February First came in that cold period of January.  Actually it hadn't been a bad winter in Oswego, just gray, cold, the steady wind 15 mph off the lake, but not much snow, hardly much at all beyond the covering of a couple inches during the middle and late part of the month.  Mom brought up the weather many times, often saying I haven't seen anything like this in years, or, asking me, as I'm driving, when is it going to get warmer, what's tomorrow going to be like, and of course with her constant distracting element of volatility, going on with nothing to say while I'm trying to catch the NPR news of the times, all our struggles, the Pandemic Relief Bill, should it come, when...

I get up late, feeling ill again.  The cheap Portuguese box red wine and the stress hanging over me after dinner...  I toast a couple of pieces of gluten free bread, with slices of turkey and red pepper hummus spread, and when she comes in, as I've told that breakfast is served, as I'm eating she's fumbling around putting the turkey away clumsily, and already getting my worn nerves up...

I'm coming down from upstairs not long after when she tells me the Vision Center called, my glasses are ready.  Okay, great.  I get dressed, sipping yesterday's cold coffee, feeling sensitive in the throat again, and the wind outside is blowing, and I tell her to put her coat and boots on, oh, but Ted is going down to pick those up, she tells me, just following a great debate over the socks before her, always a big deal.

Down there, pick them up, dragging myself through the parking lot, the wind blowing strong and cold, into the shop, trying to oversee mom's banal conversation with the woman there, did you make an appointment?  No, mom picked up the call, sorry...  I'm irritated, depressed, in a grump mood.

Back through Oswego, left on First up to the Big M, a rotisserie chicken, a vegetable, bacon, gluten-free bread, do we need butter, eggs, a six pack of generic ones (instead of farmers market) good through February...  Pepsi, toilet paper...  Today we have to pay rent, me too.  I get her home, with her New York Times, I go out for a brief walk, too cold in the wind, take the cooked chicken out of its plastic container and into the oven low in the small iron pan, 225.  I don't have much of an appetite.  Up late with the wine, getting back to writing in my journal, I was eating toast and butter, sprouted grain from the health food store.  There was a special on New York Strip at $4.99, cheaper than the stew meat I brought home a few days ago.  But I don't feel like cooking one, and I let mom go through the long process of sauteing the spinach, which she figures out after several irritations that make me leave the room, such as trying to slice the spinach leaves in the stainless steel pan with a sharp knife, and then wanting scissors, which she'll use for anything now, and did she wash her hands, I doubt it.  The usual story, I used to be a good cook, heh heh heh.  I get the chicken out, cut into it on the cutting board, eat lightly and desultory, and as I soon as I possibly can, without even telling her, without offering her ice cream, I duck down into the cold cold basement for a long snooze, first interrupted by her small shouts, help help help, but then into deeper sleep even with the light on overhead, and I've never been so fully worn out and exhausted in all my being, and the dreams are both good and bad, feeling good and feeling poisoned.  One involves one of the big old Orange huge snowplows from the old road back home, and maybe also the school bus, and there are hold ups, getting everyone from the festival down the road onto the same page even through we have to get somewhere, and my old college friend Jon Gluck is there to offer some sort of advice that's so helpful it sounds stern, and yes, I have been fucking around for the last million years, and look where I am now...  Broke.

Of course now that I am sleeping here in mom's apartment there are lots of worries, and will she be stalking through the night every two hours, or what, will it be peaceful at all?

I wake up fuller now and around 10 PM cautiously climb the stairs with the glass pitcher I use for comfort, emptying that out when I can.  I have not had a drink all day, not since I got up, and though it's very tempting now, I remain calm and she's not down to bug me, and look, I'll make a chicken salad, then marinate the boneless breast chicken tenders for a stir fry, and then I'll cook some bacon, and then I'll do the dishes, sweep and mop the floor.  Pretty good for monkish activities on a cold night waiting for the snow.  I make a pot of sleepy time tea.  

I chop a stalk of celery after washing it under the tap, and then some apple, a bit of white onion.  Finally chop some walnut halves into small thin crunches.  A cooked chicken breast from a night or two ago, and some from the rotisserie chicken, slicing on the yellow cutting board with the good knife, the blue handled chef's knife I got for mom as part of a set.  Stirring in a little mayonnaise, olive oil, Celtic salt crystals.  

Then some ginger, and in another bowl the marinade for the other chicken I have.  Soy sauce, olive oil, pepper flakes, orange juice and zest, a dash of white wine, a quick shot of red wine vinegar.  

The snow starts falling around four in the morning, a steady one with a good wind behind her and the intent of blowing and falling and adding up significantly.  I mail mom's rent check in the standing boxes , after putting boots and coat layers and hat on, as I'm taking out the trash and then for good peaceful measure some paper recycling cardboard etc.

I listen, watching something I find on the early desert father type saints, which is boring, then half entertaining, then somewhat comforting and mom only comes down once to bug me for some Pepsi.  I'll be able to feed her tomorrow.  What's on your agenda for today, she asks me, well, mom it's two in the morning, I hope to go back to bed.  And in my mind, if not to her, I say, and I haven't had a drink all day.  The crucial first day of the month, to keep yourself honest.

At five in the morning coming on six my nerves are calmer now, and I have no real desire to open a can of cider before bed.  I hear mom get up now and again, to use the bathroom, and I strain my ears to see if she's coming down the stairs, knowing that pace of footsteps and the sound of her hand sliding on the banister, but she stays in her bedroom.  I went to check on her earlier and we watched the story of an arts & crafts vase from Cincinnati.   The cat has been out several times in the night, not staying out long.

By the hour, I'm feeling better, physically, spiritually too.  No, it wouldn't be worth having a cider now.  I've done enough damage to my life.  Look where I am now.  Even the cravings are departing me.  But I need prayer and patience and no one antagonizing me because I do enough of that already from within, knowing too well my faults and sins.  I put some multi-grain gluten-free bread, small end pieces into the toaster oven.  Almond butter, detoxing.  The quiet remains, I go off to bed down in the basement after resetting the rugs and the mat, refreshing the air in the Thermorest Neoair green mattress with the little blower that starts blowing with its little fan as soon as you open it up with the little valve attachment.  Resetting the bed.  If I don't drink I'm not sure I even should go back to the wine bar.

There's the heartbreak, I'm familiar with that.  There is the emptiness at the core of my being, I've tried to fill with fantasy and wine and music and foolish writings and wasted time walking, and bicycling too, for reasonably long dedicated miles, surely good for my health and mood and my liver, but stoic and solitary in their own way, miles of an art form, and every now and then another guy on a bike to talk to would get it, not really about the speed, but the miles themselves.  Filled with rationalizations and self-cheating lies.  Sure, everything is fine, but knowing full well it isn't at all fine, that each and every day I am screwing my life up further and further.  Money, savings, investments, real estate... forget it, and no artiste is ever smart to continue that way, else it isn't really art, it's just self-indulgence.  And perhaps this is why mom pulling at me and my life's blood has become tiresome...

After my day off from drinking, an auspicious February 1.  I wake and finally rise to face mom, who has been clomping around in her fur-topped snow boots over the floor above me.  I feed her an open chicken salad sandwich, make sure she has taken her pills, another small battle, sure I took them, I have her check her pockets, yup, there they are.

I sneak back downstairs, living her to read the newspaper.  She wants to talk to me, but I've already had it.

At 3:30 PM I come back upstairs, and snow is coming down sideways.  I look out and see Ben, in his Carhart black yellow safety reflective stripe railroad coat looking pensively out the door of the garage building they give him for his tools, cranking up the snowblower, but where would one start in all this, as it's coming down, as the wind blows.  Later, a big blue formidable snow plow dump truck comes down and then turns in for to sweep a swath through the parking lot here, pushing the snow forward, some of it gathering as small snow banks that the parked cars will have to get through later.

After dinner she goes off to bed, and I'm still wiped out, trying to keep Henri Nouwen's thoughts in my mind, and when I come back up from the basement to check on the weather she is soon coming downstairs.  I had nothing at all to drink on February 1, but now late into February 2, her presence makes me so anxious I could jump out of my skin.  I don't know what to do with myself, she says, after she sits down, after I've tried to nudge her to go back up to the television and her book laden bed.  I was doing the dishes, pots, pans, silverware, the cat dishes, the plates we ate off of, her wine glass, and not drinking over dinner for me was a good thing, but now, she's on my again, wandering about in a half ghostly way.  The snow is not about to stop.  I've let the cat out, and he doesn't get very far the first few times, preferring to remain on the back steps.  I shovel the top one off for him.  The third time out, and mom doesn't want him out at night on a night like this, he works up the courage and steps down, pouncing into the snow, digging at the snow, as if to check how deep it is, with his forepaw, and then makes his break for it, charging through the snow, pretty deep now, out to the two spruce trees at the edge of the grass behind the rowhouse townhomes.  Which gives me the idea that I should dig a little path for him so he can run out and back with more ease, because he's always going to run out to the shelter of the trees on his way to prowling along the edge of the wild brush.  The cat is out when mom comes down and up to me in the kitchen, and as I'm finishing putting the rinsed silverware and the last things away to dry on the dishwashing machine's racks, as I'm scrubbing the countertop with soapy water, she brushes her hand across the top, to say, oh, or some complaint, and I can't avoid raising my voice, look mom, I'm cleaning, scrubbing, that's why the counter is wet, and she takes offense, she's going to go kill herself, storming off.  What a fucking nightmare this is, on top of being cooped up, on top of being so far away now and made unfamiliar about my old life and all its mistaken vestiges, do I even want to go back to the bar, be a people-pleaser all over again, and by now my nerves are so charged up again, I can't do it, I put socks on from earlier that have dried overhanging my boots, put all my gear on, and I don't care, I'm going out, as I'm dressing she's sitting down on the couch and pulling out some papers from an old manilla envelope from 2005 her teaching days, and I have to get out, have to.  And I think, god, it's just like tending bar when the last few customers push you over that edge, "What time do you close," or just because of who they are, or whatever the cause be.  I'm the one stuck up here with mom, why, because I've been her helper all along, and now I'd like to push her away and get on with my life too, to hell with her and all her "they all hate me" kind of crap.  

Later, I come up and watch PBS with her, first about Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an comic and an actress with Irish roots, and then a great show about America sending its jazz musicians to the far-flung world, to spread the freedom spirited democratic thoughts of our culture throughout, to Africa, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Poland, Germany, of course, and even to USSR.

After sitting with mom, the television on with all the interesting jazz cats one instinctively loves, Satchmo, Ellington, Brubeck, I retreat back downstairs, regretting very much I quit the Amherst College Jazz Ensemble, putting my music aside, such that I lived for miserable years without being in a band, or really having a guitar, as if ashamed of that part of my life, on top of a pervasive lack of insight as to how to find a job in the world, sad about things such that I shut down the entire world of mine inner life, in somber tones, toiled as a bum...  at least I have a guitar, at least I make a fool of myself strumming away solitary on Facebook Live, at least I've cut a path in the snow for the cat, so he can run to the yonder edge of our little world to do his mysterious work, like a farm boy might cut a path through the heavy snow for the hogs on Iowa farms...

Yes, I have to downsize, I have to go on the road myself.  

The cider soothes me.