It is a relief to get up and off the camping air mattress in mom's old study and find she's quietly in bed, dozing with the tv news on not too loud or head propped up on a pillow reading a book.  With so much paper, and so many books all over the upstairs here, the air is dry, and I cough at night.

I get up now.  It's nice to find I haven't overdone the wine, and in concert, important, underdone the food department.  Some decent smoked salmon before bed, and three or so hours before, a good bowl of aduki beans.  

My mind has space to bring the yoga books back downstairs to look at them later as I pour myself green tea in the kitchen, opening the laptop out on the kitchen table, where it seems vulnerable to interference of some sort.  I write a sentence or two.  Peace, for the moment.  I did some great yoga yesterday, when mom was off with Mary down in Fulton at the hair dresser.  Three full daytime hours, a good portion of it spent cleaning around mom's bed.

It's a strange kind of a job here, taking care of her.  It follows from my years in the two restaurants on Wisconsin Avenue, but it's a stretch, a mental battle, sometimes pitched, in my own head.  She makes me nervous, as a job would, just exactly like nights at the restaurants always made me wildly nervous as I dragged myself in, knowing that such jobs were, on the one hand, a humble living, but on the other hand a complete waste of time and talent, but for the up close and personal view on the human condition, even as viewed through the artificial circumstances of privileged customers, etc....  "What's going to happen at work today..." and in the restaurant bar business, you never know.  You're on the bus, going in, tolerating how full the bus is, what the weather is like, whether or not you've gotten through with mom to keep her calm...

I have some tea and check what the weather is like.  I see the guys, powerfully built, who work for National Grid, neighbors, talk shop as I look out the outer door at the light out front.  Burly quiet men, not particularly friendly, former warriors perhaps.  I hear them talk about Doug, how he's a good guy, who'll do anything for you, how to handle people if you need something, "just saying..."  The sun has not come around the building yet.

Ahh, but I hear mom clomping around above me, and the upstairs bathroom fan turned on.  Mom comes down, getting in my face as she sits to my right at the kitchen table, so that even as I sit hunched over my tea she can look up at me, drilling her prickly consciousness energy into me.

We are on different planes, I really think.

It's an interesting situation to be in.  A man-child with his aging old mother, who accounts for a large part of his creation.  She's about the created world, and the man-child is about what is beyond it, or about studying it more than actually living it in the typical way of seek and grab and work work work.  It does not seem my fate would be one of the real men who work at National Grid who climb ladders and go up in bucket lifts to take care of power lines. 

My principle source of keeping mind alive is Robert Thurman's lectures on YouTube explicating Tibetan Buddhism, along with some art, some music, some old films, documentaries on other subjects...  I'm far away from my old book shelves in Washington, DC. 

After getting mom a little bit of sliced turkey, I get up, okay, Mom, I'm going to go out and do some yoga, okay?  Okay.  But we were supposed to be doing something today...  Well, we'll go for a ride later.  I can't think of anything in particular, I tell her.  She sighs, her exhale, burdened by inner conflicts.  She goes and sits in her chair.  We'll take a ride later, I tell her again.  Okay.  This makes her feel better.  I'm feeling sore, but somehow today I feel it's very important, to keep the ball rolling with the good health stuff.

I go out.  The grass is dry.  I take along an old faded green towel.  I pull my yoga shorts up, tying them a bit tighter below my belly.  But I get to it.  The sun is barely coming through the cloud layer, the temperature comfortable, enough breeze to keep the bugs off.  I find a place that isn't an ant hill.  Sun salutation, and then, the poses that follow, easy warm ups.  

I wander through the usual stretches in their poses, without the fortitude of the day before.  Pain is a good sign of working out the muscles, so I'll just go slow today, I tell myself.

I'm working my way toward my headstand, and I hear mom coming outside.  She calls me.  I thought we were going to do something, she says.  I answer, but she can't hear me, so I get up and step closer.  We'll go for a ride later.  Okay.

God, she makes me nervous.

Later, when I came back from doing fifty minutes of yoga, I feel a vague sense of the form of an internal monk who is happy to go about monk duties, a sort of picture of a St. Jerome, hunched over his book, translating, within.  And one who must go in and now and face something.  And mom has a toothache.  I've called in, but no appointment made yet.

I'm going to take a shower.  Do you want to go out to the mailbox and get the mail, give you a little project to do?

I come down clean and she is just reaching the mailbox.  She comes back in.  It's damn hot out there.  I'm sweating like a pig.  Take a shower, mom.  Do I have time?  Of course you have time.  We're just going to get the newspaper, nothing crazy, drive by the lake maybe.

Mom has to complain, about the shower, about her clothes, etc.

I grimace, as much an inward expression, as anything.  The meditation after a yoga routine cut short by an nosey old woman who can't hear very well...  after the headstand, lotus pose lightens the brain, soothes the entire nervous system.  But having that under my belt, I can deal with the day.

But another devil is on the horizon, as Friday wanes, after the ride, after the bargain, I'll take you to The Press Box, when she suggests we have lunch somewhere, and then you can give me some space after, okay?  Over our booth, attended by Ellen, who grew up around here, and who, when I ask her what does she do to ease the Mommy Stress, tells us she runs, as we eat, facing each other, I see some swelling on along the front of her right jawline.  

It's raining still when I get her out to the car, and I'm too tired to even make a stop at the grocery store, just get us home.  And it doesn't quite dawn on me the import of this swelling I've just noticed.  Oh, shit...

By nighttime it is more pronounced.  I've run down to the health food store to get something to ease her pain, I have her gargling with warm salty water, swishing out with Listerine, giving her aspirin when she needs it, and she is reading quietly and watching television, but we have a problem on our hands and it's beginning to make me increasingly anxious.  I google local emergency dentists, but there don't seem to be many options.  I'd called the dentist Mary had recommended--she knows him from his work at the nursing home where she worked as a nutritionist--but didn't get through to make an appointment, and missed one morning call while asleep, shame on me.  In fact I should have taken care of all this a long time ago, when she first broke the top of a tooth while eating a lonely slice of pizza at Cam's, and she put the broken off part in a napkin, but then someone she knew came along and she lost the napkin with the tooth in it, a tale I heard walking to work from George's old house through the woods behind Dumbarton Oaks to get to Lepic for my shift.  These kinds of things turn my guts around, "you've got my stomach in a knot," as we say...

To cope I have some wine, and cook the basis of an American Chop Suey, using ground turkey I bought the other day, trying to think ahead.  I check in on mom, give her an aspirin, but yes her face is getting more puffy and swollen.  Alarmingly swollen, in fact.  Oh, Mom, I say to myself...  It's a vulnerable feeling, when you see how a parent doesn't have the sense to be able to deal with practical matters enough to take care of themselves, and then on top of that, a cluelessness.  

In the morning I awake with her calling out, so I rouse myself to check on her.  And now the wine is still sitting in my blood, making me as nervous and anxious as I could possibly be.  And feeling sick is no way to help yourself feel capable of facing the sufficient evils of the day, and I don't even know what we'll have to do.  But seeing mom in pain, and worrying about her, I call the dentist's office and leave a message with the emergency get ahold of phone numbers.  

In my morning panic I'm wondering, what do we do?  Go to the Emergency Room?  One dentist calls me back in an hour or so.  Probably best to take her into Urgent Care over by the Utica Street Bridge on East First Street so she can get an antibiotic.  That's going to be her best friend, he tells me, and this helps.  Then later on, as I rest, going through all this in my worried head, feeling badly I've not taken better care, not having insisted years ago we go to a dentist, the originally recommended dentist, Dr. Bozek, calls, and offers up, with his gentle manner, the suggestion that I call her primary care doctor, this being a Saturday, and have them call in a prescription.  So we are spared from having to go in and waiting at the Urgent Care, as the on-call doctor, calls in the medicine.  I have an appointment set up for Aspen Dental, and he diplomatically suggests I give his office a call Monday afternoon when things settle down, as he would be a bit more ginger about what measures to take with an 82 year old.

I'm still nervous when mom comes down the stairs, as she can get angry in her fragile state should I suggest something, gargling with hot salty water, and then have to explain it to her, mom you're going to swish this around, don't swallow it, and maybe you should be over here by the sink...  "I'm doing the best I can!"

I'm heating up Campbell's Chicken Noodle in a little pot with a lid, and the lid top is a cork stuck on the short post of the old lid top, and when the soup is hot, I lift the lid and the cork separates and the lid falls with a little clang and we both jump out of our skin, as mom is very noise sensitive indeed.

An enormous chagrin has been with me, and in studying it with the meditation that writing is, I think of that heartbreakingly beautiful passage somewhere in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck and Jim get lost from each other at night in the meandering channels in the heavy rain fog, swirled around, disoriented, then finally they find each other come morning, and Huck thinks it up to play a little trick on old Jim, that it was all a dream, but Jim looks down at the raft, covered with litter, looks back at Huck, and Jim delivers the most beautiful lines about how he was "mos' heartbroke"and most relieved to find Huck again, still alive, and all Huck can do is think of playing a trick on old Jim's head.  

Dealing with someone, as I tend to react with anxiety and fear with mom's volatility, can lead you to downplay the humanity of them, even your own loving care and best wish and intention;  you're glad to have another chance at it, as a swollen jaw or abscess is no joke.

You should be a doctor, mom tells me.  Ah, it's too late, mom.  It's only too late if you think that...

And so as I take in my dandelion tea and soda water, I gradually begin to feel a little bit better, even with the remaining sense that life always catches me with my pants down, unprepared, and too self-absorbed and selfish to think my way toward some basic productive role in society helping people out.

Philosophical types are drawn to certain situations.  A gambler likes the race track, the poker table, the casino….  The Philosophical tend toward difficult things…. They, we,  like to look in at suffering, as a mathematical problem, a geometry to solve.  What are the other points on the triangle of human suffering and misery.  They look at suffering intimately.  They don't care to drive around in fancy cars and go sit in hot tubs and go to fine dining restaurants all that much, distractions, wave interference with the true stuff, and the true stuff can be almost horrifying, terrible, so far out you'd thought you would never have to ever go to such places, and see so clearly your own irresponsibilities, your own failings.

Libraries exist.  They do.  For good reasons.  You can't go out to the bookstore and get a copy of Desolation Angel, or Dharma Bums, or the Diamond, or Lotus, Sutra just because you don't have your own with you at the moment.  They wouldn't have such books on their shelves anyway, with all the space taken up by promoted things, sections...

Mom rests through the day.  The drug store drops off the necessary antibiotic, and I'm doing the best I can to have her wash and gargle, and rinse with hot water with salt, pain pills.  But by nighttime with the swelling getting worse--her temperature is normal when I take it--she is beginning to get weary of this situation.  Can we see the doctor tomorrow?  Soon, mom.  Soon.  Oh, boy.

This, on top of my own personal sense of disaster in my life, a ticking time bomb, when my own health goes bad... who knows.  Makes one pretty awful tired.

"how much bone-sucking jarring misery this mother of mine has caused me all through the years, having to tolerate her, telling her her rudeness is okay, and she's even a decent person, but just... yeah, I'm the one she chose to vent all her misery on...  And now I'm out of Beaujolais after one and a half glasses of it, and have to switch to cider, and I go up and look at her on her bed, with the light over her she always leaves on, a Susan Howe book open...  How would I have ever known what mental health was like with all of her shit bearing down upon me...  Self medication, that's what I chose.  Except it backfires the next day, deeper into the hole..."

I go look in on her as she rests, and the swelling is worse, not better, her lips closing in on that side of her face.  She's two pills in to her antibiotic regimen.  Tomorrow is Sunday.

The cider now it's just making my blood pressure rise...