But I thought it was going to be women only, mom tells me as we drive down to pick up some wine for dinner with mom's two colleagues, B & T.  She's disappointed that I will be coming along, angry to the point of hatred.  "You'll take over.  You always do."  I'm driving, Fifth Street to stop or cross at the light at Utica Street, which leads eastward to the southern bridge over the river and the canal lock.  Mom likes her rides.  Stop for the newspaper?  She's not really talking to me.

Mom, they wanted us to both come.

We get back, after a short drive down to the marina and the lake overlook.  It's hot out.  Hurry up and wait.  When are we going?  I'm hungry...  All day I've been telling her, six o'clock mom, six o'clock.

I get her some soup, Campbell's low sodium chicken noodle, just the broth.  She says broth like a 1940s gangster, making me wonder who she might have sat next to the old diner when she was the prettiest little girl.  Soup.  She says that in a funny way too.  It goes way back.  A little girl, the darling, listening to people talk when she is given a bowl of soup.  Before it went south, the losing of the diner, the hard economic straits after the decent successful time. 

I never really heard too much from my father about his family.  Most of it was Doctor Torrey.  Ray Ethan Torrey.  Professor (doctorate from Harvard) of Botany.  There was The Depression and all, of course, the movie matinee double to hide from child problems...  There were the hard grim things, the basic tales, but they disappeared under the force of my father's achievements, in World War II radar weather research out in Provincetown and in Texas.   Calling the weather at Arkansas air field flight training airport.  Issued rifle and helmet for the invasion of Japan, then they drop the bomb, just in time.

Mom has been wearing her light pink denim jeans for at least a week, and they are dirty.   There have been bits of mail, offers from the Sierra Club, and toothbrushes, their heads wrapped in toilet paper, sticking out of her back pockets.  Worn without a belt.  Standing unsteadily in the hallway in the way.  Now we get back.  45 minutes or so til we'll be leaving.  I ask or plead with her, or rather suggest, mom, here's a nice dressy pair of pants, purple blue and they'll go with what you're wearing...  I brought them downstairs where they were draped over the upholstered easy chair.  She goes off crying, "you make me feel like I'm worthless!" storming away upstairs in tears.

If I tell her she might change, no, I don't have any clothes here, she tells me.  Mom, what are all those up stairs in your bedroom...  They're not mine, she says.

The dinner party, four of us, goes smoothly.  I probably talk too much.  These women are wise.  I should learn from them.

I take a nap when we get home, tired out by the 14% ABV Rioja T served.  And when I wake up I mess around, get into the wine again, the 12.5% Loire Pinot going down easy, then play guitar down in the basement, and then next day I don't feel much like getting out of bed, and anyway...  what can I do for a career now at this point in my life, and this guitar playing thinking I can sing is a pipe dream that cycles in with my bad wine habits alone at night quietly going out of my mind but trying to not realize or really cope with that.  Just like my mom, my singing sucks.  Stop, I've been told.  Just like, famously, her.  I wouldn't want to get up and face her, but feeling the usual wine after effects and dehydration makes that worse.  I'll hear her above me, the chair creaking into the rafters above my dark basement chamber, and then she'll start to bellow, louder and louder, and playing on my guilt and duty.  "Help, oh, help...  get up you lazy bums.  Ted, ted, where are you...  oh help."

The family problem.  Which then in its turn makes for the next round of family problems.  

I look at her like she's crazy.  But now I realize I look at myself, and I'm crazy too, and hardly am I scholar about anything, at least she's made a career as a college professor, and what do I got...

And next day, I mention, as I come to the light and try, mom, Mary is coming tomorrow to take you for lunch and a haircut.  

You always spring these things on me.  You're bossing me around.  I'm tired of IT!

Mom, uhm, there's a business card with the date written in, I told you last week.  

More huff.

Finally after dinner I go down to the basement for some quiet darkness.  I've had enough wine.  We've got mom's sister on the phone, she called, that was nice at least.  Floods here and there, the Housatonic...

I go do something not worth a word just out of boredom and too out of it to go a bar and for what anyway...  

I come back, cook another dinner, meatballs, sausage, wine to scrape up the good stuff, Rinaldi provides a sauce.  The terror of being unemployed and without a discernible career seeps into my night, and I have dry woodchuck cider made of pear with no added sugar, and I drink for a bit of a relaxed time, and then I drink to quell the terror.  And even listening to Thomas Merton, who also like a beer or an ale, or a cider, he sounds like a creep too, talking about how if you love with your heart your prayers are open to God, "see," he says, as if he were a Humphrey Bogart Duke Mantee version of himself, with, I must admit, good moments, like, don't feel you need to read all the research on the Psalms, just enjoy them...  

Creepy anxiety grows.  I'm not even doing a good job taking care of her anymore, grit my teeth silently in her company.

What's Ted got to do?  He's not doing anything with his life...  he can deal with it.  What else does he have going on...

But that's not fair for me to say...

But who am I to be, to even try, to be capable of restoring mom her majesty to her original glory, when I'm the only one sucked down into her disaster.  I'm not the one.  I'm the one with the poor but fair Lynn blood of melting pot character immigrants.  Kerouac's distant relatives lived there.

And every time we go out, oh, look at the car, I like that blue.  What a nice car that is...  (Yes, I don't even have one of my bicycles here...)  What a nice house that is...  (I'll never own one, even the most modest.). 

"I hope they're paying you for this," she'll say, now and then, like when I'm toiling away at the stove or a tub of dishes.

I check in on mom after eleven in the morning.  Mary is coming to pick her up at 11:45.  Lunch and a hairdresser appointment down in Fulton, so I'll have three hours to myself.  I'm feeling pretty drained, and by the time I get her out the door, answering her last flurry of questions, I have some tea.  I decide to to do some yoga outside in the backyard.  They just mowed it earlier in the morning, and the sun is muted by cloud cover then breaks free, but still not too hot.  The ground is a bit damp anyway, and my yoga shorts get wet bottomed.  But it's the first time I've been able to do yoga in a long time.  I'm ginger and careful with my left ankle, as I move in and out of pose.  Headstand is easy after a few warm up down dogs.

I take a shower, and then it's two already, after the meditation poses done carefully knowing I have need of them.  Then do I run out across town to pick up the bank records I requested, which would put my return close enough to three in the afternoon when Mary, not wanting to leave her alone, will drop her off.  So I stay, put together a load of laundry, and given my energies today this is about I'll manage, and then I hear the outdoor door open and then here they are, carrying a to-go box.  Back already, fuck.

Did you miss me, mom asks.  Three hours goes by pretty quickly, I say.  She says she's tired.  Well, why don't you go up and take a nap.  Maybe I'll do that.  She asks for a glass of water.  I pour it for her and follow her upstairs, losing my patience, I don't what's gotten into me the last few days...  By the bed she fumbles with her shoes, while I stand there patiently but wanting to yell.  Then at last I'm able to get around her, and put the glass of water down on the little table by her bed.

Then I go do my errand, driving across the town eastward in the busy three thirty in the afternoon traffic and left past the Price Chopper and the T J Maxx to the Compass Credit Union office where they are very polite. 

When I return, opening the door, the place is cool with the AC on, and it's quiet also.  I'd go for a walk, but it's hot.  Tiredness hits me and I go down and take a nap.

My friend Adam from open mic night was going to bring his band out to Fairhaven, but he lets me know, by text, that he's not going, and I'm relieved anyway, I don't feel like bringing my crap music out in front of people I don't know, at least not without having a few, but then I got to drive back, so anyway...  T & B are taking mom to the concert series in the park by the lake.  I could just let them take mom and have a break, but they are wise and maybe they'll end up being helpful.

Taking mom there, even as a group, isn't too much fun, and in her folding chair, she gets grumpy about us talking behind her.  So when I get back finally, and heat up a frozen pizza because she's hungry, and that's her choice when I present her the options, I see there is no escape.  And I indulge in the thick dough pizza myself, and then have two more slices from the heated pizza on the cutting board.  A nap and then I wake up at two in the morning, and yeah, I'm going to have some wine.

I find What Happened to Kerouac on the screen of my laptop through Amazon Prime.  And it has better fidelity than the one for free on the YouTube.  The bottle of Pinot Noir, half full is soon gone, so I drink mom's chardonnay over ice.

But what a mess this all is.  You look for a little self time and sanity and a project to get your head into, but then it's the same thing the next day, an old woman who's acting now like a petulant child.

There was yoga yesterday, but now it's back to full time with Claire.  

There's always something about the mothers of the great wisemen.  Buddha's mother dies after bearing him from her side.  Mary, a special case.  They are special, unconventional.  

I should train her better.  Get up and out the door, and go find a place to do some work, some looking for a job...  But I find myself at the kitchen table, the counters cluttered, silverware and dirty cat dishes in the little tub that I banged around in anger and frustration the other day.  You don't fit into society when you don't have a job.  No one is going to date you.  You shouldn't even bother with it. (You don't exist, except as a congenial shadow in the grocery store, with mom out in the car for the sake of entertaining her.)  Just go back to being the saint, the one who doesn't fit in, who keeps a meagre diary of gruel, steady, boring, but there, not even an interesting pace to it, just the usual.  The pit you're falling into, to write about.  A little chess game with pill bottles, turmeric, milk thistle, vitamin B, ashwagandha powder as I absorb dandelion tea and dragonwell, as mom futzes with the piles of books on top of newspapers and books on top of those, already hoarding two of the three JFK special Parker Jotter clickable ball point pens I ordered through Amazon along with a good sized bag of Moroccan Mint tea.  The cat comes in after mom comes and causes commotion, and I help her feed him with the cans she already has opened I put away in the refrigerator, and she chides me for "being cheap."

I organize things a little bit, as I attempt to reveal through writing the deepest basic truths of reality, which might be that there is nothing to really reveal, nothing earth shattering, nothing particularly interesting, just life itself in its dribs and drabs.   Life as life is, nothing interesting really, just the day to day, dealing as best you can with the moment to moment, the present right in front of your nose.  Writing is about as interesting as watching the little rainbow wheel turn while you're trying to figure out a clerical on-line form and then how to pay for it.

"Can't people put the goddamn toilet seat down," mom the boss says as she clomps into the kitchen in her Keens, hunched as she is, ready to issue a few directives about her things, jeopardizing my own motions, as when she hunches over the sink twiddling with the drain catch when there's a tub of four plates, five dirty cat food dishes, silverware, the spatula I used last night for dinner before we went to the public jazz band performance...

A mist comes, a light drizzle.   She worries about the cat being outside.  "A wet cat, well...  that's no fun."  Mom, it's not raining out...  When she asked me what my plans were, I shrugged, well, I need to go grocery shopping.  It's obvious to each of us that the cat food can situation is low.  I take the large paper grocery bag of recycling out to the recycling bin, cat food cans, cider cans, soup cans, a few wine bottles, some odds and ends and at the front door, then she asks, "Can I help, what can I do to help, you never ask for help," or some such nonsense, and I shrug, mom, I'm just going to take out the recycling...  I cross the parking lot, and god I'm in a terrible mood.  

I come back, and pick up four more wine bottles and a stupid clear plastic bin they put greens in from the grocery store, and back to the bins in the parking lot.

You don't mind if I don't come along.  Not at all mom. 

I'm slow at grocery shopping, a journey of many constant assessments.  I'm so glad to hear she will not be, and willingly, coming along.  I'm tired out anyway, but off I go.  Straight to the grocery store.

Later, sitting in the parking lot after getting some wine my aunt calls, and I remember it's Farmer's Market Thursday, where the town shuts down the Main Street.  Good people watching.  But I'm distracted, I feel distracted all the time now, it seems, unless it's late in the day finally, with mom in bed, nighttime.  At any moment I could get into an accident, because of it.  Thus the difficulty of shopping when mom's waiting in the car, or worse, if she follows me in.  Everywhere.  Everything.  You can't remember a thing, and then you're also facing choices, expiration dates, different thing that shy people find hard to contend with, how to approach, gracefully, taking the other human being, there behind the deli counter, into consideration.  The pain of asking for, yet again, another "light half a pound of low sodium turkey breast, please."  Painful.  After a while of dealing with this, you see why Europeans are so practiced.  They go to the market every day, to pick out the choice of seasonal vegetables, the best of this or that, and I've become, out of disuse and ill mental health, to be too shy to pick out what I want, and now I have a teetering old mother behind me, half entertained, half ready to become nasty and mean.  I park the car, down on Bridge, jaunt into Wayne Drug, with its classic neon sign, to get some allergy pills, maybe cotton balls if they have them, and, because I'm being brave, I ask the check-out guy if I might speak to the pharmacist, no big deal, and he says, yes, she'll be with you shortly, go have a seat over there at the consultation desk, okay, cool, thanks.  She's nice, she's given me and mom shots before, and though I'm stressed enough I have problems putting words together, like sebhorheac dermatitis, she's kind, and shrugs, about the skin tags, little bumpy things, not much we know what to do, hydrogen peroxide?  There is a thing they sell, at the Walmart, a "skin tag remover kit," but again, who knows.  Still, I'm glad I asked, and I'm glad I went through with the drill, and without mom getting grumpier in the car as she waits.  I stand and shrug, "oh, the curse of being blond haired and blue eyed," (which she is too), so I smile and thank her.  

Over dinner, the meatballs in sauce I made a day ago, it gets difficult again.  I can't find anything to talk about with mom, and admit my frustration that she can't remember the jazz band we saw in the park last night...  So it quickly degenerates again, into "you hate me," and in my mind I'm asking, god, can't anyone else help me out here...