"Ted, you need to evolve," I say to myself.  You had a great chance to do that back when you had all that knowledge potential at your fingertips.  A chance to learn Sanskrit, if you had looked.  A way to go with the Amherst strength, its Transcendental ties to the East and its perennial wisdom...

I'd been working on it then, just not very effectively.  And while I was working on some secret parts of the brain, where knowledge is a physical sense of the body and the world around it, the flow of the spirit within, I didn't do a very good job at just that, finding a good job for me, a place.  I mean, half of it worked pretty well.  A flow between myself and the people passing through the restaurant jobs where I worked, first as busboy, then totally dragged into it as The Bartender.  

Oh well.  Poisonings many times over, after riding the back of the tiger into the night.

Mom, thank god I get a break, Mary, her old helper, is taking her down to Fulton for lunch and a hairdresser's appointment.  I have three hours.   So I get her up, feed her a slice of turkey breast, so she can take her pills, she took a shower a few days ago, so we're fine on that, and the clothes she's wearing work, even matching, pink tones.  But somewhere along the line, I guess I was not as respectful as she might have wanted me to be in bowing to her and over her repeated questions to not irritate me, anyway...  so the frustrations between us are there again immediately and that's life in broad daylight now.

How do I do this on a daily basis?  No wonder I stay up late, and hide by slumbering until I have to get up, as she won't fix herself anything to eat but peanut butter crackers or almond butter on Saltines...  Pepsi.

The anxiety level when I wake up...  I don't even want to do yoga, and I'm kind of sore anyway, but she'll be gone at some point, so...  out into the world from my own inner one.  I'm going to take advantage of this day, and I'm up before her...

I take her for a little walk, so she'll know to wear a coat..  When is Mary coming?  In about forty five minutes, I tell her, for the 40th time, and she is beginning to get testy with me.  "I'm not the village idiot.  Don't treat me like that..." 

And then I get set up out back to do a good yoga routine.  I start slowly, just warming up to do the poses, testing them out, making expanding stretches into different poses, legs straight, holding onto big toes.  Nice and slow and deep into the sun salutations, then some of the poses of the sequence I'll dabble with later.  Each pose, as you align yourself into it, is good exercise.  I go back in just as Mary is taking Mom off to her car, in a jovial mood.  

Oh, thank god.  First, back to the yoga.  Self care.  Shoulder stand, plow, headstand, lotus, corpse, and then I'm ready, after a walk barefoot up across the lawns of the town houses, and up the road, the pavement being cool enough even in full sun with a breeze blowing.

When I get back from my little cool off after the good yoga walk, I get out the Meile vacuum cleaner.  The living room, it's enough of a mess.  I was sorting through New York Times piles the night before, but they are hard to throw away, there's always something interesting...  And then the courage to go face the disaster area, upstairs, her bedroom.  I put on NPR, and President Joe Biden is speaking.  And after all the shittiness of the Trump Era, as if it would ever leave us, I get emotional listening a clear calm rational well thought out voice...

Bits of paper, baby aspirins, useful pills for her dementia, toothpicks, batteries, parts of plastic mechanical pencils, paperclips, binder clips, pennies, bobby pins, balled up kleenex, the last bit of toilet paper rolls, and the books all broken and strewn askew over the piles of clothing and papers, mail and old cards.  It's not a large area I've done by three in the afternoon when she's set to return, but it's something.  The vacuum cleaner is still laid out, coiled flexible tube, cord, the business end of long tube

The good yoga and work mood gets immediately dashed, as soon as she comes in the door.  She wants me to sit and talk to me...  "You were going to do something weren't you, how did it go..."  Well, yeah, I did yoga, and then I did some cleaning up.  I explain.  Nothing in particular.  "No, something about your head," she says.  "Well, yoga is good for the body, good for the mind...  meditation, poses, keeps you calm..."  No, it was more than that.  I shrug.  She gets angry at me as I go up the stairs, to see where I am in my little projects.  I feel dusty now, in need of a shower.  "Okay, fine, leave me alone." 

And I'm getting ready for the shower and she has worked herself up into the high drama, help help help, please, someone help me...   As if she psychically felt how down I instantly became as soon as she was dropped off, how I did not wish for her to be back...

And I'm realizing, by having a break from it, how bad it's been, without any break that was more than sleep or hiding or a long walk, always, when will the anxious one rise to trouble my peace as I try to figure out something to do with the rest of my life, which needs to happen desperately enough.

She seems to intuit these things.

I have not eaten much, just some aduki beans.  After the shower, I'll make peace with her by taking her for a ride along the port and the lake view bluff then to Breitbeck Park, where we walk over and sit on a bench.  Mom's beginning to lobby for going to The Press Box...  Mom, you've already been out for lunch today.  

But I'm feeling a little bit leery of the meatball and sausage Sunday sauce I made, turning the burner down to medium low, putting the lid open just a crack before going off to bed and when I come down the next morning the burner is cold, even though it appears to be on...  I don't want to add food poisoning on top of everything else.

I call in an order from Skip's Fish Fry for a Maine style lobster roll for mom, as she's always talking about lobster and growing up on the North Shore north of Boston, I know about fresh lobster, and a broiled haddock dinner, and this isn't cheap either, but cheaper than if we went out when you add in the wine.

We get home, and the lobster roll, the meat served in separate container with a very light touch of mayonnaise, the bun buttered on the two outer sides, is pretty good, though she hems and haws about it.  The fish dinner of haddock is edible, not thrilling, too big a piece, I should have just gotten the sandwich portion.  I put one french fry in my mouth, and it's salty and good, but I think of my belly and spit it out while mom can't see it.   

She asks me if we should go out for a ride, but I'm tired.  Maybe, I hope, she can just go off to bed.  I told her earlier of how I almost filled up listening to President Biden give remarks at Geneva after meeting with Putin, a return of our democracy, and I hope she can watch the news and be happy with that,.

But she isn't.  Well, I'm watching television all alone, she says, coming down the stairs to hang over me at the landing as I look through my iPhone with the yoga book beside me, as I'd like to study it, the sequenced order of poses, the mantras, the breathing, energy centers to focus on in the particular poses... 

Well, Mom, I've got some work to do.  It's still light out.  She hasn't fallen asleep yet.   

Evolving.  Yes.  This is what we need to do.  This is our chance.  We missed it before, a long time ago.  Now, one cannot avoid it.

 But just briefly, as I woke up late and hungover with a wine headache, mom was not being easy going with me after dinner.  She got angry with me because she felt she shouldn't have to watch television alone.  I'd had my taste of freedom earlier in the day...  She followed me out into the parking lot in her light shirt, following me as I walked toward the road with my neon green down sweater jacket on.  Three hours away, you'd think she'd be calm, but earlier she started right in on me, wanting me to sit and talk with her...

So the anxiety and the lonesomeness and not knowing what to do with myself, her pressure, when I wanted to be reading my yoga book, feeling so good earlier, and then hearing a cat fight going on outside just after I let him out, well, I got on the phone with my old friend Randy out on the west coast, first about the weather in Encino...  

A good conversation with the wine, and then some down time on Facebook, thinking you're a wit.   Mom comes down and you deal with her, you open another bottle of the Loire Valley Pinot Noir, thinking you're okay...  

Anyway, I wake up, probably a bit intoxicated still, and I feel like a nervous little animal, shaking...  It doesn't help to hear mom from below, "hello, hello... Is anybody here?  hello, hello.  Help, help...  Ted, where are you?"  But I'm too hungover to get up.  And when I do, I'm still shaking, and feeling like a scared little animal wanting to hid.

The opposite of how I felt at night, feeling like I was a giant walking below the stars with a half moon sinking...

Then later, you are just depressed.  Things that are slight weigh heavily on you;  a small thing in passing becomes symbolic of all your own failings.  The girl you saw walking your mother through the Farmer's Market...  Make eye contact, you manage a smile, a smile with the beauty of life, but also its ephemerality, the sad things, of tending your old mother, walking her at her pace across the street, half afraid of her, drawn away from the old things that could have symbolized life and pleasure, blocked off now, leaving one high and dry.  Feeling too old, weak and feeble, already, in life.  The soreness of the good yoga from yesterday and the success, while mom was away with Mary to the hairdresser, of cleaning mom's room and the living the room, all of that having faded into the nervous system's troubles...  more keenly felt because of the good and healthy things you were able to do the day before...

Back from the errands of the grocery store, first a New York Times for mom to read in the parking lot while you run into Big M, then the farmer's market, unexpected, then closing out the ride, and back around 6 PM, I go and put my exercise shorts on, take the old towel out back to practice on the dry grass.  The yoga goes very slowly, which is perhaps a good sign of the work accomplished on an old body in yesterday's practice.

Maybe it's the pollen, I tell myself.  It drags your energies.  And, again, you boost yourself with wine to have enough energy at the end of the day to do some work, or self work.

It is said that the Buddha, just as he was about to attain enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, was able to envision all his past lives, his past lives as different creatures, on and on, and even the lives of every being that ever was and will be, in his great compassion.   And so do I feel the little life of the poor little anxious creature ready to shake, fluttering heart beat, and then later in the day moving upward, just feeling a sadness, a heavy slowness of the depressed creature dragging along in some form of muddy burden, and that too will lift, eventually, with some rest, I'll climb back up to the human being creature and remember to be with my fellow beings.