I got on the road about 1:30 in the afternoon.  I had woken slowly, but managed a last round of things to help mom out organizationally, cooked sausages that would have gone to waste with peppers and onions, watched the cat on the table as she stalked our plates, stepping with long gingerliness over the various piles of papers...  The heat was on, and I took a shower, and occupied myself with a few more things, such as trying to figure out what was going with the three or four email accounts of hers, why, for instance she could receive emails from one on only one of her devices...

We took a short walk in the wind, a much warmer day, down to the little pond she had now named after her deceased neighbor JoAnne, and I felt very sad for being short with her over various matters of imperfect organization, my attempt to put like things with like things, and her, 'hey, I'm retired...'   I hoped I hadn't missed all her holiness now, her gentle way, her books, her intellect, in my desire to see them all lined up in neat piles and in book shelves, and how long would it take to organize her anyway...  And realizing that this was my own worst fault, reflected back on me.

Vacuuming around her bed and under her night table and lamp, saltine crumbs, organizing, like with like, finding old empty orchid pots from the Price Chopper, one for batteries, one for change, one for the mechanical pencils she's taken to, one for all her colored handle scissors.  Who needs to watch the news, the repeated stories taken on an irrelevance.   Her office is another situation altogether.  The bed has piles of books I would like to put into little piles, but it would upset her, taking something away from her which she values...

Though I was doing my best, and working on it through prayer and meditation, still...  I was not being as sensitive as I might have wanted to be, at least until we finally opened the wine and relaxed over dinner, three times at The Press Box, once at Canale's, once my attempt to cook lamb for dinner where we talked about my father's passing, of her grandfather's final heart attack, my guilt at not being there when my dad succumbed to the final, brief, illness in the hospital in Utica...  The birthday dinner with dear colleagues down in Baldwinsville goes well, after her nerves.



The sun was out, the sky clear, and I did not have to go straight to work.  There would be enough hours left of daylight to get me most of the way.  I drove and I drove, stopping for little pit stops, the rest stop near Whitney Point, and then the one after the traffic of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, then the one just above Harrisburg, not the easiest traffic with all the trucks to merge back onto 81, then the last gas stop, right before Mount Saint Mary's College, finding the barbecue place had just closed...  "We're closed, hon," the woman sweeping the humble dining room tells me after I stand at the counter for a couple of minutes.  Just as dusk, and then the road lonelier, dark, random, blind with the lemmings coming back through Frederick, then up over the hill past a Civil War stream, and back into Washington, D.C., via River Road, slipping onto Massachusetts Avenue and up past American University, slow and careful now and back to the little quiet street.

Take the car back after emptying my bags and stuff, and then two triple cheeseburgers from the McDonald's Dollar Menu for three dollars each, putting the bag into my coat pocket, and over the long gloomy bridge past the new Chinese building complex and down the last dreary hill by the Hilton, a peek into the windows of Du Coin, dead, one person, facing away at the bar, and on foot, tired, back to the quiet of apartment life alone.  And after the end of a long day, behind the steering wheel, and all the ups and downs, and all the thoughts, the thoughts of new perspectives by the small discoveries of going back to your mom's, therefore your home, spiritually, your place of renewal, there was a bottle of Beaujolais and I opened it, after the first bites, cutting into the small burgers, saying to myself, this is not going to be enough, with knife and fork, avoiding the buns, but hungry enough to scrape off the last of the rehydrated onion bits, the two cheeseburgers gone even before one glass of wine...  So it goes.


And being overly dramatic, in your mind, trying to figure out this life stuff, you look at your life as it is.  You didn't even want the wine, but it soothed, medicinally, and you were alone, protected from rambling on like an idiot to anyone in your relaxation.

A Mass came on EWTN in the background, the good Father reminded us that Mother Angelika had passed away two years ago to the day.

You must, I suppose, first realize you have nothing.  All you have is this little stream of writing, called by some sort of bogus modern technological term that would offer little explanation of it.  And after such a trip, with its long drives, its frustrations, its dealings with difficult personas, its easing of a mother through her birthday, you feel a bit tired, sure.  And it is a relief not to have to, immediately, go back to that job you have, which itself gives you next to nothing, but a modest income, no provisions for the future but Social Security, how do you stand it all...  Well, you like it once you get there, there is something spiritual about it, it lets you keep up this writing stuff, and there is the wine, which is both good and bad, very good and very bad and all things in between, such that it is very nice not to have to peddle it, driving one's own thirsts up to the roof levels.

What do I have, I ask myself, but very little.

But, on the other hand, it always seems like you're learning something, really just through the processes of one's own mind, not from that job, not from any particular experience, but my long careful deep thought and considerations.

And what you do have, in Holy Week at least, is a realization of the great almost impossible sensitivity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that holy man who comes through the storied books, the Gospels and their recollections...

It might not be so much that he knows everything, as in, being able to read the future, but just that he, He, is so very attuned, so very sensitive, so open to the vast world beyond humanity's usual protective gear and stupid talk, beyond their blusters and vocalizations, their small attempts to find a safe protected perch in this life in this world.  He is so much so, that he really can rewrite, as if, or embellish, as if, or explicate in thorough completeness all the stories of all the major figures and prophets that are in the tales already written of in The Old Testament, speaking of the entire learnings and teachings of the Judaic Faith.

Would it be a little shocking to him, this small minor obscure poetic writer who takes all this upon himself, such so that he moves beyond literary craft to really see things.  He sees things so much and so clearly, that he himself no longer even writes.  Rather, he writes through his sayings, through his parables, through his observations and even his actions.  Which are recorded, because obviously and instinctively to the minds of everyone around him, he has something to say.

He is a teacher, even called a rabbi, but he does not belong to exactly nor neatly fit in to the tradition as it is practiced.  His understandings go beyond, even as they are completely in tune.

And he is remembered, amongst many things and many reasons, for shedding light on who we are, on what we are like, on what would be the truest form of our good health and sanity.   This is his message, directly, through the indirect.


There are all kinds of terms for it.  The heart of Jesus...  Mary is a 'virgin' because she like him is fully sensitive.  No part of the crassness, of the usual understandings put forth to explain humanity...
She has an imagination, as her son will.

 As I take my bags in, turn the power strip back on to regain television and wifi, a cockroach, red, large, is there on the top of the old dishwashing machine, creeping under a black foil bag of dragonwell green tea, left, as it was empty.  I had done my best to leave things clean in the kitchen before my departure a week ago.  I'd taken the trash out, leaving only the recycling bottles.

The kid has texted me asking me to cover his Thursday.  I'm due back at work Wednesday.

The guitar.  They are made of pieces of wood.  Some are solid.  Some are hollow.  An old Hohner Strat, beat up, strings on ash, what's not to like.  Look at the strings as they come metal over the bridge, then down into the tremolo body, miracles of engineering put together.  I wish I could sing better.