As I saw it, I did not have any other way to do it, but to seek rest and peace after dinner, then wake up later and rise and do my work.  The day would drag, taking mom along with me on errands and taking care of her, feeding her dinner, restraining her when she started saying, how about we go out to The Press Box tonight I'll write you a check when we get back, even though I had shown her the local statistics and the risk rate published in the newspaper, and even if I had lined up dinner, told her what we were going to have, gone out for a walk, then come back and started cooking, then she would hit me with different concerns, how her real home was up the road a piece, then we'd take a walk around the building just to get her oriented, and then she'd be angry at me for no reason.  So I'd turn the burner off, put a lid on, and take her for a short ride, over to Cemetery Road, then back along the Rice Creek road, then down along where the peepers were.   I'd get through dinner, her talking as if she was in a good mood, and me saying nothing by this point, grim.  I'd go up to the room and the green air mattress, close the door and fall to sleep.

Then at night, say I woke up around midnight, I'd go downstairs, do the dishes in the tub, putting them to dry on the rack, keep an eye out for the cat, and then I'd have some peace.

I'd had beer one night, just to feel better the next day, and then some cider, but the wine came back and I hoped my head would not hurt after I did what I had to do to smooth out the pain that was almost everywhere now.  I knew it was not exactly good for the brain to have light and LED lights and electronic device screens, to have that brightness, but I did not have time to write on paper.

So I sat and wrote on the old dining room table in the kitchen after getting the dishes and the pots and the silverware and the glasses away, and prayed for a miracle or a vision, put away my worries why the deposits for my unemployment were not coming in deposited into my account, and then I put away the worries about my apartment and all the things in it, my books, my decent clothing to give me some diverse options, I'd then put away my worries about where I was going to end up, where should I be.

And then I remembered I had done my yoga out in the heat of the afternoon out on the mossy soft grass in the backyard.  And by the time I'd done my headstand, holding it, done the right counterpose of the child's pose head down in a crouch against the ground, then laying back in corpse, then mom came out.  And she was not in a panic, and not demanding, and so I showed her just the very surface of things, the chakras, the globes of energy within us to be aligned.  She'd been complaining about a pain in her side, and I explained the alignment necessary in a pose, and how holding such an alignment increased strength and balance and health.  She held her arms out at her side, as I was showing her, and she said, have you ever taught this, you know so much, you should be a teacher.  And later as I said we would, I took her upstairs gently, and showed her how, in terms of the relaxation poses she needed to clean the clutter off her bed, all the books, the papers, the other books, hardcover and soft, and for once I convinced her, and I readjusted her pillows and put some of the books on shelves and straightened a few of them too. 

It made me sad when she was agitated with me later at dinner time, when we had our lamb stew, which was indeed very good, after I added a pinch more cayenne paper and Celtic salt as it heated.  I had one beer, before my escape from her, and I knew, after the three nights of the Hemingway special documentary, I would need some time, as if I had to digest all the head injuries and gashes, the concussions, the ill effects of medication and years of steady drinking the hard stuff, poor Papa.  There was one moment when I'd finished my bowl and just felt I'd had enough and made a motion to the back door to sit outside on a white plastic chair.  "I'm never coming here again," she almost yelled, and with anger she hunched over, bawling for a moment until I came back in.

I had wandered long, away from family, on my own.  And I deserved my fate.  Now my punishment.

But I did not always mind it being alone at night to write.  After I'd been through what I had endured during the day with the human species, a female, lots of talk, enough to inspire all forms of Lear and Ophelia and other mad people, I found I could no longer talk about pedestrian things, or rather, that most talk now, after being burned in it all day with little relent, emotionally charged all the time those words, I had finally that true adult lack of patience to put up with words of the normal concerns, and I was glad I was away, far away from my old haunts, even quiet ones they were, glad I could be alone in my agony in the spring garden, safe in it for a time.

My mother, she had no idea, she could not, of what I was going through.  Of course she wanted me, hypothetically to get back to work, though she would be lonely.  She had no idea.  No one could blame her, given her state.  "I've been taking care of myself for years, all by myself," her refrain.  If I'd tried to explain it to her, she would only feel insulted.  Indignant, an old old habitual stance of hers.  

Setting her bed straight, before my long slow walk after the yoga in the first 75 degree day, I picked up a three by five card, and I noticed it was in my father's handwriting.  Red felt marker, as he often wrote in marker, usually black.  And I remembered.  This was when we still lived in the house on Ernst Road. We were at the same table I'm writing from, but in a place long ago and far away and far better.  But my mother was arguing with my father.  He had a course he was teaching, a beautiful one.  It was called, "Plants and Man," about all the uses and beneficial relationships between the plants that had been created and the humans that had been created, after the first stars and suns were born, and of how all the higher elements came along, hydrogen, helium, on up the periodic stellar table, up until when silicon comes, and then a star collapses.   And the card, with my mother's huff and ire on the left side of me at the table, and my father on my right, and he told her clearly in a clear voice, that judging a course by its title was anti intellectual.  She had him write it out, and sign it, and how here it was before me.  And whose word had lasted longer, even in this chaos.  And I was showing mom how she needed to be put to bed and how to sleep, and later, when I came up to check up on her, she was sleeping not cowering at the edge, but normally, and now even on her side, and I quietly came in and tuned down the volume of the television playing This Old House, turned one light off, then another, and let her be quiet on her bed.

I changed the water in the little plastic humidifier, and went back downstairs, stepping outside for a moment on the back step off the kitchen to look up at the stars, without the back light on.  Very clear.  Then I heard a commotion, bird chirping.  And then coming toward me in the dark the low figure of the ginger cat came, and then he was pouncing forward and putting his big front paws out, to hold down what he might have caught in his mouth, and the bird was still alive and the cat was fumbling intensely, and I raised my voice at him, again, and moving toward him, "let the bird go, let the bird go," the cheeping frantic now, squeezed, and I reached forward, and then I felt the bird go free, flying away, and cat was shaking his head now, as if to clear the feathers out of his mouth.

Mom stayed quiet upstairs.  Blessed silence.  I thought of Dostoevsky, as I often do, up late at night, lights dimmed low.  A cool breeze came in through the kitchen door, the screen lifted up halfway, touching my back in through my tee old college tee shirt, as far in the background the little peeper tree frogs were in symphonic escapades.  And I felt decently again.  The wine was no longer a bad thing.  I thought of my father that evening writing out in his handwriting things he believed in, with his beautiful hand.

And I was awake and alive, having a slice of liverwurst, with cayenne and numeric and olive oil and a light touch of prepared horseradish, forgetting the good sail, as it lasted good with the wine, and I thought of reading the Torah.  

Out back, above the trees, the wind was just now picking up, and it would be raining likely in the afternoon.

Somewhere in the starry night the cat is out.  Kerouac is a small room in a plain low house in Orlando, cracking off writing the Dharma Bums, up late but feeling decently.  Somewhere Hemingway is either by a fireplace with the driftwood burning different colors like the old fire in Bimini's fictional Cuba, just as he was when he was squeezing orange peels into fire at a top floor Paris walk up where he wrote.  

And then I hear mom calling, help, help, and when I go upstairs to check on she's in the bathroom, and then later on she's angry, and I find her riled up about having to shut the window I left open for fresh air and rest, and I give her the blanket Elizabeth brought in her Easter baskets for us when she came up with her family to cover her, then we watched a little bit of the second part of Hemingway, Avatar, and soon I'd had enough of the neat wealthy life of Hemingway in Key West.