Ash Wednesday, they are doing fried fish at the market counter.  They'll take it out and let it cool on the rack, and then place it on a thin little rectangle of styrofoam, wrapped in plastic.  Mom's waiting in the car.  I got the sliced turkey breast, a six pack of V8, a little bag of pre-washed baby spinach, what else to I need.  A New York Times.  Pepsi in the little plastic bottles, mom will have 3 of them open at a time, and the little cans you can't close and go flat, live and learn.  The sun is out, with blue sky above and to the east, so, hmm, a little drive, let's go over by the old fort, and the roads, when we get in through the parking lot, are narrow lanes with snow plowed up neatly on each side.  The further parking lot, just above the lake, unmistakable, a Bald Eagle in the tree standing high in profile, and even rounding the last corner, with the dark almost black body and the head that is white, that's got to be, you say to yourself.  We get the binoculars out of the glove compartment.  Good call.  I take a panoramic of the lake from the dark clouds beyond the steam plant smoke stacks to the far right east where the sun is in a clear sky still, all the way to the cooling tower of Nine Mile Point, in operation since 1966, with big steam clouds of shape towering above the land, Scriba.

We get back after dithering around along the lake for another view, and then on home, and the sun is still out, I dig out the little walkway trench through the snow I've been maintaining through the snow falls, so I can get to the spindle spruce trees and the bird feeder, which is now seeing lots of visitors, worth the entertainment value and the silent unspoken connection with this little part of nature.  I get the path cleared, refill the feeder better than I could this morning, and when I come in the cat wants to go out, but not for long.  I watch him pouncing, holding out his two catcher's mitt paws to catch and hold down his imaginary snowball prey, readying himself to stomp the liveliness into submission, he takes a few bursts of runs back and forth, and when he comes back I open the door and he keeps on running right into the house.  Okay, mom, who's happy, in her chair, a little glass of wine, fed with a little bite of something, she's reading the newspaper, okay Mom, I'm going out for a walk while the sun is still out, and it is.

Up the road, clear pavement.  The crows are out in the tree tops, kawwing, cawing, clicking, balling little bird roars in three excited notes as they rise and coast in the air moving from tree to tree.  The sky is Prussian blue to the north, a light wind.  I walk for a little while, almost up to the National Grid fenced off power station with all its cables and insulators and odd Flash Gordon silvery connectors, and then I turn back.

Mom's okay when I get in.  The garbage truck attending to the big green dumpsters and the smaller recycling bins, its sound drives the singing crow birds deeper into the woods, quite a song.  I'm cold anyway.  I go upstairs for a little quiet time, prayer for Ash Wednesday and my own directionlessness, leaning back flat on the crunching air mattress, lifting my iPhone to do some business with Earthlink, reaching a gracious woman named Rhonda, or Ronda, who is in Durban, come to find out, and she politely likes that I mention Gandhi living there for a time, and yes, there's a statue of him in the park near where she lives.   Her feminine kindness, her Indian diction of polite words, soothes me, and I don't even need a nap, and mom's probably getting hungry anyway.

I had put the fish away, and I look in the refrigerator for what I might add to this dinner of ours.  Frozen squash, a hot dog, where's the chili, a tradition here with fish, though they call it Texas Hot sauce here.  The ubiquitous spinach.  I'm too wiped out to think of cooking the chicken thigh stew I'd planned out a few days before but didn't get around to.  I cut the single later of saran wrap of the fish, put it out flat on a dinner plate, along with the single hotdog, no chili, half a previously baked potato, a couple slices of thick cut bacon I cooked a few nights ago, sort of half ruining the Ash Wednesday meal but that's what we have, so... into the toaster oven, the rack in the bottom for reheating mode, and push the button with a beep and the elements start their jet plane engine rear glow...  The little frozen block of Birds Eye cooked squash barely fits into the little pot I've designated for it.  And I'm feeling tired.  I call mom into the kitchen as we get closer, as a gesture, lifting a glass I just poured of Bolla Chianti, imported by Frederick Wildman, goes down well, but a nasty headache if you drink more than a bottle, which I shouldn't anyway, now that it's Lent, cheers mom.

For the last several days she's been talking vaguely about having a lot of things going on, hopeful to attend some sort of ceremony honoring one of her gentle Syracuse University graduate Reading and Language Arts professors, Hal Herber.  She keeps a lot of papers and things, academic newsletters, reading societies, rare book collecting magazines, a lot of it great stuff, but I have no idea, beyond a name, what she's talking about.  It will cost a lot, but she needs to go, she tells me.  And at this point of the day we're just at that cusp, the turning point, when she starts saying, no, my clothes are over at the other house, that sort thing, and quite stubborn about it to the point of getting disagreeable with me.  Ahh, what's the use, I think to myself, just draw inward.  Too tired to talk anyway.  Because I know all of this has been handed to me for some sort of purpose, all these shifts, and I know my own old life as a barman lackey has large shortcomings and financial issues, though, to be true, it's the only job security I've ever managed, for, like, thirty years plus, too much of a coward or an introvert to seek a bold moving on from it toward something where I might bloom a little bit better and now the old dog is too old to bloom much more, old vines, concentrated clusters, roots going way down to make our living under the sun and the rain and the world God made.

When she goes off to bed, finally, I'll have some creative time to look forward to, such as it is, but after dinner, scraping off the plates, wiping some of the curry powder out of tonight's spinach plan and a few other greasy things with a paper towel, I can't take anymore.  Mom has been talking all through dinner to me with a great sense of importance about this vague thing for Professor Hal Herber, professor of reading.  Again, I pull my phone out to the google machine, enter the name, "look mom, here he is.  He died in June of 2012.  Maybe you went to his memorial back then."  But I just read it.  Well, mom maybe you were reading from an old issue, or something.  She reads from the phone, holding it close to her, picking at her head with her right hand, and finally I just go upstairs to my little nook.  I'm exhausted anyway.  Yes, mom, I'm going to go up and turn the TV on, I think there's some good TV on now, on PBS.  I encourage her to come up, but she's got her own will to will things different from my own, which I might regard as unpleasant, stubborn, disagreement for its own sake.  I've fallen into a heavy nap at the edge of a dream, feeling chilled, when I hear her calling my name, energetically.  Mom, the tv is upstairs.  She comes upstairs.  Calls my name.  She opens the door.  Yes, mom, I'll come watch TV with you, in a little while, and then I fall again into dream.  Sort of a restaurant meets home dream.  She's following me around.  Down on Reservoir I befriend some guy, and I end up being too nice to him, like he has no where to stay one night before flying out, and I take him in, but then my brother comes, and he's right, I'm a complete fool to do such a thing and even I know by this point the guy, nice as he seemed, is turning at every minute into a huge pain in the ass, and I forgot that we had to put on an event this night in the house, and five minutes before opening, and someone already opening the door to let people in and they want to be seated in my section and I'm not even dressed yet...

Waking at 11PM, more or less after a good nap, I feel first the pain and then the pain lifting from the muscle cores of my shoulders and wing blades.  I have to get up and use the john anyway.  So I roll to my side and then up, standing now and quietly out the door past mom's bedroom and down the stairs.

I put some water on on the stove, some in the kettle, some in the big pot, to send up some moisture into the air here.  The cat wants to go out.  I watch him go out on the little path, and then he climbs up onto the crusty snow, he walks a few strides, then sinks down in through the crust, and then lifts himself out and continues on with dignity, crunching down in, then up again, and maybe he's learned how to do it as I see him walk down to the end of the row where he'll stick close to the buildings and then slip underneath a row of gas meters and their pipes to emerge on the front side of the townhouses.  I'm at the front door to watch him pass, and he stops to look at me, before going on with his prowl missions, daintily down the sets of steps and out toward the street, sticking close to the cars, and I can track him.

Later mom comes down.  I hear her first rising then using the bathroom, and I tend to hide here in the kitchen, closing her laptop, which is far faster than my own one which is old now and hesitant.  She comes into the kitchen, oh god, but I don't say anything, and she looks around, pours a little Pepsi for herself.  I don't say a word.  The spell is about to break... which makes me feel sad, on top of being sad.

A long time ago there was a girl who was kind to a shy busboy.  She'd wait for him to clean up and sweep the floor after the upper class, the waiters and waitresses had gone home with their take.  We hung out some, but it never ignited into anything.

She invited me to Berlin a few years later, after she'd lived in San Francisco for a time.  She had a boyfriend named Roland, who had once been a street musician.  We were friends soon enough, and they'd go to work and then I'd walk along the old sections of the Berlin Wall there in Mitte, at the edge of Prenzlauer Berg, and I'd buy beer and wait for her to come back.  They liked techno, and soon I was digging it too, in places like Tresor, a former East German money depot not far away from Hitler's bunker and the Reichstag, where I danced to a famous German DJ.  

We staying in and out of touch.  But we saw something in each other, peacefully.  When I flew away, boarding through the gate at Tegel, after she dropped me off that morning, the man said, "don't let her go," but at that moment it didn't feel like I really had that choice.  One can romanticize, but there in person, in close quarters, it's not easy, and I was grumpy and she was critical at times, as I deserved, and I wondered what she might have wanted with me, and I her.

I had a horrible hacking cough and a flight ahead of me, through Heathrow.

She and Roland came and visited.  Her mom lived not far away.  They came and sat at the bar at Austin Grill and I took care of them and Roland took pictures of me, the phone held in the crook of my shoulder to my ear while I punched in a carry out order, made a few drinks, coping with the rush.

And then you get something from say Facebook Messenger, an old acquaintance, oh sure, I remember.  And then, it's, 'oh, you don't know..."

I let the cat out, and now mom is sitting in her chair, mostly quiet, but a presence.  I don't want her to know, of course, that the cat is out at this hour.    My face falls grim again.  

Mom comes in as I'm starting to do the dishes from dinner, wiping the bacon grease from the reheating plate the fish sat on.  "How can I help," she asks.  I don't say much.  "I know when I'm not wanted," she says, with a sigh.

I finally have the energy, around 3 AM, to look in the fridge, taking out the chicken thighs and boneless breast, wrapped like the fish, but on thin gold yellow styrofoam, with the little watery mattress with chlorine chicken pink slimy juice.  And then comes Mom again, starving she says, and I'm about searing the thighs in too much olive oil, after laboriously chopping old carrots and then new ones, the celery, the onion, then searing the breasts, and I have to say, Mom, I'm sorry, I don't feel like talking much, when she asks me what's going on, and I elaborate why I'm glad I purchased a Gretsch guitar at a good price on a President's Day Sale, an old reliable friend of mine, an artistic mind, a curator, a publisher, her artist boyfriend stabbed her to death in Berlin, last July, and then he drove away and killed himself in the lake house she had, a nice little project they seemed to have together.  23 years ago, she and Roland took me swimming in one of those pristine lakes east of Berlin.  There were guard towers, the party apparatchiks were allowed their peace by the lake.

She grew asparagus, it was a fixer upper, her little house by the lake, sparse and tasteful, used year round.  She and him.  Saul, the self taught artist and photographer, from up by the Humber, Lancashire, Larkin country, I would guess now.  Yes, he was troubled, they say.  He used his darkness, his depression to create.  

Family, we're all a bunch of creeps really.  Insecurity with other people is our only true guide, so that our art doesn't get overblown, costing other people too much in its wake.

Hemingway did smart things, like build little out buildings where he could go and write alone, not be bothered by wandering family members.

To her credit, she gets it.  I'm sorry about your friend.  Is it in the news?  Young people need to know about this.  She was 53, I tell her.  Yes, you're right.  People need to know about this sort of thing.

In fact, the first pictures of his art I ever noticed via her social media, or facebook, was his sacrilege of the poor old cross, of poor old Jesus, done up, if I remember with smears of blood, that sort of thing.  More of a mocking than anything else.  And even then, I thought, seven eight years ago, creep.  Unfortunately, the extreme and the grotesque statements, are read less as juvenile, less as creepy, weird, a very unhealthy thing, a kind of inner poison letting itself out, which might be good on the one hand... more of a current style, or that sort of a thing, a bold and valid voice, place that in quotation marks.  Saul, the artist, the provider, the artist, in between one thing on the one hand and the deeply troubled thing on the other, New York, Berlin, Brad Pitt in Florence, they'd buy that sort of a thing.  And I'm sure, yes, he was a talent, sure...  but the cost, yes, one fears it, it will come out, not being anyway near normal, wearing the black trappings of the contemporary art world...

But best yet used to insecurity early on, at a decent age, at a time you're emerging from the good health of youth, always running things off, before you encounter the true blood competition of human beings with themselves, the taking, the attractions, the selfishness you need in order to succeed.  Best you face failure and ostracism, left untended by the good light and the good water you deserve, sinking into your own shyness, the sense of ridicule, "you're weird," "you're making a fool of yourself with that guitar," "you pissed away yet another thing.."  Rejection outright.  Yes, I'd rather that be my star rather than the praise that just leads you down  into your own hole...

The only thing that makes art true, I mean, besides showing up and the constant practice and the proper flukes of condition and attitudes at a certain point in time, what makes it true is the character within.  And that lies invisible, and unknown, protected in the soul, a decency about it.  And even at your worst, you'd simply say, leave me alone.