I wanted to find a warm, cozy picture of home to post today, but, as you know, I am not at home and all my images are, and I figured I needed color today but not bright colors, and so. . . this is all I had. It does not really go with what I wanted to write about, though. Now I'll see if what I write is influenced by the photo at the top or if I can. . . whatever.
It is rainy here in the Sunny South, cloudy with a drizzle, not the tropical downpours we often have. It is autumn rain, I'd guess. After the gym, where I had the longest aerobic--oops--cardio--workout that I have had in months, I went home and put on the university jazz station and poured Epsom Salts into a hot tub. And there I lay for a very long time. Followed by a hot shower, after which, I was noodle limp. The music was perfect, real rainy day jazz, and played on and on and on without a single mistake. The slow, low light from the overcast sky barely shown through the windows, the house lit by many small lamps making pools of warm light. A small lunch of crushed sardines with crackers and Sriracha sauce. Then the big chair in the t.v. room, me facing the bookshelves and the passage to the kitchen, the the panels of the glass kitchen door and the big windows above the sink. I sat for a very long time pretending I lived in my own home again, just sitting and looking and thinking, remembering, planning. It was the closest I've come to bliss in a very long time.
Oh, Christ, how I miss my home.
The phone rang. It was my mother. She had gone to breakfast with the neighborhood gang which had released me from making breakfast and had wonderfully elongated my day. But, she said, I had not left her pills. Bliss shattered. Reality intrusion.
"O.K. I'm sorry. I'll be back in a bit."
It was difficult leaving the house, the light, the music. . . the buzz. . . but outside the day was still mellow with a misty rain and the university radio was still playing beautifully. I drove slowly through my part of town with it's oak lined streets and the richer landscaping, the winding streets. . . . The phone rang.
"You need to stop and get me some whiskey!"
As I've said, she isn't drinking beer any longer. In truth, I don't know what holds her up. Narcotics and whiskey and whatever other pain relievers she gobbles during the day. But as the doctor said, he can't really treat her, so let's just try to manage the pain. I guess that is what we do.
Going from my house to my mother's house is like moving from a beautiful old private club to the lobby of a Holiday Inn. I had the evening groceries and the whiskey. I gave my mother the pills she should have had three hours before. She was in obvious pain. She downed the pills with a whiskey and coke as I got the rice cooker going. I washed and cut the broccoli and cut the cod into bite sized pieces and put them in a bowl with a cracked egg and let them soak. I washed my hands and made the cocktail I thought all afternoon to eschew. Like my mother, we can't cure my predicament, so we try to manage the pain. I took the drink to the garage/porch to watch the dying of the day.
Sitting in the garage, I remembered that I had once wanted to live in a big metal hanger in the desert. Twenty foot arched ceiling, open at both ends, sitting at the end of the day with a cold beer watching the sunset. The garage is a bit like that, I thought. As close as I would get to that old dream that I had picked up somewhere long ago from an unremembered movie. I was still, I guess, wrapped in the aura of the day.
At dinner, I asked my mother if she had fun at breakfast. "No," she said. She couldn't hear what anybody was saying. It was just noise. Her hearing aids weren't worth a damn. She had two pieces of worthless toast and "scrambled eggs that weren't worth a shit." Twelve dollars, she said. I agreed that eating out anywhere had gotten expensive but that eating at Perkins was never going to be worth the money you spend. I was looking ahead to Friday hoping to get away for another quick sushi dinner on my own.
Today's weather will be like yesterday's. I hope to feel some blissful peace again, but you know how that goes. Same river twice.
Driving from my home back to my mother's, this song came on the radio. It is an old Duke Ellington tune done well. I love Ellington, but this version has just a bit more kick to it. If you click on it, give it a minute. The intro doesn't really sell the song so very well, but thirty seconds in, if you have an old soul, the damn thing will get you.
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