asking for a can to be opened.  I do the dishes.  Mom is sleeping.  I have some peace for a little while.

After the Christmas holiday, falling back to earth, as if one ever left, just one more thing scratched off a to-do list.  Survive.  The difficulty of dealing with the difficult elderly with dementia, hard of hearing...

And all along, in adulthood, somehow I've ended up not taking care of my own basic needs, physical, emotional, social...  ever since the bad year senior year in college...

Emotional support.  You get too proud to ask for it, apparently.  Or it just falls out of habit.  Becomes hard to ask for.  Shouldn't it be evident...  

That's where it starts, and it goes downhill from there.  You take a job that keeps you out of synch, around people all the time, but without intimacy.  Then on the other side you take up some form of poor self-explanation, pretending it's art, to keep yourself company, but it's all in a vacuum, in a sterile jar.  Then at the end of the day, pain killer, red wine...

The second day after Christmas, 9 AM, after the usual argument with mom the night before, I get up and go down to the kitchen, sneaking past mom's bedroom door on the way, and the cat is following me.  I pick out a can for him, but before opening, after a sip from the mug of last night's detox tea, the vomit reflex has hit again, and I move quick to the little bathroom off the hallway, stooping down on knees and vomiting up yellow liquid bile.  I hear mom call from her bedroom, "Hello?"  Stress.  The first day, losing unemployment relief.  

I wasn't able to find an ATM that would accept check deposits to my bank account, and it dawns on me, my unemployment has run out.  Congress let it happen, thanks to Trump.  I was sitting pretty before any of this happened, back in March.

Mom is quiet.  I don't feel so hot, the cat is fed, I sneak back up to my air mattress, just to soak it all in, let it ride over me, mom's habit of anxiety, always looking for strife, the little complaint, the question, repeated, again and again.  "Any reunions this year...  What's a Zoom...  How did you sleep last night... What are we doing for fun today..."  At 9PM I'd had enough, last night, and so I went up the stairs, into the hopelessly cluttered office, turned out the lights...  And when I come out of sleep, I hear her, downstairs, talking to herself and the cat.  Some of her dramatics.  She won't just go to bed and watch a blaring TV anymore...  "Help," I hear.  She likes to say this now, a mantra.  I might be saying it someday myself, soon enough.

But what queer gene inside of me does not allow me to seek what I should truly want...  emotional support, not just giving all the time...  What allowed me to waste talents groveling to the restaurant business and to the fickle gods of writing  as they will never pay a mortal in the act.  At best they'll wait till you are dead.

"What's a Zoom call?"  Mom, I've explained to you this a thousand tines...

Shrill voice, called out the back door:  kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty...  what stupid jackass let the cat out.  on a night like this, in pitch darkness...    boo hoo boo hoo hoo hooo hooo.   I get up from the couch, where I was finally writing again.  I walk over to the kitchen, I open the door, the cat's right there, I let him in.  He's all cold.  How could anyone be so stupid...  I wish I were dead.  She sits down in her Eames chair, fumbling around for a toothbrush, a book, paper, sags back in misery, exhausted act, her fingers still working.  Hi, pretty tree, she says finally.  Pretty sound it will be the end this year...  but we'll find you next year, if I still live...  Sigh.  Sigh.  Oh.  

I get up, take her out for a ride, after scrambled eggs.  A Sunday New York Times.  Sharing a tuna salad on rye sandwich from the Stewart Shop as we park on the bluff to look over the big lake and the light house.

She likes a little ride, it seems to entertain her, we don't argue as much, so we turn up by the university and then down to drive westward along the lakeshore, past Rudy's, then following the shore line around through a march where the water feeds toward the lake, then a wetland after the turn by the muddy farm, and turning to go a little further, the noise from the front end of the exhaust system blows.  Mom grabs her head, you've ruined the car, it's all I have...  Indeed, it is loud, loud as a B-17 bomber or a Harley.  Loud pipes, save lives.  Mechanic says a new catalytic converter could put us over the edge as far as sinking money into a 2003 Corolla.  We just spent $1500 on the gas tank, heat shield, fuel distributor....   Now what.

Cold.  Wind blowing.   Grey skies.  

I call the mechanic's shop Monday.  Bring her in tomorrow, as early as you can, so we can order the parts...  

I'm awake early, snoozing, then at 7:20 the alarm on my phone goes off.  How bad is this going to be...  Does this sink the economic viability of keeping a 2003 Corolla on the road.  Snow has come.  Mom is awake, but when I check in on her again, in her bed, she has dozed off.  I start the car up, after dressing, boots on, triple layer jackets, scarf.  Change for the bus.  Clutch in all the way.  A tap on the gas pedal, it starts.  I take the brush out, sweep the top off and the windshield and the side windows and the back window with the long armed yellow snow scraper sweeper.  Oh, turn on the defrosters...  Clear the windshield wipers.  I go back in, stomping to get the snow off the boots.  The pipe coming out of the engine...  it comes down, then it opens up into a wider tube, as wide as an old coffee can.  There, where it looks like it had been patched, sautered, the pipe has failed.  

So, I drive down, to First Street, and then on to Bridge Street, and I'm 104 all the way east... 

Hey mike, how are you.  Yeah, so...  Well, we'll give you a call.  He doesn't offer me a "need a ride?" so I walk out and on to the road, the shoulder.  Back west on 104.  Trucks going by.  A snowplow, then another.  I keep on walking.  Maybe I can catch a Centro Bus back into town, from the Walmart Stop across the road.  My bus schedule blows in the wind, and skin is beginning to hurt.  When will this end?  Well, I need a walk, a long walk.  People in history have made worse marches.  I pull my scarf out from the courier bag, wrap it tight.  That helps.  My timing for the Walmart bus is off.  I might as well keep walking.  I deserve the punishment.  The sky is blue, but then clouds come over.  I push the large buttons which barely depress to signal when to walk across intersections.

I slip and fall on the icy plowed parking lot by the Dunkin Donuts at the top of the hill by the two story motel.  Do I walk the whole way?  I cut across the road to the side street on the other side, maybe it will be more direct, lead me straight to the Utica Street Bridge...  The Big M.  No sidewalk on the other side anyway...  I follow this path, at least it's quiet, but then, coming back to the main road, oh, I just miss the bus into downtown, and now this is hurting...  Jack Kerouac suffering on the roads, and he could suffer it, tough, and make art of it.  I'm just trying to get back to mom's, and maybe the car will be fixed by tomorrow.  I'm back on the rough snow covered sidewalks headed west on the south side of the street, past Garofallo's where they make an excellent sub here in the poorer end of town.  I think of stopping into the convenience store, something warm, coffee, a breakfast sandwich or cold cut sub, but shyly, plighted, I walk on, too shy to stop.  Blocks become longer.  

Okay, so I cross the river over the old diagonal old railway bridge walking path, and gulls hold over the waters of the great churning cold river below us, looking down, beaks down, studiously, over the canal lane, over the river, perched just so thanks to their winged hold on the air, and I shuffle onward.  I'm close to the Big M now, now far away.   (The wind is stronger over the valley of the wide channeled river.)   There I can find warmth.  Wait for the bus.  I cross first street, and embarrassed by my state of affairs, I duck in to the covered shopping cart can recycling foyer, out of the wind, finally.

Mike, the boss of the mechanics and our friend from the service center shop has called.  I call him back.  From the dealership, the catalytic converter costs $2000.  Yikes.  But I found...  $650.  With labor and struts... 

Could be a lot worse.   I shop.  I finish shopping.  I go across the street, to replenish the pinot noir supply.  The Italian Covit will work just fine for $9.  

I've lost it all.  I cross past the snowdrifts, to get back to the Big M.  Take a minute at the little bench by the newspapers just inside the automatic doors in and out.  At 10:50, the Ellen Street bus will finally come, after all that hour and a half walking trudging along, in low Bean boots that slip sometimes.

And miracle of miracles the bus comes, and I'm alone on it as it takes me up the hill and over, and then I go down, the back way, slipping on the hill where four wheel motor vehicles chop up the ground, and finally I'm taking my boots off coming in the back kitchen door of Mom's.  I sit with her for a bit, feed her, get her her pills.  And then I take a nap.  It's cold up in the room.  I've got nothing going on.

This is a madhouse.  The cat was yowling in the night as I slept, falling to sleep early, not long after mom finished her slice of pizza, wrapping the rest of it with wax paper.  Where's my bedroom?  Will you be up to watch TV later, sure.  But I'm worn out and tired, and I fall to sleep even as the TV is loud. 

Later, around 3:30 in the morning, I wake up, and the problem is now that we can't find the cat in this madhouse.  She must have let him out.  The lake effect snow is coming down now, heavy, and there's a guy running a snowblower along the sidewalks.  Finally, the cat comes back to his little stoop and I let him in.  I heat a leftover slice for mom, who says she can't see out of her glasses they are so dirty.  Okay.  I'm feeling pretty twitchy, and so I crack open a can of cider and do the dishes, so I'll have some clean soapy water for all the cat dishes, the wine glasses, the people dishes.

Mom goes back up to bed.  There's some paperwork I need to get done.  The bill of the car insurance.  Checking her TIAA and the bank accounts.  And fortunately, they are holding steady.  

One writers for the glory and purpose of God.  That's about all one can say at the end of the day, and in the meantime I have the downstairs bathroom where the cat box is to sweep out.  Paper and used toilet paper rolls mom saves, smaller bags.  Keep moving.  I clear the refrigerator, let the cat out, get him back in, cook some bacon in the oven with the Lodge iron pan lined with tin foil in batches, 400 degrees in the oven.  Fill out the paperwork and seal the envelope.  Oh, thank god.  Some space finally.  Wasn't feeling well yesterday after a bottle and a few extra glasses of Beaujolais over a twelve hour period with a long nap in the middle to get through my birthday.

And Joe Biden will be elected today, and so the nerves are still up.  I was for a long very interested in inaugurals and Presidential history, but as I slacked off and dropped out in my moodiness at the end of my college days, my odd insights to Hemingway's later work as a kind of prayer, an abandonment to the textual truths of life, exemplified by The Dangerous Summer, Islands in the Stream and A Moveable Feast, work of intuitions rather than scholarship, marked by fine prose and evocations, a picture of humanity at the level of the human being's natural mind, well, I put aside all my JFK knowledge and remembered history and speeches, also all my Lincoln tales and words and letters, his speeches too of course, committed at least somewhat to memory, as poems must be remembered line by line, well, I put that aside, along with my Henry Steele Commager history books, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, the rudimentary beginnings of cultural histories and PBS, all that I put aside politically, to aim for the cultural things.  The Irish poets.  The Buddhists.  The Christian stories.  The Bible.  Shakespeare.  Then the restaurant business got its hold on me, took me for a ride.  And I went along.  And much of it was good.  Except it was irresponsible.

I go out to the car, placing the pizza box from Cam's in the recycling.  Sweep off the old Corolla, 3 inches or more of light snow.  Coming back from the mailbox I run into Ben the maintenance guy, just getting out of his car, new to him, a 2008 Chevrolet, which too has stories.  He's sad for Trump.  I don't contradict him.  He pulls on a heavy black Carhart Jacket with broad yellow reflective stripes over his work hoodie.  He's holding a Stewart Shop coffee cup.  He goes to his little shed to warm up, before coming out with snowblower.

But even as Trump flies off in Marine One and lands at Joint Andrews...  to tell a few more last lies to cap it off as he grins, white teeth...  made for television, I feel private feelings too deep and too worried and anxious enough to crack open a cider to deal with the daylight.

In the night, nice and dark, it becomes clearer to me.   Hemingway in Cuba, and before, was on his way to be a desert monk.  Like St. Anthony of Egypt.  He retreated, always, really, to nature.  To close animal friends, to like minded-outdoor men like Gary Cooper, to his childhood in a wild Michigan we'll have a hard time finding now.

It's the hardest act to pull off.  The writer artist's necessary call to the solitude where he will use words to analyze himself.  He must stride the world of society and his own private reactions.  As Hemingway did.  Finca Vigia, then driving 15 miles westward into Havana to the bars.  A social life, but balanced throughout his life, the quiet removal from the world.

"Go and sell what you own.  Give the money to the poor."  St. Anthony hears and follows the command of Jesus.  He retreats from the world, first at the edge of the town of his family, doing physical labors, prayer.  In the desert he meets the enemies of anger and greed.  He withdraws, rather than continue entangled, a victim of society, in order to escape the seductive impulsions of the world, the sinking ship.  Solitude of the desert, the furnace of transformation, to rid one's self of anger and hatred, of all the temptations Jesus found in the desert, the transformation of solitude.  This is where the writer is headed, bowing out into a longer silence with a final Brothers Karamazov after a fraught life.

There's a reason Kerouac liked to sleep outside.  He was not a lazy man.  This was the Christian road for him, the way of being a disciple, a comforting proof, similar to Hemingway's intimacy of his cats.  Perhaps in someway abetted by the sugar fuel of the port wine, but then trees run on sap and sugar too.  He knew his family, his mom, his sister, his brother in law, down  in Rocky Mount where he stays during the Dharma Bums tales, couldn't consistently provide, given their resources, the emotion support he might have needed, so, "inwardly (he) turned to God."  "Go thou, go thou, die hence, go roll your bones, go groan, go moan... go moan for man,"  or whatever it is exactly that he beautifully wrote and uttered on Steve Allen, old Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts and other places.  Kerouac liked, enjoyed, the monkish simplicity, the setting of boundaries by going off on his own, a habit he had his whole entire professional life.

Hemingway, life in Paris, being a bon vivant, is a Christian life as well, the discipleship of the cafes, the contact with artists of different stripes, the waiters, the other writers, a sense for travel and wide possibilities.

The thoughts of Henri J. M. Nouwen playing in the background on my iPhone on YouTube, coincide at this chapter in life, looking for a bridge.  Yes, I have been a people pleaser, I have given in life to help other people, and at a cost.  I've been a person used, shut off to things and people that might have brought me joy and relationships, a wife, a different path in life, a happier one.  I've let how others look at me become as a large part of my identity.  I have not established my boundaries as I should have.  I've not thought as highly of myself, rather thinking myself inferior.  But that all seems to be a classic pattern.  "Let go of all the self-made props," Nouwen tells us.  "Trust the inner voice."  Stop seeking everyone's opinions and input, which only tangle you up, leaving you dependent on all you've listened to.  And I fit the pattern.  I worked as a bartender for more than twenty five years, alone at the end of a day or night.  You give to your people, and then you eventually discover that they aren't able to provide you the emotional support you might think they could provide.  It's not their fault.  And that realization is a help in going "back to Jesus," the places you feel you need to go to.

"The inner voice of love:  Work around your abyss.  There is a deep hole in your being. You will never succeed filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous, and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid, being completely absorbed in your pain,  and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

"Cling to the promise:  Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.  You have to close yourself to the outside world, so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love."  Henri Nouwen, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom.  1998.  (Found on YouTube.)

There's a light covering of snow over the tops of the cars out in the parking lot, lit by three street lamps visible out the window.  I make a tuna and white bean salad for the morrow, red onion treated with lemon squeeze, zest, a forgettable dried sprinkle of oregano.

I pass the night before my birthday proper in some agony.  But I manage to rouse myself, come downstairs and the first thing mom says is, are we going to do anything fun today.  I have in mind taking a shower, and shaving.  I have lived for fifty-six years on this earth, as they say, apparently.  There's even some sunlight coming through the clouds, if not any blue sky to be found.

The television on upstairs, Christine Amanpour, mom being quiet now on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my birthday of 56 years, a light crystalline lake effect snow falling just like It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is suddenly back in the present world, present in time again, back in Bedford Falls, as far as explaining what the snow is like, just as it was a billion tiny perfectly round golf balls an inch thick over the grass the night before, I think of the great void in all of us, the great emptiness at our core.  The great unquenchable thing, the abyss we must work around, by first accepting, and then asking for some kind of change.

With mom off to bed, finally, again, I let the cat out, as he's been crying at me, yelling to be released.  I do the dishes.  I gather the plastic Pepsi little bottles, into one tall kitchen garbage bag, put my boots on, coat, hat, and walk out into the night to put the bag in the back seat of the car.  Through the powder on top of tiny golf ball snow upon the grass I see our friend's paw prints, and I'm somewhat alarmed to see, so it goes, that they out into the parking lot, along the backs of parked cars.  I follow on, and they lead out into the road, so maybe mom is right about keeping him.  A big blue snow plow truck with its snow blade scraping up sparks on the road comes down the moraine hill in the distance and past me as I stand in front of the first of the two farmhouses, where the cat's foot prints in the snow lead me.   I walk back, put the bag I've carried along into the backseat of the Toyota.   I come back and up to the townhouse barns for people, and there coming along the back side, to the kitchen door, he's been waiting for me.  I take him in.  As I come in and stamp my boots, there's mom in the kitchen again.  

 At night, in the peace, praying within myself, I know the wordless truth.  There was a king with a Midas Touch who sat commanding on a Golden Defecatory from his great abyss, his absence of soul.  A crass manipulator, whose command smeared the temples of democracy with shit and lies and conspiracy theories and murderers.

And it was part of fallen human nature, untaught, manipulated, that from their own abyss and compulsions for some form of identity, their lacking, that so many have listened to him, and he preyed upon them.  He promised an identity, that he'd be there with him.  One would hope that he would only disappear into the mastering of his own illusions.

Anyone with a soul would come, at some point of wise years, to know that hollow place within that cannot be filled.   I too have tried to fill my own voids, as a less than perfect male, an escapist.  I have spent sinful time with publicans and sinners, been gluttonous and a wine-bibber, knowing myself as a weak and powerless sinner, to use a language, terms we are in rational modern life we have become detached from.

But I will go on.

So.  I go out after dinner, after cooking the usual chicken breast in the iron pan, spinach, a baked potato, also preparing hot Italian sausage from the Big M with peppers and onions.  I've had problems starting the old Corolla in the cold, even following the protocol, pushing the clutch in all the way, as the mechanic explained to me during the last go round, then the gas pedal.   Pump the gas pedal.  Turn the key, click, nothing happens, what am I doing wrong.  I have to ask mom to get out and come round to the driver's side as I get out for her little touch, and the old buggy fires up.  So I'm facing the devil of the car not wanting to start in the cold, with the simple desire for completing a lonely little mission of going out with the car down to the McDonald's for a double Quarter Pounder Deluxe.  I get in, climbing down into the seat, getting my legs under the steering wheel, okay, relax, pull my cell phone out of my back pocket, wiggle the stick shift to make sure we're in neutral, in with the clutch, foot on the gas pedal, turn the key in the ignition, and nothing happens, but the lights on the dashboard turns on and the gas needle jumps to its proper reading.  Again, and again nothing.  Then, okay, a little heavier on the gas, and as I turn, the clutch pedal, it turns out, has just a little bit further to go in toward the engine, and this does the trick, after one second or so, she fires right up, purring away now, and I can go down to McDonald's, just for some variety.  Around the corner, to Hawley, turning left, then to Erie, west and down along Lazarek's yard of gravel and sand and stone and brown dirt, ready-mix concrete, a series of green elevator chutes like dinosaur's reach, each with conical piles below, old rusty Caterpillar big light green rusted bucket-loader, dump truck yard, low cinderblock garage buildings on either side of the barren curving road.  Massive cement blocks laid along the road, no trespassing.  We saw a fox here in daylight on one of the outer mounds of dirt last summer.  A little bit of a break I'm taking.  A small effort back toward self-confidence and my own choice making.  It's not far, down toward the power plant with its smokestack towers and past the high school playing fields, the brand new football stadium bleachers.  I was going to go through the drive through window, but the lobby is open, so in I go.  A nice greeting at the first register as I study the lit menu board with the computerized display of offerings, so I order my Double Quarter Pounder Deluxe and also, from the Value Menu, how about a triple cheeseburger for three bucks, that ought to do it.  Anything else, no, thanks, I think that's it.  I've left the car running, so I take a look out the picture windows, ahh, everything fine now.

I drive, slowly, back up the hill, back past the mining operation, back to the townhouses.  Mom has gone up to bed and she is still there, so I can open my McDonald's paper bag of burgers for traveling, markers on the roads of life, sitting down at the dining room table there in the kitchen, unwrapping the Quarter Pounder, mowing that down, bite by bite, so good, not bothering to avoid the bun this time around, the sweetness of the dough going well with the rest, mayo lettuce and tomato on top of the original, and I didn't even tell them to hold the cheese, a rare treat.  I guess I don't care tonight if my belly keeps expanding over my pants.  I sip from the glass of Beaujolais I left on the table from before.  I find myself looking at the yellow & blue wrapper of the triple cheeseburger.  I cut it in half.  I'm free from Ophelia's singing, from Lear's blearing, mom's off tune Oh Danny Boy and soft song help, help, and all the self talk.  And with its bun, there's the classical beauty of the diner cheeseburger with a simple splash of ketchup, mustard, two thin slices of pickle, melted yellow beautiful American cheese, just like the quarter pounder but a different experience. I eat the first half of the cheeseburger, but then later I'm back in the kitchen and the rest is going to taste good, the thin roll soaking up a bit of grease.

I recall the Spartan habits of the family, like Pepin, the pleasure in a simple meal with inexpensive cuts and ease, not wanting more than you need.  Living this way, the world closes in on you, a fifty five year old man soon to mark a year older, sitting alone, eating McDonald's burgers on the old family dining room table.  "I'm used to hardship," my grandfather the chef would say, in family legend.  Simple life.  Solitary life after the crowd of the restaurant goes home.  Eating the last hamburger in town.  Putting away the cash drawer.  Once they left it out on the top of the car, this being in the Fifties or so.  But the cash drop box was heavy enough to still be there when they pulled up at home.  

Friday night in these strange days.

Saturday.  I was going to try to go dry tonight, but as dinner came along, again with the baked chicken breasts, and four hours with mom and her outbursts and my grumpiness of her intruding on my solitude, I folded, mom, I'm going down to Five Points, you want to come along?  Sure, she says, agreeably.  Okay.  I turn the stove down slightly, the bone-in chicken breast with onion, hot sausage from Big M with onions, green and red peppers... We've both been wearing those heavy Keen hiking shoes, and maybe their Frankenstein clunkiness is why I don't have a better feel of those careful Japanese Nip Zero, ha ha, pedals, as if I were obstructing myself, and mom is telling me to just be gentle, gentle, from the passenger's seat and just about all of the times I'm driving it's not for a joy ride or a date, but to keep her entertained.  I wince as she talks as I'm trying to listen to the hourly news on the local NPR station on the radio, as the little car tanks along in gear.  Gentle, gentle with the clutch, gentle with my car.  

Earlier today, when I finally had the courage to get up, after watching the news with her last night, then fucking around on Facebook for some milk of human kindness and some post Capitol Building Trump Conspiracy Riot arguments, I got up, fed her, showered and shaved, puked, dressed, sadly gathered myself with fresher clothing, and we go down to the Stewart Shop, mind you the sun is out, still a few cloud bands in the sky, and in to get a New York Times and the Palladian Times local newspaper, excellent, by the way, I ask mom if she wants the usual tuna wedge thing, but she says, how about in ice cream cone.  An ice cream cone?  (It's thirty out.)  Yes.  Okay, sure.  What kind?  Coffee.  Okay.  In and back out, put the newspapers in her little lap, underneath the big purple winter coat with the fur lined hood, and hey, she's happy.   Okay, now, after gassing up the car, leaving the motor running, not wanting to be caught out again, off we go, mom reading the big headline, House Moves to Impeach Trump, which is bringing her back to her old sense of humor and joy.   Off to the old Big M, which is in a building that not too too long ago was a pretty good little train station, as there were lots of goods coming in off the Great Lakes to the port, and then to the freight storage buildings, the mills not far away at all over here at West Second and First Street at Utica Street.  Okay, mom, I'll be quick.  In for supplies.  A guy on a small bike came in with white plastic garbage bags full of empties, plastic bottles, cans, to be redeemed in the machine.  Okay, Saltines, for mom, a quick check of the vegetable aisle, soup du jour from the polite hot counter, grab some precut turkey breast, though the low sodium is better, what else I need, uhh, ear plugs, cat food, oh, back to the vegetables, I need peppers both green and red for the sausage, remember that Mom was slowly reading from Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking book to me yesterday.  Eight-pack of Pepsi.  Vine-ripe tomatoes you might get two slices out of for a sandwich with a good sharp knife.  A quick tongue in cheek chat with the brunette who is the sophomore at college cashier, with whom I talk to about cats and chickens and dogs, because she had some, growing up out in Scriba and she studies Physics over at the college, the SUNY, explaining why I'm spending $3.99 on orange almost industrial rubber earplugs to her, "sure mom, yeah, sure, uh-huh, yup, oh isn't that interesting," (she might was well hear about that from me about these things, now, early in life, me being the benevolent kook wandering professor), and the poor young thing get it with a light polite quiet shy chuckle, as I load my stuff on the belt, ask if her if her cats will go out today, oh probably, and I'm a bit amped up and nervous as I always am, at the last moment remembering to find a vanity light bulb for mom's upstairs bathroom, and then the sort of good looking enough to be on her way to New York City to be Scarlett Johansen's stunt double, when I 'm kidding with her, because I never go older than a few years out of high school, it seems, she says hey to me from two aisles over, how are you, and I go, well, I took a shower today, but how about all that craziness in the news, achh, why am I babbling to the poor girl who's in high school, but she adds her agreement, and offers kindly, "at least the sun's out," and I say yes, yes, and then I pay with the credit card and squirrelly shoot away out through the automatic doors and up the parking lot and there's mom's silver hair head poking up like a Japanese spa snow monkey in the passenger's seat, and I come and put the bag in the backseat, and having forgotten to put back down the emergency brake--cars cost the absent minded a lot of guilt--as I forgot on the two slow drive blocks from 4th to 2nd Street...  trying to read mom, is she going to hassle me about going for lunch, let's go down to the lake, is that okay, mom, sure, I'm always up to go down by the lake.   But I'm getting bored.  I'm nervous again.  We go down to the dock, past Skip's Fish Fry and the Humane Society where we got the kitty-cat last February, kitty corner from the Salvation Army outpost, and mom says, is that a boat out there, well, the old World War Two tugboat is still out there...  we go, then turn around, back home.  The cat is waiting at the back door.

Not long after we go back, dragging the groceries and the newspaper in, mom's piping up with some fancy for excitement and adventure.  What's for dinner? she declares, as if a fanfare would come along hallways and Jacques Pepin and The Galloping Gourmet, (Kerouac watching the latter on TV one afternoon in Florida when the hemorrhage drove him to get up and go vomit his life out in the bathroom, dying in hospital hours later, not much they can do) and I can't even face the usual things in the fridge.  Mom, I'm going for a walk, while it's still light out.  Chinese or Pizza?  I ask, heading out.  Oh, I think Chinese would be fine.  Okay, ma.  And then, walking to the road, scrub Cape Cod like pines are hosting two little red squirrels running about and making a continuous chirping sound of noise, such that I thought they must be birds, but the sound coming from the old industrially disturbed ground here underneath the great overhead power lines.  Mink?  I wondered, having seen some before, but anyway, a magnificent free from stream of consciousness chatter from these little fur people of the wood.  And just coming out of the parking lot, small birds fairly high up were having a decent conversation too, seven of them, peeping, smaller than cowbirds and grackles, but bigger than finches and chickadees, a few wing-beats carrying them forward to the west, toward sunset, then cut the motor, then beat again, streamlined through the air.  As soon as I get back, so, again, "what's for dinner?"  It's barely four in the afternoon.  Too cold to go out walking too long.  Are we going out, or staying in?  I'll cook mom, don't you worry.  

Then Sunday.  The writing helped me find some peace, and I was kind to mom before going to bed Saturday night.

After dinner, a long nap, and then the TV News from CNN, which mom was watching, with the volume up loud, entering my dream almost as I woke up.  There's a special Jake Tapper piece about the fascist putsch event at the Capitol Building incited by Trump of January 6, 2021.   By midnight I've had enough, and don't really feel a need for company, and head downstairs from mom's bedroom for some proverbial solitude, first to do the dishes that came with cooking a chicken stew.  And then Mom comes downstairs.  I'm feeling a bit tweaked.   Filing for the weekly unemployment didn't work as it should.  I'm trying to stay calm, but then down comes mom.  

She fumbles for a saltine and peanut butter.  Mom, there's sliced turkey in the fridge.  She goes to fridge, but can't find it, here mom.  It's one of those ziplock plastic bag with a little sticker over the opening sealing it shut, Big M Turkey, 1/9/21.  She can't get that open, then fumbles for the scissors and opens the little bag, and I bite my tongue.  Okay, at least she figured out how to get a slice of turkey out, eating it straight off the counter top.  Oh, well.

But a writer's ideas have to be found, as if out of the blue, they must be tracked, stalked, caught blindly by surprise.  They must be found whatever, as they are, one never knowing which wild animal of the bush might appear in the night.  And having mom around is not helping me get into that groove.

Later on, after washing the dishes, the clanking of plates and silverware and cups upsetting her, getting her halfway upstairs, desperately in need of my own space, I take out the garbage, and the recycling, having sorted through the leftovers of carry out boxes.  I've got the colored load of laundry going down in the basement.  The pants and two green shirts and the socks and the underwear I've sat in for the last two weeks.  A bit of mom's clothes, the hand towels from the kitchen that mom uses to wipe the cat's feet dry when he comes in cold and wet.

I take the trash bag out, tossing it in the dumpster there in the parking lot, then lifting the lid to the smaller green bins to gently offer to the recycling effort a few wine bottles, clear plastic spinach cartons.  I walk toward the road, straining my ears under a winter watchmen's camp, are those wild dogs off yipping to each other in the distance wood...  Deep night.

I walk through the gap in the apartment townhouses, two floors, plus the basements, peaked roof line, over the frozen ground.  Dirt frozen now where the grass was reseeded after the lumber ties were replaced with finished low cement brick retaining wall.   I'm walking toward the back yard here, flat grooved ground, the ruts of lawn mower tracks or the original plowing and seeding when this farmland was claimed for townhouses.   The cat is out here somewhere, and sure enough he finds me by sight from a good distance, as I come toward him in my winter coats, my cap.  He jogs toward me, happy to find me, trotting up beside me, tail up, coming by my legs as I step into his world.  Sorry you're lonely, cat.  I'm lonely too.

Then suddenly his, the cat's, world opens to me in the wintry dark, where above us there are breaks in the patches of cloud through which the constellations can be seen in part.  I'm also in Ernest Hemingway's world, the beautiful passages of the posthumous writer notebook that he had also been working on, the sketches published posthumously in Islands in the Stream.  A cat father speaking to his favorite cat, Boise, here in Cuba, and Hemingway is talking to, and about, the habits of the cat, who likes to go up into the mango, or is an avocado tree, and chase the fruit bats, but who also enjoys eating the flesh of the avocado.  It's not a passage many speak of in reading through Hemingway, this late generally poorly considered poorly regarded and poorly received rambling novel in sections about his sort of retiring rambling years in the Keys and Bimini, Havana and the Finca Vigia days, going into town to drink in bars to the point of drunkenness, or going down to the harbor to take out the Pilar, Hemingway's Brooklyn Boat Yard boat, his yacht.  Passages on fishing the Gulf Stream, passages on chasing German U-boats.  Passages on Havana bars sharing fresh prawns with the local fisherman and his favorite cat as a kitten.  Hemingway felt strongly that the cats, who were around him constantly, helped him write.

I walk around with Mr. Kitty Cat, Yellow Fellow, Beetlebaum, originally by the name Mitchell, but when I call him I give him any number of names, even I call out, hey, Dumb Ass, or, come home, Stupid Kitty, I'm not so stupid, kidding, and he comes running, loping quickly when I open the back door off the kitchen of this cluttered townhouse apartment.  He wanders and meanders like a fish through my legs as we walk along the weeded edge of small trees and reeds, tail up all the time, and us menfolk needed a break from the house.  There are the two spruce trees, where I see him take shelter when there is light snow on the ground, a little patch of green where he can shelter within striking distance, of the bird feeder and other prey.  It's a joy for me to be on his wavelength all of a sudden, refreshed, here on his ground, with his senses, his sight, a moment of living in the present in the damp dark night.  A rabbit emerges and takes off to a safer distance.  They probably know each other.  Mr. Kitty Cat goes through his paces, going low, ready to creep up low to the ground and strike.  Then he goes for bursts of speed, romping fast as I've ever seen him, here at thirty degrees in the darkness, only a few lit windows in the town house apartments, mom's being the brightest one, everyone else behind drawn blinds and shades.  For a moment, closer to the building, I hear her television.  (Later I'll find a wonderful show about Alastair Cook...  "What a creative man," my mother says, as I go up from my writing post on her Eames Chair, her laptop, when I hear that he was there too in the hallway kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel where Robert Kennedy was shot, something I did not know.  The scene is replied in about the best motion picture footage there exists of the scene, the blood, on RFK's hands, pooling beneath his head, smeared on his cheek and the back of hand as the busboy cradles him.)

Here outside in the night, over frozen ground and grass and dried weeds, rushes, small weed trees like sumacs, three feet tall, or four, without language he shares with me his spots, how he hides here, strikes out of there, can escape this way, the cat.  I walk along the edge of rough grass lawn, toward the place where he usually enters into the weeds, sometimes meeting a friend or enemy with a puffed tail.  He follows me and I follow him in, to the edge of the drop off, near where I tossed the dried Christmas tree, and he sits on a log looking back at me.  I go back to the grass and away from the buildings, walking.  He bolts to the corner of the property, near a deer track.  I follow him and find him sitting upright on a mound, left by the original bulldozing of the clearing of the land, showing me his perch.  It is too far in and too dark to come closer to come.  We stand together for a moment.  We walk back where the deer and the fox go down to the wide ditch of the sunken railroad bed.  He stops to pee here, and I find this friendship just about the most entertaining thing I've ever felt, or felt in a long time.  When cats befriend you, they like to walk with you.  They tell you things, without language.  

In the night, nice and dark, it becomes clearer to me.   Hemingway in Cuba, and before, was on his way to be a desert monk.  Like St. Anthony of Egypt.  He retreated, always, really, to nature.  To close animal friends, to like minded-outdoor men like Gary Cooper, to his childhood in a wild Michigan we'll have a hard time finding.

It's the hardest act to pull off.  The writer artist's necessary call to the solitude where he will use words to analyze himself.  He must stride the world of society and his own private reactions.  As Hemingway did.  Finca Vigia, then driving 15 miles westward into Havana to the bars.  A social life, but balanced throughout his life, the quiet removal from the world.

In the solitary desert.  To rid one's self of anger and hatred, of all the temptations, as Jesus found in the desert.  The transformation of solitude.

"Go and sell what you own.  Give the money to the poor."  St. Anthony hears and follows the command of Jesus.

He retreats from the world, first at the edge of the town of his family, doing physical labors, prayer.  In the desert he meets the enemies of anger and greed.  He withdraws, rather than continue entangled, a victim of society, in order to escape the seductive impulsions of the world, the sinking ship.  Solitude of the desert, the furnace of transformation.  The struggles of the false self-compulsions of the world.  The three temptations Jesus found.

The struggle, the encounter.  We are all driven crazy.  All driven mad.  We cannot leave the world and society.  But we cannot.

Mom talks to herself, sitting in her Eames chair, thumbing through, browsing different books from her piles, book in one hand, picking at her scalp with the other, legs crossed, still wearing her Keens at 10 o'clock at night.  Finally, she quiets down.  "It's such a pleasure to have you here," she says, looking up at me. "Mothers don't last forever."

The desert, this is where the writer is headed.  Bowing out with a final spiritual Brothers Karamazov after a fraught life.

I watch Captain Phillips on Amazon Prime, switching from the last of the Beaujolais to a can of Woodchuck Cider.

The next day, I regret, I lounge in bed, letting the inner wheels tick, not wishing to tangle with the egos cramped up in the house, hearing mom carrying on downstairs.  It's cold, grey out again.  I order Chinese for us.  Dumpling soup, small fried chicken wings with the sauce, dumplings pan fried, and then Kung Bo Chicken.  I'm hungry, bored with what we've been doing for dinner, though the chicken soup I made along with the Hoffman hot dog chili dog supper I put together last night was pretty good.  Together we mow through our courses.  I need to take a nap later on to aid digestion.  Mom's only had one and a half glasses of wine, with food, but she carries on for a whole half an hour, "help, help, will someone please help an old lady...  bastards...  help, help...  where is everybody..."  I continue to hide in quiet prayer coming up through my chakras with Jesus Prayers and Hail Mary and Our Father.  It is like that I like the desert monk fathers am also all alone here, in my little cave, hearing my own inner devils of ego, of fear and anxiety call and call and call.  I'm proud for myself not having any wine.  Her devils are the mother of my own devils.  Finally she quiets down, finding company in her cat, and talking to the CNN News about Trump.  Later, she is at it again, hello, is any body here?  Ted?  Can anyone help me?  I go downstairs, refill my water bottle as she stands near the counter.  So what's up for today, she asks.  Mom, it's midnight.  Time to go to bed.  You're no fun.  I thought we'd have a nice conversation.  Go to bed, Mom.  And later again, I hear her coming up the stairs, hand on the bannister, talking to herself.  The bathroom, then her bedroom, giving an account of taking her socks off.  

When awake, it's either scrolling...  or getting up and writing, done in the quiet.  But you would not blame me for this found time through hiding, turning to the unlikely path of writing, as I have done before when life has stumped me.  You would not blame for the quiet when she sleeps on her bed in front of the television with the lamp on.  I've turned them off before, but, alas...  I seek calm, away from the frights she gives me over the day.

The thoughts of Henri J. M. Nouwen playing in the background on my iPhone on YouTube, coincide at this chapter in life, looking for a bridge.  Yes, I have been a people pleaser, I have given in life to help other people, and at a cost.  I've been a person used, shut off to things and people that might have brought me joy and relationships, a wife, a different path in life, a happier one.  I've let how others look at me become as a large part of my identity.  I have not established my boundaries as I should have.  I've not thought as highly of myself, rather thinking myself inferior.  But that all seems to be a classic pattern.  "Let go off all the self-made props," Nouwen tells us.  "Trust the inner voice."  Stop seeking everyone's opinions and input, which only tangle you up, leaving you dependent on all you've listened to.  And I fit the pattern.  I worked as a bartender for more than twenty five years, alone at the end of a day or night.  You give to your people, and then you eventually discover that they aren't able to provide you the emotional support you might think they could provide.  It's not their fault.  And that realization is a help in going "back to Jesus," the places you feel you need to go to.

And there was always this stuff going on in my mind, this whole time, for instance, the brokenness of the world, of our own selves.  Sometimes Buddha providing me support, stories from the Good Book, or sometimes the story of a poet or a painter, stubborn, hearing their own inner call despite everyone else.

There's a reason Kerouac liked to sleep outside.  He was not a lazy man.  This was the Christian road for him, the way of being a disciple, a comforting proof, and also similar to Hemingway's observations of his cats.  Perhaps in someway abetted by the sugar fuel of the port wine, but then trees run on sap and sugar too.  He knew his family, his mom, his sister, his brother in law, down  in Rocky Mount where he stays during the Dharma Bums tales, couldn't consistently provide, given their resources, the emotion support he might have needed, so, "inwardly (he) turned to God."  "Go thou, go thou, die hence, go roll your bones, go groan, go moan... go moan for man,"  or whatever it is exactly that he beautifully wrote and uttered on Steve Allen, old Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts and other places.  Kerouac liked, enjoyed, the monkish simplicity, the setting of boundaries by going off on his own, a habit he had his whole entire professional life.

Henri Nouwen tells you, don't share, when you're in the state of limbo.  It will just make you lonelier, as others don't have the capacity to offer you the emotional support you would need.  

And look where Jesus ended up...

So, is it any wonder... Mom in her state, talking to herself softly, can't really provide me much, except to say, more or less, keep a good attitude, that "if you think it's too late, then it's going to be too late..."  I applaud her encouragement, and I pay for it, cooking, doing the dishes, shelter from her pension paid rent, small intermittent efforts to keep this little place from falling into disaster of piles and piles of this and piles of that.   "I have a Ph.D," she tells me, if some minor criticism should come out of my lips.

Then it turns, after I wake, into a kind of dull night, in that mother is asleep, and I can do the dishes, drink YellowTail Chardonnay on the rocks, sort out the refrigerator, take out the trash, manage the recycling. pay the bills, writing out checks, looking through my own mail, confusing enough, my writer friend Bob sending it along up to me.

Why did I have all these expectation...  People are too screwed.

Hemingway, life in Paris, being a bon vivant, is a Christian life as well, the discipleship of the cafes, the contact with artists of different stripes, the waiters, the other writers, a sense for travel and wide possibilities.

Just to get out of the house as the contentiousness with my old mom rises, after I've taken her with me on my little rounds, newspaper, sandwich overlooking the lake, through the old town, then groceries at the old train station on Utica Street and First, then to get wine, then back to the townhouse, get mom settled, her anger flaring at me as I lug grocery bags in, the wind is up now, she needs to go to the bathroom all a' sudden, I heard her walking behind me clutching her cane, bastards, bastards..  dusk.   I don't feel like it but I go for a walk.  It's just about dark.  I've slept again until 1:30 in the afternoon.   I have dinner to decide on, but even with the wind it's not bad out, 37 degrees out, and though it's just about dark, to move the legs will help the rest of me.  And so I put on a few layers of coats and walk down to the parking lot and out to the street, the road.  

Past the first house, where the dog on the chain barks in a friendly way, then past the older farmhouse with the implements and junky things out front in his yard, a nice guy, with American and Trump flag on his flagpole, bear figurines, stuff sort of for sale, even now, in January, I walk past him and then past the marshy cattail pond where water flows toward the lake even though it's low and even and flat here, the corrugated pipe under the road proofed against beaver, and just then lights coming down the moraine hill toward me and just then an awful loud "whunk."  Sound of hitting the breaks, and the car stops.  I waffle a bit, in the wind.  Is this a sign telling me to get away from the dark road?  I get my courage up and walk, as I've been walking very slowly, toward the scene of the accident.  I don't want to.  I'm not qualified in first aid.  But I walk up, one step at a time.  The hazard lights are on now.

It turns out to be one of those boxy U.S. Postal Jeeps sort of a thing.  I hear a woman's voice.  She doesn't sound too distressed.  She's talking on her phone.  Everyone has a phone now.  I get a little closer.  She would have seen me in the light of the headlights anyway.  Approaching reluctantly.  

Are you okay, I ask.  Hit a deer, she says.  She's looking in the tangled low brush woods at the road's side, shining a flashlight, so I join her with the small light of my iPhone.  Sad disaster of my own life.  Mom weighing me down like a choking anchor.  I don't see any eyes reflecting back, I tell her.  She jumped out into the road, she says.  Yes, it's a dark spot here.  I'm a bit squeamish, I tell her.  Indicating I'm not a hero pretending to save her.  Her supervisor is coming anyway, to check the damage.  A broken headlight, or rather, knocked out of sorts.

I'm sitting her writing this at 6 AM and Queen Lear Ophelia comes down the stairs, goddamn.  I serve her some soup.  She talks to herself.  She sings, I don't know why I love you like I do...  I just do.  Hows the weather, I'll go check, make sure all the animals are in.  She sighs.  I know I'm not doing a good job, they hate me anyway.  Help.  Back to the salt mine.  I'm afraid I have to go back to bed.  I'm going to crawl back to my bed.  Okay, you SOB, she says, finally going up the stairs.

The cat is back in.  Cleaning his flanks on the top of the couch.  

"The inner voice of love:  Work around your abyss.  There is a deep hole in your being. You will never succeed filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous, and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid, being completely absorbed in your pain,  and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

"Cling to the promise:  Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.  You have to close yourself to the outside world, so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love."  Henri Nouwen, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom.  1998.  (Found on YouTube.)

The usual mom over dinner.  I was a very fussy eater, my poor mother.  All I would eat was mashed potatoes, with bacon.  My parents were in the restaurant business.  My mom was very intelligent.  Was your mom a good cook?  Yes, mom, you're my mom.

Later on, after I'm goaded to come downstairs after my nap after dinner, Chinese again, not having the energy to cook, hello, is anybody here?  Help.  Bastards.  I hear her opening various doors, calling the cat.  I pour some hot water in the kitchen sink tub with the dishes from last night, a quick scrub and I'll load the dishwasher and put it through, silverware, glasses, plates, cat dishes, tea cups.  I wash the two pans and the pot I used last night.  Mom sighs, huhhhhh.  She burps.  The cat is standing expectantly looking up at the back door out into the yard from the kitchen.  I crack open a can of cider.  I pour her a little wine, always a tentative mistake, the darkness of ego coming out in her further as she sits there at the table.  I let the cat out.  Two minutes later she is upset about it.  He'll never come back.  I shake my head, cradling it for a moment in my hands.

I get the dishwasher full, and just enough liquid soap for the little pockets on the door to lift and close with a satisfying click of a seal.  Later on, she comes and sits down in her chair, I'm on the couch.  Do you mind if a poor old woman joins you...  I'm trying to fill out the weekly DC Network unemployment form on my iPhone.  What's going on with it, I don't know.  She has a thick book in her lap now.  A Companion to Feminist Literature, and mom is talking in her baby voice.  I'll have to come visit so I can read this book, it's awesome.  Mom, you live here, it's your book, you must have bought it yourself.  But it doesn't seem to sink in.  She gives me a dull look, her eyes resting slightly lower in their sockets almost.  Earlier she told me I looked like I wanted to hit someone.  It was a small success back when we were in the kitchen that the cat came back, as there is a light snow falling.  I feed him again, from a previously opened can.  I go back to the kitchen, trying to find the space to tackle the computer issues...

Prayer is not easy.  Lord, I am a bum.  I even failed at being amongst publicans and sinners, let alone being a college professor or a lawyer...

There's a light covering of snow over the tops of the cars out in the parking lot, lit by three street lamps visible out the window.  I make a tuna and white bean salad for the morrow, red onion treated with lemon squeeze, zest, a forgettable dried sprinkle of oregano.

I wish I were dead.  I'm no good.  I'm just a stupid woman.  Wish I were dead.  Do you need any help?  What can I do for you, you never ask for any help.   Well, I'm cooking mom.

Any booze in this house or is it a bunch of teetotalers, my mom from Lynn, Massachusetts says to whomever might listen as I've brought her lap top over to the kitchen table for some peace and journaling as she continues on with her self-talk back in the living room, wish I were dead.  There's an abyss in us, one we realistically cannot fill.  Dr. King was depressed in his later years, with all the factions, sensing his own hounded irrelevance.  A great loneliness I feel, but that is normal, to be expected.  The beef stew has been brought to a boil, the cilantro from the Health Food Store bubbling toward the surface, now to simmer.  I woke up and recited the Jesus Prayer of Orthodox Christianity as my body waited to start the day.  Just at breakfast my aunt calls to wish me well, and I take the call over in the living room.  Mom comes and sits down in her Eames Chair and glowers and glares at me.  She doesn't remember today is my birthday, and though I turn the heat up she doesn't want to give up her spot to take a shower.  I puss the phone over to her, and she is curt with her sister.  Later:  what does she have, radar?  how does she know that you're here, she knows how to find you.  Mom I've been here almost three months...

I pass the night before my birthday proper in some agony.  But I manage to rouse myself, come downstairs and the first thing mom says is, are we going to do anything fun today.  I have in mind taking a shower, and shaving.  I have lived for fifty-six years on this earth, as they say, apparently.  There's even some sunlight coming through the clouds, if not any blue sky to be found.

Got a major headache, I wish I were dead, pipes up mom from the living room over the slow muffle of NPR.  I tried and I failed.  I'm no good, she goes on.

I need to go for a walk, so I do, after having chopped the onions, the carrots, the celery and browned the beef for the stew, brought it to a boil.  It takes ten minutes slow walking up by the power grid transfer station and the small pond and the corrugated pipe system that goes under the abandoned railroad tracks with the honeysuckle type woody weeds coming up, the paved service road slick with ice here and there, to warm enough to think of the phone calls one might make on his birthday.   I call my father's widow, who lives up in Northern Vermont, Newbury, close to the family of her son, Jeff.  She tells me about the town square with the classic town things around the green, the church, the town clerk, the local library, and I bring up the little postcard from Pompei, the House of the Fawn, her note how beautiful it was when she and Dad went on their bus tour, guided by the local art teacher, Citadino.   As I walk back, I keep on going, place a call with my aunt for some good vibes, and she's making a batch of American Chop Suey, with turkey.  I consider walking up to Hawley, then left down toward Erie to pay a visit to the Polish Veterans Virgin Mary shrine, white benches in front of her, white statues of two prayerful women on either side, a fawn, the juniper bushes having been mowed low this summer past, green emerging from them again, but it's cold and I make a lap around the parking lot to wrap up the call with my Aunt and Barry.  We've covered a few bases, touched on the family history in the restaurants, the Covid vaccine, the how's mom doing.

At night as I write, with the television on upstairs, Christine Amanpour, mom being quiet now on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my birthday of 56 years, a light crystalline lake effect snow falling just like It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is suddenly back in the present world, present in time again, back in Bedford Falls, as far as explaining what the snow is like, just as it was a billion tiny perfectly round golf balls an inch thick over the grass the night before, I think of the great void in all of us, the great emptiness at a core.  The great unquenchable thing, the abyss we must work around, by first accepting, and then asking for some kind of change.

Mom comes down the stairs.  I put things aside.  I microwave us a container of Cantonese Wonton Soup, and for a little while things are peaceful again.  We sit at the table, quietly, as the cat prowls.  There are dishes to do, but I'll wait.  She talks about the news interview she just saw, powerful, she says.  We're in a tough time.  We're kind to each other for a little while, before it becomes necessary for a break or earplugs.  I can't do the dishes with her sensitivities to noise, until she goes back to the television, a book in bed.

Egos and agendas are quieter at night.  Muted.  Except for the cat's, who finds me again, after mom goes back upstairs.

I write all this as a journal.  I put it up here so I can find the record of it, as a reference.  I consider it a private effort at finding out basic human truths.

With mom off to bed, finally, again, I let the cat out, as he's been crying at me, yelling to be released.  I do the dishes.  I gather the plastic Pepsi little bottles, into one tall kitchen garbage bag, put my boots on, coat, hat, and walk out into the night to put the bag in the back seat of the car.  Through the powder on top of tiny golf ball snow upon the grass I see our friend's paw prints, and I'm somewhat alarmed to see, so it goes, that they out into the parking lot, along the backs of parked cars.  I follow on, and they lead out into the road, so maybe mom is right about keeping him.  A big blue snow plow truck with its snow blade scraping up sparks on the road comes down the moraine hill in the distance and past me as I stand in front of the first of the two farmhouses, where the cat's foot prints in the snow lead me.   I walk back, put the bag I've carried along into the backseat of the Toyota.   I come back and up to the townhomes and there coming along the back side, to the kitchen door, he's been waiting for me.  I take him in.  As I come in and stamp my boots, there's mom in the kitchen again.