And then as strangely and haphazardly as they had begun, my years behind the bar came to an end.  The random fact of my Covid unemployment stretching on into the not so random fact of my mother's need for care as she struggled with dementia in the eightieth years of her life, a well lived scholarly one, now fading into clutter and disarray.  I made dinner for her, lunch, took her out to dinner, did all the cooking, the grocery shopping, the errands, the bills, the keeping of medications and doctor appointments, and of course the duties of entertainment, the most tedious of all in many ways, taking her daily rides, at which point she would do her best to insist that we go out somewhere for lunch, or dinner.  And by that point in my life my own nervous health had taken a battering. 

A thing which had begun long ago, as happens to children, just like her, who are asked to be more adult than they should be, in order to deal with life, with this thing we call consciousness.

But it had, I suppose, in some way, been a glorious run, I have to say, ending perfectly for my cultural observations, having grown out of a Tex Mex neighborhood rather vital restaurant, at a decent price range, to life as the barman, a position earned out of professional respect, at a rather fine and professional, and vital too, French Wine Bar Bistrot in Washington, DC, affectionately known as The Dying Gaul.

And then.  During Covid.  Where there still was not the eager business to go rub Tocqueville-ian shoulders, between all classes, as we had before, when all that was gone, when I had been laid off again, I got the call, mom is in the hospital, and they won't let her go, until you come.  To take her home.

One day, Election Day, upon which the nation voted out the dark and evil times of Trump, of greed, of the gutting of all things that should be in the canon of the great American Democracy, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, general happiness, and voted in a good man, President Biden, I packed a bag or two, remembered my laptop, my D-28 acoustic guitar, loaded up one of the Enterprise Rental cars I had relied on, locked my apartment not knowing how long I'd be gone, and drove up to get mom out of the hospital, and there was no going back.  Leaving a lot behind. With no source of income to pay for its rest, now that I'd been kicked out of George's house, but my old job's unemployment...

It could not have occurred to me fully, but basically all I had, besides the things in my G.I. issue one bedroom apartment on Reservoir Road, was the work mainly entered here as dispatches from the road, from, rather, my point of view as a place where I met people from all over the world.  And I had those memories, of African chefs, diplomats French and Afghan, German economists, Latin American bankers, Arab World and Middle Eastern and Far Eastern journalists, in addition from all tribes of American culture, political and otherwise, my fond experiences waiting on people far away and upon journalists.  Nights, of live jazz, the musicians who became my friends, my own Tuesday Night Wine Tastings I'd bone up on, slowly learning the ins and outs of French wine through my wine company representatives who came to help me.

Any kind of music, we could have talked about, from Cape Verde Islands, to Madagascar, so on.  

At points my writing was fiction that struck as too personal to want to share, and though my road was dull and in one place, it was all I had, to mine for material.  My poor blog, such as you read it here, of dubious value, but as a way of keeping, as Robert Bly the poet is quoted alluding to on the NPR station radio for his obituary, your boat afloat in the storm, by persistence which allows credit, at least some credit, as many boats flounder.  Give people credit, simple poets, just trying to keep up with words and life and love for their people.

Whether or not chronicling my own shaking insanity as my boat came to the bigger waves of life's storm, requiring sudden maturity and grown up responsibilities such as I had interpreted differently, and yet basically the same, as earlier.

No one can really touch their own lives, or tell its story, its stream of stories all that well, to be sure, and writers tend to be a sorry lot, full of vanity and laziness, selfish declarations of independence, a tribe of irresponsible people, more about the Quixotic symbolism of life rather than life itself, believing themselves well enough full of shards of Shakespearean characters and experiences, of poetic moments worth sharing somehow, even if poorly, to a crowd of people not always so full of readership.

With poor shaking frustrated and scared hands he, the middle-aged writer, turns to attempting to marshal his sloppy field notes together somehow.  Give your poor old nervous system a break, the Universe was saying, you can leave those old duties behind, even as you walk out upon a surface of a new life not fully solidified in any apparent and pleasing to the confidence sort of way.  Even as the bulk of daily conversations betrayed the look within at the insanity shared in all character's true inner selves, tales told by madmen, full of sound and fury and signifying only a glimmer of a reflection of meaning, as found in yoga and the like, the long work to gain, or feign, some sort of wisdom worth the paper it is printed on.

Ophelia, Lear, everyone loses it in the end, sooner or later.  There's a lesson in it.