Early February 2022

Shut the door, it's cold! she says, as I come in with a heavy bag of groceries.  "I know!"  The snow is blowing.  I've been through it.  The streets and roads are in a shape the old Corolla puts its hazard lights on.  The wind is whipping about, twenty miles per hour from the north, but with changes of direction.  You can see it best in the street lamps up at the level of the maples along the road as I get away from the lights, The Big M, The Stewart Shop I never made it to tonight for homework, a place to write on the laptop, have a hot dog, something.  Bame's Liquor Store, with the Open sign, where I buy the wine to keep us going here.  I need to pee as I come out, but a nice police man has pulled over a woman, young I gather, who has, or might soon have, a suspended license.  The man is truly helpful.  I'm surprised to find him still graciously talking.  But that's who he is, man is part of his job, and the other way around.  I wait for the policeman to leave, I don't know why, and find behind the dumpster by the drive in bank window to take a little relief off the old bladder, as the wind keeps hurtling air and snow, tiny particles of ice that will cover a car window blind in a matter of minutes, all around.

I slam the door behind me to make sure it's shut, down the steps, the sidewalk, out to the car again over on the other side of the parking lot.  The snow is coming down sideways.  Blowing as it crosses the vector of light beneath a street lamp.  I go over to the car, open the back door on the driver's side, and look in, to bring back the three bottles of ten dollar Beaujolais.  The other bag of groceries, or my lap top and Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the soda water bottle that will be wasted if I let it freeze.  I've failed again at achieving the homework goals I might have ideally set out for myself.  Dinner for mom.  We will see.

At the grocery store, when I come back, the car is covered when I turn the ignition with the clutch pedal all the way down beneath my snow boots.  I get out to brush it off again.  Did I drop a glove somewhere.  Just getting dark out.

I was up late doing the yoga exam.  Needed wine after all that.  Got up at one pm.  Mom comes down as I drink my tea.  Of course.  Hello, hello, is anybody here?  Is anybody here?  Oh, my savior, she says when she comes down.  Chicken salad sandwich, she responds after I present her the options.  I'll just be drinking tea and turmeric lemon water.  I need to do my sadhana, which you must do on an empty stomach.

Later, I've gotten all the way to corpse pose.  Down she comes.  Same thing.  The ideas are percolating through my body, through all the rocky pores like that old horsebone limestone.  I'm feeling better, but it doesn't last.  Mom is not sure if she's hungry.  Something cold and wet, she says.  Okay.  Was the cat out?  The good mood, the joke she made seeing me lying on my back, has gone away.  What are you going to be doing later?  I don't know mom...  Now all the decency of the yoga thoughts have vanished.

I take the bag of black sunflower seeds out, hopefully it will be enough.  I cross the new fallen snow.  The birds have come back, after a few quiet days at the feeder.

As soon as I'm in the door with laptop, yoga book, wine, she's all over me.  Did you see anybody you know?  How are the roads?  It quickly gets repetitive.  

I duck down into the basement. 

It isn't easy to sustain any kind of professional thought faced with such, and on top of that, "what?" she asks, over and over, so that soon you really feel that you do actually have to shout, but then she covers her ears.  "You don't know what shouting does to me..."  she says.  Okay, she's right.  

But when all my wordy thoughts and moods are shot to hell every single time, as if she had some kind of sense, how to ruin the lad's projects, so he'll pay more attention to me, and I'll be helpless and not do a thing, as such I am owed, because of whatever faults she might perceive in her ordained and ordered world, by now a great grating irritation arrives quickly, a pissing away of life, for whatever junk you're given, the right to pick up the pieces and mourn over all the books and stuff that will meet the private dumpster, because there's no where else for it all to go...

And can I study, can I focus on the last hurdles, the attempted teacher yoga practice, come to the front of your might, open, engage, align, expand...  and whenever I say it, I can't get rid of all the little voices, old cartoon voices, Ola, Señor Duck, Hey Ant, how'd you like to jump between two slices of bread and be my lunch, Ask not what you're country can do for you, my brother need not be remembered in death beyond what he was in life, Monty Python's Flying Circus, It's just a flesh wound, It's just a rabbit, This is London calling...  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray... Purple Rain, purple rain...  Purple haze, is in my brain..  Tis a far far better thing I do, than I have ever...  Tyger tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night...  And the Auld Triangle, went jingle bloody jangle, all along the banks, of the royal canal...  I want to hold your hand, I want to hold your hand... My name is Jan Jansen, I live in Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there...

No, a phone call and that's all truly gone out the window... I can't do homework anymore, or reading, beyond my own selfish mind.  Buddy Holly died, on this day, February Third.  HIs chartered plane, a small thing seating three in addition to the pilot, a Beachcraft, flies off low into a snow storm, the kid pilot who's not so good at instrumental flying, tends to panic, did he miss where the ground was?  It seemed the plane dragged and skidded along the cold frozen cornfield ground for hundreds of yards.  The Big Bopper was ejected, by the end, when the plane's broken fuselage came up against the fence where the pictures of the crash and the deaths were taken.  

But this is a story, of how I struggle to get any work done.