Sketches, pre Christmas 2021

You try to live a life working on the meaning of life.  You wait on people, fair enough.

But you end up taking care of your old crazy Mary Lincoln volatile mom.  Broke.  Running out of money to pay for basic things, like rent.  And a job after all this?

So you end up soaking the dishes, getting the silverware done that you'd washed yesterday but didn't rinse, just left in the sink the morning after you cooked dinner and served mom and then got so tired you had to disappear, pretending to do homework, reading at least, but doing nothing, so disheartened.  And the next day is a big doctor's appointment.  But we can't really be getting on the road until just after two, and it's noon now and you've fed mom, so you take her for a little drive into town, a cup of coffee ice cream, a New York Times she won't really read, a look over the lake, the sun is out.  Skip the bookstore, to buy a book for kids or to shepherd her around the store, waiting for her, no real time for that, just a grocery store run, quick, and then the wine store, being out of white for her and red for me.

I get her down to the doctor's office, down in Fulton, a nice drive along down the west side of the river reflecting the winter sky, then over the bridge, and not too many hysterics from mom.

We need to up her dosage on whatever we can up, the memenda, and maybe, well, something to mildly tranquilize her.  She talks one story to the doctor, and I slip in the truth, my perspective anyway, where I can.  I think he gets it.  Dr. Ouano.  

But goddamn, I'm feeling grim the next day.  The hour of yoga anatomy with Ellen Saltonstall was fascinating, about fascia.  And in the night, with wine, I think of how all the writers in the world were motivated by this strange enveloping muscle holding organ that goes in bands through all of us.  The fascia has moods, is effected by them.  Any writer worth his salt knows motion, physical activity, the knowledge of holding a tool, an axe, let us say, or a wine bottle and the opener, the lifting of cases, the motion of running.  The writers knew, know, the secret of keeping the fascia happy, and of how bands from the forehead go over the head and down hour back and through your legs, and all the way down to the bottom of your feet.  And inactivity is no good for these fibers.  Motion is necessary.  Kerouac the fullback.  Hemingway the hunter.

So I get the tub with hot water and soap, get the batch of the silverware dipped and rinsed, all of it feeling the silverware rack of the dishwashing machine that does not work here, waiting to be replaced, and then I proceed with the rest.  Then tossing a few things from the fridge, packing the tall trashcan liner bag full.

Mom slept on the couch again.  In her coat.  I had to take her out to The Press Box, as a treat she insisted upon, though by that point I had time constraints.  Coming up the stairs from the basement she is bent over, head on her hands and forearms.   But I let it slip, mom, you need a shower, you haven't taken one in more than two weeks.  There's shit on your pants.  She denies it.  From two weeks ago when you had to poop against the dumpster outside Bame's.  

I go up the stairs and look back, to use the upstairs bathroom as she uses the downstairs.  She's looking for her cane.  She sees me looking at her.  You're a fucking creep, she tells me.  And I am.

I go back down to sleep more, or just hide.  Got a headache.  Can't deal.  Summon the courage later to face the day and the dishes, and the rest.  The bookstore?

I feed her, I get her out for a drive, around 3 in the afternoon, we go get a newspaper and her cup of coffee ice cream, then down for a view of the lake.  The old lighthouse reflecting the sun.  Quick swing through town, First Street, then to The Big M, quick run, okay, we'll take a quick trip to the book store, but we can't stay long.

I put two chicken breasts in the oven with some quickly cut onions and I make the meeting, Cheryl, for a tutoring session.

But it is no fun to have the time to write, rather a curse.  A time of being unable to make any decisions.  Of being stuck.  The argument when we got home, when I tell her, look, be thankful, I took you out to the bookstore, I told you I had a meeting.  Oh, you're so important.  You have a penis, I just have a hole...

What?!?  (Disgust.).   Look, mom.  You were a professor, you had meetings too.  Anyone still working has meetings to go to.

So I stew around with what to do with mom for the day.  I've done the dishes.  Let the cat out on a prowl in the back yard before it rains.  It's not warm out.

After my meeting, which takes my head away from mom, who's carrying on upstairs, with large long OOOHHHHs and other cries, so that I have my aunt call her just in time, and my tutor asks me, "is your mom okay," as I get completely distracted with the directions I'm supposed to be giving for The Four Essentials, Open, Engage, Align, Expand.  I need to work on my language for the poses anyway.

I get through the hour.  I don't how dedicated to yoga I can be.  I'm making it hard for myself, psyching myself in a lot of ways.

But after we're through dinner, I've had it with mom.  

There's no way around it, I need to go to graduate school.  Brother calls.  Maybe it's too much for her to be driving all that way, then not being in her home with her cat, disorientated as she is.  Will the pills, the new dosage, help?  Will there be a tranquilizer for her?  Take care of her teeth, or get her hearing aids.  I tried to press the point about her anxiety, as did her colleagues.  The doctor is listening to her, yes, but I get my points in...  We went to The Press Box that night...

I'm trying to look past, or around, my misery.  I deserve it.  What did I do with that nice kid, but become the Prodigal Son, had, been had, by everyone and every thing...

And I'll never have a chance at a girlfriend or any fun or happiness like that ever again, not at my age and state.  That's what you get for being a writer...  a bum...  I get the internet, the web, friends on Facebook far away, in all senses of the term, unreal.  Horror.   Dark thoughts.

But my job has been good for the fascia, at least.  Constant motion.

Other than that, I've never achieved a thing.  I"m ashamed of myself.  How could anyone else likes me...  And I know my situation...

Mom is quiet til mid morning.  I sneak a peek in at her, she's reading, okay, cool.  I can go work on my yoga practice and my homework.  There's the whole decision too about driving her down to DC to see her grandchildren.  I could go by my old apartment...

After making soup for her, a nice onion soup color from the onions baked with the chicken breast, I get her to change out of the jeans she's been wearing for three weeks now, telling her I'm doing a colored wash.  I'm also working on the Cologuard stool sample process, and of course you don't want to get that wrong.  Set up the little tray under the toilet seat, then the white sold plastic bucket with the screw on tight lid, and also a strange Q-tip type thing you swab through the shit you just took, to cover the groves at the end with poop matter.  I've been careful to take a probiotic and also some fiber, but the shit doesn't come out as neatly as I'd hoped.  Well, anyway...  I shave, I take a shower, after sealing the whole thing up.  

It's cold, rainy, I head out, taking out the trash, and with my poop box all sealed up under my arm in the cold blustery wintry mix rain.  I'm not happy about anything anymore.  There is no more happiness.  I'm not even confident about doing well in yoga class.  To earn the heart affection of a woman, you have to be capable of doing something, like, being a school teacher.  Competent at it.   A man about it. 

No wonder, no girlfriend...

But as soon as I get my laptop out, after coming back, concerned she might be hungry, from my yoga homework--I saw a pretty young woman working the barista job at a little coffee booth in Canal Commons, having forgotten my laptop earlier after dropping off my Cologuard Poop in a Box, just as soon as I sit down to write, after putting a tray of stuffed peppers, gluten-free spaghetti and potato gratin for mom, just as soon as I sit down to write, mom comes down from upstairs, talking to herself, sighing, talking to herself more.  Just as sure as the ghost she's been in my life, pouting and sighing, always with the big volatile explosive reaction, all my life, since boyhood, putting on all the lights back on Ernst Road after I came home late from necking with Hilde in high school, on my way to being a local rock star with the Chevy Malibu station wagon with faux wood paneling.  Everyone else was drawing away from her, just to spare themselves the craziness, patient as my father truly was, an honorable man, my brother just finding a way out and away and off I go, bye.   I wanted my father's life.  Not hers.  She'll still lampoon anyone for "never doing anything fun."  And her defense against that, of course, is ugly.  Do you placate her?  Or, maybe you just begin to hide, let the cat deal with her.  Your father, he didn't know how to have fun... 

So speaketh Claire.

Every day is an ordeal here.  I hope the dosage change helps.  I hope they can come through...

Disgust is my feeling every day.  And of course mad at myself for having fallen into this trap.

I wake up foggy, and I have to get mom down to the hospital for a bone density scan.  She's out cold up on her bed.  I touch her toes, and a twitch, but she's still deep asleep.  Finally I wake her, and the first thing she says, she asks me if I've come to try to kill her, Jesus Christ mom.   Mom I'm sorry to do this to you, but the next appointment isn't until February.   I bring her up a chilled Pepsi.  Downstairs, I get her a slice of pizza, eyeing the clock.  The appointment is at ten.  They ask you get there fifteen minutes early.  Okay, we'll just try for our best.   Old lady wrangling.  On top of Christmas open mess of of all the possibilities of what might be needed ad infinitum.  Presents?  What kind of presents or price range?  Ship, mail, or are we going down there in person, just so other people can see where we are at with mom...  But that's eight hours on the road... 

But on certain days I become aware of my true horrible college failures, and if I'd put just more effort in and not been such an obstinate contrarian and if one of my professors might have caught it, and asked me what I needed, instead of letting me dangle...  Drinking to rid myself of all the bad feelings...  as if to put them away, hide from them.

And I need to put out another book, morally, just to show I was wrong, that you shouldn't go drink your way through college or whatever I did, and offer some sort of pained correction over the lessons learned about the illusions I've lived under...

You made a choice, my aunt says, to stay at that bar with all those interesting people, no need to be ashamed of that, you still have a life to live..

But I need to express to someone where I'm at, how I'm struggling.  Like a confession.  A correction.  A rock bottom I've hit, finally unable to hide it from myself or anyone else.  But then there's mom on top of me, squeezing me all the time unless I simply escape.

But you'd thought what you wanted, what you'd hoped for, the chance to write, to not have to drag your sorry ass in to the bar to work like a dog until you were completely beat and do it four straight nights, after cruel earlier Tex Mex Restaurant shifts, night, day, night, day.  Sunday night, typical of your love hate relationship with the whole thing.   The day you wanted to stay home, the sabbath, and in the same the night you hold court.

To have to sit home, or wherever you are, on the roads of life, and have nothing much to do BUT write quickly becomes a nightmare more than an opportunity, a deep look at your ugly old lazy self who, unlike all other adults, hasn't gotten a single thing together.  And the boring life you previously wrote about has just gotten, seemingly anyway, even more hollow, devoid of all the normal things of male human life, the job that is a career, having your own family, passing on that most precious thing of all, your genetic codes and the traditions of your parents.

I do have the yoga to lean on.  A therapy for all those years not being good to myself, just hanging in there.

A few days have passed since I last wrote.  I got the booster, it didn't even hurt, down at the Kinney's drug store near the McDonald's and the Quik Mart gas pumps, the intersection at 104 just this side of the university and the electric plant's huge stacks, and I didn't think much of it and went for a cup of coffee.  At night, not enough water either, and rather getting into the wine, just feeling desperate and behind and incapable on my yoga teacher training course.  And the next day feeling increasingly achy and tired through the day...

I gutted it out, my heart almost breaking at my lousy job of being a student.

And is spirituality any good for you in this world, or does it just get in the way...

I'm not even Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs in the chapter of Nin's house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina...

And so I try to get distracted, after I've cooked breakfast and gone to the grocery store and kept mom entertained some, then lunch, then dinner, and dishes all the way through, and the constant battle to keep the kitchen organized...  I attempt to distract myself so that my mind can work.

Mmmm k.  The way mom says okay.  She uses a sharp knife to spread the almond butter on saltines.  She doesn't want the cat out at night.   There are small open bottles of Pepsi by her bed,  by her chair, on the counter, on the kitchen table.  

She comes down and wants a bite to eat.  I give her a pill for her memory and focus.  I heard her stirring upstairs, just as I sit down to write.   Then she's calling my name in the living room.

Am I your mother?

So I tell her I'll cook a pizza, the frozen cauliflower rice crust kind, with some ham and sliced red onion, but it will take a few minutes, and she's asking me, so, are there any interesting plans for later today?  No!  

So later after it's cooked, I go up and call her down.  I put a slice in the toaster to heat it just a bit, and present it to her, and soon enough she's using scissors to cut it, having failed with the sort of sharp knife.   and then she's staring at me as I'm half watching YouTube for a good classic samurai film, then finding Lester Young jamming some bluesy jazz, and she's looking at me, anything new in the world, usually people talk at the table, is that a song, so I raise my voice, yes, Mom, it's Lester Young from 1944, raising my voice and she gets angry at rises from the table.  Don't forget to brush your teeth, mom.  Don't forget to wipe your ass, she counters.  I feel a bit bad, but frustrated enough to just shrug, oh well.  Off she goes.

But it's enough to destroy the mood.  

 Christmas Eve.  

I went over to the Throop's house the eve of Christmas Eve, and fortunately, almost psychically I brought along my guitar. 

A welcome break.  I lead them into Like a Rolling Stone...  it's a good jam.

I remember how my father would handle it, her expositions, her rants, her tirades, her takeover of our peace and happiness, taking us back to the picture of her childhood seen through her childhood mind, now acted out upon us.  I felt so sorry, so sympathetic, when he'd take to the bedroom in the afternoon, to lay on his back and close his eyes, and just let it rest, let it pass away.

And now I find myself doing the very same thing, feeling an exhaustion, even from just spending two hours with her.

That's how I grew up.  Expecting all of that, as normal.

And so when I met a girl in college, who pursued her New York City scorched earth policy against my sensitive benevolence, putting her fireworks and unpredictability, virtual schizophrenic duplicitousness then blaming me, and then when she'd done that marvelously, then she softens... but by then I have enough self awareness and self respect to know that she's evil, no good for me, so I avoid her, to what I would later see as a chance, one that I missed.  Great.

So the whole thing is bogus.

hard for me to be a man anyway, when the burden of mom living off on her own came down squarely on me just as I was going through my senior year at college...  blah blah blah.

Mom's crying out on Route 5, because her car has broken down.  No body else going to help her.

Unwrapping presents, or, rather, cutting open the heavy paper sealing tape on the Amazon Prime boxes, giving gifts, rather, Mom opens her first one, struggling to open first the box, and then the gift bag within.  Over on the couch, I cringe, trying to write off an email to my little yoga group, and I cannot form sentences in my mind as mom continues with her circular rambling talk.  The first gift, or maybe the second, after the body lotion from her grandkids, Kiehl's, is the new book in hardcover, the latest biography on Sylvia Plath.  I might have grumbled my exasperation, and then after enjoying the book and reading off the picture captions, oh, we need to go to Cape Cod, I haven't ever been to Cape Cod..., suddenly her face drops.  Earlier she'd asked me, "did she kill herself," well, yes, mom, it was a cold winter and she was alone with the kids and with the gas ovens back in those days, you could do that, so it was sort of a fluke as much as anything...  But now she's turning on me.  You gave me this book, you want me to commit suicide, she suddenly shouts at.  Mom, I didn't get you that book.  Chris did.  She's a writer, she was married to Ted Hughes, you know, so you can round out your history of him...

Brother calls with family.  That goes well.  Everyone is Covid shy these days.  Everyone has a story, too.

Another Amazon box, and this time it's the biography of Ted Hughes.  I shrug.  Sorry about the theme.  Writers are miserable people in general.  It's like a possession.

(Later she's mumbling on to herself over his pictures like she's talking to him.  Stay out of trouble.  Handsome...)

She calms down later.  We have some chip dip, onion, with small curd cottage and cream cheese, Nana's recipe.  Potato chips. 

I go out for a walk.  Not far, just to get out of the house and let my back straighten and my shoulders going up for a change. 

As far as I see it, the roast, a huge one, sure to give us plenty of leftovers, needs to sit out to come to an even temperature, and I don't feel a lot of happy energy to get the roast going.  I'm just putting it in over the onions I've sliced into the big Lodge iron pan.  Mom comes into the kitchen, looking concerned.  Is dinner ready.   No, I'm sorry mom, I'm not very organized today...  I'm sorry.

I end up making her some soup to calm her, and she goes back into the living room.

She comes back and stares at me...  No, not yet.  How much longer...  Oh, half an hour anyway, then I have to let it rest.

I get her some, and then she's talking to herself in her chair over her books, and I go up for a nap and conk out, then I come down later and do the dishes.

The day after Christmas I wake at 1 in the afternoon feeling empty and hollow, with a tight cough deep in my chest, a pain I've never felt before, and too exhausted and fall back to sleep after taking a pee and drinking some water.  I was up watching Russell Crowe in Noah, and after my Christmas alone with mom, who wonders, "where are the people?"  What people?  We talked to x and y, and Sharon can't do anything...  I see the grey murk clouds of winter sky... don't get up really til after two, but something is up with my lungs, and who knows now, Omicron...  It was a long day, two bottles of pinot noir down in 12 hours...  that's too much.  Why can't I quit, I'd like to...

And Noah was a righteous man, where the rest were wicked, and God sent a great flood to wash away the evils thereof.

Mom comes down.  At least I had the energy to do the dishes last night.

I heat a slice of pizza for her.  What's the plan today?  What's on your agenda?  Did you sleep well?  3 times.  

Again, I make soup for her.  Again she comes down after I've stirred after my nap as I'm doing yet another round of dishes and carving up the remainder of the standing rib roast and putting some of it away in the freezer, well-wrapped up.

I'm getting impatient with her, but she has enough kind words, it's a hard holiday, very tiring.  And after I ask her how the plate of food I've put in front of her, and she says, snootily, "fine..." dismissively, the same thing she did to the apple pie my sister in law cooked from scratch at Christmas dinner at my brother's house a few years ago, and he blew up at her too, just as I want to now, but I let it slide, slide past, just ignore it, Sanskrit chants...  She'll go to bed soon, she's got her pills down, just gotta get her to do her rinses and then brush her teeth, which she always finds a way to resist, and she complies with me and goes off to bed, though she might well stir in the night, as she did last night to the point where I shouted at her.

I found that I needed to remind myself what a woman is.  I looked at things at night I felt a bit ashamed of.  Even then I'm scarred, not finding anyone, to be all that nice, either out there in unfortunate addictive cyber world, or in on line dating.  And I can't blame anyone.   

Mom reminds me, "you hate me."  You hate women, she tells me.  

Oh, what a fine example you are, Mom.  

It takes whole blank hours of the quiet nighttime late hours to relax. Sad, I suppose, but that's how it is.

And finding myself too old to connect as I had been able to for so long with anyone, as if cast out, I thought of Noah, and of God.  I thought as an ineffectual man in a fallen and wicked world, to entertain a fantasy at least, briefly, as I knew not which direction to turn to.

The things the old people in the oldest of tales, they went through things.  Things painful to take.  And so they took to coming up with stories, out of their own experiences, of course, to symbolically express a sense of the deeper things they knew to be going on.  Could all of humanity be wicked, so wicked, evil and violent so that they, we, ruin the whole face of the earth of God's Creation...  Only a great flood could do justice, justice itself.  And one, only one, that's all it takes, along with his family, one family, were enough.

But it's not that bad.  It's just how I am tested, and finally become a man, as they say, an adult.  I see her later, all by herself, the cat at her bed, as she watches television, after I wake from my nap, feeling lousy again.

The pressure had left off a bit, and Christmas was retreating from the calendar.

Okay, she comes down from the bedroom to the kitchen, checking the bathroom, "toilet seat down," as if she does anything to clean here, she takes a bottle of Pepsi from the refrigerator.  And then, thank god, she leaves.  I hear her pulling a couple Kleenex tissues out of the box as she goes, and then her feet, as always, in her Keen hiking shoes, back she goes.

October '21 sketch

 Core wounded identity, the enabler. 

Placation.

Mom is an interference pattern.  I regain calm through meditation.

I wake up with a bit of a headache.  From the Bota Box Cabernet Sauvignon from two nights ago, probably.

I get my morning sadhana in at least.  Then fall back into a nap, after a terrible sleepless night of anxiety, realizing all my sins.  The time just totally wasted. 

The day before mom pleads with me.  She's a nervous wreck.  The only thing she'll settle for, she says, is to go to The Press Box.  She says she's just realized that her mother is dead, and says that this place is not her home.  We were just there, last night, mom, I tell her.

But every day, no, I don't know what to do with her.  I hide by sleeping late, until her shout rises, "Hello?!" or some other expression.  "I'm hungry!"

I drag my self up or down the stairs depending where I slept to the kitchen, worrying about what to do feed her.  

Will I ever work again?  What happened to my literary life?  My mind is clouded.  Anxious.  I had cider last night, maybe four cans.  A headache lasting from two days ago.  From the Lexapro?  The cheap box wine?  Mold in the cellar?  I treat the flea problem down in the basement, not with the fogger bomb I purchased from the hardware store, but the peppermint clove oil spray I sprayed over the concrete floor after moving my bedding up to the second floor.  I left the fan on in the heating air conditioning system and I'm upstairs watching the television with mom after giving her evening pill and the strong fumes come through the vents, prompting her reaction, "you're trying to kill me..."  I crack open a window, go down and click the wall unit to fan from On to Auto.   Later I soothe myself listening to Todd Norian, Shanti Mantra, music from YouTube.  And I can understand why I like the night, a break from her constant consciousness.  

I wake tired and anxious, and the green tea, while giving me some pep, makes me more anxious.  Mom suggests we order a big pizza as I check in on her first thing, rising from my air mattress when she lets out a shout.  There's a cauliflower crust pizza, Price Chopper brand, in the freezer, so I go down, turn the heat on--pouring rain earlier coming down heavy with a Northwest wind--and then get the oven preheated to 450, have some tea.  

Later, when mom asks, after she's had what she will eat from the slice I give her, giving me her pepperoni, what might we be doing later, I tell her, well, it's Sunday, we'll go get the newspaper and take a look at the lake, the waves will be up, and she says, "whoop-tee-shit," and inwardly I wince, taking the blow with a slight inward bow, my shoulders sinking just a little bit more.  With the wind up there's a small boat advisory from the weather service, waves 6 to 9 feet up toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

With the rain I go down to the basement and lift the water collection pan out of the back of the dehumidifier and jostle it up the stairs to pour out in the toilet.  I take a shower.  

The duty of another is full of peril, I remember, one of my father's sayings.  The duty of another is full of peril.  Let that sink in, here in this situation.  My failed literary career.  At least I should have gone into the academic side, somehow, too hard to make anything come out of your writing.

It's hard to do anything, fearing interruption or attack, hearing her creep down the stairs, hello, is anybody here?

Yoga, or at least a sadhana session, would be good today, but it's hard to concentrate enough once both mom and I are up.

Mom makes me nervous.  That's nothing new.  Feels like I'm standing around with my dick out in the open.  I take a propranolol, half a tablet. 

That feeling, nothing is ever good enough.  Unless everyone gets into the wine, for a temporary reprieve. 

I was meant to be a teacher, literature, that sort of thing, analyzing poetry.  But I went into the restaurant work, so I could write.

To ease my nerves, I get the big pot out, with butter and olive oil over the burner, to sear a link of sausage, then the meatballs, then the onion and pepper, then a splash of wine, then all back into the pot and then make a tomato sauce.

Mom comes down, I pour her some wine, as she asks for it. 

Later, the pot simmering now, I go in to the living room to check on her.  So how are you, she asks me, from her chair.  "I'm a bit anxious, I say...  my career."  "A state career?"  No, mom, just a career in general... I don't want to go back to bartending.  

"You better not have done that to my son," she says, when I suggest I'm unhappy, over yesterday's newspaper.  Peak foliage the back page of the front section says.  

 Light flurries in the night, and when I wake I see some blue sky, looking from the pillow on the floor up to the front, western facing windows, thin, if there are any clouds, grayness to the east, but the sun is out, and mom is snoozing on the couch next to the orange cat, wearing her bathrobe, over her clothes, still wearing her hiking shoes.  I walk past, take a cup of tea from the fridge, back upstairs to hide for a little while longer, then I hear her stir, so I go back down and take care of breakfast, a slice of Stewart Shop cheese pizza.  It's classic and very good, kind of a doughy junk Central New York baker's almost bread dough hearty pizza, quite delicious, not too thick, greasy cheese crust.  Could become a habit.  Addictive.

It goes okay at first, as I have my tea and then sliced turkey at the table, as I look over at her.  She's sweet enough, but after several times of telling her that we are invited over to Barbara's for dinner, Sharon will be there, what time, because she's with her son down in Florida, no mom, it's Tania's son who is in New Mexico, Barbara's joining Tania down there for the winter, so this is the last little dinner we'll have with them for a while...  

Mom indicates she finds the Tuesday dinner thing a little boring.  I'd rather stay here with my books, she says.

But, Mom,  you like going out.  It'll be good for you.

I've already told her, where, when, what time.  She's called me a loser, a woman hater, a sadist, any number of things this week, with the enforced closeness of the holiday.

If I mention anything to the effect of, you're ruining my life, mom will come right back, you don't have a life!  That's not my fault, that's yours!  No one likes you.  Okay, mom...

Okay, I'll take her for a ride.  Just to see the lake, get some sunlight on our bodies.  Stewart Shop for the newspaper, a drive along the lake by the loop road past the university, the Big M, home, hopefully.    

I'm worn out already.  She's pretended not to know where the sink is when I ask her to brush her teeth.  She's asked me again, and then again, and then again, what time, where... is it today?

I could just take her back, but okay, she tells me she wants to go out, for lunch, though it's 4:30, okay, fine, we'll swing by The Press Box, and the frozen peas will keep the sliced turkey bread cold enough for the hour, and then we'll go back

We pull in, finally, worn out again, into the parking lot of Cedarwood Drive Townhomes.  Help.  I can't hold it, my intestines.  I hustle her around the parked SUV, to the steps, two sets of them, pulling at her arm.

Soon, I hear her squatting on the toilet, squirts of liquified shit.  And now, help. help, Ted, Ted, I need to vomit.  So I bring over the big stainless steel bowl.  Pepsi.  So I get her a Pepsi, and later a glass of soda water to wash her mouth out.

I get her upstairs finally.  By her bed I find a package of rolled Kleenex around a half a baked potato and a piece of the chicken breast I cooked a few nights ago, still rolled up, on the window sill.  Who knows what happened.  I've eaten the same things she's eaten over the last few days.  I don't know.

I avoid Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.  If you allow your concentration to be distracted, you miss your line to the Collective Unconscious, the play of thoughts and the sudden reality of objects of art, thought and creativity that are like a stream to feed off, water to sustain us.  Caravaggio.  Vs. the iWatch.  

I'm too tired to write anymore now.  I'm not even happy enough.  I want to sleep, but lie awake.  I want to hide.

The cat is proud.  Mom is proud.  They all want , insist upon, their own thing.  Noisily.  To be fed, to go out.  And I'm fucked.

Mom is still feeling queasy by the time I could get over to our normal recent Tuesday night dinner engagement with mom's colleagues over at Barbara's house off of 104 near the university, a quiet ranch on a quiet street, and I'd stay home and stew in the usual things, and on top of yoga homework due soon and not even touched.

I stay later and it turns out to be a session of therapy for me, about how mom's anxiety is getting worse along with the dementia, when I'm not around to drive her back and forth she keeps asking for me.  Barbara tells me her mother was put on Ativan and it worked wonders.  

So today, after a yoga sadhana, the first one in more than a week, clearing the congestion in my nose, the nadi kriya to develop, the Sanskrit chants, the pranayama breathing and further meditations, completed after getting mom some soup, as she's helpless now about feeding herself.  Down in the basement. It's not a bad place after all, though I can't quite tell if putting up a plastic sheet to cordon off my yoga mat end in front of the washer and dryer with the space heater like a radiator but with hot oil circulating in it.  The air is pretty dry now, another issue for trying to breath.

I make an appointment two weeks out for mom to check on her medications down in Fulton.

Later she has the large picture book of Audobon bird prints, taking in the beauty of it.  She sits in her chair looking over the egret in its print habitat, reminding me of Wyeth realism.  I pass by her a couple of times, checking on her as I do the dishes.  "That's very irritating, that sound," she calls regally from her chair, so I open the door to the cellar as a baffle, wearily proceeding with the dishes, the soup bowls, the pot, the chat dishes, the mugs, the assortment of small glasses used not long ago for Pepsi, water, her wine.  I venture past her, to see if she's taken the two pills from the morning which she refused to take.  Ahh, a bluebird, I say, as I pass, to go upstairs to empty the upstairs bathroom paper trash can, and she responds in a haughty tone, "Eastern Bluebird," correcting me.  Okay, mom.  

After the dishes are done I come by and there she is tucking her pills in to her pocket, the little pockets of her jeans.  So we go through, no, if you put them in your pocket you'll never take them.  I know my body! Okay, don't take them.  You're a cruel bastard.

Again she finds the recall notice for the Toyota airbag recall, and again I have to tell her, no, mom, remember when we took care of that?  I bring out the invoice from the dealership.  See, here's what it says.  Remember driving back?  But by now, I'm a piece of shit, not to be trusted, and she's getting aggressive, so, I take my yoga notebook and flee, taking yoga notebook binder and laptop, heading down to the Stewart Shop.  It feels weird at first, but everyone is encouraging me to get out of the house and not worry about it.

But the stuff has all been getting to me.  Kerouac was a writer and when he died his estate was worthy, oh, about 95 bucks, so I hear in a documentary about his presence and life in old mill town Lowell.  Later valued at what, ten million?

And not only that, he ended up so terribly unhappy, on top of the alcoholism, his mother having crowded any other life out of him, after the death of brother Girard, the saint he could have used, his father, never to have a wife, kids, a normal home life, a house, a job, though he did work a job on the railroads and other American jobs along the way.  Am I, will I ever be, ready for marriage, with a job and all that, or am I too warped already, permanently.  But you would be obliged to try, if you could.

I too was an anomaly in my work career, which lasted til I was 56 or so, before breaking apart taking care of mom.  Weill all the paperwork we could have never moved mom anyway.

The ladies observe me getting close to finishing the bottle of French pinto noir I brought alone as 6 in the dark evening turns into 9 at night.  I tell Barbara, the doctor tells me my liver is fine, and she says, Ted, that's kind of a low bar, with a chuckle.

Coming away from it l come down with a cold, no surprise from visiting at dinner with college professors.

After escaping mom’s afternoon accusations and unpleasantness, at the Stewart Shop, in the dank cold of 5 o’clock, I feed her a cursory dinner, offering her chicken tenders, fried chicken breast, a cold cut sub, or a slice of two day old buffalo chicken pizza.  My headaches, my body is sore, I can hardly breath through my nose, I don’t even want any wine at all.  I endure the table as long as I can, which isn’t long. She’s trying to argue, or talk about something and go upstairs for an hour turns out nap.  I’m awakened by frantic calls for help, doors opened and closed.

The children, she cries, we’ve got to do something for the children, for Christmas.  We need to get a tree.  We need to get presents.

Mom, your children have grown up.  …

But it's useless.  I've made it til past 9 PM on December 1st, but now just looking for something to make this all bearable, I twist off the cap of the $10.99 French pinot noir, pour it over some ice, and go hide down in the basement.  And hopefully, she'll stop yelling help, at some point go upstairs to bed so that I don't have to hear her creak away all night in her Eames Chair.

I have a headache, but it helps.  I take another Tylenol.  I have yoga homework to get done, at least review the poses and so forth, but inspiration for that is rapidly dwindling.  I have a cold.  I tried to do some work, and at least got some writing in down at the Stewart Shop, but the grocery store errand took it out of me.  My joints ache, a feverish feeling that I've had all day worsens, as mom sits on the couch and ends up sleeping there, refusing to take her nightly pill, the meantime.  Okay, fine, Mom.  I'm never going to try to give you another pill.  Good luck with that.

Later on there's a news story, a writer, a female, who chronicled a horribly traumatic rape as a college student at Syracuse University.  5 months later she's walking and sees a guy, a black guy, thinks it's him, goes to the police.  I think I know those neighborhoods between the University up on the hill, and then winding down below the Carrier Dome down to South Salina Street, where mom lived as a grad student in an large Italianate on the upper floor, while the ghetto blaster cars rolled by.  The man, picked out by the Prosecutor, not the man she picked out of the police line-up, she later identifies, in her situation, and he's sent down the river.  He comes up for parole, but each time, five times or so, he insists on his innocence, so rather than being freed, if he had admitted to it, he spends the full sentence behind bars.   And then it's no better when he's out.  No possibly of any job.  He's shunned by his own community.  He's welcome to a very small number of people's houses, 10 or so, others won't even let him in.

Finally, a producer of the movie version of her book, sees the glaring inconsistencies, comparing the actual with her written story of the trial, with the script, approaches a private investigator to handle it to find a way through.

Here comes mom down the stairs.  I told her I had some pot-roast cooking.  Down the stairs she comes, hello... hello... hello, is anybody here... coming through the living room, past the couch.  hello?  Louder now.  Dinner is ready, spinach too if she wants anyway.  

Too sick to do anything for a day or two, fever of 100.  

Friday evening, the yoga weekend module thing starts up again, 7 PM.  Please, let's just get through this, get what we need to get, wine, groceries, so forth, I'll get some time, maybe start to catch up on the homework I wasn't able to look at.

She's insistent, needy enough, to demand going out.

Debacle.  I get her a pizza, to go, so she can have something to eat on when I'm doing yoga, but as it arrives she wants some.  Mom, you just said you were stuffed.  I've just packed up the last of her chicken fajita along with some Cole slaw from my fish dinner in the to go box.  I've put our plates aside, neatly stacked, silverware together, easy to take away.  I want to get out of there.  She wants her taste of pizza.  Almost just to defy me, I wonder.

Okay, here. I put the box in front of her, lift the lid.  She can't figure out how to lift the lid.  I help her open it.  Okay, mom.  Give her my fork.  The box open now, she takes fork and knife to it, cutting into several different slices, from one side to the other, haphazardly.  Mom... what?  I want a crispy piece.  

Mom, look, I have a class.  We have to go soon.  There's your wine.  

She tries reaching over the box, to get to her wine glass.  She can't do it.

She raises her voice at me, so the crowd can hear.  "I'm no good.  I'm no good!" she shouts.  You hate me.  

People are looking on now.

She ends up hatefully telling me I'm pressuring her and that she needs to use the restroom.  Okay, fine mom.

She comes back, without her cane.  I look at her.  Mom, it's okay, you can go back in and get it.

Behind, the four-top of retired aged women having a Friday night dinner, three of them, at least, drinking, parallel to us, over my shoulder, one appearing to have tea, or maybe a hot toddy.  I notice one of them is going to the lady's room, but as I'm encouraging mom to go retrieve her cane, green aluminum with a matching green rubbery handle, I hear behind me, sir, sir, so I turn around.  Our friend is going to go get it for you.  Which is kind, and good, but adds to the shame of the drama.  The scene we are has ruined their Friday night, I'm sure.  They probably take me as being the true lowly shit.

I thought it was all going okay, earlier.  I'm just trying to get her through dinner.  It didn't help that chatty Terry with the white goatee who plays some of the open mics here comes by even as we're at the back table by the brick wall of the old freight house by the gas stove with the fake logs but real heat, and I'm enjoying the music, came by to check in and tell us of his pending knee replacement and earlier eyelid surgery and other things, and we're eating and mom is getting irritated, and not engaging, and she probably can't understand a word he's saying.

Just get through this, and then I can get in with 15 minutes to spare, and get, at least, a decent start to the class.

I'm buying wine later, after The Big M.  There's a guy giving wine tastings, and I would slink by him, but I get a good vibe from him.  At least see what he's offering. Oh, a Montepulciano, cool. And guess what, it's pretty delicious.  Though I was draining Guinness over the bitter Friday placate the bitch dinner.  I have a nice chat with him about wine importers, working with them, etc., it's a pleasant moment for me.  Sean, from Fulton.  He studied, marketing, at Oswego.  I like the importer's taste.

I get out to the parking lot, after passing a hot chick, tall, and I say hi, and she gets it, and says hi back.  She could hear the goddamn you're pretty but I'm burdened by some serious shit now, my wistfulness, hope-gone deal with mom, no one else will, vibe, and when I get back to the old Toyota she's not there.  Darkness.  I don't even have the car door light on the right setting so the light turns on.  What the fuck...

Okay.  So.  I look around.  Will I need the car?  I look across the street.  Toward Big M.  I look east, toward the river, I look west.  I look by the tree at the corner of the parking lot, 2nd Street.  Good god, has she wandered off, crossed the road?  Where could she be?

I go take a little walk through the parking lot, and then in the car lights, I see her, with her navy short purple overcoat on, pulled up, I think, I hope, her jeans down to below her knees, leaning forward, her back almost against the dumpster.  I see the pale flesh of her thighs in the headlight lamp light from the liquor store parking lot.  A squirt of shit, followed by another.  I can't tell if she's reaching her left hand around to her wipe her shitting as her right hand holds her pants up.   

She's...  I walk over toward her.  To shield the scene from the light.  She's fishing for crumpled Kleenex in her pockets.  Are her hands clean?  

I go back to the car.  Box of tissue paper in the glove compartment.  There's a full one somewhere in the back seat, but I can't see it.  Rattled, I can't get the car overhead light to turn on.  She's still shitting when I get back.  Her hat fulls down on the used tissue paper she's wiped with.  

I pick up her hat.  I take her by the arm, back to the car.  I open the door for her.  Pull out the bottle of hand sanitizer.   Squirt it over her hands, which she dutifully holds out for me.

I get her back in.  By the time I tune into yoga class I'm fifteen minutes late.  

After the true ordeal of the weekend's classes--I haven't done my homework, running a fever, exhausted, joints aching, mom demanding, haven't turned in the written asana pose assignment, have lost touch with what we are supposed to be doing, losing sleep over it all--okay, let's go out to dinner.  Even if it's cold and dark, and raining on and off.  Maybe we can call my nephew, mom's grandson, from our booth at Canale's, if they're not too busy and we can get a booth, whatever, they are nice.

I have my 20 minute teacher training practice session to live down.  Even the boss cut me off.   Early.

I think the team realized I was having major troubles with this yoga teacher training, with all the language-ing you have to do through the poses, a musical scale, a script to put into the motions and actions of the yoga poses, step by step, and even remembering what you're supposed to be doing.

Mom dogging me everywhere I go, no wonder I hide down in the basement where there's obviously some airborne mold or something that makes me feel like my lung tissues are fighting something.  Or just appearing, I'm starving.  Or, I'm so lonely.  Kill myself.  

Or I'm down in the basement, trying to follow along with the class.  And I have to hear her above me.  The  intensity of the feeling.  Ohhh, help...  HElLO?!  Creaking in her chair.  Self-important.  Unwilling or unable to feed or entertain herself, so she acts, bellowing like a king from Shakespeare, bring me the map there!  I am Lear!  Nothing is happening here!  What are we doing for fun today?  What are you doing next?  Where are you headed?  Any summer plans?  Mom, it's winter, the beginning of Winter!

All I can think about is groceries.  How can I be prepared...  cold-cut turkey, frozen pizza, maybe a fried chicken breast to pull apart after getting rid of the fried crumble of skin, to shred into a pot over a large can of super market non MSG soup with added broth, hopefully bone broth.    Eggs.  V8.  Cans of tuna I have not used to mix for a tuna salad, with Hellmann's mayo, lemon, chopped celery, parsley.  

The teacher practice came at the end of the day, at the very last, where I was so worn out with stress I didn't care anymore.  Fried.  I'd listened to all the presentations, and done my best to comment.  I'd paid attention, followed along with all the poses.

So when it's my turn, after rising at 6 AM, now it's 4:15, and I've had mom to deal with, take your pills, no, please, I'm losing my will and energy and focus.  

And so when I try to tell my story of why we should connect, how do we do this, how do we apply to the theme, in this case of CELEBRATION, and to, specifically, the Fourth Essential of Expansion, radiate out from the Spanda center, etc., just telling the story of the theme, which I desperately wanted to do correctly, I've flubbed it, unable to read my handwriting, confused, and I can't quite tie in reading Edward Arlington Robinson's poem, Mr. Flood's Party, in that classroom with the rippled Chapel windows where Frost himself taught, the loneliness of poor old Eben Flood, how one cannot have a party all alone, and how, maybe, if you do yoga, you can really understand and experience that there are Multitudes within, that No Man is an Island, as Donne said, that within us are genies whirling around in atoms, and within those atomic particles, more genies, and all down the line, and that if we realize this we don't feel along.

But as I muddle through explaining to this artificial class where everyone is looking at you, the poses, a sequence I didn't even have time to plan, as I get cut off by the Master, now we are picking apart my theme.  "You have to do it quickly, simply.  Get them engaged."  And it all feels dumbed down to me instantly, but that's how you learn.  You get hit by the bamboo pole.  Okay, fair enough.

I look at the computer zoom image of myself. Ashamed.  I thought I'd do slightly better.  That's how it goes, though.  I understand.  I am lagging behind.  My habits as a poor student are coming out.

And then, so it goes, as I've had to devote attention and time to monitoring the refrigerator's temperature, by the time I get mom home from Sunday night dinner, get mom in the house, after she tries to charm her way with a man she's been asking me about, Mom, no, he's not familiar, he just looks like Chatty Terry, because of the goatee, but I can't restrain her and she goes over to the table, and I hear a chuckle, but then, as I go over to pull her back in, they are from in town for a funeral.  

I wake up in the early hours, down in the basement, not feeling well, lungs in pain, and that feeling of now shower stickiness.  I have a cider, there's nothing  left to do at this hour, besides take a shower, drink a can of cider.  And after the shower I need something to relax, after also doing the dishes, and checking the freezer and refrigerator temperatures, wearing a bathrobe, I'd like to write, about how I got called out, the Master a good humored sweet guy so you don't mind him having the powers of discernment.  Okay, my statement was not so concise.  

I put on a little show, on my iPhone to record, the samurai monk I've always wanted to be.  I put on being Lord Kikushiro, from The Seven Samurai, as if he was your yoga teacher for the day.  I have fun with it.

But later on, my little performance, while winning a nice complement, is deemed to be offensive.  My new friend the restaurant guy even himself doesn't see how my references to the Shakespearean quality of the a great work of art have any bearing on the specifics of our facebook group discussion.  Okay.

Okay, fine.  I can imagine who the complaint came from.  A person who has kept her dog Fluffy's body in the freezer for the right moment of funereal dispatch.

And so I'm left alone again.

Friday, with a bundle of nerves, I sneak out the house.  The air is dry.  My heart is in my throat.  Mom is up in on her bed.  I get the car packed, and proceed to the library.  I need to escape, and yet I feel guilty the whole way.  Over the bridge.  A very grey day.  I find on open kiosk.  The wave of anxiety, this grey winter morning, dissipates slightly, but I could still jump out of my skin.  I ponder my future, what I'm doing here.

I am behind in my homework for the yoga class.

It's almost too still here in the library.

I've escaped the gravitational pull of all mom's worries.  I've become skeptical of the basement.  The mold, the mildew.  The breathing problems.  Will I ever have a job ever again...

 I've suffered through another day, just like the one before.  The ups and downs of my mother's dementia.  There were the phone calls.  Is my mother there?  No, mom, that was me who left the dinner table and I said I'll do the dishes later, I need a nap, feeling a cold coming on if I don't get some sleep, and I how I get her out her laptop so she can see Claire the Scottish Deerhound win best in show at the National Dog Show broadcast on Thanksgiving, figuring it will keep her entertained, just a five minute clip, then hopefully she'll be quiet and go on up to bed, as I am suggesting she do.  I've already repeatedly explained applicable local events such as Sharon's nephew Mario's pneumonia and how he's been taken up to Schenectady and how he's responding to the treatment there in a favorable way.

She's up for another few hours, as my nap turns from ten minutes for digestion on my left side upon my air mattress upstairs in her old abandoned study full of papers into an hour and beyond, unable to muster myself upward.  I find it quite exhausting dealing with her, her detachment.

She began whimpering before we'd even left Oswego, with the big river to the left as we head south, to Sharon's house past Baldwinsville to the south, climbing up the hill with the green of the golf course, dampened by the drizzle into grey, off we go to Thanksgiving dinner, lucky to have a gracious hostess preparing the entire meal, mom's old colleague, they go back to grad school at Syracuse University, she starts in, "please slow down."  Mom, I'm going the speed limit, here in her 2003 Toyota Corolla, 35 mph.  And at this point, after I point this out, I must admit, I push down on the accelerator gas pedal just a big.

Soon it will be shrieking.  And the whole way, almost, I chant my Sanskrit chants, while she bellows on, hurling devilish insults at me, as the rain streaks down the windshield, as the farmland farm's pass, ups and downs, cows free to move in and out from the muddy yard back to their pen, the hills changing from north south drumlins and moraines, into the valleys of my youth to the east, the skies changing too, the gloom overhead of Oneida County...

And damn if I don't feel tired every day and nighttime is my only escape, my imposed way to avoid her, resting, such as this morning, my morning around 2 in the afternoon, when the door was thumped upon and the doorbell rang, I come down, and it's two guys in black coats almost like trenchcoats, Mormons, and I haven't even had my morning tea, Jesus Christ.

Mom questions about them, after I politely humor them and express the hospitality of interest, as any decent person would.  Mom says something crazy in front of them, two guys, clean like FBI agents might be, after I say, "I can't even afford one wife," and I roll my eyes at her response, and they can grasp this strange situation of mine.  Later on, as we drive to get the groceries, after the break of a few days, as the darkness comes and the sleety snow picks up, walking down to Erie Street, bareheaded, walking together on the side walk past a house with a Trump sign.

Just keep writing.  That's all you can do.

No great artist ever sees things as they are, wrote Oscar Wilde.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

And like Dostoevsky, once he had experienced some things in life, we lived and worked at nighttime, getting up around 1 in the afternoon.

I too lived at night, not having much beyond my own distilled perspective, mom boring the hell out of me. Coming down, coughing, and what relatives do, older ones in particular, becomes disgusting.  On top of the same clueless conversation bytes.

And that's where I get my point of view from, from artists.  Not necessarily a good thing, not at all. But that there is inherent symbolism available to any one curious of his own life.

Things have become too boring for me to chronicle anyway.  The number of shirts you threw into a suitcase when I came up;  mom's reaction when you only want a brief word with her, you walk away, okay, and she says, "hello?!"  The constant blahs from trying to drink away your own troubles...

Things to boring to mention.

After another day of exhaustion--they seem to add up, on top of winter's coming with a light covering of snow, with the ice, with the cold air blasted by a western wind--I make a pot roast.  If I con't seize the nighttime, the comforting dinner to be picked upon for a few days, getting better each day, will never happen.  Mom is quiet upstairs.  I haven't been able to administer her nightly pill.  I woke up from my heavy nap, tried to slink past her bedroom door, taking a quick peek in, yes, the cat is there, that's good, but she calls, HELLO?  Shit.  I go in and sit down, and see what might be on television, between the BBC, PBS, the news channels, TCM, classic movies, History Channel, nothing inspiring.  I'm barely awake, groggy, unable to talk.  And she cannot hear what I am saying, she's telling me I interrupted her sleep, I say, Mom, I was just slinking by your door, I didn't want to bug you, but she can't hear what I am saying, and then it gets to being an argument, with her telling me that I "hate women," and it's just getting worse, okay, I bow out, and she stays, and thank god.

Pizza from the Steward Shop friendly people.  In addition to the sandwiches, tuna salad on marbled rye, cold cut Italian combo, worthy for later use, maybe on frozen pizza.    It's winter time, you need calories, even if it's dough, cheese, sausage, tomato sauce, on bread.

I start the post roast process.  I've got the things I need.  It will let me process things, and maybe I can clear my mind and get ready again for the yoga course.

Kerouac and his mom...  Left no room for a relationship with any other woman...

Kerouac, a recluse, he wanted to do his work, 

and my own life is so formless now... I can let the cat in the door, pick him up and give him a hug in my arms, then put him down so he can crack his teeth with moist interest over the new kibble I've poured him, and then say his word to me, in peeps and purrs and and three syllable talk then hearty wheezy purrs of remembered happiness, his nails on the linoleum of the kitchen floor as I pull him lightly holding on to his tail as he brings out his cat jaws more wheezes of cat pleurae, tail up now, rubbing against my leg, looking for all his pleasures, while most of mine have gone away.

He mews his "MEH!" as I get up to open a can for him, then he goes and looks up at the back door, and how come I have time for this, for recording the small things of life, so gone off chart a writer can get, just through trying to keep his chops up, but the chops distort his way of looking at life, as happens with all artists, they go crazy.

So I pour myself a little more wine, even at 4:26 in the morning, wondering what to do with the rest of my consciousness that was so sleepy and unproductive all day, but that it needed rest, lots of it.

Might as well play a little guitar and call it a night, before mom gets up to terrorize me.

The thing about writing is, that if you keep at it, it can lead somewhere, just that you don't know where it will or would lead, or if at all.  The listening to the sirens singing?  Your own human flaws that you might then share with another being?  

Then you find yourself at 5 in the morning, a time most people balk at, go to bed, sleep two hours, but at the point where the log jam of your mind connected might free itself.  This is yet another problem in the great insignificance of the addictive pleasures of trying to make an art, and one out of thin air and thin wisdom.  The first bottle of pinot noir is a tune up, as was the phone call to an old buddy, the most forgiving friend you have

By the time you are in the creative channel's flow, most people, to be responsible, need to go to bed.  This the stories of artists, the Caravaggio's of the world, not easy to fit in.

 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.

 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.