8/30/2023

 8/30

I listen to myself drink the lemon water as I stand over the sink.  Another day of doctor appointments for mom.  

 Calm I say to myself.

My day starts at 10:30.  The alarm on the phone was set for 9:45, but I give myself a little extra.  The realities of the day weighing on me, and Sherry, who I spent the night with 35 years ago, between a Friday night shift and a Saturday day shift, where she lived down in Georgetown off of Q Street in a sort of apartment for young women.  I didn't know what I had at the time.  I'd lost everything already.

I have a mason jar of green tea to work down as I wake up and go upstairs after making the BLT for mom. I see her jeans, the short leg ones, Oompa Loompa pants I call them, on the floor in the bathroom, along with a pair of dirty wet Depends lying on the floor.  I bring her the sandwich, but there she is now in the bathroom sitting on the can blankly.  Same striped socks she's been wearing now for a week or more.  I have to go through it all step by step.  She retracts her usual knee jerk reaction, oh, my feet, they're ticklish, your hurting me, but I get her socks off, one of them wet, and put her feet into a fresh pair of Depends, seeing her long ugly toenails, thickened with fungus, balled up feet.  My grandfather had bad feet.

Then she's sitting on the bed.  I'm trying to get us out the door by noon, but I'm beginning to wonder now. She's absently-mindedly eating her sandwich bit by bit, and she still hasn't put pants on.  So it's a big fight to get her pants on, and her zip up fleece jacket, is on inside out.

I end up having to yell at her and grab her by the arms to get her to realize we need to go.  

But we get there.

I need to sit down she says, as she gets downstairs, her pants zipped but not fastened, don't touch me, she shouts as she comes down the stairs.  I get her out the door, and it's windy out.  Easy down the stairs, very carefully now.  

It's a fight to get her into the car, and I know the clock is ticking.  48, down to Fulton, skies overcast, rain earlier, and maybe some more coming later.  The end of August in the air, and just a few twinges of color at the edge of maple leaves.  The ragweed high in bunches mixed with golden rod.  

I get her in the door just about 1 pm, fifteen minutes late.  

Waiting room.  First nurse comes to get mom to put her chin on a bar and look into a machine.  Then back to the waiting room.  Then another machine to go to, and do similar things, and mom is complaining the whole way through of her neck hurting and could you hurry up.  

I attempt to assist.  I push the rolling chair in behind, looking down at her matted hair.  He doesn't know what he's talking about, she says.  Get away from me.  Don't touch me.  I back in to the brightly lit hallway, feeling the softness of the institutional carpeting, good for yoga.  I let the woman, a nice sort of heavy-set woman, a mother of four, proceed.  She won't sit still.  She keeps closing her eyes.  The woman calls another woman, also heavy set and in blue nurse attendant smock, in to help.  Do you make a lot of money for this, mom asks her.  It's going slowly today.  We're supposed to get across down, really just over the river, to Fulton Prime Care, overlooking the curve in the road where the railroad tracks came through, the big old brick Nestle plant that made the town vital, with factory houses all round.   Do you see a green X, the woman asks mom.  I see some lines...  Yes, look at those, dear.  Finally, either they give up or they get the four pictures they need.  Back to the waiting room, mom wanting to stop and talk to everyone along the way.  

Driving down, flickers of visual memories processed in the brain, two white rubber lawn chairs in a green yard 'neath two pines in a yard as Ellen Street curves to meet 48.  The garage door of the hydroelectric brick plant close to the falls is open, and looking in I see the green metal turbines standing, then the road rises with the golf course sloping down to the left of the road with a line of hemlock, pine, tall evergreen, a flag flying by the country club main hall at the top of the hill beyond the green, and above that a bulbous water tower with cell phone antennae wired on top of its silver metal.  The river below on the left, trees, more trees.  Americana the whole way.  Beautiful.  I switch from NPR to the classical music station, and Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo comes on as the clock nears the hour, and in Minetto, passing the boat landing and the Stewart Shop and the World War Two bridge past the brick mill building and the lock dam, an old hydroelectric plant, onward, we're already late now.  Mom sitting on the bed, refusing to get up, or to understand the nature of doctor appointments and how they're good for you, pleading with her, and no, I'm fine staying here, it will all work out, after I've put aside her plate on the cable box and put her shoes on, after asking her to pull her pants up.  There's a triangle garden tucked neatly in a grove of trees where they rebuilt the small bridge over a marsh.  On into Fulton.  

Then we go back to the waiting room until we're called again, and it's the woman who was helpful, Shannon, like the river, yes, she's Irish, and in this room we're now in after we rise again from waiting, mom sits in the optometrist exam chair and given eyedrops, and then asked to look and read back the lines.  Each of these rooms visits is running long, protracted, delaying things.  

Back to the waiting room, and mom says she needs to pee, the whole room hearing it, and someone's in the bathroom, so we wait, and there's a woman mom asks her, so where did you go to school, and it turns out west of Rochester, Victor, NY, and once upon a time perhaps she was a pretty farmer's daughter, and now she's waiting somewhat uneasily in a room full of other aging Americans, the man with a sort of hunting camo jacket with his wife, he has shorts on and you see the vertical knee replacement scar, and later mom tries to talk to him, and he's polite, says he's doing fine, how are you, but ignores her next attempt at questioning.   I take mom into the restroom.  I'm waiting for her when the Caribbean skinned blend of humanity comes to the open doorway to call us, as the doctor is ready, as she takes the measurements he will later mumble and enter them into the laptop.  

I'll come back in five minutes and now a sort of desperation has come, regarding the 2:15 across town with mom's primary care doctor, Dr. Oauno.  Bernadette is her name, as I get mom out after having her wash her hands, having to take a used paper towel out of her hand, we have to go now mom, and in the hallway, I say outloud, after mom says something, oh, that's... is that Portugal, Fatima?  Oh, yes, that's Lourdes... why... 

In the final office, there's the lean white coat doctor, Dr. Spitzer, and he asks mom to uncross her legs in the examination chair so he can shine a light and look at her eyes, I don't want to hurt you.  Does anyone want to kill you, she asks him.  You'd have to ask my wife, he says.  Where did you go to school.  Syracuse, he says, having nothing of it. 

Bernadette comes back in and I get mom's water bottle out of her way.  I think I just wet my pants, mom says, and I go out in the hallway, and say to myself, but outloud, NOoooo.  

It's 2:12 now, and I call Fulton Prime Care, to see what to do.  I thought we could get there, but... The woman at the other end of the line understands, Dr. Oauno has a full day of appointments, so, no, after 2:30 he doesn't have any availability.  I'm still monitoring what's going on the exam room.  Shining a light in her eyes after sweeping the lens thing on the arm back away.  It turns out we have a 1:45 physical planned next week anyway.  First she says he won't have anything for a month out, so it's good to hear.  

I go back in and the good doctor, who reminds me of Henry Fonda, and sounds like him, says there's only the slightest sign of macular degeneration, the lenses look good, everything looks good, we don't need to see her for two years, and I say that is fine.  Eye drops as needed, after I try to stutter out some small concern, pulling the non-prescription little green eye drop bottle Refresh out of my shirt pocket.  Mom tries to talk to them more.  Okay, mom, let's go to lunch now.  Where are you taking me, I hope it's the most expensive place...

Bernadette, tall, mom always comments on her hair, what nice hair you have, smiles at me in the hallway, as I kind of sigh in my body, have a nice lunch, she says, and you have a nice lunch too, I say, playing along with the big joke this all is.  How long have you worked here, mom asked her earlier, 19 years.  I think of that later.  Do they pay you well?  I don't know, she says, and I sort of chuckle at that.  I've looked at the poster photography... It's all from New York State, one of the girls told us earlier.  

Okay mom, come along, and past the checkout window women and the eye glass display of all sorts of things I'd like to look at and past the two openings to the waiting room, and the old people smile at me as we go, for taking the time and having the saintly patience.  It's all going as fast as I can process, but there's a note of relief as I get mom to the door as she keeps up her tirade, jackass, you don't know what you're doing, and it's all a grand cosmic play of male female in the universe.  

Was it her having to fast before yesterday's trip to get a blood sample that did it?

The bacon cheeseburger American cheese with ranch wrap, a green tortilla wrap, rather than romaine, as I might have been thinking, as I order mom a Pepsi, and then her usual grilled lemon pepper chicken with wild rice and zucchini, myself a soda water yesterday about 3:30 at the Press Box, was pretty good, and I had a few of the onion rings, I got for them for mom.  Then taking her along to see the new pedestrian pier, than a walk out to Breitbeck Park, where she sat at a picnic bench and took a dried tree leaf structure apart as I walked a little further to look out over the vast lake, careful with my mask on still, and hat, after we met Toby the dog, a Shitzu blend, with a young man who had just moved from Grand Junction Colorado who turns out lives on Polock Hill.  

Mom asks him repeatedly where he found the dog.  I want a dog, she says.  Originally he was going to be my mother's dog, but I decided to get away from my family and move her, and they say, take something you love along with you, he says in a sort of almost Southern or Western drawl.  Do you have a wife, mom might have asked him at some point, and there's a slight awkwardness, but it's cool, we've made friends and he's a neighbor.   I don't want to give him the wrong idea.  Oh, yeah, Polock Hill, the church there, St... uh, St. Stephan's... we live over at the Cedarwood Townhomes.  I know where that is, he says.  

When we get back, from the rain on 48, as mom eats a packet of annatto colored peanut butter crackers, her mood improving, making me wonder if this was all, despite my feeding her, an episode of low blood sugar, we get in and she takes to the couch, soon enough falling into quiet.     

I go out to the store to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a few other things that seem dutiful enough after getting mom home and she didn't even question not going out to lunch.  

Now at 3 in the morning she's still on the couch almost 12 hours later after our appointment and our failure at the second one.  The cat came in, he's next to her, and she's leaned over on him.  

When we got in, not ten minutes back, she looks up at me and says, that was fun.  I look at her.  I look her in the eyes.  Seriously.  Are you being real?  Fun?  Are you kidding me?  I let it drop.  I let her snooze off, make another pot of tea out of the same leaves.  

I called the car mechanic shop about the slight oil leakage, the drip on the strut, as I've looked underneath the car, an awkward angle, to find the plug, not seeing any drip, and finding from above the oil filter down there in space between the radiator and the oil pan, but there's definitely a drip and I've put newspaper underneath the car, with little rocks found in the parking lot so the wind won't take them away, seen the rainbow mark of water drop on the pavement, yes, something is going on.  I give him the quickest of sketches about the discovery, mention we were there on the 11th to get inspected and then the oil change, which isn't a bad idea and I wasn't at all sure when we were due...  "It could be a number of things..."  He's a cool guy, I enjoyed hanging out in his shop with the girl who was his niece, helping organize the old garage storage area to the left, the east of the shop as it faces out on 104 out near the farmland where now there are fields of solar, the niece also working at a stable, and I ask her about horses and their demeanor.  Thoroughbreds versus regular horses I forget the words, and her Arabian is more flighty than the usual regular horse, a draw horse or something like that.  The man at the shop, who has taken over the shop from mom's long time friend and political difference of opinion, Mike, aka Mr. Torbitt, who became my friend too, is a sturdy fellow too, mustache, strong, well educated, and spoken, taking everything in easy stride, there was a minivan with a blown head gasket and I saw him shake his head, no, I'm booked solid and that's a big job, and later said, the guy isn't going to make it back to Alexandria Bay, or was it Watertown, well, he found the appointment from the previous service, and tells me, oh, bring it by, how about Friday afternoon, and I'm grateful.  Sharon is going to take mom for the day, I hear, and I have an appointment with Ron my therapist friend, Mary's husband, but I think, why am I telling him about my Friday appointments, talking on almost like a woman.  Well, if he knew what I'd been through and eaten silently without much expressed verbal complaint out loud, yeah, he's a man who gets stuff.  The real world.

The Year was 1965.

 8/14

The year of this musical hit, Prabhupada's Pattcha Tattva Mantra, was, and is,1965, at least in the sense of the year of his arrival in the U.S., from India, when he came to set up shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The same year The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction (I Can't Get No) hit the charts and dominated the airwaves and even the thinking of many a young man, once young, including me.  The depths of the heart were looking for the light, and along came Mick Jagger singing on TV, and the world, for better or worse, was hooked.  A spectacle.  Who knows that the older people thought at the time, they kept it to themselves.

Things that happen in the world on the year of our birth might be said to have a significance somehow.  Why did the great Divine send off a vibration of the great dream to look back at the Great Self of Creation, picking a particular and highly appropriate time and situation.

My mother was born in 1939, in March, the later half, the year Hitler ran the Nazis into Poland, the year Ted Williams came up from the Minors to take up playing for the Boston Red Sox, her hometown, and in fact her father, a chef, who may or may not have had some humble connections, brought her to his last game, in 1960, on a drizzly day, when he hit the greatest of towering home runs in his final at bat, circling the bases, and refusing the gesture of tipping his hat.

Philip Larkin, in England, in that famous year, 1965, was hitting his stride too.  Writing poems like Going Going Gone, considering the pollution of the marshes as the Northern England economy discovers consumer materialism, having left the small stone churches to rot and for bicycle rides, all of which too would be a part of the ethos and the realities of the world one lives in. Poems with a wry empathy for those doomed to sit on park benches, "nothing to love or link with..." And he was the perfect Egghead, a librarian bare to mockery in another society that would come, but did okay in his day.  

JFK had been shot down in the motorcade, a year, two months and few days before, a few days early, scrawny, with poor skinny legs, I was taken from my mother's womb by Cesarian Section on what I imagine was a cold morning of a cold day when the sky was deep blue purple that night in the small house up the quiet street with the Holyoke Range comforting us, the South Amherst Common with its ice rink.  Politics has never been the same since, his speech at Amherst College, about the corruption of power, and the healing offered by poetry and imagining and thinking, becoming part of the strange legacy of the Transcendental Town with its hills of Emily Dickinson's.  An Eden, of sorts.  My brother remembers Tommy James and the Shondells, Crystal Blue Persuasion, playing on the blue Volvo station wagon to go pick up dad from the science halls over at UMass.  Amongst the early words I tried to utter, to clarify the world, before we moved away, in 1968, was, turned out to be, Flower Car.  Apparently, somewhere around the Common, perhaps, or along one of the many fine old roads, there was a VW Bug with flower stickers on it. 

What else... 1965...  The Vietnam situation thickens, develops a kind of cancer, by human reaction to the action of other humans...  Politics, votes, the M'uhlutu'ary, which indeed had one the war against Facism, but now had less of a reason to exist in a productive fashion, after the Marshall Plan, I suppose, to give a quick and unnecessary sketch of History.  There were protests against the war in the old town, Amherst, where people gathered under the great trees of the Common near the churches, my aunt remembering them well.

The man, once a boy, who heard those songs, who was largely defeated by society and its shaping, not able to quite fit in, having played too well along with it, and given the many gifts and talents he could have developed, spent to far too long and too much on the fool songs of This World, as charming as they might be, to play upon a lyre and sing and laugh along to with friends growing up.

And finally, after 60, almost, years later... one discovers the songs he should have been listening to, as once Tibetan Buddhist Monks had come to the auditorium of the Musical Building and chanted, multiple notes, almost like a triad, deeply vibrant, came from the throats of their shaved head saffron robed faith.

From the year, of his birth, something one should not exactly ignore, if he's looking for meaning, if that would do him any good, 1965, the world having inherited much faith and literature and theater and a fine tradition of music.  One comes new to the world, innocent, a babe... and it can take a very long time to grow up, as I suppose he would listening to Jacques Brel, and less and less to the mind blowing moment in Pop Music when Keith Richards steps, with heavy click on a Fuzz Pedal, a new thing, to sound like the saxophone, plays that simple rhythmic three note riff, up, then back down again, while Charlie Watts clicks away almost with jazz beat, but driving, and the whole thing comes together, and Bill Wyman thumps away at the thick strings of the bass and Brian Jones plays perfect blues licks with tasteful and knowing interjection. 

One fine day comes, metaphorically, when you realize it's not about all that, Getting Satisfaction as opposed to No Satisfaction, when the song turns, and must honor the realities of old age, sickness and death, of the finite being who must go with all the grace he or she can muster to face such days.  The importance of the day itself rises, in addition to the original year, and the importance of the Mantras themselves, better in Sanskrit, for effect by the nature of how the language works on the body and the mind becomes a life boat, a way home.