When I come up from the cold basement after the snowstorm's end, there's some light in the sky.  She has gone upstairs, so I can't complain as I brew a cup of tea bag green tea and a little pot of coffee.  Toast.  Reheat the bacon I cooked the night before last.  I make myself a quick BLT with a slice of turkey, and wait for her to come down and she comes down soon enough.  "I like my bacon extra crispy, I've been eating that way my whole life, ha ha ha," she says.  I've put her on toast and heated it a second time in the toaster oven.  I shrug.  I can nuke it in the microwave, if you want, I say, going for the coffee.  I blow my nose.  There' a congestion here I can't get rid of.  I take a decongestant cough syrup, half a Lexapro, half an allergy pill, half a beta blocker.  Mom, take your pills.  From the little plastic sleeves that tear away, that you have to cut open  with scissors.  Today she gets the extra high dose green blue vitamin D pill.  I go upstairs.  I look in the mirror.  I need a shave.  I look bad.  I put menthol vapor rub on spots on my skin, including one on my scalp.  My hair is greasy.  Okay, why not, take a shower.  Shave in the hot water.  A change of underwear.  Look out the window.  A new tee shirt.  More coffee.  Brush my teeth.  Cat fed. 

She lets me go out, down to the Big M by myself.  I'd like to write, but I have to dig the car out, and it's just nice to be free of her, to not have the constant running commentary over the car radio WRVO as I negotiate the streets of Oswego.  That alone is a blessing.  

I get back.  I take mom for a ride, walking her out to the car without her cane.  I drive up away from town, west, up over the hill, then down past the bottle and can recycling plant and beverage center and the muck farming fields for onions, then up the next moraine, then down, then out south Route 7, turning up the road that goes past the Sterling Nature Center.  A little tour of Fruit Valley, over to Cemetery Road, turning at the old Colonial white farm house that was an Underground Railroad stop, up past the orchards and the quonset hut farm stands, then back, slowly, an ambling drive with a pink sky, and she doesn't push me to see the lake and we don't need to anyway.

I cook dinner.  The stir fry.  We sit down at the table finally.  So what's in the news.  I show her an article about the kid who killed a person as he was playing militia cop at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, who was out on bail, but now the circumstances have changed.  So I explain it all to her.  Yes, she wants to know.  "Is the kid black?" she asks me.  Mom.  Think of it.  Would that make sense?  I go back and try explaining, using salt and pepper shakers.  Cops kill and unarmed black person.  Black Lives Matters protest.  Militia goons come with their guns...  She doesn't get it.

I haven't the energy to explain further.  Another fight.  She shrieks at me.  Okay, maybe I pushed her a bit about her logic.  Would that make sense, mom, I pushed her.  She has her distinct logic, which, to be honest I have been pretty tired of for some time now.  And if I were to explain something to her, how we all got here, she would then say, "oh, you mean it's all my fault," ready to flip out on me and go shrieking within a matter of minutes, I'm never coming here again!  Which to my mind largely confirms this set-up in my mind.  So whatever, I'm stuck here for the night and the fucking foreseeable future so why not just take a break in the cold basement watching old German grannies meeting young male lovers in some happy cultural event that is not in the programming here in our culture, given things the way they are in our fine country and democracy as far as I can tell, the U.S. like everywhere else all about property rights, no sharing without paying, thus no true democracy beyond the token shoulder rubbing.  Some things, here, are sacred, I hope.

I go down to the basement to hide.  

Later on, after a nap, I leave the basement.  The concrete slab, it gets very cold.  I can't do another night down here, as dark as it is, comforting in a way.  The downside, I still hear her clumping over on the floor above me on the other side of the plywood boards I see with joists and cobwebs, back and forth.  There are the dishes to put through.  The iron pans need boiling water to clean them out.    She screamed at me tonight on two separate occasions about my not putting salt down on the ice concrete steps front and back, okay mom.  "We could get sued."  She wanted to throw out two tablespoons of carrot peels out for the creatures of the forest, off the back stoop where the cat sets up his watch, after I asked her, when she asked if she could help, to toss them into the trash can from the drain catch, and so she goes out, and I hear her yell, and she almost slips, she says, angry at me now as she comes back in.  And I'm beginning to doubt if I'll ever go back to that futile old waste of a life back in DC being a people pleasing barman pretending he's some sort of missing Jesus.

I like this town.  The big lake, an inland sea, Ontario, it turns the land around in your mind.  It's not all from the perspective of looking down at where you came from, the big cities, DC, Philly, but it's now about looking over the lake, in a town that has genetically duplicated all towns, in a scale that fits the land.  Here the occupations are heavily skewed more to trades that involve pickup trucks.  Working men who put up siding, dig foundations, build from the ground up, plumbing, engineers who work at the 9 Mile Point Nuclear plant and the aluminum plant closer in to the town, and the big electric plant near the university.  A bookstore.  An old school pharmacy.  A few local restaurants, Italian, sports bar, a Chinese one, pizza, chicken wings, a few other efforts, a vineyard up the road west beyond Fairhaven beach state park.  The young people are the same as young people everywhere, attractive, and so are the adults.  A few people have had tougher lives.  There's meth, poverty, things like that too.  The churches are retreating, only a few open in the pandemic, or maybe none, not the big megachurch ones.

A pretty girl from up the road in Scriba, a college student in Physics, sweet, quiet, she looks Irish to me, told me quietly, after I quietly asked her, what you make as an hourly rate as a checkout person at the small local supermarket, the Big M, going on 44 years with its "Best Yet" line of products that are as good, if not better often times.  They just got a raise the first of the new year.

And what good have I do for the world.  I've done not much, as far as working Oswego terms.  Oh, sure, I was a barman in Washington, DC, for thirty years or so.  But that hasn't left me with anything, I guess I didn't work hard enough, though I thought I did, being efficient and thorough.

Writing, why, I don't know.  I'm not sure I respect writers, the kind like I am, the Kerouac, the Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Vonnegut...  maybe it's all useless and terribly self-indulgent.  Don't do it, in particular, if you have no real profession.  Fine if you can make a dreary living out of it, though I don't think I could do that sort of a thing.  I'd rather do some other form of dreariness, more physical, and leave my thoughts to the word chains in my own head, and no longer have the burden of sharing them.  At this I spent thirty years too long, at least.  

So now what.

Writing helps me get through the night.  It helps me when I have no friends to talk to, at 3:15 in the morning, when there is no possible help for my situation, probably given a sort of low mood I've dragged around my adult life, treating it with walks and nutrition, good things, healthy things, but also bad things, unhealthy things who knows.

I watch Chernobyl for the hundredth time.  I put neat's foot oil on the old low Maine Hunting Shoes old George gave me before he too failed, gave up.  The soles are worn out.  I do not feel like watching/listening to a reading from Henri Nouwen, nor, at least right now, about the Saints or the Desert Fathers.  Get a little color from the old days, Moby Dick, maybe, or Hillary and Tenzing on Everest, 1953, or JFK or LBJ?  Nah.  I wish I had a bottle of Moscow vodka.  They knew they were dying.

 Some nights I stayed up late, playing the D-28 in the kitchen or down in the basement, sussing out a Hank Williams' song and thinking of the life he led, the way that life ended, how he come not to care anymore about performing for the Grand Ole Oprey, how he really was a song writer.

Mom is talking to herself more,  and between being trapped in here, even over three floors, with the cold January in the teens, it is hard to escape and hide from her.  Help, she stage whispers, everyone hates me.  They hate me, from her Eames Chair.  I was tired and feeling pretty bleak myself, there being no answers any more but money.  "I don't know what I'm doing," she says, then lifts herself with a groan as I wait to be interfered with.  Sighs, and more sighs.  The cat is in.  I slept all day, only getting up to see the last of a clear day and the golden light of the setting sun out to the west here, below the lake.  They are supposed to be getting snow back in DC.  There is not much here, except for the drifts by the power plant I walk through.

Last night cooking dinner I took mom's iPad and showed her a YouTube of FDR making his 1944 speech including Fala, as she'd been happily referencing that from new biography book of Eleanor Roosevelt, our little effort to keep the local bookstore up and running through the pandemic and all.

It's pretty cold down in the basement, and once I get down there, down on the air mattress and a comforter over me, it's easy to sleep and not want to move and time can go by.  It has been exhausting here.  She'll tell me she's lonely, I say, well, why don't you call Sharon or call your sister but then she won't do it, she's not in the mood for that, she'll call them when she gets home, mom you are home.  

Even taking her out for a ride, down to the little gas station shop or the Big M little supermarket and then for a pass by the lake and the frozen river is exhausting.  I'm trying to listen to pertinent news from NPR but she drones on over that, about the weather, how much is it going to snow, I've never seen cold like this, what's new in the world, maybe we could go out for lunch...  On and on, and the same sighing, and we should get another cat.  The other morning I spent an hour getting through to the DC Unemployment Office, as I had not been able to file my claims for the whole month of January and finally I get through.  The latest round will go to Mid-March, but after the car repairs mom's own checking account is getting too low for comfort.  So I am justified when I say, mom, we cannot afford to go out.  Then there's the matter of getting the vaccine, then the matter of the airbag recall in the Toyota, and mom's teeth as well, and it would be nice to find her an inexpensive set of hearing aids...

Before bedding down I made a beef stew, after cooking dinner for mom earlier, her usual potato with butter along with chicken wings, and she tells me again about what a fussy eater she was, her poor mother, and how she'd put bacon over mashed potatoes, and on and on it goes, was your mother a good cook, mom you are my mother and you were a good cook.  She seems now to be in perpetual need of approval, and praise, and in the meanwhile the running commentary, help, where am I, I hear from the living room over her in the kitchen, as I try to eliminate clutter and other things

I wake up desperately depressed about what I've done with my life, having started out as a very good reader, into a wide range of subjects...  but how I got depressed and all that slowed down and maybe it was the drinking, as that will get to your brain too, and I hear her coming on her dragging feet and can feel her looking at me as she stands leaning on the tall trash can as she goes over to look out the back door in the winter darkness at 8 o'clock, calling a cat that doesn't exist.  She looks over my shoulder as I type, on my old slow Macbook, did you write all that, yes, do you need a reader, and I tell her no, and she says fuck you and walks slowly back to the newspapers.

I grew up amidst and amongst a lot of powerful people and assured directive voices, my father being the mellowest of them, and he had two modes, quiet and lecture, a gentle inward man who could come up with an answer for everything if you cared to ask him.  Like brother like mother, I suppose, commanding personalities who know what they want and are willing to butt heads, and since they don't speak anymore, I am the one stuck here with momma and her sighing, and no wonder when I yell at her for all her acts.

My old laptop heats up now, the fan coming on, the little color wheel swirling, and I have to shut it down after this little burst.  Mom is getting possessive about her laptop and comes down every two hours to tell me I'm wearing it out, it's all she has.

Mom likes the beef stew, which I serve late, around 9 PM.  With dinner she can have some wine.  I manage to hold for awhile.  Yes, mom, this is your home.  See...  your bed is upstairs.  When I'm writing and she comes in it's the same feeling you'd have with mom walking in on a self-pleasuring (masturbation) session.  And by the time we're done for dinner, please, please, go up to bed, in my mind, but she dawdles around.  I get her ice cream.  Okay mom time to go to bed.  Okay, I'll leave you in peace, but minutes later she's there in her Eames Chair again, looking at the bookshelves and talking to herself again, apparently believing that these are books which she can borrow from but that they are not hers because this is not her home.  I go upstairs and turn her bedside lights on.  I find the remote.  I turn on the TV.  Please, please, please go to bed.  I go downstairs.  She's still in her chair.  Mom, please...  She's looking for her Eleanor book.  She needs a glass of water to take with her.  She wants to say good night to the cat, who's there on the top of sofa back, where he blends in.  Please, mom, please.  

Finally, I can barely hold back, I clap my hands in an effort for instant prayers and intercessions from God, Jesus and Mary.  Then it comes.  You hate me!  I wish I were dead!  You've ruined the day...  And so with a final indignant look, bitter, mistreated by the world, she finally goes upstairs, but not going easy.  I love you but you hate me.  Mom, please.  Do you want to watch the news or PBS?  I move a few books and other crap lying at the foot of the bed so the cat will have a place to spread himself out when he's ready.

She comes down the stairs one more time, poking her head in, a parting shot of some sort to my despair.  I hear her climb the stairs again.

And then it's hard even to regain where you were.  It exhausts you.  So patient I was through dinner.  The stew was very good actually, slowly cooking away for 24 hours, low and slow.  I showed her the pictures from Sterling Nature Center from a week ago, after she asks me about the weather for the billionth time, such that I show her the Weather Channel App on my iPhone.  See, mom, it's 16 out.  The low will be 9 degrees tonight.  Tomorrow the icon is for cloudy, but no snow, high of 25, low of 19.  Tuesday the icon if for snow, 70% chance...  my energies crumbling, sapped.  

She goes back upstairs, and I put layers of coats on and let the cat out, and walk with him out to the two pine trees and the edge of the grass to where the wild brambles and weeds grow.  The moon, fullish, waning is a coin in the cloud winter sky, and it's pretty cold out.  Crystals reflecting from the snow covering the ground.  I go back in and take the brown paper bag for the recycling out, cartons of stock, V8 cans, wine bottles, cider bottles, plastic that once bore fresh baby spinach, for $4.99.

Now what?  By now I'm feeling too messed with anxious to be calm, so there's the wine, over the last week a box red from Portugal with a black Labrador dog on the box, Vinho Regional Lisboa, aged in oak, 13% abv.  And if she has a migraine coming on, I do too, or some sort of headache to match the dry air and the winter and the boredom, such that I could not be blamed for delving into some of the things that made old Hank Williams tick. 

It eats you.

 February First came in that cold period of January.  Actually it hadn't been a bad winter in Oswego, just gray, cold, the steady wind 15 mph off the lake, but not much snow, hardly much at all beyond the covering of a couple inches during the middle and late part of the month.  Mom brought up the weather many times, often saying I haven't seen anything like this in years, or, asking me, as I'm driving, when is it going to get warmer, what's tomorrow going to be like, and of course with her constant distracting element of volatility, going on with nothing to say while I'm trying to catch the NPR news of the times, all our struggles, the Pandemic Relief Bill, should it come, when...

I get up late, feeling ill again.  The cheap Portuguese box red wine and the stress hanging over me after dinner...  I toast a couple of pieces of gluten free bread, with slices of turkey and red pepper hummus spread, and when she comes in, as I've told that breakfast is served, as I'm eating she's fumbling around putting the turkey away clumsily, and already getting my worn nerves up...

I'm coming down from upstairs not long after when she tells me the Vision Center called, my glasses are ready.  Okay, great.  I get dressed, sipping yesterday's cold coffee, feeling sensitive in the throat again, and the wind outside is blowing, and I tell her to put her coat and boots on, oh, but Ted is going down to pick those up, she tells me, just following a great debate over the socks before her, always a big deal.

Down there, pick them up, dragging myself through the parking lot, the wind blowing strong and cold, into the shop, trying to oversee mom's banal conversation with the woman there, did you make an appointment?  No, mom picked up the call, sorry...  I'm irritated, depressed, in a grump mood.

Back through Oswego, left on First up to the Big M, a rotisserie chicken, a vegetable, bacon, gluten-free bread, do we need butter, eggs, a six pack of generic ones (instead of farmers market) good through February...  Pepsi, toilet paper...  Today we have to pay rent, me too.  I get her home, with her New York Times, I go out for a brief walk, too cold in the wind, take the cooked chicken out of its plastic container and into the oven low in the small iron pan, 225.  I don't have much of an appetite.  Up late with the wine, getting back to writing in my journal, I was eating toast and butter, sprouted grain from the health food store.  There was a special on New York Strip at $4.99, cheaper than the stew meat I brought home a few days ago.  But I don't feel like cooking one, and I let mom go through the long process of sauteing the spinach, which she figures out after several irritations that make me leave the room, such as trying to slice the spinach leaves in the stainless steel pan with a sharp knife, and then wanting scissors, which she'll use for anything now, and did she wash her hands, I doubt it.  The usual story, I used to be a good cook, heh heh heh.  I get the chicken out, cut into it on the cutting board, eat lightly and desultory, and as I soon as I possibly can, without even telling her, without offering her ice cream, I duck down into the cold cold basement for a long snooze, first interrupted by her small shouts, help help help, but then into deeper sleep even with the light on overhead, and I've never been so fully worn out and exhausted in all my being, and the dreams are both good and bad, feeling good and feeling poisoned.  One involves one of the big old Orange huge snowplows from the old road back home, and maybe also the school bus, and there are hold ups, getting everyone from the festival down the road onto the same page even through we have to get somewhere, and my old college friend Jon Gluck is there to offer some sort of advice that's so helpful it sounds stern, and yes, I have been fucking around for the last million years, and look where I am now...  Broke.

Of course now that I am sleeping here in mom's apartment there are lots of worries, and will she be stalking through the night every two hours, or what, will it be peaceful at all?

I wake up fuller now and around 10 PM cautiously climb the stairs with the glass pitcher I use for comfort, emptying that out when I can.  I have not had a drink all day, not since I got up, and though it's very tempting now, I remain calm and she's not down to bug me, and look, I'll make a chicken salad, then marinate the boneless breast chicken tenders for a stir fry, and then I'll cook some bacon, and then I'll do the dishes, sweep and mop the floor.  Pretty good for monkish activities on a cold night waiting for the snow.  I make a pot of sleepy time tea.  

I chop a stalk of celery after washing it under the tap, and then some apple, a bit of white onion.  Finally chop some walnut halves into small thin crunches.  A cooked chicken breast from a night or two ago, and some from the rotisserie chicken, slicing on the yellow cutting board with the good knife, the blue handled chef's knife I got for mom as part of a set.  Stirring in a little mayonnaise, olive oil, Celtic salt crystals.  

Then some ginger, and in another bowl the marinade for the other chicken I have.  Soy sauce, olive oil, pepper flakes, orange juice and zest, a dash of white wine, a quick shot of red wine vinegar.  

The snow starts falling around four in the morning, a steady one with a good wind behind her and the intent of blowing and falling and adding up significantly.  I mail mom's rent check in the standing boxes , after putting boots and coat layers and hat on, as I'm taking out the trash and then for good peaceful measure some paper recycling cardboard etc.

I listen, watching something I find on the early desert father type saints, which is boring, then half entertaining, then somewhat comforting and mom only comes down once to bug me for some Pepsi.  I'll be able to feed her tomorrow.  What's on your agenda for today, she asks me, well, mom it's two in the morning, I hope to go back to bed.  And in my mind, if not to her, I say, and I haven't had a drink all day.  The crucial first day of the month, to keep yourself honest.

At five in the morning coming on six my nerves are calmer now, and I have no real desire to open a can of cider before bed.  I hear mom get up now and again, to use the bathroom, and I strain my ears to see if she's coming down the stairs, knowing that pace of footsteps and the sound of her hand sliding on the banister, but she stays in her bedroom.  I went to check on her earlier and we watched the story of an arts & crafts vase from Cincinnati.   The cat has been out several times in the night, not staying out long.

By the hour, I'm feeling better, physically, spiritually too.  No, it wouldn't be worth having a cider now.  I've done enough damage to my life.  Look where I am now.  Even the cravings are departing me.  But I need prayer and patience and no one antagonizing me because I do enough of that already from within, knowing too well my faults and sins.  I put some multi-grain gluten-free bread, small end pieces into the toaster oven.  Almond butter, detoxing.  The quiet remains, I go off to bed down in the basement after resetting the rugs and the mat, refreshing the air in the Thermorest Neoair green mattress with the little blower that starts blowing with its little fan as soon as you open it up with the little valve attachment.  Resetting the bed.  If I don't drink I'm not sure I even should go back to the wine bar.

There's the heartbreak, I'm familiar with that.  There is the emptiness at the core of my being, I've tried to fill with fantasy and wine and music and foolish writings and wasted time walking, and bicycling too, for reasonably long dedicated miles, surely good for my health and mood and my liver, but stoic and solitary in their own way, miles of an art form, and every now and then another guy on a bike to talk to would get it, not really about the speed, but the miles themselves.  Filled with rationalizations and self-cheating lies.  Sure, everything is fine, but knowing full well it isn't at all fine, that each and every day I am screwing my life up further and further.  Money, savings, investments, real estate... forget it, and no artiste is ever smart to continue that way, else it isn't really art, it's just self-indulgence.  And perhaps this is why mom pulling at me and my life's blood has become tiresome...

After my day off from drinking, an auspicious February 1.  I wake and finally rise to face mom, who has been clomping around in her fur-topped snow boots over the floor above me.  I feed her an open chicken salad sandwich, make sure she has taken her pills, another small battle, sure I took them, I have her check her pockets, yup, there they are.

I sneak back downstairs, living her to read the newspaper.  She wants to talk to me, but I've already had it.

At 3:30 PM I come back upstairs, and snow is coming down sideways.  I look out and see Ben, in his Carhart black yellow safety reflective stripe railroad coat looking pensively out the door of the garage building they give him for his tools, cranking up the snowblower, but where would one start in all this, as it's coming down, as the wind blows.  Later, a big blue formidable snow plow dump truck comes down and then turns in for to sweep a swath through the parking lot here, pushing the snow forward, some of it gathering as small snow banks that the parked cars will have to get through later.

After dinner she goes off to bed, and I'm still wiped out, trying to keep Henri Nouwen's thoughts in my mind, and when I come back up from the basement to check on the weather she is soon coming downstairs.  I had nothing at all to drink on February 1, but now late into February 2, her presence makes me so anxious I could jump out of my skin.  I don't know what to do with myself, she says, after she sits down, after I've tried to nudge her to go back up to the television and her book laden bed.  I was doing the dishes, pots, pans, silverware, the cat dishes, the plates we ate off of, her wine glass, and not drinking over dinner for me was a good thing, but now, she's on my again, wandering about in a half ghostly way.  The snow is not about to stop.  I've let the cat out, and he doesn't get very far the first few times, preferring to remain on the back steps.  I shovel the top one off for him.  The third time out, and mom doesn't want him out at night on a night like this, he works up the courage and steps down, pouncing into the snow, digging at the snow, as if to check how deep it is, with his forepaw, and then makes his break for it, charging through the snow, pretty deep now, out to the two spruce trees at the edge of the grass behind the rowhouse townhomes.  Which gives me the idea that I should dig a little path for him so he can run out and back with more ease, because he's always going to run out to the shelter of the trees on his way to prowling along the edge of the wild brush.  The cat is out when mom comes down and up to me in the kitchen, and as I'm finishing putting the rinsed silverware and the last things away to dry on the dishwashing machine's racks, as I'm scrubbing the countertop with soapy water, she brushes her hand across the top, to say, oh, or some complaint, and I can't avoid raising my voice, look mom, I'm cleaning, scrubbing, that's why the counter is wet, and she takes offense, she's going to go kill herself, storming off.  What a fucking nightmare this is, on top of being cooped up, on top of being so far away now and made unfamiliar about my old life and all its mistaken vestiges, do I even want to go back to the bar, be a people-pleaser all over again, and by now my nerves are so charged up again, I can't do it, I put socks on from earlier that have dried overhanging my boots, put all my gear on, and I don't care, I'm going out, as I'm dressing she's sitting down on the couch and pulling out some papers from an old manilla envelope from 2005 her teaching days, and I have to get out, have to.  And I think, god, it's just like tending bar when the last few customers push you over that edge, "What time do you close," or just because of who they are, or whatever the cause be.  I'm the one stuck up here with mom, why, because I've been her helper all along, and now I'd like to push her away and get on with my life too, to hell with her and all her "they all hate me" kind of crap.  

Later, I come up and watch PBS with her, first about Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an comic and an actress with Irish roots, and then a great show about America sending its jazz musicians to the far-flung world, to spread the freedom spirited democratic thoughts of our culture throughout, to Africa, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Poland, Germany, of course, and even to USSR.

After sitting with mom, the television on with all the interesting jazz cats one instinctively loves, Satchmo, Ellington, Brubeck, I retreat back downstairs, regretting very much I quit the Amherst College Jazz Ensemble, putting my music aside, such that I lived for miserable years without being in a band, or really having a guitar, as if ashamed of that part of my life, on top of a pervasive lack of insight as to how to find a job in the world, sad about things such that I shut down the entire world of mine inner life, in somber tones, toiled as a bum...  at least I have a guitar, at least I make a fool of myself strumming away solitary on Facebook Live, at least I've cut a path in the snow for the cat, so he can run to the yonder edge of our little world to do his mysterious work, like a farm boy might cut a path through the heavy snow for the hogs on Iowa farms...

Yes, I have to downsize, I have to go on the road myself.  

The cider soothes me.  

The most mundane things can lead a writer somewhere necessary.

I move my Thermarest air mattress down to the basement in front of the washer and the dryer.  It's a cold night.

The night before:  Lake effect snow comes early in the night, and I go out walking in it.  Wet.  Tiny globes, soft hail.  I call mom's friend Sharon to update.   I learn that Saturday will be the birthday of Henri Nouwen, S.J.  I learned that Sharon had done a retreat at a monastery south of Rochester, one he'd been to.  His last book, he writes about being there, in fact, from the Genessee Trappist Monastery, Sabbatical Journey. 

Why didn't I think of this earlier, I say, finally getting away from the noise of the blaring television in mom's room, her night wanderings talking to herself, help, help, bastards, where is everybody?  Wallows of self-pity.  And to be trying to hide across the narrow carpeted townhouse hallway, in the clutter of her former office.  I've tried to untangle, sift, toss, but no, useless.

It's the worst thing imaginable as far as people put together to have to deal with each other.   A 56 year old son without a job and "no job prospects" who is looking for a formula, something of Kerouac resting from the great on going road with the crazy roman candle people,  writing in some odd corner, reading his religious books and other books.  

So mom bugs me on Monday, let's go for a ride.  The sun's out, my Portuguese wine headache is gone, after the aspirin and extra rest, mom retrieved the meals on wheels drop off.  What could we do for fun.  Okay.  So, Sterling Nature Center, good bang for the buck as far as driving west out of Oswego on 104, then turning off to the right past Ontario Orchards farm market stand, which is a big affair now, 104 A, the old state road.  We drive into Sterling proper, where there's a waterfall and several grand old houses, then after that northward to Jensvold Road and the Nature Center and up to the parking lot.  Perfectly still.  The sunlight is warm even.  The trees still.  Mom's enjoying it.

Looking back at the old farmhouse with the tall dried grasses brown and tanned in the foreground I'm reminded of Christina's World, Wyeth taking the then 55 year old woman who, suffering from a degenerative muscular condition could only drag herself along the floor to do her chores, placing her outside, down the hill, looking back at the old weathered sea captain's house.  We are all trapped in our conditions, in our bodies, and no one else can really imagine how we ourselves feel and react to things, know what's good for us when they reside in entirely different lives.

The next day:  I've served mom dinner, turkey meatloaf, spinach, mashed potato, and even though I had a break earlier in the day, going out on my own for groceries under the Winter Storm Warning and the sloppy roads under the constant snowfall, canceling the two o'clock eye exam for mom out on 104, even then I can't take another minute more of her around seven now as we finish dinner, and I just want to disappear, she can get herself ice cream if she wants.  Worked called earlier, the boss, as I was driving back.  When the dining restrictions are lifted, would I be able to be back for a couple of days a week.  Doesn't need me right now, but when the city allows the bistrot to have live music again...  "the customers want to see you," as he says.  So put that too into my equation.  

The drive and the afternoon out at the Nature Center was a day of peace for us.   I gave in.  Okay, you want to go for a ride, the sun's out, fine.  And sometimes it's just easier to go along with things when you're stuck with them anyway, know what I mean?  And anyway, capturing mom looking back over the tawny Wyeth grasses at the old white farmhouse that now holds taxidermies of birds and a fox and a coyote, a mink, owls, fish, and other collected samples of nature's great works, closed now during the pandemic, and just like she were some kind of Christina, taken out of the confinement of her mind and body to be freed out here in nature, a natural element, no longer simply a feeble minded case of slow dementia, and all the unpleasantness of personality that comes along with it, through a series of poses I've come up with a composite of the pose the painter gave the original Christina blending the realities he witnessed and studied and the imagination.

And I think too of after having conducted that rather simple math, about a person, me, my mom, becomes free from the weights of all our circumstances and conditions, our health that is sickness and the sickness that is health, both good, tied together, about how outside of ourselves and more often than not let free in nature, we are liberated, in such a way as to free ourselves from that inevitable emptiness, the abyss within, at our core, that we can only fill with the things that are appropriate to our souls.  To bridge that great gap, hard to find a steady way, but yet, we find sketches, activities, taking a walk, the little acts of the day, and even though those times and little habits are not perfect, too self-conscious on our own, so that we seem to be plodding along in some routine that is healthy for us, good for the internal organs or posture or musculature, we place trust in the idea that such things will lead us out of our abyss, closer to the things of God.

My aunt calls just as I'm plating dinner.  I hand the phone over to mom, but mom is too grumpy to want to talk, and I don't have much to add, I've had it.  Now you're mad at me, mom says, after I hang up, not wanting to have a chat now either.  She's been talking to herself all afternoon, and whenever I suggest she call someone if she wants to talk, or starts in with the same repeated stories...  mom, you just told me that five minutes ago.  In her own mind she is a fascinating person.  I see many of my own faults in her.

I let the cat out, after waking up for a bit at 1AM.  Later he comes back, making little noises like an accordion warming up, asking for a can to be opened.  I do the dishes.  Mom is sleeping.  I have some peace for a little while.

After the Christmas holiday, falling back to earth, as if one ever left, just one more thing scratched off a to-do list.  Survive.  The difficulty of dealing with the difficult elderly with dementia, hard of hearing...

And all along, in adulthood, somehow I've ended up not taking care of my own basic needs, physical, emotional, social...  ever since the bad year senior year in college...

Emotional support.  You get too proud to ask for it, apparently.  Or it just falls out of habit.  Becomes hard to ask for.  Shouldn't it be evident...  

That's where it starts, and it goes downhill from there.  You take a job that keeps you out of synch, around people all the time, but without intimacy.  Then on the other side you take up some form of poor self-explanation, pretending it's art, to keep yourself company, but it's all in a vacuum, in a sterile jar.  Then at the end of the day, pain killer, red wine...

The second day after Christmas, 9 AM, after the usual argument with mom the night before, I get up and go down to the kitchen, sneaking past mom's bedroom door on the way, and the cat is following me.  I pick out a can for him, but before opening, after a sip from the mug of last night's detox tea, the vomit reflex has hit again, and I move quick to the little bathroom off the hallway, stooping down on knees and vomiting up yellow liquid bile.  I hear mom call from her bedroom, "Hello?"  Stress.  The first day, losing unemployment relief.  

I wasn't able to find an ATM that would accept check deposits to my bank account, and it dawns on me, my unemployment has run out.  Congress let it happen, thanks to Trump.  I was sitting pretty before any of this happened, back in March.

Mom is quiet.  I don't feel so hot, the cat is fed, I sneak back up to my air mattress, just to soak it all in, let it ride over me, mom's habit of anxiety, always looking for strife, the little complaint, the question, repeated, again and again.  "Any reunions this year...  What's a Zoom...  How did you sleep last night... What are we doing for fun today..."  At 9PM I'd had enough, last night, and so I went up the stairs, into the hopelessly cluttered office, turned out the lights...  And when I come out of sleep, I hear her, downstairs, talking to herself and the cat.  Some of her dramatics.  She won't just go to bed and watch a blaring TV anymore...  "Help," I hear.  She likes to say this now, a mantra.  I might be saying it someday myself, soon enough.

But what queer gene inside of me does not allow me to seek what I should truly want...  emotional support, not just giving all the time...  What allowed me to waste talents groveling to the restaurant business and to the fickle gods of writing  as they will never pay a mortal in the act.  At best they'll wait till you are dead.

"What's a Zoom call?"  Mom, I've explained to you this a thousand tines...

Shrill voice, called out the back door:  kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty...  what stupid jackass let the cat out.  on a night like this, in pitch darkness...    boo hoo boo hoo hoo hooo hooo.   I get up from the couch, where I was finally writing again.  I walk over to the kitchen, I open the door, the cat's right there, I let him in.  He's all cold.  How could anyone be so stupid...  I wish I were dead.  She sits down in her Eames chair, fumbling around for a toothbrush, a book, paper, sags back in misery, exhausted act, her fingers still working.  Hi, pretty tree, she says finally.  Pretty sound it will be the end this year...  but we'll find you next year, if I still live...  Sigh.  Sigh.  Oh.  

I get up, take her out for a ride, after scrambled eggs.  A Sunday New York Times.  Sharing a tuna salad on rye sandwich from the Stewart Shop as we park on the bluff to look over the big lake and the light house.

She likes a little ride, it seems to entertain her, we don't argue as much, so we turn up by the university and then down to drive westward along the lakeshore, past Rudy's, then following the shore line around through a march where the water feeds toward the lake, then a wetland after the turn by the muddy farm, and turning to go a little further, the noise from the front end of the exhaust system blows.  Mom grabs her head, you've ruined the car, it's all I have...  Indeed, it is loud, loud as a B-17 bomber or a Harley.  Loud pipes, save lives.  Mechanic says a new catalytic converter could put us over the edge as far as sinking money into a 2003 Corolla.  We just spent $1500 on the gas tank, heat shield, fuel distributor....   Now what.

Cold.  Wind blowing.   Grey skies.  

I call the mechanic's shop Monday.  Bring her in tomorrow, as early as you can, so we can order the parts...  

I'm awake early, snoozing, then at 7:20 the alarm on my phone goes off.  How bad is this going to be...  Does this sink the economic viability of keeping a 2003 Corolla on the road.  Snow has come.  Mom is awake, but when I check in on her again, in her bed, she has dozed off.  I start the car up, after dressing, boots on, triple layer jackets, scarf.  Change for the bus.  Clutch in all the way.  A tap on the gas pedal, it starts.  I take the brush out, sweep the top off and the windshield and the side windows and the back window with the long armed yellow snow scraper sweeper.  Oh, turn on the defrosters...  Clear the windshield wipers.  I go back in, stomping to get the snow off the boots.  The pipe coming out of the engine...  it comes down, then it opens up into a wider tube, as wide as an old coffee can.  There, where it looks like it had been patched, sautered, the pipe has failed.  

So, I drive down, to First Street, and then on to Bridge Street, and I'm 104 all the way east... 

Hey mike, how are you.  Yeah, so...  Well, we'll give you a call.  He doesn't offer me a "need a ride?" so I walk out and on to the road, the shoulder.  Back west on 104.  Trucks going by.  A snowplow, then another.  I keep on walking.  Maybe I can catch a Centro Bus back into town, from the Walmart Stop across the road.  My bus schedule blows in the wind, and skin is beginning to hurt.  When will this end?  Well, I need a walk, a long walk.  People in history have made worse marches.  I pull my scarf out from the courier bag, wrap it tight.  That helps.  My timing for the Walmart bus is off.  I might as well keep walking.  I deserve the punishment.  The sky is blue, but then clouds come over.  I push the large buttons which barely depress to signal when to walk across intersections.

I slip and fall on the icy plowed parking lot by the Dunkin Donuts at the top of the hill by the two story motel.  Do I walk the whole way?  I cut across the road to the side street on the other side, maybe it will be more direct, lead me straight to the Utica Street Bridge...  The Big M.  No sidewalk on the other side anyway...  I follow this path, at least it's quiet, but then, coming back to the main road, oh, I just miss the bus into downtown, and now this is hurting...  Jack Kerouac suffering on the roads, and he could suffer it, tough, and make art of it.  I'm just trying to get back to mom's, and maybe the car will be fixed by tomorrow.  I'm back on the rough snow covered sidewalks headed west on the south side of the street, past Garofallo's where they make an excellent sub here in the poorer end of town.  I think of stopping into the convenience store, something warm, coffee, a breakfast sandwich or cold cut sub, but shyly, plighted, I walk on, too shy to stop.  Blocks become longer.  

Okay, so I cross the river over the old diagonal old railway bridge walking path, and gulls hold over the waters of the great churning cold river below us, looking down, beaks down, studiously, over the canal lane, over the river, perched just so thanks to their winged hold on the air, and I shuffle onward.  I'm close to the Big M now, now far away.   (The wind is stronger over the valley of the wide channeled river.)   There I can find warmth.  Wait for the bus.  I cross first street, and embarrassed by my state of affairs, I duck in to the covered shopping cart can recycling foyer, out of the wind, finally.

Mike, the boss of the mechanics and our friend from the service center shop has called.  I call him back.  From the dealership, the catalytic converter costs $2000.  Yikes.  But I found...  $650.  With labor and struts... 

Could be a lot worse.   I shop.  I finish shopping.  I go across the street, to replenish the pinot noir supply.  The Italian Covit will work just fine for $9.  

I've lost it all.  I cross past the snowdrifts, to get back to the Big M.  Take a minute at the little bench by the newspapers just inside the automatic doors in and out.  At 10:50, the Ellen Street bus will finally come, after all that hour and a half walking trudging along, in low Bean boots that slip sometimes.

And miracle of miracles the bus comes, and I'm alone on it as it takes me up the hill and over, and then I go down, the back way, slipping on the hill where four wheel motor vehicles chop up the ground, and finally I'm taking my boots off coming in the back kitchen door of Mom's.  I sit with her for a bit, feed her, get her her pills.  And then I take a nap.  It's cold up in the room.  I've got nothing going on.

This is a madhouse.  The cat was yowling in the night as I slept, falling to sleep early, not long after mom finished her slice of pizza, wrapping the rest of it with wax paper.  Where's my bedroom?  Will you be up to watch TV later, sure.  But I'm worn out and tired, and I fall to sleep even as the TV is loud. 

Later, around 3:30 in the morning, I wake up, and the problem is now that we can't find the cat in this madhouse.  She must have let him out.  The lake effect snow is coming down now, heavy, and there's a guy running a snowblower along the sidewalks.  Finally, the cat comes back to his little stoop and I let him in.  I heat a leftover slice for mom, who says she can't see out of her glasses they are so dirty.  Okay.  I'm feeling pretty twitchy, and so I crack open a can of cider and do the dishes, so I'll have some clean soapy water for all the cat dishes, the wine glasses, the people dishes.

Mom goes back up to bed.  There's some paperwork I need to get done.  The bill of the car insurance.  Checking her TIAA and the bank accounts.  And fortunately, they are holding steady.  

One writers for the glory and purpose of God.  That's about all one can say at the end of the day, and in the meantime I have the downstairs bathroom where the cat box is to sweep out.  Paper and used toilet paper rolls mom saves, smaller bags.  Keep moving.  I clear the refrigerator, let the cat out, get him back in, cook some bacon in the oven with the Lodge iron pan lined with tin foil in batches, 400 degrees in the oven.  Fill out the paperwork and seal the envelope.  Oh, thank god.  Some space finally.  Wasn't feeling well yesterday after a bottle and a few extra glasses of Beaujolais over a twelve hour period with a long nap in the middle to get through my birthday.

And Joe Biden will be elected today, and so the nerves are still up.  I was for a long very interested in inaugurals and Presidential history, but as I slacked off and dropped out in my moodiness at the end of my college days, my odd insights to Hemingway's later work as a kind of prayer, an abandonment to the textual truths of life, exemplified by The Dangerous Summer, Islands in the Stream and A Moveable Feast, work of intuitions rather than scholarship, marked by fine prose and evocations, a picture of humanity at the level of the human being's natural mind, well, I put aside all my JFK knowledge and remembered history and speeches, also all my Lincoln tales and words and letters, his speeches too of course, committed at least somewhat to memory, as poems must be remembered line by line, well, I put that aside, along with my Henry Steele Commager history books, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, the rudimentary beginnings of cultural histories and PBS, all that I put aside politically, to aim for the cultural things.  The Irish poets.  The Buddhists.  The Christian stories.  The Bible.  Shakespeare.  Then the restaurant business got its hold on me, took me for a ride.  And I went along.  And much of it was good.  Except it was irresponsible.

I go out to the car, placing the pizza box from Cam's in the recycling.  Sweep off the old Corolla, 3 inches or more of light snow.  Coming back from the mailbox I run into Ben the maintenance guy, just getting out of his car, new to him, a 2008 Chevrolet, which too has stories.  He's sad for Trump.  I don't contradict him.  He pulls on a heavy black Carhart Jacket with broad yellow reflective stripes over his work hoodie.  He's holding a Stewart Shop coffee cup.  He goes to his little shed to warm up, before coming out with snowblower.

But even as Trump flies off in Marine One and lands at Joint Andrews...  to tell a few more last lies to cap it off as he grins, white teeth...  made for television, I feel private feelings too deep and too worried and anxious enough to crack open a cider to deal with the daylight.

In the night, nice and dark, it becomes clearer to me.   Hemingway in Cuba, and before, was on his way to be a desert monk.  Like St. Anthony of Egypt.  He retreated, always, really, to nature.  To close animal friends, to like minded-outdoor men like Gary Cooper, to his childhood in a wild Michigan we'll have a hard time finding now.

It's the hardest act to pull off.  The writer artist's necessary call to the solitude where he will use words to analyze himself.  He must stride the world of society and his own private reactions.  As Hemingway did.  Finca Vigia, then driving 15 miles westward into Havana to the bars.  A social life, but balanced throughout his life, the quiet removal from the world.

"Go and sell what you own.  Give the money to the poor."  St. Anthony hears and follows the command of Jesus.  He retreats from the world, first at the edge of the town of his family, doing physical labors, prayer.  In the desert he meets the enemies of anger and greed.  He withdraws, rather than continue entangled, a victim of society, in order to escape the seductive impulsions of the world, the sinking ship.  Solitude of the desert, the furnace of transformation, to rid one's self of anger and hatred, of all the temptations Jesus found in the desert, the transformation of solitude.  This is where the writer is headed, bowing out into a longer silence with a final Brothers Karamazov after a fraught life.

There's a reason Kerouac liked to sleep outside.  He was not a lazy man.  This was the Christian road for him, the way of being a disciple, a comforting proof, similar to Hemingway's intimacy of his cats.  Perhaps in someway abetted by the sugar fuel of the port wine, but then trees run on sap and sugar too.  He knew his family, his mom, his sister, his brother in law, down  in Rocky Mount where he stays during the Dharma Bums tales, couldn't consistently provide, given their resources, the emotion support he might have needed, so, "inwardly (he) turned to God."  "Go thou, go thou, die hence, go roll your bones, go groan, go moan... go moan for man,"  or whatever it is exactly that he beautifully wrote and uttered on Steve Allen, old Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts and other places.  Kerouac liked, enjoyed, the monkish simplicity, the setting of boundaries by going off on his own, a habit he had his whole entire professional life.

Hemingway, life in Paris, being a bon vivant, is a Christian life as well, the discipleship of the cafes, the contact with artists of different stripes, the waiters, the other writers, a sense for travel and wide possibilities.

The thoughts of Henri J. M. Nouwen playing in the background on my iPhone on YouTube, coincide at this chapter in life, looking for a bridge.  Yes, I have been a people pleaser, I have given in life to help other people, and at a cost.  I've been a person used, shut off to things and people that might have brought me joy and relationships, a wife, a different path in life, a happier one.  I've let how others look at me become as a large part of my identity.  I have not established my boundaries as I should have.  I've not thought as highly of myself, rather thinking myself inferior.  But that all seems to be a classic pattern.  "Let go of all the self-made props," Nouwen tells us.  "Trust the inner voice."  Stop seeking everyone's opinions and input, which only tangle you up, leaving you dependent on all you've listened to.  And I fit the pattern.  I worked as a bartender for more than twenty five years, alone at the end of a day or night.  You give to your people, and then you eventually discover that they aren't able to provide you the emotional support you might think they could provide.  It's not their fault.  And that realization is a help in going "back to Jesus," the places you feel you need to go to.

"The inner voice of love:  Work around your abyss.  There is a deep hole in your being. You will never succeed filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous, and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid, being completely absorbed in your pain,  and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

"Cling to the promise:  Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.  You have to close yourself to the outside world, so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love."  Henri Nouwen, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom.  1998.  (Found on YouTube.)

There's a light covering of snow over the tops of the cars out in the parking lot, lit by three street lamps visible out the window.  I make a tuna and white bean salad for the morrow, red onion treated with lemon squeeze, zest, a forgettable dried sprinkle of oregano.

I pass the night before my birthday proper in some agony.  But I manage to rouse myself, come downstairs and the first thing mom says is, are we going to do anything fun today.  I have in mind taking a shower, and shaving.  I have lived for fifty-six years on this earth, as they say, apparently.  There's even some sunlight coming through the clouds, if not any blue sky to be found.

The television on upstairs, Christine Amanpour, mom being quiet now on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my birthday of 56 years, a light crystalline lake effect snow falling just like It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is suddenly back in the present world, present in time again, back in Bedford Falls, as far as explaining what the snow is like, just as it was a billion tiny perfectly round golf balls an inch thick over the grass the night before, I think of the great void in all of us, the great emptiness at our core.  The great unquenchable thing, the abyss we must work around, by first accepting, and then asking for some kind of change.

With mom off to bed, finally, again, I let the cat out, as he's been crying at me, yelling to be released.  I do the dishes.  I gather the plastic Pepsi little bottles, into one tall kitchen garbage bag, put my boots on, coat, hat, and walk out into the night to put the bag in the back seat of the car.  Through the powder on top of tiny golf ball snow upon the grass I see our friend's paw prints, and I'm somewhat alarmed to see, so it goes, that they out into the parking lot, along the backs of parked cars.  I follow on, and they lead out into the road, so maybe mom is right about keeping him.  A big blue snow plow truck with its snow blade scraping up sparks on the road comes down the moraine hill in the distance and past me as I stand in front of the first of the two farmhouses, where the cat's foot prints in the snow lead me.   I walk back, put the bag I've carried along into the backseat of the Toyota.   I come back and up to the townhouse barns for people, and there coming along the back side, to the kitchen door, he's been waiting for me.  I take him in.  As I come in and stamp my boots, there's mom in the kitchen again.  

 At night, in the peace, praying within myself, I know the wordless truth.  There was a king with a Midas Touch who sat commanding on a Golden Defecatory from his great abyss, his absence of soul.  A crass manipulator, whose command smeared the temples of democracy with shit and lies and conspiracy theories and murderers.

And it was part of fallen human nature, untaught, manipulated, that from their own abyss and compulsions for some form of identity, their lacking, that so many have listened to him, and he preyed upon them.  He promised an identity, that he'd be there with him.  One would hope that he would only disappear into the mastering of his own illusions.

Anyone with a soul would come, at some point of wise years, to know that hollow place within that cannot be filled.   I too have tried to fill my own voids, as a less than perfect male, an escapist.  I have spent sinful time with publicans and sinners, been gluttonous and a wine-bibber, knowing myself as a weak and powerless sinner, to use a language, terms we are in rational modern life we have become detached from.

But I will go on.