Upstairs I rise from the green air mattress, to use the john.  The cat scratches at the door, so I rise and let him in.  He plays by the side of the waste basket overflowing with crumpled tissue paper, pawing a q-tip.  Mom is downstairs already.  I'm by her bedroom, so I look to see what I might bring downstairs.  Red fleece gloves from the hardware store.  Her heavy parky.  A cane.  Her boots, and her Keens hikers.  The second trip upstairs I look for the remote, to turn the television off, the piles of open books on her bed cast haphazardly, her blue bathroom crumpled by her pillows.  There it is, hiding beneath an Emily Dickinson paperback with an introduction by Ted Hughes, and several open books on book history.

She's reading a fine magazine about books and book collecting, the sort of thing I enjoy but don't have time for.

I'd love it if someone would take me to one of these book fairs... 

Mom is sitting in her chair, with a woolen over coat, a winter cap about her silver hair.  Her socks don't match.

Why do you go around barefoot, she asks me, as I peer out the front door.  It's warmer today.  Some sunlight coming through the milky cloud cover, drips of water steadily falling over eaves.  Why do you not clean your room, I ask.  Why are you so mean to me, she replies.

I shouldn't have said it.  Pointless.

I wish there was someone nice here, instead of (mumbling)...  oh well.  High-pitched, softly, oh my legs...  Hi, Peter Rabbit... (the theme of her mug).  What are you going to do...  Sighing, a breath out, Help... Why doesn't someone take me to Brattle Street books... But they all hate me.  I'm no good.  Wish I were dead.

Mom, it's a long drive to Boston.

So I start the day on egg shells.  Days up here require thought, to get much useful out of them.  Should I go out for a walk?  Get a haircut?  I'd like to do some yoga, but where...  Surrounded by the clutter here, everywhere.  I cooked last night, short ribs with onion, celery, frozen Birds Eye stew vegetables as I didn't have any carrots.  I cooked also a long link of hot sausage, with orange sweet pepper and onion in the big pan.  The stew I left on the stove, electric ring burners, on a small burner a notch above low, with the lid on.  There are some things in the little tub, dishes, a cutting board, silver ware, a bowl, to clean.

I prepare myself the tea, using Best Yet green tea bags, three of them, but first, heating the water, I cut a lime in wedges, adding hot water, turmeric, cayenne, ginger.  To start my biome off right.

The Meals on Wheels delivery comes with a knock on the door meant for the hard of hearing.  I go get the door, thank you, feeling guilty.  Have a nice day.

Mom comes into the kitchen.  She stands at the counter in the kitchen, having some tuna salad from the plastic sealed tray, skipping the chocolate pudding.

Oh, what a pretty kitty, I hear, as the cat stalks back to the living room.  What you want?  There you go.  What a smart kitty.  

We do not have much in common anymore, mom with her knee-jerk feminism, I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know, oh, we need a man for the job, something I cannot connect to.  I have my sufferings.  She doesn't get them, or care to.  There's no point in talking to her about Henri Nouwen's thoughts with her.

Banging, banging, banging, she says, when I come back to look at the laundry pile from doing the dishes in the kitchen.  Granted, the hallway seems to amplify dishes clacking against each other, silverware being placed upright to dry in the dishwasher rack, the contact from stacking plates, all those noises...

Later on, after I take mom to the book store, The River's End, where she is happy, finally finding a book she wants to purchase--we don't really need any more books here at this point--back to the car, parked down the block a bit, the ice edges finally receding over the last few days, today it's almost 50, for a quick stop in to the Big M.  I get mom into the car, swing over to the driver's side, start the car, check my phone, NPR on, and in my inbox there's an email from Kinney Drugs, Covid-19 vaccine appointments available.  So, I get on that, pulling her cards out of my wallet, filling in the information as I go along, and though the Thursday appointment fails, no longer available, I'm able to use the filled out on-line form for Friday at 4:50, this time successfully.  It doesn't feel like a big victory, almost every day feeling pretty much like a loss, but it's something.  As was getting to the bookstore and not having it all fall apart.

Then we are able to get back home.   The wind is still up.  I get out for a walk, after making a call pertaining to the Toyota recall we need to accomplish.  I talk to my aunt, who's checking in, just being low key, calm, helpful, and soon it feels warmer out, and I take my walk up the road, toward town and the houses along the streets with sidewalks cleared cleanly and neatly by the snowblowers of the home-owners along this route.  I cross the parking lot behind the church, and see if the back door is open, and it is.  I'll come back later, after I finish chatting with my aunt.  It would be nice to have somewhere dry to sit, but I'm walking, the sky is interesting...

The light is later now in the sky, and I've not seen the inside of the church lit like this.  The light shows up the Stations of  the Cross are after Giotto almost, three dimensional, inside dark wooden frames with the station captioned in Polish.  They are not young, these works of art on the life and death of Jesus.

I guess you have to be feeling pretty battered to really get a church.  You have to be really feeling it, really living the inadequacy, the inclemencies of life.  One could joke, yeah, it must be bad if you're looking at paintings and art along a wall, as some regard it all as a kind of fiction or fairy tale, but to really get it, the feeling of peace and sanctuary you can no longer find anywhere else, that you love and understand all the imagery, then you must really be feeling life, if all of a sudden the church, and being in the church, is making more sense to you than ever before.  

Or perhaps it's that you want to change, that you find your old ways completely inadequate.  I say my prayers, after taking pictures in the great church with its Polish character and it's a God-send to me, a connection to my ancestors, to Pani Korbonska, and my dear father, both of whom I tried to help and do the right thing by, but failing often enough.   One hopes someone somewhere, up above, is looking out for you, and helping in some way, in a way that cannot be seen, but which takes in account for the work he has set out upon, trying to do, has been doing.

Mom comes and sits down with me as I rise to write with my cups of nostrum hot water with lemon, ginger, cayenne, turmeric, and my tea bag green tea from the Big M, with a good heap of ground flax seed...  I can't write anyway, and I got up rather late, feeling the wine that started at dinner, but went beyond its point of artistic humor and playful use, to the point of introspective uselessness, and then you feel like crap, half awake the next morning, early, too early to get up.  My style is cramped anyway here.  But I deserve it, having done little in life to help others on their way, I don't think, and having the same psychologic nervous anxious brain faults that my mother does, "all about you," yup, that's me.

But, the sun is out, that's very good.  And when I look through the old items of my life I feel that strange sense of growing up.  I like the music of The Pogues still, but not all the lore about it, the drinking aspect of it.  I like the religious writings that are all threaded through the works of Kerouac, but again, the fame, the image, it's all a very sad story.  Is there inspiration in wine?  Perhaps, just so, but you have to be careful, very careful.

I get up as soon as the spirit allows, forcing myself.  I'll use the john, then go downstairs to face the gauntlet.  Today, at 4:50, down at the Kinney's Drugstore, mom will get her first vaccination shot for the Covid-19.  The sun is out.  She tells me she would have taken a shower last night if she had known.  Mom, you have five hours to take one if you want...

I struggle to get to the water pot, to make tea, and she comes in and feeds the cat, meaning that she opens one can fresh, but by the time she gets to the sink, she finds another can open so choses to feed him that first, which actually makes sense, but seems a frustrating note to me.

I woke up thinking of the time Deke Matthieu borrowed the Walkman my mom gave me to go play basketball.  It had a microphone on the front.  It would have started me down the road to recording conversations, voices of the people with sweet voices I sorely miss.  My dad, my family, I could have started doing interviews.  The lady I helped up on Deerfield Hill who had Irish Wolfhounds, a retired nurse who used to live up in Boonville, was a neighbor with Edmund Wilson for a time.  Pani Korbonska's stories of the Warsaw Uprising...  But I let it go.

Back then, coming out of college, all I wanted was a pick-up truck and a dog.

But maybe something about the Polish church here has awakened something in me, and even grim as I'm feeling now as I take some time to get the day rolling, doing my best to be kindly with mom and overlook her fits of anger, is there some angle to take, say, since I've failed at all other journalistic efforts, to be a kind of spiritual journalist, by which possibly I could serve somehow, to aid in someway, to help other beings get through their own appointed rough times, their own Job time, their own Jonah time and so forth.  Just a little bit of prayer helps, a little bit of finding something out about an icon or the origin of the religious art work, that Wojtyla used the altar once.  

We should all be able to do that, at least a bit of that, even I.

To pass the time we go out for a drive, down the gas station shop for the newspapers.  Down by the lake.  Then back home.  Two more hours to kill.  I go for a walk, it's cold and windy, I'm in a gloom.  Finally, the appointed hour approaches, so I load mom in the car after getting her coat on, take drinks along for the ride, down to the Big M, it's Friday, fish fry night, I'll be quick.  Get back to the car with the groceries, still a few minutes early, so by the lake again, and then finally up to Bridge to the Kinney's Drug.  I leave mom in the car.  Mom has been telling me it's cold, then that it's too hot, and I get out of the car to go in and complete the sign-in paperwork with her IDs and insurance cards, I'm looking for a second mask to put over the first, and she's telling me it's cold because the driver's side door is open as I fumble around and through my pockets.  Okay!  In I go.  Then after that I go back and get her, and the she wants a newspaper to read, I get her sat, mom, do you want to take your coat off, no, I'm fine with my coat on, but she's not happy with the local paper's sports section.  Mom, I can't think of everything every time we go out.  I didn't know what we were going to be doing...  okay.  So, I go off and wander through the aisles up to the front to see what they have...  I go back and she's standing in the aisle looking for me...  Did you read this?  Read it.  Mom, the shot is safe..  Read it!  Okay, I look at it to humor her, a little piece on the local school and people having an adverse reaction to the shot so that the school was shut down for a few days...  Mom, please.  I get her to sit down.  She looks up at me, defiantly.  Mom, how many people has the Covid killed?  She shrugs.  Half a million, mom, half a million.  But she wants something to read.  Okay mom, do you want a Cosmopolitan, do you want a scandal rag with a story about the Queen?  Woman's Day, what?

I get a large box of white tall kitchen trash bags and head up to the register to the young woman who's been there before and witnessed our sunglasses purchases five days ago, along with US Weekly, with a picture of the Queen on it, and something about Philip.  A sprinkle of Harry and Megan.

We're finally getting ready to leave, waiting around for fifteen to make sure there's no reaction, and a tall man who looks like he could work for the college has been through the wait, the shot, and the aftermath, as he's leaving I say, "Hey, all set," and he turns around and says, "Hang in there, you two," empathizing from how I read it with our drama and micro battles, expressing a note of sympathy and concern.  The guy, the pharmacist, a man in good shape with a shaved head and a sense of humor to my tastes, has calmed mom down.   Yeah, the paramedics just came and took out the last person I injected, did they do a good job mopping up the blood...  I laugh in the distance, pleased to have some comic relief from the godly chorus here...

We get back home.  I warm the fish in the toaster oven.  Okay, I'll go off to bed.  But as I get her up to bed, with a glass of water, she's going on, I'm never coming here again, you all hate me, I'm never coming here again.  I go down into the basement, assuming corpse pose as the dryer runs its cycle, my colored wash.

The Buddha's story has it that his parents are royalty, his mother, a queen, who dies after the Buddha comes out of her side.  St. Stephen, his mother was a queen too, in Hungary.  That's the pattern, it seems, as I look out the window trying to think something worth thinking about.  It sleeted and rained through the morning.  I was in up late hiding mode, didn't get much done.  There are dishes to do, after having a chili dog with mom for breakfast, as she talks away in the living room.  One comes from royalty, a royalty that falls, such that it is appropriate for the hero to go out on his or her spiritual journey of learning the great wisdom and then teaching it around in travels.  The myth, which we respond to...  Something to justify the complete failures of your own life.