But each day, it is too hard to go, too many things to do.

That was Monday.  I wanted to be ready to get on the road, back to Washington, but when I woke I had no will.  It would be too hard to part, to leave my old mom.  It was a nice day.  Blue sky, clear air, even with the humidity.  Around noon I went for a walk up the road.  The night’s thunderstorm rain had helped with the swamp by the power grid station.  I called the car rental company.  They were raising the weekly rate on me.  Then I called my aunt.  The guilt of leaving mom, versus the guilt of not being there on my own home turf to face looking for what to do, a forced career change.

We went for a quick drive, to find a newspaper, groceries.  The usual.  Keep mom happy, comfortable, while I run in..  Then we went for ice cream, a drive by the  big endless lake, the shore, stones, the bank below the picnic tables, then on past the snapping turtle swamp, where we were there just as a huge blue heron lifted slowly.

I had mom back, I was  getting ready to squeeze some lemon on top of chicken breasts.  Mom commented about how I shouldn’t fill the cat’s water bowl so high.  Okay, I said, in a sort of drone, and then mom was sudden angry at me again.  I’m never right.  I’m always wrong.  She flung herself out the back door, sitting down facing away, her small frame in an outdoor chair on the grass. I looked down at her through the storm door window.

Well, it’s almost four, she was up early, so I pour herself a tumbler of Chardonnay, drop a cube in it.  And then I reach back into the fridge for the bottle of $9.99 Beaujolais.  Suddenly the neck has snapped off as I yank with the shaky corkscrew.  And something has happened.  I wrap it in white kitchen towel, raising it.  Shit.  The gash on my left index finger is long and deep.

I drive myself to the local hospital.  I wait on a bed in the ER.

One nice woman, an angel in my eyes comes in, checking in with the paperwork things to render.  Then a slender strawberry blond young woman.  She’s the first person to want to look at it.



Hemingway, always getting into something.  The skylight falling.  Car accidents.  Concussions.  Stitches.  The later plane crashes.  Scars. Organ damage.


Melville.  The idea a part of you will meet an end in the writing of a book.  Even when you’re not a great writer, there’s still the Ahab in you.  The whale adventure co-opted, for psychological revenge.  The physics of it, part of you will die, and leave you with what’s left.

Dostoevsky says as much, standing at the precipice of the first words of Karamazov.  It was on my parent’s shelves from JK Lumber.  A Bible quote, after books full of nightmare and feverish visions of the world turning into hallucinations and madness, things we all get, hey, it’s all entertainment, all cut form the things we would all understand, intuitively, given what we will have to go through.

Something from John.  But if a kernel of wheat shall fall to the ground and die, then it bringeth forth much fruit.

And Dostoevsky, he would have known that.  He would have earned a glimpse of that.  Given what he’d been through.  Add on the great vulnerability of having epileptic seizures.  Or of being thrown away to Siberia, human trash.  Creditors, income problems.  The final unending long adult pains of the never ending shit stream.

He hated electric lights.  He’d be up late, hand rolling cigarettes, not allowed to smoke them.  Like Vonnegut, he was a great doodler.  Here’s Father Zosima, off on a margin space.


The blood starts again, after I’ve peeled back the white kitchen towel, which I have to pull off, tearing it away.  Faint stomach.  Oh, you did a nice job on that, I think she says.

Then, finally, an older woman with a blue smock.  She’s the one to take care of it.  Wheeling in a stand with a tray.  She assembles her gear.  Packaged Bandages.  Needles, three thin ones, for numbing.  This will be the painful part.  Okay.  I look off, away.  I don’t want to be here, but I am.

She doesn’t say much. I’ve asked her if she’s a native of Oswego.  New Hartford.  Oh, I grew up in Clinton...  She’s busy.  That’s okay,

I hum a song without any tune, just notes.   Taking breath, air up the chest, alternative to breathing, like I’ve been, through the nose.  Are you doing okay, she asks me, as I felt the tug of thread, bringing a peel of tough sagacious finger skin back in line.  “I’m fine.  I’m thinking of the story my mom tells about my C-section...  ‘I can feel you cutting...’. So they gave her more juice.”  The doctor almost chuckles. She studies her work so far, sewing up the old catchers mitt baseball glove while I float in time, as it flows on, beyond my control.  55 years.

My mom is calling.  Hi.  Yes.  I’m being taken care of very well, by a nice woman doctor.  I’ll be home soon, mom.  Are you doing okay?  Well,, I’m good now, but before, I was scared shitless, to tell you the truth.

At  some point into the procedure, I forget, I say, I’m sorry for being stupid, I tell the doctor quietly.  No.  That’s what we are here for, she says.

Earlier:  Looking up at the flourescent lights, or away, you feel the loneliness.  Poor suffering humanity, all the sickness, the waiting for medical help, the cancers, the pain, the shocks.


Then later, wrapped in gauze, my finger protected, numb,, I’m on my way out, back through the ashen lobby,  after the nice nurses.  When you’re suffering, in need of medical attention, you become reminded of something.  People care, even for you.  And in your own shocked pathos, you find that people care for you, even, and that you yourself are polite.

I’m walking across the warm paced parking lot, towering cumulus clouds like mountain distance.  I start the car,


I settle down, we order delivery.  After half a glass of white, I pour some red from the broken bottle.  Later, thinking, I strain the wine through a tea strainer for safety. Ibuprofen, baby aspirin.



Next morning, Tuesday, The rough part, taking the bandage off, peeling off the gauze pad after the gauze wrap.  Oh boy.  The shower blasts too much, the water cutting the stressed, so I hand cup water over the finger.