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.