We go out for the usual errands, me, alone, trying to keep mom entertained.  We go out by Rice Creek and Fallbrook, but it's too hot for any kind of a walk with her, and the pollen has got me anyway, even with a mask.  Then eastward, not bothering to go as far as the lake, into town, for a stop at the health food store, Green Planet Grocery.  Detox tea, aduki beans, some parsley, bone broth.  Anything to help allergies?  Okay, sure, throw that in too.

Swing by the Big M.  And then, let's check out the farmer's market, Thursday afternoons.  I'm just going to a get a few tomatoes, from the Amish, down by Auburn.  Throw in some plums, a zucchini, sure.  Back at the car, mom, would you like a sausage sandwich?  We get one and one shaved steak, no cheese, green peppers and onions.

We sit in a park bench, and I take my N95 mask off, and we eat everything, bun included.  As garbage can bees buzz at our sandwich rolls held carefully anyway in a sheet of wax paper, which is not enough to hold everything, the meats, the onions, the peppers together without spilling.  The aromas are fantastic.

I get mom back, it's still hot out, but she's on top of me in the kitchen, wanting to share how's she's putting away and organizing the additional fruits and vegetables I get goaded into purchasing from the humble famers.  She pushed for the haricot verts, goading me for "always saying no," but now she says its was my choice.  Okay.

Then she's trying to coax the cat back inside.  Mom, I just let him out.  He's been sleeping inside all day.  Minor tantrum, about the cat, pleading me that he doesn't know where he is.

I can't take it anymore, I sneak out the backdoor.  There's live music in town, under the big umbrella thing along the river by the war memorial and underneath the shadow of Saint Luke's apartment building for the elderly, , and you can bring open container, a cooler, a cider in if you want.  The music isn't quite as advertised.  Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.  By the railing along the river I talk to a guy from Hawaii originally, who's smoking a cigarette.  Just lost his wife, eight months ago.  Yes, he pulls fish out of the river, big ones, soaks them coconut milk overnight to get rid of the poisons, the mercury, the metals.  His son is the baker, or maybe, as I remember, the head cook, at Canale's.   Maybe he's the chef.  Mom calls.  What about the people coming over for dinner...  

Over the facebook, my friend Mike is playing guitar, down at Gibby's.  So I end up going down there, drinking ciders.  I hope he'll let me up on stage, and he makes a brief offer, so he can take a break, but I don't jump on it, and then he gets carried away and forgets.  Later, his ex wife joins him, and I keep going back in to get another cider, and forget about wearing my mask.  It's still warm out, my glasses fogging up if I do.  

So I'm there, late.  Always the gentleman I help Mike pack up.  A woman comes by, and he's glad for the help to get him along packed up in his car and out of there.

I get back too late to give mom, sound asleep, her pill, and I eat some meatballs and chunks of sausage, cold out of the pot.  Off to bed.

And then the next day,  I get up to give mom her pills, but that's all that's happening today.  I go back down and fall asleep again.  Dream of having some fantastic photographic place, far away, like Siberia, and I'm lining up shots by a stream and the grasses at dusk, greys and browns and earthy colors, and across the stream, I see mom climb up the bank, and then she falls, back down, over the rocks, not quite into the stream.   I run and check on her, and of course, that's it.

So I chose, over family, drinking, and hanging out with interesting people, as if I had no family, as if I rejected all they had given me, and so I deserve to be where I am, having given myself no goal, but to drink and be creative, and hang out with people, and never did I bother or take the time and effort to focus, to develop a skill.  Beyond the half-assed ones...

Caretaking you demented 82 year old feeble hard of hearing domineering strong willed mother:  every day you just try to survive, you try to keep your sanity.  That statement alone tells you that it's not really working.

The days skip ahead, as if on their own, each one of them full of a peculiar blinding pain.  Too heavy the mind at the end of them to recount.  A Friday evening dinner at The Press Box, mom turning away from me when I look into my phone, a text from my oldest best DC friend, who is busy, and who's wife has taken an issue with, so I don't get a clear chance to talk to him, all of which is far too tedious to repeat to mom, to repeat myself, again.  "I'll just walk out now."  I gesture with my hand, open palm, go right ahead.  So it's getting to be a scene even every time we go the old easy place.  Not wanting to drink, I immediately order us both wine as we get sat.  I order the fried fish, mom gets a chicken fajita, so I can make a sort of fish taco without the tortillas.  

I'm so tired of her by the time we're done I was just going to drive straight home, but I take her by the park by the lake, and there's a small polite musical group playing gentle songs on a platform overlooking the marina.  More time I don't want to be outside, with the ragweed pollen, and I'm tired of walking alongside her, but I deal with it.  We walk down and find a bench, easily enough.  I've come to just not walk with her best I can, without her falling over, it's just to irritating.  I'm trying to stop listening to her.  We look down from the park bench on the trio, seeing their backs.  "Are you ready for a thing called love," the lady, singing, sings, sounding pretty much like the real thing.  The guitar player, playing a Taylor, is very organized and crisp.  They do a Squeeze song, "tempted by the fruit of another," with the other guy adding conga drums, and it works.  Crisp.  A lot of acts were rained out down to the south in Syracuse, the vocalist tells the crowd.  Thank you, Oswego.  I can't remember now, the first song they were playing when we came, but I could hear they were good, even as exasperated as I am.

About a half an hour after we get in, I start feeling heavy, and I'm down in the basement hiding anyway in corpse pose anyway.  Then I wake up, putter around for a while.  I got her her around 10, after I'd woken up from my nap.   

I'm up late, I get up late.  But I rally, take mom down to the old fort, Fort Ontario, where they have a reenactment of the British abandonment, along with other activities.  Every time she sees a British soldier, she says, "the British are coming, the British are coming."  We get through the musket firing, with a loud pleasantly surprising bang, and smoke, then some other wanderings, and finally back through the tunnel and outside the old stone walls onto the golden light and green grass and white canvas tents set up under the big trees by the old light keeper's stone cabin.

I propose getting some cooked sausage pepper and onion sandwiches from Garofola's Importing Co., since we're on the east side of town, but she says, no, shaking her head, let's go out to lunch, somewhere cheap.  But there's no other option than where we went last night, and when I say that, she turns to me and screams, "you're trying to destroy me," in such an aggressive way that I can see her teeth.  Geez, I say.  Okay.  Vitriolic.  "Why don't you just kill me!!"  After all that effort, getting her in and out.

And over our table, after several, "have we ordered yet," yes, mom, we ordered, she says, look, if you're so unhappy, get rid of me, go.  And she throws in a hint of "there's the door," just for extra.  Several choruses of "you hate me, you hate me."  Mom, that doesn't make this any easier, that doesn't help matters.

And I see it.  She has to be on top of every single thing, wants to be, demands on knowing.  

"Look, mom.  I don't really have a job right now.  I need to find a career."  But you have a job, she replies. Mom, what did I do for work, for the last thirty years.  Blank.  Where did I work?  Blank.  Restaurant? she comes up with finally.    "I worked in the restaurant.  My mother made me when I was young."  (Mom, were you even a waitress?  I doubt it.  Maybe you worked the ice cream counter at Howard Johnson's, not that that was easy, but...

"You don't realize, everybody likes you, everybody respects you.  No one says a bad word about you," she says.   Yeah, mom, but what good does that really do me now...

She can sense, by the time the waitress server comes by--she tended bar last night--to check on us, I ask her for a to-go box for mom's salad, and maybe a little lid for the salad dressing, and I surrender my plate without really wanting to, as far as the laws of good service go, but hey, this is a sports bar, about free hands on a Saturday night, mom can sense how utterly tired I am of her, how the last few minutes of this is getting hard to bear for me, given my own psyche, my own personal circumstances, things she can make little effort to understand or empathize with beyond what it might mean directly for her, and a new wave of anger comes up.  "We used to have fun.  We could have had fun at this nice place, but it's ruined."  Mom, I was just letting you know that I have a box for what you don't want to finish.  She's already been telling me how full she is, "I'm stuffed."  But for me to press her, even to suggest the asking of "are you finished with that?" offends her.

The clouds of her anger clear for a moment, as I don't react, just suck it up within, good god, what a disaster this is all turning about to be, and I deflect by getting the hell out of there from the table, to go the use the rest room, a quick pee, wash my hands again, look in the mirror at my wild hair, oh, boy, at least I'm authentic in this.  But I cannot wipe the guilty feeling away of how we might be making it unpleasant for other customers, no matter how polite we might be to the service, for our raised voice and the bitterness.  I come back to the table.  "I have a little bit of wine left."  Yes, mom, take your time.  But it's probably fairly obvious even to the blind that I'm dying, miserable, just please, can't this end, get her home, no, no grocery shopping, no wine shop, just get her off my hands, drop her off, maybe use the bathroom, but get away, get away, get away while you still can.

She still has plenty of drama and arguments and points to make, I can tell.  It's my fault, for one, she can say, for being depressed, sick of dealing with her, sick of looking at her, sick of being near her physical presence.  There's a seed of that I must admit, unfortunately goes back a long way, me, the younger son being the only one get close enough out of some pity, so he thought, to calm her.  

I get her to the car.  First out the door, a thank you quick goodbye to Marisa, the owner's daughter, to tell her I like the area down below on street level for Covid dining having been turned into a sort of gaming area, bean bag toss, stackable wood you then try to pull out fingers of wood where you can until it topples over on the loser of the game.  "Yes, an outdoor drinking area," she says.  Cool.  Makes sense.  I get mom through the dining crowd, and she insists on talking to whatever children might be hear her, and I move on ahead, please, please, please, just come, and finally she's at the ramp, nice and slow.  Yes, mom I know you like the ramp.  It gets very slippery in the wintertime, yes.   She wants to stop now and hang onto someone's car.  

I'm a gentleman enough to not make a show of going straight home, pull the car up, open the door, still her where to go and drive off.  We go by the lake.  It's all new to her.  The students used to fill that park up, she says, which makes little sense.  Okay, mom.  Focus, focus, don't get us into an accident, easy at intersections, don't listen to her, just take it slow and easy.

I feel my own anger, and all the emotions I could have used in a healthy way, imploding my being into an angry bitter core, almost.  

This is why I've staked a fair amount of my energies on cooking, to have an agreeable meal ready to go.  

I've got shaved rib eye steak, ground beef 85/15, ground turkey, kale, spinach, parsley, I've got aduki beans in cans, tomato sauce, diced tomato, tomato paste in cans, soup in cans, stock and bone broth in cartons...  onions ready to go, fresh mozzarella, plastic sealed cold cuts good for a month, a carton of eggs, almond butter, cans of tuna, fruit, citrus, dried white Turkish figs, dried prunes.  I'd like to get some liverwurst, but reading the package leaves me cold every time.

When I wake up, I find the open cans of cat food left out on the counter, sometimes covered with the evil little sharp lid, sometimes just left open to the air.  I tend to save them, put a peanut butter jar lid over them, put them in the fridge.  And I often say to myself, "you stupid bitch, stupid fucking bitch," when I see them, have to put them away, and then later wash six of the little monkey dish dishes for the cat.   

And it's all my fault, I didn't push on ahead, couldn't make one simple stupid good decision, to do one thing or another, couldn't even take the GREs, my head clouded by "things."

 

Sunday, same thing.  I get up late, anxious with a hangover from the bottle and a glass of the Beaujolais, not eating enough, a hot dog, and then later as I prepare for the next day by chopping onions and green and red peppers half a can of adzuki beans.  I feel like hell when I wake at noon.  I forgot to shower, as I should have at some point last night after being outside for so long.

I want to get us there, but am unable, with the massive headache, to get up before 2:30, and I know we will both need to eat something, so I whip up the shaved rib eye onion pepper treatment, throwing on sliced provolone as the meat finishes in the iron pan.  We get out the door as soon as we can, no shower, but it is obvious by the time we are walking up to the gray cut stone ramparts that the party is over.  They're packing up the simple white canvas tents, and the men who were dressed in their period gear have changed, ready to drive away.  

The day is saved when we run into the nice young man who just handed in his Masters in Literacy Education over at the college, who's gone from volunteer status here at the fort to being an employee.  He tells us about the women who came along, as settlers, who tended to the soldiers here, cooked meals for a modest price.   We spoke with him back in May, during the anniversary of the battle associated with the War of 1812.  History is a special thing.

Later, we smile at a Japanese couple with a baby.  We saw them at the bookstore.  I was up on the grassy heights of the fort, then down into the chambers where the cannon and guns would be pointed out the casement windows, finding her where I left her, and she berates me for not being faster on my toes, going over to talk to them.  "You're always so morose."  We drive over to look at the lake, and the couple is walking out to go sit on a bench, and so I make awkward amends by dragging her over there to meet them.  I mention I watch NHK, Japanese public television, and they chuckle, and brighten.  We chat a bit and then mom and I go sit at the next bench, until mom tells me her intestines are roiled, so we get up and slowly walk back past them. 

Later as we drive away, she remarks that it I sad to meet people who you will probably never run into again.  He's a doctor in the first year of his residency down in Syracuse, interning in family medicine.

I get mom home.  I get dinner going, again with the peppers and the onions, now working up a turkey American chop suey and we call mom's friend Sharon after I get out of the shower.

Dinner goes okay until it doesn't.  But by that time I'm finished anyway, and the dishes that are can be easily rinsed off and then done later.  I don't even remember now if it was one of those "you're always putting me down" sort of things, and anyway, I hit the ejector seat button and promptly went down the cellar stairs closing the door behind me, and falling into another two hour heavy pollen hits immune system sleep.  

I'm up later, and I remember how I ended up not feeling so bad about missing the events earlier today, the reenactments at the fort on the high ground over looking the lake.  It seems better to me that it's just as good to commune with the spirits, to look at things as they might have seen them, the vibrations put into places where people were once upon a time.

I've got my laptop out running The Chosen, the life of Jesus in episodes along with those who came into contact with him. And sure enough I hear mom upstairs, stirring, the bathroom, and then down she comes. She sits at the table, as if expecting something, and with her heavy thick legs and short stature and her matted hair, reminding me of a troll-like figure.  "Are you hungry, mom."  Yes.  Okay.  I'd turned on the oven anyway to 425, expecting her anyway, so I get the Paul Newman cauliflower thin crust pizza out of the freezer, rip off the frosted wrapping with a frustrated tearing motion, get it out of the plastic, and I add some thinly sliced red onion and some thin slices of the little red peppers from the Amish at the farmer's market, tear some sliced fresh mozzarella, some tired fresh basil, a slice of salami I've cut up into strips and then halved, and then into the oven.  But it's a long twelve minutes and mom, her chair at some distance from the table peers at the screen, where Jesus and Nicodemus meet privately at night.  You're not going to get it, mom.  She too is a scholar, and thus has difficulty believing in anything, just like Jesus is saying.  It irritates me, her sitting here, as if there were an evil spirit in the room, a stubborn one, somehow very self-centered, offering nothing.  I get a creepy feeling, I don't know why.  Is it a dimness scholars and intellectuals have when they lose their marbles, and have nothing of faith that they've cultivated in their precise skeptical practice of a body of knowledge.  Not fair, I know.  She enjoyed the bookstore at the fort, like a kid does.  And after using the rest room--I had to stop her from going into the men's room--she went back and asked the volunteer, a large barrel of a man with large arms and one tattoo on his upper arm, a former member of the military I would guess, easy going, she asks about how to become a supporting member.  We've just spent $60 for two books, one being nautical paintings of the War of 1812, and the other a maritime history of the locality.

I come over to the laptop as the timer ticks away.  I switch the YouTube by typing in Fort Ontario and something pops up, a tour.  It starts rolling.  "Who's that?" asks mom about the narrator.  "I don't know mom.  But do you recognize where we are?"  She doesn't seem to get it.  Okay.  Why bother.  She leans forward to look.  Okay.  Next up is a collection of the haunted places of Oswego, and it's a mistake to having opened it, and I cut it off soon after it gets through number 2, the fort's hauntings.

Well, I'm waiting.  I thought you said you had some food coming.  That was an hour ago.

Okay, mom.  If I can just keep my mouth shut, It'll be okay.  She'll go back up to bed.

The phone goes off, and I peer into the oven, not having cooked one of these before, and it looks about right, so I get a wooden spoon and nudge it onto the large bamboo cutting board, then over on a counter where I just fed the cat from, and it's easy to slice it with the chef's knife into halves and then quarters.  

Mmm, this is good, she says.  And I have a piece too, and yes, it's addictive.

She finishes her slice.  I feel I'm taking more than I should.  No, mom, that's for you.

Do you want to rinse with mouthwash before going to bed, Mom?  No, I'm going to bed.