I've suffered through another day, just like the one before.  The ups and downs of my mother's dementia.  There were the phone calls.  Is my mother there?  No, mom, that was me who left the dinner table and I said I'll do the dishes later, I need a nap, feeling a cold coming on if I don't get some sleep, and I how I get her out her laptop so she can see Claire the Scottish Deerhound win best in show at the National Dog Show broadcast on Thanksgiving, figuring it will keep her entertained, just a five minute clip, then hopefully she'll be quiet and go on up to bed, as I am suggesting she do.  I've already repeatedly explained applicable local events such as Sharon's nephew Mario's pneumonia and how he's been taken up to Schenectady and how he's responding to the treatment there in a favorable way.

She's up for another few hours, as my nap turns from ten minutes for digestion on my left side upon my air mattress upstairs in her old abandoned study full of papers into an hour and beyond, unable to muster myself upward.  I find it quite exhausting dealing with her, her detachment.

She began whimpering before we'd even left Oswego, with the big river to the left as we head south, to Sharon's house past Baldwinsville to the south, climbing up the hill with the green of the golf course, dampened by the drizzle into grey, off we go to Thanksgiving dinner, lucky to have a gracious hostess preparing the entire meal, mom's old colleague, they go back to grad school at Syracuse University, she starts in, "please slow down."  Mom, I'm going the speed limit, here in her 2003 Toyota Corolla, 35 mph.  And at this point, after I point this out, I must admit, I push down on the accelerator gas pedal just a big.

Soon it will be shrieking.  And the whole way, almost, I chant my Sanskrit chants, while she bellows on, hurling devilish insults at me, as the rain streaks down the windshield, as the farmland farm's pass, ups and downs, cows free to move in and out from the muddy yard back to their pen, the hills changing from north south drumlins and moraines, into the valleys of my youth to the east, the skies changing too, the gloom overhead of Oneida County...

And damn if I don't feel tired every day and nighttime is my only escape, my imposed way to avoid her, resting, such as this morning, my morning around 2 in the afternoon, when the door was thumped upon and the doorbell rang, I come down, and it's two guys in black coats almost like trenchcoats, Mormons, and I haven't even had my morning tea, Jesus Christ.

Mom questions about them, after I politely humor them and express the hospitality of interest, as any decent person would.  Mom says something crazy in front of them, two guys, clean like FBI agents might be, after I say, "I can't even afford one wife," and I roll my eyes at her response, and they can grasp this strange situation of mine.  Later on, as we drive to get the groceries, after the break of a few days, as the darkness comes and the sleety snow picks up, walking down to Erie Street, bareheaded, walking together on the side walk past a house with a Trump sign.

Just keep writing.  That's all you can do.

No great artist ever sees things as they are, wrote Oscar Wilde.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

And like Dostoevsky, once he had experienced some things in life, we lived and worked at nighttime, getting up around 1 in the afternoon.

I too lived at night, not having much beyond my own distilled perspective, mom boring the hell out of me. Coming down, coughing, and what relatives do, older ones in particular, becomes disgusting.  On top of the same clueless conversation bytes.

And that's where I get my point of view from, from artists.  Not necessarily a good thing, not at all. But that there is inherent symbolism available to any one curious of his own life.

Things have become too boring for me to chronicle anyway.  The number of shirts you threw into a suitcase when I came up;  mom's reaction when you only want a brief word with her, you walk away, okay, and she says, "hello?!"  The constant blahs from trying to drink away your own troubles...

Things to boring to mention.

After another day of exhaustion--they seem to add up, on top of winter's coming with a light covering of snow, with the ice, with the cold air blasted by a western wind--I make a pot roast.  If I con't seize the nighttime, the comforting dinner to be picked upon for a few days, getting better each day, will never happen.  Mom is quiet upstairs.  I haven't been able to administer her nightly pill.  I woke up from my heavy nap, tried to slink past her bedroom door, taking a quick peek in, yes, the cat is there, that's good, but she calls, HELLO?  Shit.  I go in and sit down, and see what might be on television, between the BBC, PBS, the news channels, TCM, classic movies, History Channel, nothing inspiring.  I'm barely awake, groggy, unable to talk.  And she cannot hear what I am saying, she's telling me I interrupted her sleep, I say, Mom, I was just slinking by your door, I didn't want to bug you, but she can't hear what I am saying, and then it gets to being an argument, with her telling me that I "hate women," and it's just getting worse, okay, I bow out, and she stays, and thank god.

Pizza from the Steward Shop friendly people.  In addition to the sandwiches, tuna salad on marbled rye, cold cut Italian combo, worthy for later use, maybe on frozen pizza.    It's winter time, you need calories, even if it's dough, cheese, sausage, tomato sauce, on bread.

I start the post roast process.  I've got the things I need.  It will let me process things, and maybe I can clear my mind and get ready again for the yoga course.

Kerouac and his mom...  Left no room for a relationship with any other woman...

Kerouac, a recluse, he wanted to do his work, 

and my own life is so formless now... I can let the cat in the door, pick him up and give him a hug in my arms, then put him down so he can crack his teeth with moist interest over the new kibble I've poured him, and then say his word to me, in peeps and purrs and and three syllable talk then hearty wheezy purrs of remembered happiness, his nails on the linoleum of the kitchen floor as I pull him lightly holding on to his tail as he brings out his cat jaws more wheezes of cat pleurae, tail up now, rubbing against my leg, looking for all his pleasures, while most of mine have gone away.

He mews his "MEH!" as I get up to open a can for him, then he goes and looks up at the back door, and how come I have time for this, for recording the small things of life, so gone off chart a writer can get, just through trying to keep his chops up, but the chops distort his way of looking at life, as happens with all artists, they go crazy.

So I pour myself a little more wine, even at 4:26 in the morning, wondering what to do with the rest of my consciousness that was so sleepy and unproductive all day, but that it needed rest, lots of it.

Might as well play a little guitar and call it a night, before mom gets up to terrorize me.

The thing about writing is, that if you keep at it, it can lead somewhere, just that you don't know where it will or would lead, or if at all.  The listening to the sirens singing?  Your own human flaws that you might then share with another being?  

Then you find yourself at 5 in the morning, a time most people balk at, go to bed, sleep two hours, but at the point where the log jam of your mind connected might free itself.  This is yet another problem in the great insignificance of the addictive pleasures of trying to make an art, and one out of thin air and thin wisdom.  The first bottle of pinot noir is a tune up, as was the phone call to an old buddy, the most forgiving friend you have

By the time you are in the creative channel's flow, most people, to be responsible, need to go to bed.  This the stories of artists, the Caravaggio's of the world, not easy to fit in.

 I write at night now.  I got out of my yoga class, feeling like a weirdo, like I'd failed, having to do one of those dreadful teacher training sessions which I feel no good over.

At night, about half the time, mom goes upstairs to bed, where she'll sleep on her bed, cluttered with books and papers and junk mail from animal nature rights organizations and credit cared offers...   The other half of the time she won't go upstairs, she'll fall half asleep on the couch, her arm with the cat, cooing over him as he snoozes and dreams about going out at night in the back yard under the full moon.  

Like in yoga class I hear her creak in the old Eames type leather and wood chair above me, and at least at night she is quiet, sleepy, but it still makes me incredibly nervous to hear her just a floor away from me.  Few things are pleasant with her, full of her accusations toward me.  I ask her to come to the kitchen to listen to the phone messages her sister and Sharon Kane have left her, the former from the road, heading south on from the Berkshires away for winter in Leesburg Florida, the latter with a sad realization of Sharon's nephew sweet Mario, who, on top of some form of Down Syndrome has sleep apnea and now pneumonia, so that he is destined for a long hospital stay, a long road, as she put it over the landline phone line.

But Mom is irritated immediately, and just by playing these messages for her as she hunches over at an odd angle from the table, a refusal to behave, picking at her head, greasy now from lack of a shower, matted curly, like JFK spiral death operating or morgue table hair but not blood, just old lady greasy hair her great logic disdaining circular defeating conversations, by the time you get back to the first point or premise that first point has changed, called into question, as if I had brought it up to accuse her over something, by habit now. 

She is angry at me now.  I wanted to put Sharon on speaker phone.  Mom says, Hi Trish, when the phone line is picked up. no, mom, you're talking to Sharon, and mom's fragile enough where I can't interrupt.  To her credit she has a nice conversation, an attempt at soothing for Sharon, who's deeply rooted dry humor is well rooted in family and spirituality, but mom is so forgetful now, that when I ask the conversation's points, which I've gathered by listening, and mom has no answers, vague terms.  The people will be...  coming together... in in the place over there, so ...  so...  it's hard to...  a child...  like that.   Mom, what did Sharon say?  Does he still have pneumonia?  What hospital, has he had surgery yet?  

Then Mom is mad at me again.  On top of this the cat Yellow Fellow is meowing at the top of his lungs, establishing eye contact with me then looking up at the door hatch handle, the outer storm door, mom will rattle, but he knows the doorknob too, and I am wrung out from being too late trying to do yoga homework up in the early morning before the late unable to fall asleep after appeasing mom after the long Saturday session taking her out to Famous Real Canale's, where I ended up having three glasses of Chianti, and mom having another through some mistake which I did not pass on for the server, so I microwave a meals on wheels tray of reconstituted mashed potato and meatballs in an almost but not quite Swedish gravy with a little pocket of steamed cafeteria vegetable.

She commends the potatoes repeatedly.  Mom, you want so more meatball, and she comes back to a little more.  I remain vaguely suspicious about the meatball texture, is this rice, no?, is it milky bread crumb chunk with this plastic softness, but it's still a welcome meal and I don't have to dig around in the fridge to reheat the ragu tomato usual beef and sausage and reheat in a smaller pot and then deal with the dishes and so forth, and by now I've pleased the cat by letting him free out into the wet damp dark, and now mom is a crybaby about that, "now I've lost my cat," and on and on it goes, the whirlwind whirlpool tornado-ed winds of old age meets poor lone son trying to deal with it all, in face of Eiger wine grumpiness.

 And then as strangely and haphazardly as they had begun, my years behind the bar came to an end.  The random fact of my Covid unemployment stretching on into the not so random fact of my mother's need for care as she struggled with dementia in the eightieth years of her life, a well lived scholarly one, now fading into clutter and disarray.  I made dinner for her, lunch, took her out to dinner, did all the cooking, the grocery shopping, the errands, the bills, the keeping of medications and doctor appointments, and of course the duties of entertainment, the most tedious of all in many ways, taking her daily rides, at which point she would do her best to insist that we go out somewhere for lunch, or dinner.  And by that point in my life my own nervous health had taken a battering. 

A thing which had begun long ago, as happens to children, just like her, who are asked to be more adult than they should be, in order to deal with life, with this thing we call consciousness.

But it had, I suppose, in some way, been a glorious run, I have to say, ending perfectly for my cultural observations, having grown out of a Tex Mex neighborhood rather vital restaurant, at a decent price range, to life as the barman, a position earned out of professional respect, at a rather fine and professional, and vital too, French Wine Bar Bistrot in Washington, DC, affectionately known as The Dying Gaul.

And then.  During Covid.  Where there still was not the eager business to go rub Tocqueville-ian shoulders, between all classes, as we had before, when all that was gone, when I had been laid off again, I got the call, mom is in the hospital, and they won't let her go, until you come.  To take her home.

One day, Election Day, upon which the nation voted out the dark and evil times of Trump, of greed, of the gutting of all things that should be in the canon of the great American Democracy, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, general happiness, and voted in a good man, President Biden, I packed a bag or two, remembered my laptop, my D-28 acoustic guitar, loaded up one of the Enterprise Rental cars I had relied on, locked my apartment not knowing how long I'd be gone, and drove up to get mom out of the hospital, and there was no going back.  Leaving a lot behind. With no source of income to pay for its rest, now that I'd been kicked out of George's house, but my old job's unemployment...

It could not have occurred to me fully, but basically all I had, besides the things in my G.I. issue one bedroom apartment on Reservoir Road, was the work mainly entered here as dispatches from the road, from, rather, my point of view as a place where I met people from all over the world.  And I had those memories, of African chefs, diplomats French and Afghan, German economists, Latin American bankers, Arab World and Middle Eastern and Far Eastern journalists, in addition from all tribes of American culture, political and otherwise, my fond experiences waiting on people far away and upon journalists.  Nights, of live jazz, the musicians who became my friends, my own Tuesday Night Wine Tastings I'd bone up on, slowly learning the ins and outs of French wine through my wine company representatives who came to help me.

Any kind of music, we could have talked about, from Cape Verde Islands, to Madagascar, so on.  

At points my writing was fiction that struck as too personal to want to share, and though my road was dull and in one place, it was all I had, to mine for material.  My poor blog, such as you read it here, of dubious value, but as a way of keeping, as Robert Bly the poet is quoted alluding to on the NPR station radio for his obituary, your boat afloat in the storm, by persistence which allows credit, at least some credit, as many boats flounder.  Give people credit, simple poets, just trying to keep up with words and life and love for their people.

Whether or not chronicling my own shaking insanity as my boat came to the bigger waves of life's storm, requiring sudden maturity and grown up responsibilities such as I had interpreted differently, and yet basically the same, as earlier.

No one can really touch their own lives, or tell its story, its stream of stories all that well, to be sure, and writers tend to be a sorry lot, full of vanity and laziness, selfish declarations of independence, a tribe of irresponsible people, more about the Quixotic symbolism of life rather than life itself, believing themselves well enough full of shards of Shakespearean characters and experiences, of poetic moments worth sharing somehow, even if poorly, to a crowd of people not always so full of readership.

With poor shaking frustrated and scared hands he, the middle-aged writer, turns to attempting to marshal his sloppy field notes together somehow.  Give your poor old nervous system a break, the Universe was saying, you can leave those old duties behind, even as you walk out upon a surface of a new life not fully solidified in any apparent and pleasing to the confidence sort of way.  Even as the bulk of daily conversations betrayed the look within at the insanity shared in all character's true inner selves, tales told by madmen, full of sound and fury and signifying only a glimmer of a reflection of meaning, as found in yoga and the like, the long work to gain, or feign, some sort of wisdom worth the paper it is printed on.

Ophelia, Lear, everyone loses it in the end, sooner or later.  There's a lesson in it.