The smell of woodsmoke from the houses. Trees bare to their bark, sidewalks along shrubs cleared of leaves, the still cool standing evergreens and the twinkling of lights. A large owl calling in scrub wilds by the power station, as I turn past the quiet old house with the cats out at night, close now. Walking back, up Bridge Street, westward, feeling ill, after dropping off the rental car, masked cigarette smoke. Trying to get away, back to DC. Unable to. A cold, vague dry throat and unproductive cough, daily vomiting, from low blood sugar, dehydration, or, an additional worry, is it the effects of years of the drink, along with the stress, congestion in the dry heated winter air of mom's apartment. An hour walk, now and then a sip the tall can of pale ale from the convenience store in a brown paper bag. Christmas lights display across the town in front yards and side yards, inflated Santas and snowmen lit from within, holding tied in the breeze, clear lights, colored lights, white lights, blue icicle lights draped along eaves or trees or roofline or window frame or house. Angels. Some displays favor certain colored light schemes. Cold, quiet, walking along, alone, lost. The snowflake lights hung on the street lamps along by the town hall park and the bridge and all along the whole of the main drag, a town from It's A Wonderful Life cinema, to lift the cheer of the grey lakeside port city, and careful over the river, distant, unreal below, churning and dark reflecting lights and winds and currents toward the end of itself and the big lake just to the north. Just a few late night bums like me out crossing the bridge, uneasy, tired, pulling our masks and scarves up warily as we pass, friend or foe at this cold hour of the night. The Stewart Shop and the Byrne Dairy convenience stores having put away their warmed pizza slices and quickie little cheeseburgers, no juicy hot dogs at this hour rolling on the heat protected by the clear incubator cover, the meatballs and the chili dog sauce put away, a cold turkey sub with lettuce tomato and provolone wrapped in clear plastic, tuna wedge sandwich on marble rye, chicken salad on white, chicken caesar tortilla wrap, turkey club wrap with turkey bacon on a tomato wrap with a little packet of mayo there in its little plastic shell. Up the hill. Close to mom's Cedarwood Townhouse apartment, reclaimed land from old railroad roundhouse and junctures, freight coming in and out of the lake town with its port, a small naked harbor fitted out like the old forts, French on the west side, American on the east, overrun by the British, then abandoned. There are some kids sharing a skateboard as I come up Liberty almost to Ellen Street, houses decked with lights, a bit of holiday cheer for the tough times themselves and the winter ahead, every little holiday they celebrate, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. I nod with my brown bag can of Goose Island India Pale Ale in the quiet past eleven on a quiet Friday night, and the kids nod back. Everything is now a hard decision. Everything a mistake. A walk on the moon. Meaningless. When I go in, through the door, when is she going to start bugging to me for attention, then taking exception with things I say, open little cans of cat food, warm now on the counters she doesn't keep anymore, but complains about like a duchess, used wine glasses, dirty cat food little bowls, "don't fill the water too high, or someone will spill it," and I don't remind her that this was the very argument in the summer that resulted in my ripping off the glass neck of a bottle of red wine, lacerating my finger as she stormed outside and wine's the only thing that will pacify her, shut her up, until then later it gets her angry and argumentative, forgetting how much I've put into her day taking her around, not much, but some, a New York Times, a look at the lake while I hold on to a paper cup of coffee in the car. 30, 40 bucks a day to rent a car? And her old Toyota Corolla was good enough all along, I just pissed away almost four thousand I don't have, she doesn't have. Hard to leave her without setting her up, but that too is impossible.
I don't even want to write anymore. That was where the trouble started. Talking to myself. Every now and again, a glimpse of something in the rough draft laid down, true, but obscure, hidden, disjointed, and yet there somehow. l want to get back to DC, back to my space, my paperwork things, but that seems over now, at least for a while, though all my stuff is there still. How many days in a row can I leave mom by herself... There's Mary, the nice lady who comes three times a week, takes mom out to lunch, but that only goes so far.
Ten days till Christmas, and no stimulus check, no federal Covid unemployment relief since August 1. DC unemployment coming to an end, then to file for extended benefit. The clock running out. And the cold winter winds and storm have set in, bunker down. Mom's back on her medicines steadily, sort of. But it gets worse. And the piles of her stuff and our old kid stuff and other stuff, here everywhere, and her feeble mind remembers correctly, that she has moved many times since the old days in our family homes with Dad, up the quiet country road.
Sunday, as it is about to get dark, I take the Corolla down to the Lake Effect Carwash after running errands with mom, keeping her entertained, letting her come in with me as I go into the Raby's Ace Hardware Store down by the five corners and the tower smoke stacks of the electric plant by the university, spare key for the car, a few other items, light bulb, double A batteries. They let her use the bathroom, in the back, we know where it is already. Put the quarters in, activate the sprayer, wash, then switch over to the power soaping scrub brush to get the leaf residue off from the trees the car sat under all summer long, then the wax, after another round of quarters clanking down into the machine on the wall, spreading it out with the sprayer again. I notice a sheet of metal hanging down, its edges having rusted off its rusted moorings, something to get looked at. Then cooking Sunday dinner. A half chicken, with onions in the iron pan, along with spinach and potatoes baking in the oven.
I speak with our mechanic down at Torbitt's Service Center, our friend. No, just bring it down, he says, when I ask him if I should send the picture I took with my cell phone after describing the issue, how's two o'clock, perfect.
I have to decide again whether or not to rent another car again here, to drive back, to get my driver's license and other mail, my SNAP food stamp card, I hope, other bills.
When we go down, the plate which hangs down has served as the heat guard between the exhaust pipe and the gas tank, and yes, there does seem to be a gas leak, so we need to get some work done. Oh boy. How's Friday? Okay. The quote is scary. But what are you going to do.
I get up early and drive the car down, up over the moraine hill and over the railroad tracks north to the mills on the lake, then down along the strip malls and The Price Chopper, the fast food chains, then the box stores, then down into Scriba and it's there on the left on a cold clear morning. The man is out in his Red Wing boots and blue work pants and service center shirt, helping a large set man reattach the hydraulic snowplow to the front of his high pickup truck. I stand in the sun by the service centers own large four door high-bed pickup truck and study the mounting of the snow plow on it. And finally I go in, and he gives me a ride to town and we talk about growing up in the Mohawk Valley. And later that afternoon I get a call from Mike, "there's a problem with Claire's car... " Oh boy. Something is rusted in and we can't get it out, so... Monday afternoon, hopefully... I needed rest after my venture walking back along the stone cold snowy sidewalks...
"Hello?" she bleats sometimes, in fright, if I'm in the kitchen making a sound or blowing my nose or using the restroom. "Silence..." she says, if I don't pick up on what she's saying, like when I'm driving, trying to concentrate on the road and safe driving when you're distracted as I am. "I'm just a stupid woman." This sums up much of her attitude. And why it has fallen to me to extract a spreading cancer of clutter, to find the clean cells of a once living family, old pictures, Amherst, Ernst Road, maybe even out west, Berkeley, before I was born. Nancy Jaffee. The Keochakians. The grandparents and aunt, both out in Beverly, and in Lee. "I'm just a stupid woman. What would I know... No one listens to me. Who cares..."
"I wasn't put on earth to do dishes or housework," she declares, from the old dining room table here in the kitchen, raising her head, after I explain, well, mom, this is your apartment, and you know, we do what we can to keep it clean... And keep it clean is about all I can do along with fixing the meals of the day and escorting her around with little rides and she wants to go out to lunch of course, somewhere where they serve wine... "Well, I've been moved around so much, I don't know where my things are..." And this is her excuse not to make even the slightest attempt to ponder where her missing iPhone might be, which she must have put in a very special place after all my searching through forensic piles of a previous academic life and existence as a lone scholar, replete with all kinds of paperwork and folders, and 3 ring binders, on and on, to say nothing of miles of books, magazines, saved New York Times pieces and issues... and all put into a blender, mixed together, a bog she resides in. And the irony, I've spent half of the summer and now crucial months as winter comes at a crucial time in my own life's serious struggles for my own survival, I'm ripped from my own life and my own efforts to find time to look for work and keep going and do the things that are good for me... No wonder I end up calling her a "stupid fucking bitch" sometimes, as I really cannot help it, no matter what a nice boy I once might have been with little stuffed animals on my childhood bed.
When it gets worse, when I express my what's the point frustrations with trying to explain a political issue of note, news for the day, or when I say, mom, you already read that headline to me ten times, or she quotes from the same page she's been reading day after day, it will escalate, and she'll end up saying, "You bastard, why are you so cruel, you are the meanest person I've ever met." And this is how the day starts, and why I hid for as long as I could anyway.
And so, for a little while in the night, I have a chance to sneak back downstairs to the kitchen, first to straighten out the countertops, do some of the dishes, the trash, and then for some time for myself, to think, to write. Or to watch Moby Dick on Amazon, on my old laptop, until it heats up, the inner fan going on, whirring, and then the dreaded rainbow circle... And who can blame me, in my utter and general isolation here, if I maintain some form of "keeping in touch" with old friends' doings and humor and bits of the news national and personal and otherwise or a shared cultural remembrance, scrolling absent-mindedly through Facebook, looking for something interesting. I make my public mistakes, sure, but that's how it goes when your old mom is driving you insane and you sneak not out, not to a bar, but the kitchen downstairs, even drinking cheap chardonnay over the rocks to make it bearable...
Yes, of course. All my fault that it got this way, and that as the situation so lies, there is no right thing left to do, no good clear choice, at least not quite yet, and even then, then there will be the removal of all this, all mom's books, her furniture, her Eames chair, her cat, her piles of clothes and a basement full of stuff, her loom, the old family tent, all of this has gotten so far so far blown, nowhere now to put anything, and now I don't even have a place of my own to count on, even to hold all my books and paperwork and Buddhas and Jesus and iron pans and Instapot from aunt, teapot from old Georgie, my guitars, my professional clothes and decent clothes and basic utilitarian worker monk clothes.... my Dad's old brown chair, my rocking chair, a mid century Danish dining room set, all the things I managed to salvage from a hasty move in late February, suddenly just along for the ride, stripped from any false pretense of control I might have had.
There are small victories, now, I suppose. Repeating from a successful dinner a week ago, I get us a half chicken, bone-in, to roast in the iron pan with onions as a potato bakes deeper in, but once you see something you can't unsee it, as they say, as I pull out the poor headless baked chicken with its wings and legs tucked into a fetal pose, identifiably a beast with the range of humans, I lose an appetite. If I could only eat bread and pasta without it immediately showing up as fat around my mid section, puffing me up.
Pasta fazool. Black eyed peas. Brown rice pasta. Mirepoix. Crushed tomato, stock, herbs.
And so... at almost 56 years of age, less than a month short of a fateful birthday--Lincoln was dead shortly after his, so was Hitler, and so was Caesar, and so was Beethoven, and kind of an old life male expectancy sort of thing, from the number crunchers, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., lived longer, (87 and change,) though Kerouac (47 years and 7 months) did not, both born in 1922, as was my father--and her I am, my life run by an 81 year old mom of a certain bearing and attitude, bullying me wherever she can... No wonder. Even as we often say, "the duty of another is full of peril."
Let it pass. You can't think of everything.
As soon as the rental car has been returned, finally, a bold move, me taking charge, not wanting to hemorrhage cash anymore, already facing $8000 in debt to American Express for all these cars are rented, too timid to take much out of her own accounts, 15% interest, such things as are not taken into account when literature is written, and to keep mom up and running, well, there's still my pad, my apartment to pay for... what do I do?
All the things that have passed me by, through my own timidity, well, here they all are. And the wisdom of older girlfriend Karen I could not resist, her prophecy, knowing, "if you do not make choices for yourself, they will be made for you..." And when I had swallowed that, she looked at me, "I don't want anything to happen to you." Jesus Christ. I knew what she meant, and inwardly, I gulped.
The White Whale. Ship going up in flames.
The day the stimulus package, the last days of 2020, comes through, around 6 in the afternoon the news comes, I'm fighting off a cold again. We order Chinese for dinner. Soup with dumplings, fried chicken wing with orange sauce that mom takes a spoon to after the soup, Hunan Chicken. After which I am still tired, and I retreat to the couch after putting away the leftovers. I haven't even had any wine, nothing, and nor has mom from what I can tell. She's talking to the cat in the kitchen, and then she comes and asks if she can sit in her chair, of course, mom. I'm looking at some things on my phone. She starts pecking at me. "So what's the plan today? Where are you going next?" Well, mom, hopefully picking up the car from the mechanics, Mr. Torbitt's in the afternoon, tomorrow. I try to make a little conversation, but that too, I get "who are the people with the dog?" My brother has gotten a new puppy for his family. "Where are Trish and Barry going next?" "Well, they aren't going to Florida... too high a rate..." "But they like to travel, where are they going? " Well, they can't go on a cruise, they're not going to Rome or Barcelona... "Why?" Because of the pandemic, mom, and it's very dangerous to travel... "And how's your restaurant doing? Will you be going back to work tomorrow..." No, mom.
And soon enough she is crying, because I'm being so mean to her, and I go upstairs and see that The Sound of Music is on TV, and I go down and tell her, and then I retreat to my air mattress and I hear her boo hoo hoo-ing as she comes up the stairs, then intermittently talking to her cat quite normally, what a good kitty, what a good kitty, then immediately reverting to her soft crying and finally she quiets down. Sometimes she can forget offenses, soon enough.
Around midnight, after I hear her making noise in an animated voice, and saying, to hell with the bastards, and at one point opening the front door and wishing everyone a happy new year... I go downstairs, and she's telling me about her books again, and the Nantucket theme she's exploring these days, from both her book about the ship The Essex, and also the children's book of old Nantucket with the woodblock pictures by a Japanese artist I'd found while inspecting the furnace area of the basement... I put on something from Amazon Prime on her laptop and she quiets down and I go into the kitchen to take the leftovers of the half of the poor murdered bone-in chicken to make a soup of, first cutting some celery on the little plastic cutting board, then onions, half of them punky on the outside, ready to sprout, and there also all the clean dishes to take away out of the dishwasher, and all the dishes of the day and early this morning.
The pot is coming to a low boil rolling away, not too much so the chicken shreds into strings, and I hear her rising from her chair, and then she's in the bathroom leaving the sliding door open, and I try to smile but all I can say is, after she asks me about the cats, there being only one, for the hundredth time, I tell her, as politely as I can in my sorrows, Mom, time to go to bed. The cat will join you. "Oh, I thought we'd have a nice conversation, but never mind," she says, kicking the hollow door to the cellar with her Keens hiking shoe that she wears all the time now for support. Okay mom. I've got nice soapy water and progress with dishes to cling on to like a life-raft. And now, not thirty minutes later she comes down stairs, first cooing at the Christmas Tree, this the best Christmas tree ever, and I let quickly get up to let the cat in, but because of what I'm cooking, the chicken and mushroom potato celery onion stew, she tells me, in a better mood now, "what is that you're cooking? It woke me up." So I get up from the table and show her, and give her a taste, though I haven't corrected the seasoning and taken out the skin and the poor bones of the poor dead chicken... "It's delicious," she says, though I find it bland and too potato-ey when I taste it. But at least I am relieved now as she goes back upstairs, less haunted by childhood memories of her getting a little swaying blurry drunk with Bristol Cream after cooking dinner for the family, her personality changing, growing more entitled until she falls into a nap next to me as we watch the evening television news in the summertime on the couch in the TV room as dad finishes dishes and feeding the wolfhounds and goes to do his work in the brown chair.
Pizza last night, from Cam's, not Dominos, beautiful thin New York thin crust, and just the right slightly greasy cheese, large, half pepperoni and sausage on one side, mushrooms, peppers and onions on the other side, delicious, but in my rest, my right forearm throbs and aches, as if the salt and cholesterol kings were sending me a warning. One more thing to Google at.
So Mike comes and picks us up in his Torbitt's Service Center pick-up, and he helps mom climb up into the back sort of jump seat in the high cab. Claire's Toyota has been put back together again, a new gas tank, new heat shield, and so forth, new fuel distributor... Mike and I talk in the front seat about Chevy and GM and GMC versus Ford pickups. After all the nice conversations, time to get in and drive off back east up 104 into Oswego again, and of course mom wants to go to lunch and The Press Box.
Our meals arrive, okay.... I'll have a glass of Chianti, but with rocks on the side with a dash of bitters. And here I am, at mom's saying I look morose still, sorry, that's just the way I am, and with the wine warming up my tongue I try to converse, like about writing or whatever, or the holiday spirit, and start off by telling of how my father would issue an apologia to me about the kinds of things we would talk about, me and him, in rides, or over tables, or getting the newspaper, the things of Dr. Torrey, Alan Watts, Buddha, Christ, the Theosophists, one of the main concepts being that of the "Thou Art That Which Is." In the process of birth we roll of the great unnameable undefined unconcepted true nature of deep reality, to which, it follows, we return. And I tell mom, that this is all well and good, no need to apologize for having being passed down a sort of legacy for lack of a better word, in the form of a teaching, but, but there is something Quixotic about such things, in the sense that the great novel Cervantes gave forth begins with a man of a certain age, getting up there, and he's been reading all these books about Chivalry and Knights and Great Noble Quests and El Cid and all that sort of Arthurian stuff, and guess what, it goes, finally, then immediately, then irrevocably into, or to, his old soft head. And from thence forth the poor guy becomes, in his mind, which is all that matters, a great knight, Don Quixote. A concept Jacques Brel liked enough to sing about, whether or not he took from the musical and made it French, yes, I think so.
The bowl of chili is hot, with melted cheddar atop, good heat to it, and I take some sour cream from mom's chicken fajita to cut it a bit, and enjoy the little pieces of onion and celery slowly cooked. Feeding mom is both easy and not easy. When she is finally ready to order, after looking at the paper menu over and over, and getting mad at me at one point, our friend, Allison, takes our order, as I say, "the Ouija Board has spoken..." The chili has kidney beans in it, and they might not sit so perfectly well later, but there is the car to digest and be happy about, lest no other problems soon arise, and that's our main accomplishment of the Christmas Season, it seems, and there might be a break, we hope, in the clouds so we can see the Bethlehem Star conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, if we are very lucky, though being on the Great Lake one has to be realistic.
I look at her, she looks at me. I ask her about the little rosary I found, red plastic beads, and she tells me, Oh, it's a kid's rosary, and she shows me by trying to slip it on over her head. In the night last night I was watching Parkland, about the hospital, the Last Rites for President Kennedy, a nurse finding a Crucifix in her locker, resting it on the remains of JFK as he is wrapped in a sheet for the coffin.
The Cross, emblem of the nature of suffering, the higher four dimensional world symbolized in the world of three dimensions. The death of JFK makes perfect sense, somehow. Things you cannot escape from, that sometimes stare you in the face in their own subtle way... And in this life in a way it's not victories we chalk up, but, more properly failures, as failure has meaning and import, enough, such as to wake us all up, at least for a time, pulling us away from our own lives for a few days or so, before we are commanded back to them. I cannot help that I am here, away from my cluttered apartment, up here in Oswego, tending to mom, as if trying to bring in a very very slowly sinking ship into safer waters.
Failures and defeat lend to us a dignity one can have no other way, such as one learns, knows, that he too is one his way along the way. A source of quiet stoic pride, such as the kind that one not need sing about aloud, "look what I did, me me me," but showing the cracks and the crumbling, which themselves reveal the inner light we all have. Thus is it often such a terrible event, opening up in all its own dreaded ramifications... And writers are quick to pick up on all this, whether or not they too are being pompous and overblown, Hemingway riffing on Cervantes with his old fisherman with his old tattered sail and shirt, "flag of constant defeat."
A few days ago it was Moby Dick on Amazon Prime, a newer version than the John Huston and Gregory Peck on. How you tell the story, a matter of angle, perspective. Rothko... Twentieth Century Art, getting a little more serious, having suffered through world war and economic collapse, etc., etc. Dresden, Hiroshima, D-Day, assassinations, all such things that never really started, nor ended, but deliver to us polite reminders, throughout, little introductions, of how bad things can go wrong, Gettysburg, Ford's Theater, the Blitz.
And the truth of all this can only come out in shards and jumbles to our little primate minds, as no one newspaper can ever report on all that much better than our own fragmented view, our general gut sense, things we only can see because we have experienced a little of this and a little bit of that. Enough, and so vast the condition that we instinctively trust those who are able, as Shakespeare was, to put it all back together in their own forms and clever well aimed utterances. Clown, idiot, fool as capable as the next one of observing such things.
The cat yowls at me with some vigor, and mom is still upstairs, I let the cat out into the damp overcast solstice night, and off he treads on the grass field rectangle behind the townhouse row, an inch of damp snow covering the flat ground and off he goes toward the weedy boundary and beyond. When things go wrong, then you see they have been going wrong for a long time, as long as you can remember, and that's how it goes as things go wrong, or very wrong.
The cat has his temporary peace, as Hemingway might have said. Who knows what goes through his little noggin as he seeks whatever he asked of me to allow him to seek. Out in the dried ragweed boundary, under the two spruce trees, before the deep wide ditch that must have served as a railroad bed. Nothing ends well, Hemingway wrote, in one of his Hemingway sentences. Truth.
But this is just simply how things are. Things will go wrong. I guess the Buddhists, having followed the wisdom delivered by the Awakened One, are the ones who tell us how it is such, who get it. They go about it one way. For the Christian follower's sensibility, there is the combined atomic knowledge, that when things go wrong, they go very wrong, and then worse, and then even worse than that, worse as you could possibly imagine. How would you like it if your teacher, your man, your guide, your family member got stuck with such a fate... And yet, it's going to happen one day, as stands to reason, so we are told, so we have observed from places safe enough for us to see such things earlier in our time, protected appropriately at just the right level and temperature, clueless as we are, to go through such things.
"We were kids, just a bunch of jerk high school students," Vonnegut would later observe about his own heroic war effort of the Battle of the Bulge and all that.
Human beings, we bumble things. We fight with each other. Woe unto the world because of offences.
Light is light. It casts its thing around nearby so that we can see, see better, see reality, little harnessed metaphor and piece of electrified tamed light. The only way we have of going forward is to really suffer, suffer the gloom and the stun that comes with all the negative, the decay, the things that are the opposite physics and math and poetry of our childhood learning era, our early discoveries we do ourselves, walking in streams, speaking up in class, delivering our first speeches to an audience, our first art, such perfect moments, such as when I played the string bass on the back left corner of the stage as we, the little children's orchestra played Debussy's Pavane. Thump, thump. Our first encounters with girls, the physical woosh that goes to the head with each new discovery, blood glowing its flowing.
God, I'm worn out by the time we get back, contending with mom, us having a second round to attempt a feigning of joviality that soon wears off, and as I go up to hide and maybe nap, I hear mom's voice drifting up from downstairs, help, HELP... and by the time it's loud enough to wake the devils settling down for a cold night in yonder woods, I come down the stairs, what's the problem, and Mom calls me a bastard, how could I be so cruel to leave the cat here without another cat to live with. Mom, he has F.I.V., and they said at the Humane Society that because of the potential for contagion, Mitchell, Yellow Fellow, Orange Tabby with decent fangs on him and a general good attitude and friendliness, he's a good candidate for being the lone cat of the household. But she is angry already at such injustice and their neighboring injustices, which I obviously have something to do with in my own lonesome little world, and I am lucky to convince her to come upstairs and watch some television on her bed, so she can take her shoes off and relax. Note to self, no second glass of wine for mom at lunch, even if it's Christmastime, unless you want the scene, but isn't every night a scene.
What a spot to be in.
If one is a real writer, it is hard to sustain the look at That Which Is. No one can write so long about it. It's near to painting a painting. The painting acknowledges that one is looking at something.
Start with the brushstrokes, not even knowing what you're doing, nor what it's about. That will allow, having gotten the picture up, the better formation of an understanding of a broader "story."
The cat comes back in, after a bit. I hear him groom himself, on the top of the back rest of the couch.
Eventually, the wrong decision will be made, will come.
The situation is sticky here. The psychologist's Freudian spider's web. The more I fight the more stuck I get, it seems. She turns things around on me. I show her pictures of the few girlfriends I've had in the last ten years or so, in Irish terms of the physicality side of human nature, such as that come to me with the wine with the pizza from Cam's and my frustrations with repeating and re-explaining the political situation, and she tells me I should learn from women, not use them as objects, and that I treat her miserably and have tossed away all she has given me--indeed I feel that way often enough when I look back at life in the past and my own sins--so again I go off to bed after we've sat round the Christmas tree, unable to control her, to get her to behave, to go off to bed herself, a defensive manuever.
People as myself, white men in their fifties who sought not at all to discriminate or override or put down any neighbors, nor to be judgmental, can find themselves now, in the area of diversity and woke-ness pulled or pushed in different ways and to sides and directions. For me, it's a realization that I have become like the old bluesmen, who got good simply by listening to the life around them, who got good by being themselves, their own howling voices, put it over a few chords, get discovered finally by some sort of outlier or alien, curious intelligent young men from Britain on their own paths of musical discovery, intrigued with their old bluesman sounds and their truth, or a Lomax or a Seeger, from their own country, found by ethnographers as a native art form. Recording their sound in the rawness of originality and origin.
I grew up in privilege. For reasons unknown seem to have pissed it away to follow what my foolish youthful exuberance took to be original music, culture, just as food and drink. Lincoln's letters. Kerouac's. Hank Williams, Lyle Lovett, Marty Robbins, Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Elvis, going back toward the roots after having dabbled in the British fruits of the bluesman's labors and truths. Not high culture, perhaps, but, culture none the same, as Twain is part of that democratic fabric of our nation, the contributions of normal men with a slight musical gift, along with a larger natural desire to play to communicate what it was themselves that they saw. And this was what Kerouac played to a tee, the jazz rhythm, the real language and behavior of the street, raw as it was, learning to adjust his prose from the hyperactive master of storytelling, Neal Cassady, himself, and always, mind you, haunted by a sense of shame, Catholic guilt, such that Kerouac's stories always straddle two worlds, the one of the gritty true stories, the other of the good responsible school boy always trying to learn what life was trying to teach him, to make better of himself, to do his homework and to work away like a craftsman.
But yeah, it sucks to be broke, even if you got broke through some sort of true spiritual lessons, and being broke doesn't make one feel very attractive to people, other people, whoever one might imagine them to be.
The next week, on a Sunday, I take mom in the car, loading her up, cane and all, Covid mask, cloves, coat, a Pepsi, down for a New York Times. Down Fifth Street past the hospital and the parking lot, across Bridge Street, past the huge brick mansions, Italianate, the large green grass park, on this slope above the town, to the promontory bluff overlooking the vast lake, where we share our halves of Stewart Shoppe tuna salad on marble rye. Then, down along the lake, lower ground along the edge of the SUNY, past the fish fry and the ice cream stand and the small cottage park, then curving along. But the car is making noise in the cold air. Vapors of exhaust coming from the front of the car, and then, turning onto another road in this ride to placate mom's attention span, boom, sudden loudness. Mom cringes, grabbing her head, what have you done to my car, it's all I have...
So, dreading the call, and the forewarning of Mike, the catalytic converter, could make things too expensive, given what the car is worth, such as it is, I call, as early as I can on a cold depressed Monday, calling on my iPhone from my air mattress, bundled up, avoiding mom. It's another guy, and he makes sense too, when I ask how expensive an endeavor this might be, replacing this pipe that has failed at the flange, connecting to the exhaust pipe underneath the front seats of the car. Bring it in tomorrow, as early as you can, so we can order the parts we need to.
Okay, it's a very cold day. Coldest we've had yet. Could be worse. I manage to start the car, after organizing, bringing a courier bag, a bottle of water. Layers. Who knows. I come over the hill, past the Walmart and the Lowe's, beyond the Price Chopper and the J.C. Penny's, the McDonald's golden arches, the KFC, the Tractor Supply and the shop for tools, auto body, pet supply, the car dropping down the hill into the old strange farmland of Scriba, the first houses of some prosperous form and shape and size, then flat fields, and here's the Torbitt's Service Center, which has old bones to it, and a good area of yard in front of it, the shop set off the road. Mike doesn't really seem to be offering me a ride, so, I go hoof it. Out onto the blue snow and the highway 104, back westward toward the town, maybe I'll catch a blue and white Centro bus, such as I discovered yesterday, doing a grocery run from near Mom's apartment, in case a lake effect blizzard comes. Which worked out. I pull out the bus schedule, here at 8:20 in the morning, and there seems to be a stop at the Walmart... But the timing doesn't work out. I'd rather walk for twenty minutes for exercise, even if I could use warming up in a lobby, and the paper flyer of the bus schedule is torn at by a devil wind. I keep walking. North side of the street.
I explore another side of the street, as maybe, like climbing the Eiger, there's a more direct route, headed to the southernmost bridge over the river, which would take me out by the friendly Big M little supermarket. But in doing so, even as I'm walking back to 104 right where the Enterprise car rental shop is, I see the bus go by, and if the light had turned red, I could have caught it, gotten into town, warmed up somewhere, then figured out the next leg. But alas. I'm walking. Slipping now and again.
At last I cross the river, over the railroad bridge pedestrian path and the wind is coming strong from the south, and gulls are hanging at my head, seeking fish down in the river twenty yard below. Finally, shelter in the Big M. I shop. For what, I dunno. But, I find a few things. When I'm done, I'll have to wait for a good 25 minutes, for, as the bus schedule says, the final leg, and finally I'm out on First Street waiting and here at last comes the bus, and when it drops me off, it won't be too far.
So I'm the cook here, and the dishwasher, and the paperwork and the cleaner. The laundry. The cat. Mom, it seems, can't always hear him when he cries, big long wide and orange, to go out for his morning jaunt, or his feeding. She sits oblivious, on her chair, taking a nap, staring at the first page of a book, like she repeats headlines when she looks down at the newspaper, a passenger now in her old car. In and out, waking from a dream with a low shout. Dozing again. Thank god for the cat, for a little focus on our day together. For mom, it's always a point for an argument. It's too cold. He'll catch pneumonia. I have to dry him off. Don't let him out! Mom, he's a cat! He knows what's good for him. One day he comes in with a bloody ear lobe... I find him out front, chewing on a patch of grass, and I see the blood. It's just a little spot. She doesn't notice. I open a can for him, and he digs in. I treat him with a towel with hydrogen peroxide, before I take her on her noontime ride.
Back to get mom down into the Toyota.
Another night, I come in from my walk, just to stay calm. Achhh, I don't feel like cooking, I don't feel like the refrigerator and reheating. So I fold, no leftovers, it's Monday night, it'll be quiet, let's go down to The Press Box. It's dark out by now. I get the car started. Off we go in the dark cold.
Later on, after a long nap, I find myself awake, it's around midnight. I get up, say hi to mom, who's on the bed with the cat, and then since I'm too awake now, better if I do down to the kitchen and do the dishes that have piled up since the night before. Might as well. Better to face the frustration of the clutter now, the silverware in the Rubbermade little tub, dishes, pots and pans. I've grown tired of supermarket chickens soaked in chlorine or whatever, and whatever kind of digestible beans, black-eyed peas, adzuki beans, hard to find outside of health food stores, have become appealing, as also with rice, though the rice adds to my growing belly as I am adrift here in the grey vacuum of cold New York State winter. Bah, get through a day with mom, get dinner cooked, reach into the freezer to please her with some coffee ice cream, by then I'm tired, after being made so nervous all day, anxious from the accumulation of all her little upbraids, mom, I'm going for a walk, you just went for a walk, no I just took the trash out, okay, whatever, women can never win, and so I am left to start my little daily walk with gloom and anxiety on top of other glooms and anxieties, along with dreadful realizations that perhaps, to be true to his quest for the truth and the pith of reality as he sees it, the great job of the writer, at a certain no longer youthful point, the poor writer must finally see that it his duty to write about the end of his ability to write, to write anything worth reading, to write lastly about how with all the things, pressures, of adult life and attempted responsibilities, as if it weren't just his own powers waning, his spirit in need of some transformative thing, a Leviathan to get rid of his own Jonah, he no longer finds it possible to really believe in writing anymore, so it goes.
So I'm standing in my underwear, black tee shirt, Beans chamoix hunter green shirt, stacking the dishes, cat and other, pots and pans, in a sort of triage after assembling the lost tribe of the silverware, the tap running with hot water. I decide I'll use the dishwashing machine this time, after I soak everything and get the dried residue off, load it up after a scrub rather than using its blue plastic enamel racks for simple drying. So much crap everywhere. How could we simplify all this, even the eating part. And I'm a bit dazed, having done my little reality check corrections for mom, no, mom, there aren't any children to worry about for coming along to dinner, no, mom, your father has passed away, I gave you that copper bracelet for Christmas, no, mom, there is no other home up the road a piece, this is it, this is where all your clothes are too, no, we don't have any big plans for tomorrow, no mom, that's Wednesday Mary is taking you for a haircut, at Two PM, tomorrow is Tuesday. She's still functional in ways, despite all the nonsensical childish jabbering and ugliness, and she's probably tired of me shouting back at her when I get tired of explaining everything. I've stopped talking to her. And so I go, oh no, and here she comes down the stairs, right as I have my soapy water ready to go, the plates first, then the pots and pans. And as I do my duties of cleaning up, I don't want any company, in fact I just pulled up a little background video, about a Father Lazarus of Saint Anthony in the Desert, as background. He lives in cave up the mountain side, and he's gotten through that horrible dealing with ego and his own will, fighting Satan, the inner demons and outer demons, to get to some peace in his battle up there... well, it's a story of motivation, how certain things came to pass, and he wasn't even a church goer to start with. So here Mom is, after clopping down the stairs, I'm tired but I'm restless... I pull open a package of Saltines, a small plastic jar of almond butter, a knife, and she eats right off the table cloth not the little plate I gave her. She'll belch loudly. And this is all my earned Karma, perhaps. Eventually, seeing me work away, offering a lame, "what can I do, you never ask for any help," well, go clean your room, throw things out in your office... things she'll immediately shrug off, eventually she'll make little noises, I know when I'm not wanted.
I load the dishwasher up, having gathered what I can in it, hand-washing two wine glasses, but letting a third go through the cycle, and she sits at the kitchen table that was our old family dining room table, I don't have the overhead lights turned on, she's picking at her scalp again with her right hand, in some form of thought, occasionally asking me a question, after I slice an apple for her little repast, who invented the apple, like she asks me, did Jesus invent wine, or, who invented the cat, all good questions, particularly if you're not, as the bandied about saying goes, "at the end of my rope..." ammo of family battles... I turn to the refrigerator, so cleanse, purge, sort out, put cheeses with cheese and fruits in the bottom fresher bin, throwing out the little trays the Meals on Wheels delivers... And finally, she goes okay, I'm going up to bed, and at least she knows how to still make that trip.
And so am I left to ponder, sad thoughts, like now all the waitresses, I'm old enough to be their father, same with the young pretty women who are the synchronized swimming check out "girls" at the little supermarket that's full of nice people who remember you and your little quips. Down to the right, before you hit the hot prepared food, fried chicken, rotisserie, chili, mac and cheese, potato wedges, before you there after you've gone past the bread on the one side and the peanut butters and the crackers on the other, turn right at the potatoes, the tomatoes, the onions, the cooled vegetable and fruits, I was hearing weird faint whistling, and finally, as one of the employees, a woman stocking the broccoli, I make a discovery, it's the angels and Mrs. Claus and other elf and Santa and Christmastime figurines, up above the cooler, that's what's been making these ghostly whistling cooing noises as I shop, picking out a lemon or a lime, rattled by impatient old mom waiting in the car with her grousing thoughts and complaints, and the woman and I chuckle over my little story of discovery.
At night, in the quiet, mom gone to bed, the big orange tabby at her feet, even the books climbed up, sleeping and strewn over the blankets, there is a soul to places, a spook that no one else can give to a place. I light incense, frankincense and myrrh to disperse the egos of the day as they fall toward sleep.
