Ahh, but what do I know...  I've made my own messes.

Fear, yes.  That's a lot of what I get these days from her, waking up with an anxiety, what to do with her.  

I don't feel quite so bad today, as far as the ragweed goes, but we shall see.  I was careful yesterday.  I've made a fresh pot of tea.  Awake before noon, not bad for me.

I hear her stirring, from her bed.  I've fed the cat.  I hear her talking to herself, close the bathroom door.  She'll be coming my way soon.  I'm on the couch, not to miss the Meals on Wheels delivery, not that we need it, just one more back up.  

Job stuff.  A grocery list.  A bag of trash to take out to the dumpster.  The mailbox to check.

Why cannot my mind handle the complicated things?  The leaves of distant poplars dance across the road and the phone and power lines wave in the distance, the tops of the trees swaying.  My glasses need to be cleaned, maybe from cooking last night.  

Hello, anybody there?  Does anyone hear me?  She sighs.  She comes down the stairs.  Well, look who's here.  Hiding.  I missed you.  I'm lonely.  How are you?

I'm nobody, who are you, I respond.

She smiles.  I was just reading about the Prince of Wales and what a mess he made of life.  Are we doing anything for fun today?  Or just more loneliness... she says, acting it out, the sadness of such a prospect.  I don't answer.  She goes into the kitchen and crinkles cracker wrappers.

I get up from the couch, put the laptop down, move myself to the kitchen, mom, would you like a slice of turkey?  Yes, I'll take a slice of turkey.  I take two plates out of the cabinet, the clear plastic bag from yesterday's deli visit, and also the little plastic tub of bite-sized balls of fresh mozzarella.  

We sit there for a little while.  So what's going to happen today?  Well, I have some things to do, mom.  I get her a glass of cool filtered tap water, so she can take her pills.  Three today, in the little packet.  The extra, green gel, the vitamin D.  Will they hurt my stomach?  No, mom.  I'll call the Police on you if they do.  That's nice, mom.  

She mentions wanting to take a ride again.  Watches me for a second.  Poor Ted, life's so tough, she observes of my low-key gloom.  You have it so bad.  

All the trains I've missed in life, so as to be no longer redeemable.  The Professor who never became one, who talks to himself now, becoming more and more frightened of his own shadow, so it seems.

We sit there blankly for a few more minutes.  She brings down her empty tumbler glass of Pepsi heavily on the table, for emphasis of something.  She's always liked to stomp.  She likes to bang things, her hands on books.  Glasses on tables.  Hands on her upper leg.  Hmmph.  "Okay, my queen," I say, putting down my mug of lemon ginger water with a similar thud, humph.  "I will not be treated badly!"  She rises suddenly from the table, then walks away and I hear the front door with its seals shut tight.  Okay.  I shouldn't have mocked her, but I did.  I'm not a very good Buddhist, am I.

My mind is dull again, the ragweed, the lethargy setting in of waiting for things that will not happen.  I get up and rinse my mouth out with the new mouthwash, make the effort to brush my teeth.  I go check on mom, sitting on the stoop, still half in the shade.  My immune system is okay today, but the head is dull.  I already feel like taking a meditation or a nap.

Mom comes back in.  She speaks to me in a small voice, cut off, barely speaking to me mode.  I tell her about the fresh bottle of mouthwash.   No, she'll just have some cold Pepsi.  She goes over to the fridge.  She has her hands on the unopened bottle, but I point out the one she must have opened earlier today.  She steps past me as I sit on the couch again, taking my field notes, displeased with going back upstairs to her books and such and her sloppy bed.  No haircut today.  Mary had to go down to Syracuse for a wake today.  It doesn't even come up.  I take an allergy pill.  

I feel the pain again, of waiting.  

What to do with mom today...

I step out in barefoot and take the bag of trash out to the dumpster.  I check the mail.  Something from TIAA Cref for her.  Nothing for me.  

I come back and sit, as the garbage truck comes, wheeling in slowly like a tank, and the high branches of the poplars this side of the high power lines halfway up the window's view of sky.

She comes down later, forgetting that she's eaten not long ago, by the way she announces, I'm hungry.  Well, what would you like, Mom, some turkey or a slice of pizza.  "Slice of pizza," she says, heading into the kitchen before me.  Okay, easy.  I've found I can toast a slice of pizza and it comes out just about right, give or a take.  She likes the Paul Newman Cauliflower pizza, except the crust, a little soft, she says.  

By now it's push her back upstairs, endure her sitting in her Eames Chair throne, giving orders and dissatisfactions, or talking to herself as she reads.  She talks more and more to herself, at least making sense in her narration.  "I need some Pepsi.  Pepsi Cola hits the spot.  Where's a glass?  Here's a glass..."

Ah, so we go out for a ride, after groceries. for basics, newspapers, big plastic jug of kitty litter, Pepsi, not that it's good for her, but she can't seem to go without it, some cider for me, as an option to the Pinot Noir...

I drive the car out west, up the hill with the Ivory Tower of the SUNY, and the parking lots are full here on the second to last day of August.  The campus is back, humming.  There's the lake.  We drive slowly out past Rudy's drive in, by the water, then further on, out past the old little house and the Airstream style trailer, the estuary of Rice Creek, the lake off to the distance beyond the lower pool, then the cattle, by the junk vehicle farm meets Inspection Station garage, and along past the low lands that remind me of mangrove swamps, full of life, birds, snapping turtles, reeds...

You're being quiet today, mom says.  Well, I gotta think over what I should do with the Postal Service thing.  But I set it slip that my aunt mentioned it to me.  "She's always meddling with my life!"  And on it goes, just getting uglier, as I try to explain it, factually, that you know, maybe I could use a part time job.

It just gets worse.  "She's telling you what to do?  She's trying to take you over!  That's what she's done her whole life!  She wants to take everything away from me!"

Mom, she's just being practical.  I could use a retirement plan, you know, a... something I could do...  I mean, I know it's not what I dream of, but it's something...

It's a hard enough decision to make anyway, and even before that, so many parts.  It would depend on finding a helper to cover mom for the daytime.  If I mention, mom, you really can't be left alone for a whole day....  

I hint at this as we turn around, and I knew I should have kept my mouth shut about where the suggestion came from.  "I was thinking of this last summer...  I don't want to go back to the restaurant business...  I need something that gives you some security..."

I try to keep quiet, or diplomatic at least, about how this decision has many facets, in that, really, mom, are you sure you can be left alone for a day, and she says, I"VE BEEN TAKING CARE OF MYSELF SINCE I WAS TWO I DON"T NEED ANYBODY TELLING ME WHAT TO DO I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF...  okay.  

I hint that she's not making a pained decision any easier bringing in the whole childhood she and her sister thing.  I always knew she'd steal you away from me!!  

And so on.  

Grimly I drive, back past the lower building centerpiece hockey graduation ceremony arena where mom marched in faculty retirement and where I drove up from DC early in the morning with fog over Civil War Maryland Catoctin Pennsylvania foggy lain fields of old vaporous ghosts, through Mount St. Mary's and then past Gettysburg, to drive up all the way to get there around noon after working the jazz night before, coming up through the direct route, slower, Watkins Glen, the Finger Lakes after tracing up the Susquehanna above Harrisburg, up through Williamsport, home of Little League Baseball and rivers, onward, some crazy Autobahn route, 99, freshly paved through curved breast like Pyrenees little mountain baked hills, where even an idiot like me could take a good Nissan Maxima rental car easily on a long straight downhill up to over 100 mph, watching for speed traps, but the road so quiet, in order to take Mom to see Charlie Rose give the Commencement Speech.  Young men are out doing exercises in their Laker Green and Yellow sweats and workout gym clothes, and crosswalks ready for an eager student of any stripe, color, shape, size, but all with good attitude, walk across.  But I'm driving on, in one of the lowest grimmest moments I've ever found in my life, worse than my father's death, that cold cold blooded supreme displeasure of having to deal with some sort of weird evil hatred, as far as I can tell, with my little books and thoughts of Jesus and the Buddha and Jack Kerouac thought and Alan Watts, and here's truly evil, and now she's telling me, "And now I'm the evil one, that's what she always does to me," and it's just so grim and unspeakable and horrible I think of Afghanistan, where earlier we were driving on Erie, heading to Fifth, to turn, and NPR's on, and she says, "well, he has a depressing voice," and I tell her, "well, what he's talking about, he's talking about what's going on in Afghanistan, and the U.S. did an air strike to take out some terrorist thing, but there's also this story... air strike hit a guy who's an aid worker, not an ISIS guy, and it took out his whole family, boom..."  Yes, it's like... Vietnam, I don't know...  That's the way these things go.  Better just to end them, almost, it's just not going to work anyway.

But we wait at the light.  I said to her earlier, look, you're just making me more and more want to go over to the hardware store and buy a rope right now and just hang myself...  but as I'm saying that, no, that's of course not going to help anything, just that, you know, this is quite frustrating and destructive to me if I don't sit up late with a bottle of wine and write about it like I'm doing just now...

Afghanistan.  Why were we there in the first place...  The Russians knew, they're no fools.  The French knew this about Vietnam...  Just, why bother, another Civil War that will never end if they don't want it to,, just pull out.

We get in.  I let her walk in behind me, carrying the newspaper.  I rip open the little package of liverwurst, peeling the outside rind off, eating two, three slices.  Then going out to the car again to get my glasses, as I  was wearing the distance glasses with the clip-ons in the lower sun shining on us.  

The ragweed hits, and I just go down to the basement, I've had enough today.  I've had enough, even though it's not going to get better for me, no.

I've taken the green NeoAir mattress upstairs, but the yoga mat, eco-friendly, thin, will do it.  I fall asleep. And when I wake up, mom is bellowing again.  Help, help, I need help.  Is anybody here?  Where are those bastards.  And when I come up the stairs finally, to see what's going on, with the evening sun streaming in and encouraging the fly she let in earlier holding the door for the cat who sees what I see and hears us argue and me with no other option but to tell mom to just shut up, as she calls from far away, "what can I do to help," you've helped already....

I go up and look in on her.  Oh, I didn't mean anything. by that.  She's been into the wine already, and it will just get rose, I'll get dinner on the table with the stupid organic barnyard smelly chicken tenders with lemon and artichoke hears, rebake a baked potato, microwave some spinach, just get her dinner and then just go hide again.