In life, I mean, for a living, I’ve been, I was, a bartender.  I may have helped contribute to the happiness of many people, not that happiness is a lasting thing necessarily.  Perhaps I should have been a policeman, but maybe that wasn’t really me.

In observing the elderly, I trust a good mood less and less.

Mom wants to for a drive.  I go out to the parking lot, opening up the windows, bringing a paper bag with bottled water and a sandwich wrap from the earlier trip to the Stewart Shop for a NY Times.  I got up early, going for a walk in morning wind around seven.   After the convenience store I went out back and did my yoga as the sun was just coming up over the poplars.  Then I took a shower, dressed, got ready for taking mom out in the rental car.  I come back in.  She has intestinal issues, she tells me, so we hold off for a bit.  We go check the mailbox, but the mail hasn’t come.   Then, she is ready, so I bring the paper bag back to the car.

We are driving slowly toward the lake, through the 20 mph street that takes you around the university campus to the drive to Rudy’s with the lake view, and the motor homes and the cabins.  There are three crows just by the side of the street, picking at something interesting and agreeable to them.  So I slow down more and give them a wide berth.  They take off, calling as they do, and then from around the curve comes a university police car.

He turns around, and we’re going along slow and I’m talking to mom about what we might see today, but I know he has pulled in behind me and the lights go on.  Sure.  No problem.  I pull over, gently, stop.

License and registration.  Sure.   It’s a rental car.  Just the license then.   Sure. Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?  You were in the left lane.  Yes, I’m sorry, there were three crows by the side of the road.  Mom’s a birder, she’s retired from the SUNY...

The policeman is kind, and almost chuckles. Oh, I didn’t see any birds.  Yeah...  Any problems with your license?  No, sir.

And five minutes later we are on our slow way again.  Chastened.  Slightly nervous.  I go along with our little ride.  Past Rudy’s fried fish stand like a diner, picnic tables by the lake, then out past where the wind picks up the water in spray as the waves crash the sea wall, then out past the pond, eventually turning around and coming back.

I am a believer in the written word.

I had sent off a copy of a book I’d written, via Amazon.  A gesture of literary respect, right...

I'd gotten one of those emails, the book had been delivered.  It's Saturday, I go about the usual keeping mom entertained and fed.

I'm sitting on the couch, reading, or staring into my iPhone when a text message from the old acquaintance, whom I take as a person of literary talent, a positive note, comes over.  Coming out of the blue.  “Enjoyed your book, lol.”

So, I text back, three in the morning, enjoying some wine and some quiet time,

Still waters run deep, who knew, emoji...
We were rather immature back then, yes.
We both owe each other an apology.

I owe you a million of them, I respond.

And then I hear my old mom coming down the stairs, distracting me, peering at me surprised out of her lostness from the landing, holding onto the banister.

“Do you have wife, kids?”  And just telling mom, an old friend, etc., I want to, since she has sort of praised me, I wish to tell her that I enjoy her writing too... "What writing?   Where?"

Uh-oh, here we go again.

Thank you for not stalking me.  Oh, okay.

Still, when I go to bed, it feels positive more than negative.


Being a dumbass, and not feeling all that sexy anyway in trying times, my impressions were of a largely literary conversation.  Which don’t come about very often, if at all, as if people would rather hold a dirty diaper than go down “that path.”  My literary efforts, not of much importance anyway.

Woe unto the world, because of offences.

I’m up at my mom’s, difficult person to deal with, of general old age.

The restaurant where I have worked a good long time has had a case of the Covid-19 come through, at a cleaning session before the intended opening, and the scheduled opening I was about to be called back for was postponed once, then again, and then, a partial reopening, with my remaining laid off.  Unemployment protection lasting through the end of the coming month.

A bygone era depicted somewhat in my old book, in that I was able to pick it up, and read parts of it, and say, hmmm, not so bad.  I read my mom a passage of taking the bus back from college, her picking me up at the station.

Here I am, as my mom’s hold loosens.  But we are here, all her books.  A bookish life,  it has its organic pull.  You could not lived your way through it and not have been a writer.  Nope.

Things are broken, cannot be fixed.


And then...  first, it’s Sunday.  Somewhere through the day, around noon, I shoot of a text.  "I hope I didn’t keep you up late."  Fair enough, I thought.

"Well. it was an interesting way to spend a Saturday night in Covid-times."

Monday.  Hot.  Lots going on in my mind, but I shoot off a quick, hi, I hope you have recovered from your literary shock, returned to the land of the productive.

The old man, writing.  Faced with an adept to the modern way, disdainful.

Distance of social media, moving behind a screen.  A human robot.

Looking for a N.Y. Times, grocery shopping, I take my mother to the bookstore here.  Hot out, humid.  I ease her from the rented car and in through the glass doors, to stop at the sanitizing station they’ve set up.  We have our masks on.  She looks through the shelves, after we say hello to the staff, and I look through other ones.  I come upon two books, on writing, and I see they will be life affirming in some ways.  One, Slow Writing, and by a student of Kurt Vonnegut, accompiling his thoughts on writing itself.  And so am I protected against the coming final snub.

I’m an empath.  But I shouldn’t have written you.  Are you really seeing a therapist?  You should take to her.  You’re over focusing on me.

Jesus Christ.  I want to laugh, light a cigarette with Vonnegut.

To no avail.  Don’t even bother.  “You’re not listening.  I’m not comfortable...”

Jesus Christ.  “Go on without me”

Fine.  “I’m ok with that.”  That’s all I have to say.  Adios.

I don't need any more shame added to my plate.


Just as my therapist had predicted, things had returned to the same old.  The inappropriateness, the rising discomfort on the part of my old friend...  Fine.  If that’s how you want to be.  My blood pressure goes up, I felt a small wave of an awkward sadness come over me, but then it began to fade.



I write for life.  I write for self protecting. I write for all the human beings who do not have such a spokesperson.



Who has protection from such, the Karens of the world, what or where a leg to stand upon against their distorted privileged worldview...  Some Buddhism, or even yoga itself, comes to mind.  Nothing is good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.  All things being observed through perceptions, so that things can only be an inextricable mix of good and bad, or being neither, just being things as they are, with no need for a reaction beyond the meditations that allow perspective.

Today I awake, I get up, I go downstairs, there is tea from last night, and dirty dishes from last night’s supper, the iron pan of bone-in chicken breast and onion gravy, plates, knives, cutting board, silverware, empty wine glasses with film.  I make coffee in the Bialetti, find a deviled egg and a slice of Big M low-sodium sliced turkey breast.

Mom sighs, from her chair.  Reaches up to pick at her scalp.  She huffs at me as I write, pecking at the screen of my iPhone, not having brought along the power cord for my laptop, thinking Apple products interchangeable.  She has grown distracted from the book we purchased together yesterday about Lincoln and his Second Inaugural .  Well, I come all this way and you ignore me.

Later I ask permission for a walk.


And the next day starts, hot and aimless.  Here I am.  Feeling weakened, rather than supported.  Some creatures develop a natural protection layer or device, but for me, gullible, such growths have come slowly.

Were I to find myself caring, it all would strike me as more than a passing awkwardness.  And what returned to me, strongly enough, was the writing, through all things.

Buddhist thought and your own proofs of psychological insight come slowly, over the years, over time.

Out on my walk, up the road, away from the townhouses, there is a breeze.  I walk slowly, almost numbly, but the body strides and my shoulders feel strong, my gate upright.  Beyond the power station gates and the marshy places red winged blackbirds call their warnings overhead, having risen from the low trees, fagus japonica, one perched on the wooden power line poke before swooping to draw me away from nests..  A night heron rises and perches.  Calling.  The grasses sway, carrying the fruit of their grain now at tips.  I find my friend Hall Kirkham performing a morning prayer session, the Rector of St Michael’s Episcopal church in Malden, reading from Psalm 69.


Later, at The Press Box, around 4:30, I sit with mom, reluctantly having a glass of Chianti, pouring it over ice in a highball glass, a mushroom burger.  I tell her not to get the battered shrimp, but she won’t listen.  At least she is entertained.  But we have some wine and things go better, and we end up having a nice conversation about how literature and poetic lines are invented by finding through the ear.  All those great lines laid down, each of them having sounds and rhythms, and all such things and they sometimes when we write we are taking dictation from our ears, having to back later, finding some words spelled phonetically.   I tell her the old story of Kerouac and The Scroll, and when Bob Giroux questions, Jack, I’m not sure we can handle this, Kerouac picks his scroll up, tucks it under his arm.  “You have offended The Holy Spirit,” and walks out.  That’s what it’s all about.


I took another walk after our late lunch, and mom, after her wine, had begun to quietly murmur to herself, help...   help.  The red-winged blackbirds turned from their usual vibrant sort of two note call to their on-guard calls and behaviors of vigilant distraction.  Again I walked slowly and the marshy parts were dry and I heard the little green heron shriek somewhere up the overgrown train tracks toward the high power lines.  There were the fagus japonica along the bank, grown so as to obscure it with their shrubby height, and also sweet pea with its purple flowers, small black walnut trees like limbs coming out of the cattails, vetch, and other weedy proliferating things besides the tall grasses.  A big rain, a line of thunderstorms was in the way I hoped, as the plant life had begun to sag, and I walked along and then back to mom’s apartment, feeling like I was entering back into some sort of Bergman film scene, the coming disasters growing, breathing down my neck.


It might well be said that the only people who really get writers and writing are writers themselves.  Those who wrote the Psalms stride with maturity, they were real writers, and they knew the writer’s lot.  They wrote because they needed to, they had to.  They were not false in it, not using their talents for commerce.  So it is that writers seek out their own, for some form of company, sometimes, if they are lucky, even in person.   Their work is akin to that of the bees of this world, essential for pollination, that there be fruit and flowers and all sorts of vegetation productive.  That work is work, and it is not easy, even perhaps the cause of difficulties and honest anguish that bears upon the human condition.   They must often be thrown away, castaways, slipping into oblivion while leaving their psalms behind.  You can’t ask other people to pick up that burden.  It is not comfortable and it is not easy, and it’s mainly right of people to wish to avoid any part of it and to go on enjoying the fruits of life, of the cultural labors that writers will, by laws of nature, go about doing.

I’m sitting miserable on her couch, and mom, reclined upon the old Eames Chair with cat scratched leather, found for sale cheap at Hinman’s Farm on Route 5 near Oneida, observes, and reads something from early pages of Ellmann’s Joyce, droning on, reading aloud, almost as if drunkenly, a passage on Joyce’s father’s meaning, and after she tells me, “you know, when you’re down, it helps, just to read a book.  It will help.”

Yeah, mom.  She goes back to half talking self talk, and I’ve had each day a predictable day of repetitive phrases, beginning with, did you sleep well, do you have any reunions coming up, who was your favorite professor...  I for my part go back to my worries, considerable, financial, professional.  “Everybody is going through the same thing you’re going through,” she tells me, but I feel sick, haunted, and by now hunted almost.

By dinner hour, another repetitive round of talk.  I was a very fussy eater, my poor mother...

But later, a few evenings, I see the thick paperback book near her chair and the ottoman. I open  it up.  The cover, blue, needs some tape, to hold it to the binding.  I find the clear tape in the kitchen.  James Joyce is a thick book.  The binding is not as steadfast.  I tape  the blue cover back on carefully.  I took a class with Ellmann’s daughter, Maud, once upon a time, in the old Octagon.

Why has it taken me so long, to see, to get Joyce.  Here I am, my life falling apart, nowhere to find anywhere to save Mom and her books and all her stuff.  Here I am, a car rented, for a week, but now I’ve been here for a month, and each day rises and tells me that leaving today is impossible, and all the world’s traffic of problems is still rising higher around and before me.

Read a book, she says.  That’s what I tell my students.  Read a book and it will help.

So I pick up the story.  James Joyce and Nora Barnacle have eloped, at the promise of a job at Berlitz,  Paris, then Geneva...


“At the age of twenty-one Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him.”

Ellmann, p. 149. Oxford University Press paperback, 1965. New York (USA)


“As his faith in Catholicism tottered, a counter-process began:  his faith in art, which is written by people with faults, grew great.”

Ibid. p.50

In retrospect, I wish I had taken theater classes in my college career.  I’ve always enjoyed reciting poetry and Shakespeare.  And I would think that is the main part of acting.

I mistook the restaurant business and the bar I worked as theater.

But in a way, it is, not always a very thoughtful one, not often deep, but yet some kind of clearing house, in a democratic way, a form of allowing for the collective unconscious to come through, as it seems for birds in Springtime.

At my mother’s apartment, I slumber on a green inflatable camping air mattress, under a comforter, her very cluttered study, the room colder than others.  A soft sexuality of poems and songs comes over me as I rest, not wishing yet to rise and face the lonely day.

Was I wrong to want to write... who has time for books and poems anymore...  Better as songs, better as a television show...

I come upon an old photograph of me, taken at least twenty two years ago, and there I am, the quiet American hero. there in my old Ike Jacket, Levis blue jeans that have seen comfortable wear, sitting on a stone wall up in a village in the Pyrenees. The picture, taken by my buddy, Phillippe, who drove too fast, who smoked many cigarettes, who liked the nightclubs, and who wore me out.  But there we are, in a little village, Lescun, tucked away above Oloron St. Marie, near Pau, and unbeknownst to me, near Lourdes, and also near some of the famous climbs of the Tour de France.  I wish we'd taken those roads too.  But there you go, that's life.

The old village had at one point been a leper colony, my friend told me later.  We bought some farmhouse ewe's milk cheese, and almost stayed the night at the rustic inn, with the bathroom a hole in the cement with two foot marks like cleats to stand upon.  I would have liked to follow the road up further, gone for a hike, but after a few hours there, after visiting the church and inspecting parts of the village, we went back down, past running streams, to Mourenx.


I was indeed a brave guy to work in a restaurant, as a bartender, and quite foolish, and it cost me all the things of a good life, I know now.  But you don't really know this so well when you're in the midst, trying to get by, with some fool dream of being a writer...

I had a great uncle who, as my grandfather tells the story, started crying when he worked in the family diner business, at the chores of washing dishes.  He ended up being an engineer of some sort in the Battle of The Bulge.  And on the GI Bill, he went back to school at got his law degree at Georgetown, after attending Boston University.  He ended up working in the justice department, had a great Washington DC life, worked with Robert Kennedy's anti-racketeering people.  Yeah.

He was the smart one.

The American hero is behind now.  Whatever shot he might have had to be a teacher, well, he blew that, that civilized thing where people get together and read and talk about what they have read.  He gave that away to sort of half-drunken half-adventures that were as much a waste of time as anything else.

And now his heart flutters sometimes, and when he has wine enough to ease him through the bleakness of his solitary evenings, now made worse by isolation.

And as a sort of final act, it is up to him to go tend to his aging mother, sometimes raging in the onset of her dementia memory loss, far away enough, isolated, an apartment full of clutter he must deal with.


Then I came to befriend the night.

The car is rented for noontime, more or less, downtown now.  I cook a burger on the iron pan, eat, nap, then get up and do the dishes.  Too much tree pollen on a windy day, riding the mountain bike out on the towpath for sanity, feeling funny in the head.

I do not want to go back to tending bar, but what else can I do, at this point.

So in desperation as much as anything else, I get out my road bike, a Cannonade Caad5.  It's Sunday.  I could sit in and read and write, or I could act in the interest of my health, go out and get some exercise.

It takes me a while, of course, to put myself together, with the extra precaution of a mask or a bandanna and some alcohol wipes, pulling up the padded cycling shorts, putting on a cycling jersey, blue, with three pockets in back, cycling shoes... where are they, at last I find them under a chair.  Pockets stuffed, cellphone, an extra inner tube, a few bucks cash in a plastic bag, I pick the bike up, shut the door to my apartment, and clack my way gingerly down the steps in cleated cycling shoes and out into the light.  The world is going to hell, but lots of other people are out on their road bikes along MacArthur Boulevard.  I had the mountain bike out on the crowded tow path by the canal.  Now I'm ready.  I lean the bike up against a car, send a picture to my friend Betsy.

The bike is red, decked out with the colors of a long ago team that rode in the Tour, advertising Saeco, an appliance maker, along with the bicycle's own brand.  It's aluminum, with a carbon fiber fork.  The brakes and gearing, Campagnolo, Chorus.  And soon I'm up on it, and it feels good being on it, really good.  The tires are pumped up to 100 pounds, and they are skinny as they meet the pavement.  There is not even much traffic on the road.  Sunday, during quarantine.  I get rolling.  And I'm the slowest one out on the road, and I don't care.

Earlier, I made it to the Palisades Farmer's Market.  I purchased some meat, ground beef, chicken breast, and a dozen eggs.  I got up when my mother started calling.  Someone stole her cat, she's telling me.   The situation is unclear.  And on top of that, she is insisting that she needs to be taken back to her real home, "a few blocks over."  "Well, just open the door now and again and see if he's out there," I tell her.  "But I'm not home," and she is getting irritated at me.  I call her again, walking back, and none of this is happy to hear, and I had too much wine last night, one of those Zoom happy hours.  My heart is pounding, and I'm feeling anxious anyway, without Mom getting in on me from far away.  "Are you coming over, to take me back there," she asks.  "I'll try to drive up at the end of the week," I say, wishing to lie, wanting to.


I roll on, out through the neighborhoods.  I stop at the light at Sibley Hospital, the next set of reservoirs just beyond, before the road climbs a bit.  I've not taken this ride in years.  I used to.  I used to pretty good about biking.  I'm comfortable in the saddle.  My back is straight.   My ass doesn't hurt.    All the gears are working.  Most of the road is smooth.  Go at your own pace.  Up the hill I stop and pull over in a government parking lot.  I call mom.  No, it doesn't seem the cat has come back yet.  And still, she is angry if I suggest anything about her being, in fact, home, at her real home, and maybe the cat is upstairs sleeping.  She has wine, we checked that before.  She wonders if she can walk to the other house.  I keep trying to tell her...  just stay there, calm down, the cat will return, but she shouts at me that she can't have any wine now.

A couple of fast guys, with strong muscles in their legs roll by, not bothering to slow down as they go through the light and down the hill.  A couple riders are making their return back to DC, and they look pretty strong too.

The call has reached the end of its usefulness, we end the call amicably, more or less, and I get the pedals back in position, clip in with the right foot after checking for traffic, and I'm on the road again.

Down the hill, and through the woods on the left side of the road, the Potomac River comes in and out of view.  I can place my towpath riding experiences now with this view from a greater height, though there are trees in the way, leafed out.

And there are thoughts, many thoughts.  How foolish to have been a bartender.  How foolish to be poor, and 55, without anything to fall back on for a career.  Renting, at 55.

But the body feels good.  I roll on, past the Irish Inn, past the old amusement park, through Glen Echo, sprint behind a car getting over the one lane bridge.  Past Clara Barton signs, small communities, small shopping malls, past all variety of houses, open spaces past the crossing underneath the Beltway, the Naval Surface Warfare complex... past the parked cars along the road just at Old Angler's Inn, in business since 1860, then the climb, and onward, to Great Falls Park.  I stop to check the forecast.  Thunder storms called for, later.  How long have I been on the road?  Do I have time to stop at the river, after the beautiful turning descending road down to the park at the bottom.  It's a time consuming sport, but in many ways it matches the needs of the animal, the beast within.

I get down to the boardwalk, out to the view of Great Falls, walking my bike, carefully.  Great shutes of water.  Mom is calling again.  "Why is everything so hard...  Everybody is making things so hard,"  she says, on the verge of tears.  My iPhone is down to 10 percent power, and the signal isn't good.  Does she need food delivered?   I reach her again.  She has enough food to get by.

I walk out to the end of the boardwalk path with its system of bridges.  The air is different out here.  You come all this way, you owe it to yourself to see the great rapids of the falls with all the spumy white water and spray and objects carried along in the current.

I'm able to receive a call from her as I climb up the park's road back to the main road.

I get back to the main road, make the descent back down past Old Angler's Inn and the cars, people who have brought kayaks to the river.  I take it a little fast.  A fancy Porsche gives me a wide berth as he passes me, the edge of the road a little rough.  I catch up with the cars that have passed me, as they have slowed through the parking area, and the road is empty again, the flats.  Back over the one lane bridge, along the sidewalk.  I take it easy now, no need to push it.  The thunderstorms apparently holding off.


And then I'm closer in, up the hill, and then down along the reservoirs at Delacaria.  I stop for a bottle of wine at an unfamiliar little market, open on a Sunday, tucking into the center pocket of my blue cycling jersey, just like they used to do, the domestiques in the old days, the early 1960s, the bad old days of the Tour de France.

I get in up the stairs, get the bike in through the door.  A decent work out.  Probably too much pollen taken in.  I plug my iPhone back in to charge it up, and I call mom.  She's doing okay, somehow, though it's unclear where the cat is, and I still cannot bring up comfortably the proposal that the cat knows where home is.  She's in a decent mood, that is all, and that helps, helps me anyway.

I reheat a hamburger in the toaster oven, with onions.  And I refrain from the wine, take a shower, getting the sweat off, my face clear again.  Could have been a worse day.

And actually it took some courage, on my end, even to get out on my bike.  I don't try and go fast anymore.  I'm not that strong.  Just getting out is the point, to take in some scenery.   Wonder about how people have careers and nifty little houses and I roll along.

Just as I bike, I don't even write very well.  I'm just not that strong a writer, not opinionated enough.  I get interrupted too often anyway.

I wake up the next day fairly early, with sunlight streaming in through the blinds, the air fresh after the thunderstorm and rains the night before.  I might get up for a walk in the morning, just to be outside, but I fall back into dreaming.  I have my phone on silent, but I feel it buzz.  Mom calling.  I get up, have a cup of tea, put the water on, give her a call.  And she's doing a lot better than the day before, and empathizes with my down mood.  "I'll be lucky if I end up working in a grocery store," I tell her.  "You're funny," she tells me, "in an Irish way, and you don't even know you're being funny."

I go out for a walk, after making a pot of Dragonwell tea.


But it isn't easy not knowing what to do with yourself and living alone.

Well, you stay in the present moment.

I take a noon yoga zoom class with Betsy, and she is up in the corner of my iPhone, which is broken up into four little screens.  So it's hard to follow along, but I make mental note of the poses to learn and how to do them and what purpose, the isometric stretches.  I don't feel very hot going into it, and I start perspiring.

My mind is thinking about a lot of things, including going down the Bicycle Pro Shop on M Street near the car barn and Key Bridge.  Errands, you feel stupid about them these days.  And with time away from employment, you discover things you like to do, should have spent more time at, the things you let go, out of foolishness and desires that turn out to be false.

But I stay up to late speaking with an old girlfriend back from my hometown, and this too makes me feel sorrowful for missing out on bonding with an intelligent woman with fine sensibilities.  She appreciated my father, calling him a rocker.   I stayed up late talking with her.  She was part of a sort of punk band in Belgium for a good life once.  She was a good singer.

Errands make me nervous.  The times make me nervous.  Money makes me nervous.  Not knowing exactly what to do makes me nervous.

Feeling slightly better, having dressed for the greater mission of the bicycle, which also needs a new bottom bracket at some point, the mechanic tells me, I go out and down across the street to the little deli and my friend there, Helene, is present and greets me with her friendliness and hospitality, and I get little containers of tuna and curried chicken salad, a little bit of low sodium chicken breast sliced, so I can eat something before I take the walk down to Georgetown.

My heart is unhappy though.  I feel I've dishonored my father somehow.  And when this happens, the yoga must be good.  A walk, keeping moving must be good, to quell anxieties.