Blank page.  5:30 AM.    Friday,  February 18.  Covid-19 middle of winter.

I went to bed after supper again.  Mom had been taken out by Mary for lunch and a hairdresser's appointment down in Fulton, picked up at noon, and then dropped off at 3.  But I'd been up late digesting a disturbing bit of news, chewing it over after hearing about it the day before.  I took her for a drive, being a good sport, after she came in from her little sojourn in a chatty mood, and I had to tell her that I didn't feel like talking so much, had some things to do.  She gets up from her glass of water, storms into the living room, sitting down on the couch, cradling the cat like a child.

I take her out for a ride.  We go out Cemetery Road, getting a feel for the cold gray land under the blank metal gray sky, past the big colonial house on the left, a station of the Underground Railroad in these part, the south where the turn-off to the Fruit Valley orchard stand is, then straight, across 104, to the lake.  I'm in a bit of a mid-winter gloom.  Facebook, not enough of a social life for anyone.  Leaves on stuck in memories, nostalgia, comparisons...  Mom pipes up, she wants a dog, how about we get a dog.  

I'm gloomy about that too, apparently, because soon, as in all family matters, it seems, she says I'm depressing her, that I would depress & discourage God--actually not saying that this time, but a theme, a family expression--when I tell her, mom, if you have a dog, that's a lot of responsibility, well, I had children...  And I almost begin to think, well, she has a point, maybe she's right.  I'm never going to move forward if I'm all gloomy all the time.

The contention follows us home.  It seems I'm either discouraged and brought down by her, in my mind, or she declares she is brought down and discouraged by me, in which case I am forced, more or less, to brighten up a bit, apologetically.   So we wage our little battles of anger back and forth, her saying, "it's all my fault," meaning it's mine, while I get depressed about being so dragged down, in my own mind's outer layer's thinking, carrying on with the silence of the weight of her, our great mismatch that is our alikeness I suppose, then me having to backtrack away from my sense of the burden which is on top of the Covid and my middle-aged unemployment, so that I have to be the sunny one.

No one gets what they want in the conversation without getting angry at the other.  Each has to fight for what they take to be their own.  In a way, I'm sure of it, it would be for mom to have a dog.  But...  walking it, feeding it, picking up the poop, the veterinarian, so forth...

Mom needs her own emotional distance from me for her own survival.  She has her limitations as far as what she can give to me.  So does every conversation seem to have an ending, a terminal point.  Don't bother with her rejection, she is simply asking for compassion.  And within that is a calling for me to, as Henri Nouwen puts it, come home to God's love.  That's why, I suppose, churches, in whatever form, come to exist, to fulfill a need no one in your close family is able to give you, leaving you with an emptiness, unfulfilling to you.

Then it's the cat now.  The cat is wailing, without pause, as we sit, as I clean a few pots from earlier, dishes, he wants to be let out, after I've poured mom a glass of wine and placed some 3 year old local cheddar cheese in block form in front of her.   So, the cat is outside, and now soon she is crying, he will never come back, he doesn't know where he is...  Mom, he knows, look at all the little tracks in the snow, look at the cans of cat food here, his dishes, he knows...  But she won't listen, so I go out for a walk in the frigid dark snow rutted parking lot air.  I've put a pack of suet out for the birds, struggling with the little green wire cage, attached to the trunk of the spruce tree, just wanting to do something today, in the great stretch of no accomplishments, going on vaccine websites without sign of any appointments...    I've ladled the chicken stew I made the night before into a RevereWare pot to reheat it, but again, mom and I are at our own unpleasant throats, and I go out and call for the cat, who does not come, and in the back of the mind, a seed planted, I think, the coyotes got him.

I build up the courage to go back in, and soon afterward, looking out the back door off the kitchen, there he is again, wanting to come in.  I've stirred in some kale, and thinly sliced zucchini into my stew, some Celtic sea salt.  But she wants to go upstairs to watch some television, unpredictably, and when I go check in on her later, she is sleeping, her eyes closed, head propped up on the pillow, glasses still on.  So, I have a little stew, all by myself, not even that hungry, and then I too am exhausted down into my bones and in my poor mind with its troubles, and I need the break of sleep, at 9 o clock in the evening, and I sleep until 3 AM.  

What saves the night, the day, the second part of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., leading a history of The Black Church, and for the first time in a while, after having enjoyed part 1 of it, days before, I find myself engaged, superb television.  It's the only thing I've seen to provide some hint of a direction I've had for some time now.

There never seems to be any happiness, any lasting joy, if you're cut off from a certain kind of experience.  So my thoughts run now, in the sense deprived days of mid winter and another thick monotone sky.  We get hints of it in church mosaics, tiles flaked with green and gold and brass and brown, St. Francis in the hill towns, talking to birds and the sick wolf, taming them.  Time spent in nature, watching crows do their thing in the tree tops here with snow on the ground, a bit of light blue sky, the wind, what does it all say, who knows?

I suppose the bars I kept, or tried to keep, were some form of a church, and maybe not in an unfulfilled way, given the time.