I almost pant with stress sometimes.

The rain came through, from Ida's remnants, unheard of downpours, flooding the great cites, Philly, New York, but sparing us up north.  Mom comes down and tells me she needs to call her mother, her sister.  I show her the sheet with the phone numbers in magic marker.  She's nervous.  A lot of people died, she says, I have to see if everyone's okay.  I have to call my mother.  And all the other people.

Okay, mom, yes.  I get her through the dialing of the phone numbers.  She leaves a message for my aunt, uncertain, not realizing she's speaking into the answering machine.  Maybe my coaching doesn't help.  Mom, you're speaking to her answering machine...

I've already come up the stairs, figuring I might sneak some tea, maybe duck back down and hide and meditate some more.  I have the chilled tea, and the chilled lemon water, checking on things in the fridge.  I get the kettle going on the front left burner, smaller, on the stove, and there are dishes from last night's dinner.  The small pot used to heat up a batch of the ground turkey in sauce.  Silverware.  Mugs.  Cat dishes.  The hot water running hot, soap in the pot placed on top of the other dishes, get that clean first, and rinsing it will take the soapy water down to the rest of the tub.  I get the bowl, the big dinner plate, the mugs, first into the drying rack in the right sink, then placing the rinsed dishes into the open dishwasher rack.

And that's when mom comes down.   Just when I've got the countertop cleaned off.  She'll complain it's still wet.  All I had left to do was to take a Lysol wipe, the kind everyone has been using since the Covid outbreak.

Mom's trying to dial Sharon, poking at the numbers, but somewhat able to dial a number with her finger, the one she uses to tap on the car window when making a point, when my aunt calls, getting through, from what I can tell.  The talk turns to the bears who visited in her yard.  A mother and cub.  

While they are talking I take out the recycling, check the mail.  Still no package of my mail forwarded from my neighbor.

I take a shower after I feed her, the chicken artichoke lemon dish I attempted the other night.

Mom's pushing me, for fun, to see people, to maybe take a little ride.  

I'm still up, back downstairs, putting on my trousers, but I start to feel weary and woozy again, my inner head spinning from the pollen.  I want to go hide again, not that I want to.  The disorienting stress of trying to entertain a mad person...

I slip down the stairs and meditate for an hour or so.  Half of it close to the level of sleep's unconsciousness.

Again, after the groceries and back home to the apartment, with her along for the ride, that's enough, I'm fried.  Constant negotiation.  Knowing you have better things to be doing than some senile old woman's lark.

Okay, mom, do you want to go to The Press Box?  

I'd love to, she says.

Later at night, after all that, I slip out of the house.  I've had two pints of the Guinness, and maybe there's something a little bit more interesting than just sitting here depressed out of my mind and mom upstairs, depressing to stay in, but it's also, I come to find out, depressing to go out.  My friend Mike is playing outside at The Sting, and he's riled up, hitting his pedals and bringing one Takamine guitar to be an orchestra, the crowd is bringing him on, a drunken guy wants Skynyrd, I sip another pint and the college girls wearing the same halter top uniform and jeans come through on their way to the popular places.  And then one of his older guitar monk guys shows up on the scene, and the next thing you know it's an Allman Brothers type jam, "I've got one more silver dollar," and the slender woman is letting out a "yyyeeewww" sort of a cry of encouragement, with her arm up in the air, a slow wave going through her body, and then singing along with the next one, another Allman Brothers...  And the pints are starting to burn down in my pipes, and it's a general gloom now with the backlash of the long nights now swept away by the encroaching cool nights of darkness and college drunkenness painful to watch.  I've seen an all of the faces, more or less, studied who I can through my different lines of view, not encroached upon anyone, minding by own business.  

There are booming noises all over, almost bass feedback, but no one seems to notice, both from inside the bar, and outside.

I make a quiet exit.  I take a walk along the main strip, college kids, all the girls, virtually all of them in halter tops, or crop tops, or bikini type tops almost, jeans, a summery look.  It's getting cooler out now.

I walk back to the car and there's some poor drunk kid stumbling, a big strong kid, shorts, white tee shirt, out of control the yard between the Sting's parking lot and the next houses up.  He walks along the yards, stumbling, falling down, hiding in bushes, then getting up and stumbling again.  As I get to the car I overhear him talking on his cell.  He doesn't even know where he is.  I'm about to follow him, to tell his friend where he is, but he slips away into the darkness of the side of a house, disappearing, as a garbage can is disrupted from its place on cement.  

I drive around the block, and then home, left after the blinking traffic light at the Sub Shoppe.  

When I get back, oh, sigh... let a load off, but I can't relax, because I have this feeling now, everyone, everyone, has got me over a barrel, in every situation or circumstance in my life.  And it's a horrible feeling.

I brave going up the stairs, around one in the morning, give mom her crucial late night little pink pill and find some television to watch together, and the cat's there, climbs over on me after jumping down from the book littered bed, and mom lets me change the channels and sweep through the channel offering guide that she says gives her a headache, and I find the BBC has the Alaska temperate rain forest, the one Trump wanted to mow down and dig into and kill everything for the sake of his buddies greed.  

It's pleasant enough, while mom focusses on picking cat hairs off her little sweater jacket.  I watch it, with her, sort of, flying squirrels and truffle spores, hummingbirds, bears, moose.

She comes down later, while I'm busy in the process of rueing my whole post-parent world...  I'm starving, she says.  Okay.  I have a harder and harder time identifying with her.  Okay, mom, I have some of the chicken fajita we had at dinner, okay.  I get out the styrofoam container, a plate, spoon some out for her.  She keeps asking me, what's this, what's this.  It's chicken, mom, chicken fajita.  Peppers, onions, you mixed the guacamole in...  Where's the guacamole?  Well, mom, you sort of mixed it in, there's some, and that's the chicken, yes...

She gets up, waddles over to the kitchen door, peering out from her hunch.  Are all the animals in?  

She sits and peers over at me, staring almost.  "What are your plans for today?"

Mom, I'm just unwinding still.  It's three thirty in the morning.  I'm just calming down.  That's the main thing, get some sleep eventually. Tomorrow is another day.  I haven't thought of it yet.

She stares at me.  

If I were a happy person with a normal life I might have plans, but, no, I don't have any plans.  If I had wife and kids, or anything, a career, I'd have plans, but I don't.

"You hate me," she says.  "I'll just go Kill myself."  I look, peering back over at her.

Right now, I'm just trying to come down, mom, to just calm down and eventually get some sleep in.  Okay?

But she's a good read, politically, a shrewd read of character, at least some of the time, enough so that you'd always listen to her impressions about someone, her read.  And yes, because of her creepy over-reliance on me, yes, I have become to hate her, if you are to look at it from a practical every day point of view.  I mean, of course we all have our soft memories, but now I'm looking over at the wine bottle, realizing I've not even begun to drink, and she's turned my evening in such a way just like everything else is doing so, making me completely irrelevant as a human being, unwanted, obscure, and not willing to really listen in and bow to everybody else's little show.  Enough.  I'm tired. I need my space.

Okay, fine.  She pushes it until the point where she brings out her drama, well, I can see I'm not wanted here, you don't want anything to do with me...  And walks her stupid old wide troll body away from me still with her shoes on and her old lady haircut ugliness, the snow monkey salon look.  Not her old feminista look.

I like the humble people, the poor, the mournful and all that, but the crowd at the Sting, tattooed, pierced, neck tattoos, the pain I am self-conscious about, the son who's wasting his life in a barroom, shooting pool, because it's "cool."  The lost sheep of the herd of one hundred, is there any better definition or model...

"Somewhere in time," that's Kurt Vonnegut's line.

Somewhere in time, Ernest Hemingway is up on the top floor of a tenement building in Montparnasse.  Cold water flat, a fireplace, a shared privy down the hall.  And he has not come up with his first hit, that one true sentence that he will use as a foundation to build something on.  Is it up in an orchard in the autumn, up in Michigan,  a Three Day Blow, or is it elsewhere, is it the memory of the moment that is as close to being in the now, as best as he can be in the present that is his mind, which could also be a memory, freed up old synapse that is at last firing now.

Firing now like Kurt Vonnegut's own teenage self, jerking off and making model airplanes in the privacy of his own room, high school days, health, parent's house, Indianapolis.  Breakfast of Champions?

Somewhere in time, Kurt Vonnegut is lifting another Pall Mall unfiltered cigarette, in a mood somewhere between desperation and depression and a good hearty laugh, even afforded to the ones who are alone in their reveries.  Fair enough.  It's what we do with our alone time, just like the flying squirrel male up in the rain forests of Alaska, looking for a mate, but different.

Traveling in time.

I watch an Episode of The Chosen, the series about Jesus found on YouTube, surprised by my enjoyment, the way it calms me, like nothing else can somedays.

I've moved down to the basemen again, with the dehumidifier on.  A bottle of pinot noir, some ice cubes in one of the clear plastic two quart containers I use to store my tea after it cools, or pee in when I'm hiding out down here to keep away from the great drama.  I took an electric guitar down, a Gretsch, old style American country and rock and roll, like a jazz hollow body, but different.  

Down in the basement, where mom cannot intrude, beyond opening the door above from the hallway like a divine word in negative, line shining down, saying, "what a mess..."  after she calls, "is anybody here, is anybody here," and sometimes I just stay hiding.  Don't think.  Thinking is only going to be bad.  Yes, sentimentally, it is the Saturday of Labor Day, and I have a vision of how we could drive out to the vineyard, have some wine, some smaller meals, and be for a little while amongst normal people, not orphans with no picnics to go to.  Meet a nice schoolteacher type, a woman who is a woman, not a pain in the ass.  Be lifted out of my isolation through that thing all people need, not the image, but the real thing, and how sad I missed so much obsessing about the image, the artistically complicated issue.  I missed the real girl I should have married, somewhere along the line, not sure where, a good four of them at least.  Missing them, not realizing who they were, how kind, how great, how loving, how just nice to be with.  I was so trained to be used to complicated, and how complicated complicates your own small life, twisting its ways into mazes and matrixes that you get lost in, then can't for all your powers get out of, and no one can help you.

Somewhere in time I am sitting across from my mother in a beautiful Italian American restaurant, after I guide her in, to my impatient nerves as she seems unable to aim herself in any particular direction that to me would make sense.  It's as if she cannot decide to go right or left or straight, given what's before her.  His frustrates me.  Mom, the dining room is this way, and then the first obstacle, the kind woman who is the hostess and also the bartender.  The bar is in the other direction.  Do you have room for us orphans, I ask her.  

Somewhere in the large loaf of bread that is time laid out in the understandings of modern physics, take a slice, anywhere you want, it's the same loaf, all the same, whatever you see, somewhere in that time my mother is getting grumpier by the second, and I have realized that today, September Four, in the year 2021, this, as they count and tell us so that banks and the post office and trains and everything else will keep running, I have realized today that today is the anniversary of the most inexplicable thing, the passing of one of the closest friends I ever had, a gentleman named Uli, who worked very very hard for the IMF, and whom I had the honor of serving, twice a week, even if it was late and we kept the kitchen open for him.  He was my friend.  We listened to Dire Straits together, and I'd have some wine, his visit being a signal that I could join in, quietly, as German efficiency might have indeed demanded.

Mom is looking at me, with a cold stare.  She asked me about Facebook, I show her her page, I show her how a friend sent her a compliment, what an honor it was to be her student, but she doesn't get it, again, her mind being unable to navigate, even so as to see what is right there in front of her.  That's when the Uli anniversary thing grows on my mind, and with a sip of wine, I'm feeling it now.  The words of Genesis.  And God made the light to shine over the darkness.  

Labor Day weekend.  He had just retired from his main job he'd had for years and years.  Dropped his son off at college.

Mom is asking me again, what happened, and I've already told her, and I cannot tell her again.

We were here before, she says, as we were, in the same booth.  When something big had happened.  Yes, mom, we were.  The death of your friend, you had babies together...

I raise a glass and say, okay mom, let's do a cheers.  To Joan, to Uli.  So I raise and she raises, and we look at each other, but she puts her glass down and I have a sip.  Mom, you're supposed to sip.  I mean, that's the point.  Cheers.  To your health.  She looks at me.  Oh, so I've done something wrong.  No, mom, I'm just trying to...  Let us try it again.  Slightly more success, but as much confusion.  Jesus Christ.  Our Utica Street greens, smaller portion has arrived.  White beans, finger tip sized sausage, the stewed wilted escarole.  Have we ordered yet?  I'd like some warm bread, not this.  Mom, the bread's fine, that's how they do it there.  You always put the other people before me...  No, mom, it's just their system, relax.  They are professionals.  This is a great restaurant.  Please, mom, just enjoy.  She looks at me, pokes and takes. bite.  Her salad arrives.  One of the most boring salads you could imagine, but somehow still, just right, perfect, in fact.  Iceberg, barely enough vinaigrette, the house dressing, which is good, not overdressed into the soggy.  I've ordered the veal parmesan, and they are getting busier.  I hear the hostess woman tell an older couple, who still know how to live, she's doing two jobs tonight, as the bartender had baby sitter issues.  But life runs on, and things are okay, and this restaurant is a steady gem in people's lives.  Canale's.  Since, 1954...  The broccoli will be over steamed, but the gluten free spaghetti I am looking forward to, you need your carbs.

I'm thinking of Uli, and I remember, in time, during the shitty year in which my cluelessness at living as an adult began to more clearly manifest itself, and I moved away from Decatur Place, cast out, when Jorge had his breakdown of health and turned the page in life into no longer being able to live independently, a thing I saw going on, but did little about, not being a very good Samaritan, and I think of how beautiful Betsy sent me a text from her work down at the law school at the foot of Capitol Hill, where she coordinates an excellent program of fitness and yoga, how she got me out of my apartment that night, the first anniversary, when I was just going to go sit in a grove of the pine trees on the river bluff, she got me out, and because she is a godly beautiful person.  And that's worth a text, to say, hey, thank you, Betsy, you treated me right that night, and what a beautiful godly person you are, and I want you to know that.

This takes precedence over mom's bitter watchful eye, as she tells me again, she wants a god, and I say, yes, I remember we had the wolfhounds, but that's when we own the property, and she's about to throw a napkin and a fit at me, how I always am out to defeat and destroy her...

And Betsy is on her way to a wedding, and tells me she's just been through a rough two weeks, has no energy left, just wants to stare at a wall for five hours, and I tell her that this is pretty much exactly what I've been doing too...

But mom is sighing and perturbed and asking me the question again of what happened to my friend, and who the children of her friend Joan who passed away are, and there's not much but give basic answers and tune her out.

To go back to my slender chaste dopamine finding channels, a glass of wine, a guitar, the satisfaction of playing an old song..

Even when everyone else has got you over a barrel...

But that is something else, and now we are somewhere in time, a slice of bread, Italian bread, the white bread school style, wrapped in a Burgundy cloth napkin, and I have no resistance to it left in me, even as we have over ordered.