I write at night now.  I got out of my yoga class, feeling like a weirdo, like I'd failed, having to do one of those dreadful teacher training sessions which I feel no good over.

At night, about half the time, mom goes upstairs to bed, where she'll sleep on her bed, cluttered with books and papers and junk mail from animal nature rights organizations and credit cared offers...   The other half of the time she won't go upstairs, she'll fall half asleep on the couch, her arm with the cat, cooing over him as he snoozes and dreams about going out at night in the back yard under the full moon.  

Like in yoga class I hear her creak in the old Eames type leather and wood chair above me, and at least at night she is quiet, sleepy, but it still makes me incredibly nervous to hear her just a floor away from me.  Few things are pleasant with her, full of her accusations toward me.  I ask her to come to the kitchen to listen to the phone messages her sister and Sharon Kane have left her, the former from the road, heading south on from the Berkshires away for winter in Leesburg Florida, the latter with a sad realization of Sharon's nephew sweet Mario, who, on top of some form of Down Syndrome has sleep apnea and now pneumonia, so that he is destined for a long hospital stay, a long road, as she put it over the landline phone line.

But Mom is irritated immediately, and just by playing these messages for her as she hunches over at an odd angle from the table, a refusal to behave, picking at her head, greasy now from lack of a shower, matted curly, like JFK spiral death operating or morgue table hair but not blood, just old lady greasy hair her great logic disdaining circular defeating conversations, by the time you get back to the first point or premise that first point has changed, called into question, as if I had brought it up to accuse her over something, by habit now. 

She is angry at me now.  I wanted to put Sharon on speaker phone.  Mom says, Hi Trish, when the phone line is picked up. no, mom, you're talking to Sharon, and mom's fragile enough where I can't interrupt.  To her credit she has a nice conversation, an attempt at soothing for Sharon, who's deeply rooted dry humor is well rooted in family and spirituality, but mom is so forgetful now, that when I ask the conversation's points, which I've gathered by listening, and mom has no answers, vague terms.  The people will be...  coming together... in in the place over there, so ...  so...  it's hard to...  a child...  like that.   Mom, what did Sharon say?  Does he still have pneumonia?  What hospital, has he had surgery yet?  

Then Mom is mad at me again.  On top of this the cat Yellow Fellow is meowing at the top of his lungs, establishing eye contact with me then looking up at the door hatch handle, the outer storm door, mom will rattle, but he knows the doorknob too, and I am wrung out from being too late trying to do yoga homework up in the early morning before the late unable to fall asleep after appeasing mom after the long Saturday session taking her out to Famous Real Canale's, where I ended up having three glasses of Chianti, and mom having another through some mistake which I did not pass on for the server, so I microwave a meals on wheels tray of reconstituted mashed potato and meatballs in an almost but not quite Swedish gravy with a little pocket of steamed cafeteria vegetable.

She commends the potatoes repeatedly.  Mom, you want so more meatball, and she comes back to a little more.  I remain vaguely suspicious about the meatball texture, is this rice, no?, is it milky bread crumb chunk with this plastic softness, but it's still a welcome meal and I don't have to dig around in the fridge to reheat the ragu tomato usual beef and sausage and reheat in a smaller pot and then deal with the dishes and so forth, and by now I've pleased the cat by letting him free out into the wet damp dark, and now mom is a crybaby about that, "now I've lost my cat," and on and on it goes, the whirlwind whirlpool tornado-ed winds of old age meets poor lone son trying to deal with it all, in face of Eiger wine grumpiness.