Okay, so it gets up to 90 degrees here on a Sunday.  I manage to dodge mom long enough to manage a little writing after her early feeding and pills and the coached dental hygiene.   I've got a shower in, and after is when I wrote, as she seemed content in her chair with a book, Valiant Friend, a biography of Lucretia Mott, 19th century feminist activist, abolitionist, early suffragette, etc., making her little self comments of amusement.  Okay.  Works for me when she can entertain herself.

The dishes aren't piled up too high, can be done later, so, when we get out to the car, after I'd cooled it off already and brought water bottles and yesterday's barely read New York Times so she can read something while we sit in the parking lot, when we get her to the car, "I can't remember heat like this in years," she says, the agenda is to go to Kinney's Drugs to get the Sunday Times and an ankle support wrap sleeve for my sore left ankle.  And then take a ride.  She's quickly angered by something when I get to the car, I forget now by what, oh, I was checking my phone, going so far as to unbuckle her seat belt, "well, if you'r just going to look at that, I can just go back home..."  

The grass pollen has blown up now, in these last blooming days of June, and the ragweed pollen too has become in the range where it can be counted as well as felt.  Something's eating at me.  A fly has joined us in the car, when I had the windows open to get the parking lot heat out of the interior, then turning the AC on, first without the recirculating air button pressed.  I take the car slowly very slowly, up the roads of an unbuilt subdivision of lots too close to the high power lines, John Paul II Way, connecting with Lazarek Drive, which makes me think of Lazarus.  Lazarek has his name on the big dirt ready mix concrete lot with all the different piles of dirt, pebbles, rocks...  At the top of the hill we can look and see the lake in the humid distance merging with the sky, and we pass the brand new football field at the high school and mom offers one of her repetitive but ignorable opinions, nothing ever goes on in this building... I don't bother.  Ankle support, newspaper to keep her shut up and happy, that's how I start to see things more and more.

Out, we drive on, through the SUNY college campus, slow, twenty mph, along the lake, then the ice cream stand of Bev's, the RV summer park on the left of the two lane road here, a couple taking pictures of each other by their parked three wheeled motorcycle, then the lines of Rudy's On the Lake, fish fry, hot dogs, Texas hots, still in pandemic mode, even as the governor has lifted everything, and on we drive.  Past the point, past the outlet marsh of Rice Creek, the water low, no birds, the green algae fallen low into the muck almost, no fat kids on their bikes with their fishing poles by the guardrail.  

The cattails have taken over the water in the streambed.  It's too hot to get out the car on this Sunday drive,  so we agree we don't need to out to Sterling Nature Center.  I take a left, back southward toward 104, a quiet winding road, and climbing out of the woodlands above us to the right and the creek to the left we come upon a pasture with rolled hay bails.   And further on, to the right, a dusty dry gravel parking lot and a long low building, something I've seen on maps before,  Hooligan's Irish Inn.  There are pick-up trucks parked out front.  As soon as I mention it, I regret it, but mom is up for it, so we venture in.  There's a pretty young bartender in shorts and a halter top, and some guys speaking loudly with lots of Fucking This and Fucking that, and they have a bit of a buzz on, red faces, sweaty, eyes squinting now in the afternoon light through the windows, the room a big one with pool tables, a juke box, dart boards...  But we sit at the bar and mom is happy, so she gets a wine, and I'll get a cider, and eventually we order fried butterflied shrimp, again against my better judgment, with cocktail sauce, as mom is making a bit of a deal about them, about how they'd have fun.  Yes, mom, "it's wicked not to have fun..."  We end up talking to the gentleman to our right, who has a long grey beard, and a fuzz of hair all over where not covered by his tank top, talking about his dog, a lab, who he had to recently put down at age 17.

By the time we get home, coming back in on 104 and then the quicker way back west, I am tired from the cider, dulled, ready to take a nap.  Mom calls the cat, and when I haven't said much, back we are in the kitchen now, calls me a bastard.  "Silence."

I've received an email, a reader response, from mom's educator friend and colleague from Syracuse University and Oswego, and when she came by earlier in the week to take mom to lunch, dropping mom off I gave her a copy of my lousy book self published through CreateSpace, a sub of Amazon Industries, to see what her estimation of what market it might be appropriately aimed at.  I want to get back to her sooner rather than later, but there are sad and painful memories of the times I couldn't or wouldn't hand in my English papers, what a bum I was, and how as a reading teacher she reacted to how frustrating it is, when bright engaged kids sabotage themselves by not doing their assignments.  Groggy, taking a nap, falling asleep even, I mull over such failings.

Self-sabotage it is, and I wonder how much of a cry for attention it might be. And there's also an element of the artist's strange wish, the false need, the false perception that the artiste must work in solitude, self-isolated, secluded from his fellows while doing his work.  Rather than think a bit, reflect, meditate, but then, definitely definitely come back to the Sangha, the Community, the peer group wherein ideas and language thoughts are exchanged.  You can't go it alone, and yet you think so, young fool.

In the morning, I wake up.  I don't know what the hell I should be doing.  There's the dental appointment looming.  There's the Toyota Takata Air Bag Recall, flying bits of metal, to take care of, a whole day spent down at some dealership forty minutes away, as I can leave mom alone for that long.  There's the Medicaid Application Documentation Form the Elderly Care Lawyer asks of us, paperwork.  There's cleaning mom's house so that there might be some form of order, in her books at least, that would be a start, even though she'll soon pull them all off the shelf and put them open on her bed...

And then there is her deeply rooted psychological behavior.  I don't know what to call it:  displacement?  She takes her anxiety, blows it up.  "Where are the animals (the cat, one of them)?"  "But we are not HOME!  If we let him out he won't know the way... this is not his usual house...  My house is up the road a piece..."

If I try to calm her down, it all ends up going toward "You hate me!" or some other form of passive aggression as she talks to herself, "I wish I were dead," or "I'm tired of this.  I won't take it anymore."

It doesn't stop.  She might eventually brighten out of the particular mood, but I'm never convinced by it, and I know her chuckling over dinner with a glass of wine taking its effect, I know where it will end up, when it becomes more obvious that I have grown tired over her subtle verbal Grand Dame attacks.  

I try to point out this kind of verbal behavior, but of course she is offended by all that, deeply.  "I'm not wanted here..."

And in the meantime, were that not the case, I'd have to listen to the verbal self talk.  "I've had it.  No one here likes me...  I don't know what to do with myself. "

If I say, "well, mom, I'm sorry, I can't watch television now, I have to think of what I'm going to do with the rest of my life," as a way of explaining honestly how I feel, though I must admit I don't want to be in the same room with her after putting up with it for hours long enough, her attack comes swiftly:  "My life is over..."

Okay...

Now it's Monday, I've succeeded in writing an email back to Sharon.  I've got mom first some sliced turkey, with her pills, then later some soup.  It feels even hotter and muggier today.  And yes, it is a sad day for me to delve back in to those places my "Jamie" inhabited back then, bringing upon himself his own depressed and depressing academic downfall, ruining all the work he'd down to get there, all for the thought of how he should be a writer, not part of anything, but a fool going off on his own, which is another whole chapter, even worse and more depressing and more with the piling of continued heaping of bad consequences, than the earlier chapters of the long personal story.  

Kerouac had his "Duluoz Legend," referring to how he envisioned and wrote out the stories of his own life, in many different chapters and in many different takes, repetitive, back and forth, up and down, forward and backward in referential and reverent time.  And he had to portray his downfall, not just the happy times in 1955 where he found Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible in the Sacramento Library, but the long slide into drinking a bottle of scotch a day, giving up on his exploration of Eastern Wisdom, no longer making the effort to be a scholar, wishing to kill himself actually, and going back to Catholicism.

I get the laundry going, and mom's upstairs.  I get to write a little bit on the laptop in the kitchen with the Air Conditioning running through the house.  Mom comes downstairs.  "Where are the people?"  And she's also thinking of the poor people, the Surfside condominium collapse of twelve floors and 150 or so souls...  "I'll turn it to the Tour de France," I say.  Are cats in?  "Let's go look for him," and just as I walk out and call a few times, here he comes, sort if slow predatory mode, not the sometimes joyful hungry gallop back in up the steps and through the open kitchen door.  It's just business today.  And feeding him, getting the canned cat food out of the little can and into the dish, I have to bang a little bit the spoon at the edge of the dish, and mom's in the bathroom pooping again with the fan on, and yells out, as if I were knocking on the door, "Just a minute!  I'm in the bathroom!"  "No, mom, I'm just feeding the cat."  "I can't HEAR YOU," she says, even more agitated.  Jesus Christ. 

When she comes out from the sliding door, I try to explain to her, I was just feeding the cat, but I get into it a little too far, and then she shouts at me, "I CAN'T DO ANYTHING RIGHT," and then she storms out the door, "I'm gonna go kill myself.  Good bye."

Mom goes and sits in the shade, calming down.  I strap up the black sleeve and Velcro ankle brace, shorts off, pants on, I need to go out for the groceries.

It’s peaceful now, and I ask mom if she’d like to come along. “It’s up to you,” she says.  "Well, you’d be sitting in the Big M parking lot and I’m moving slow anyway..."

I’ll take you out for a ride later.

I gather the plastic Pepsi bottles for recycling, screwing on the blue bottle caps as I take the collection from the brown paper grocery bag to a larger white plastic garbage god for transport.

And then there is quiet, and I’m left with my own shame, which is a simpler state at least.

I get down to the Big M.  In through the double doors.  They've taken down the plexiglass barriers over the old stainless steel grocery counters.  With the brace chafing against my achilles tendon, and its sleeve's tightness around the sore of the top of the joint, I'm walking slowly, with a tenderness.  Each time I push the clutch in I'm exacerbating it a little bit.

When I get back home, mom is waiting, hungry.  What's for dinner, as soon as I walk in the door.  Okay, so I get her a little ham and cheese roll, and then start to heat up leftover and get the fresh spinach into a pan.  Pour her a glass of wine.  The ground turkey mixed with peppers, green and red, onion, a bit of the usual tomato sauce and diced tomato, herbs, all cooked down together is easy on us.  I skip having a glass of wine with her, and again we talk of the building collapse.  But I am tired, rather so, after dinner, contending with her moods earlier in the day, and as soon as I can, putting away what needs to be put away, I slip down into the basement to the Thermarest Air Mattress tucked safely in a bigger space now near the washer and dryer.  And I fall into a nap, and then sleep, and then I wake up hearing a knock on the door, the drug store delivery man dropping off the white box of mom's dementia pills, the long roll of them in the clear plastic pouches...  and mom is coming in from the backyard just then too, having hailed the cat and talked to Bonnie the farmer woman who lives with her daughter the nurse three doors down.  

I'm taking a pee in the bathroom with the door slid mostly shut, and she comes in, "hello?   hello?   Hello?  HELLO?   Is anybody here..."  which drives me quickly to anger, and I can't help mocking her shouting at me.  "Well, I was wondering what's for dinner..."  We ate just two hours ago.  Two hours ago she told me she couldn't eat another bite, stuffed.  Then the phone rings.  My aunt, I talked to her earlier today, hot out there in the Berkshires also, and she has a bear in the backyard story, and I hear my mom getting all worried as she listens to the story, and that she only has one sister, which is actually pretty good for her.

So, fuck... I've got to feed her something, and fortunately there's the thin panko parmesan crusted chicken breast cutlet I cooked two evenings ago, with grilled onions... I put that on a plate, heat it up in the toaster oven beep beep beep...  She gets off the phone, I put the plate down in front of her.  Nothing for me.  I sit down and look into my phone screen, maybe to find some news to talk about, maybe just to tune her out, and again she gets mad at me, Angry Claire, angry at me once again.   "You look so depressed right now," she says, looking at me look for something novel on my iPhone screen, something...  I guess the heat tired me out, but being cooped up is not fun.  I don't have much to say.  I look back at her looking at me, as if to shrug.  Yeah...

"Well!  It's quite rude not to talk to people when everyone and the kids are sitting at the dinner table."  Duck and cover, let it ride its wave over me...

One cannot escape the family drama, of, more specifically, the persona.  I shrug.  I'm not backing down.  Okay, Angry Claire.  Look, I've dealt with ten of your angry outbursts today already, and I'm tired. 

She picks up her plate and goes and sits in her Eames chair to finish what she wants to eat.  When I slip into the bathroom I find her glaring at me.  Angry Claire.  Keep on being angry...  I do the dishes in soapy tub water, fretting over how to be more comfortable with the ankle brace.  When's this going to get better.

Family is karma.  There's nothing to do to escape it.  Maybe this there for a reason.  You're stuck, trapped, there's nothing to do but ride it out, observing how to keep your own self calm, and meditating any chance you can, and even forget writing, if it weren't part of meditation.  

But not long afterward mom comes back downstairs and apologizes.  I'm sorry, I was being a little grumpy, she says, meaningfully.  

Oh, that's okay, no need to apologize.  I was just confused.  I thought we'd had dinner, and I was still groggy from a nap.

"I'm sorry," she says, apologizes again.  

No, I get it.  I was being grumpy myself, in a weird mood.  I think it's the grass pollen, on top of this crazy heat.