And the Other

Friday night.  Needing something, anything, I decide to take myself to a sushi dinner.  I think to go early, but my mother has needs.  Per usual, I am sitting with my mother.  She is in much pain.  Her back.  She has conceded to it now and is taking the Tramadol the doctor prescribed.  Tramadol and muscle relaxers.  She moans, burps, rubs her stomach and says she is constipated.  I make suggestions, but I don't know if she hears me.  We talk of little but her misery.  I am helpless, of course, can do nothing to alleviate her suffering other than sit in empathy.  I take on her misery, too.  My back is hurting.  I feel constipated.  She does not want to travel this road alone.  

Of course. 

I am ready for an early dinner, but just as I am leaving, she tells me she has no soup.  It is what she wants for dinner, so I go to the grocery store and buy her things.  When I return, she is still sitting on the big vibrating pad that she spends half her life on.  Her eyes are dull with misery.  I hug her and tell her I love her as I stand to leave.  I try to disengage, but the misery clings to me relentlessly.  

"You need to take care of yourself, too," people say.  But my situation is unusual, I think.  At least not usual.  I am it.  I am the lifeline.  I am the one and only thing.

I am not driving to an early dinner now.  The roads have cleared.  People have gotten home from work and are readying themselves for the weekend.  There is still sun, but it is not as intense.  The sky is clear.  I am hungry.  

The restaurant is almost full, but I get a seat at the sushi bar.  The waitress comes right away with a trainee.  I know what I want, I say.  Sake, tuna kobachi, sushi rice, and a bowl of edamame.  

I look around the room.  Tables full of handsome people, beautiful young couples.  A waitress walks by.  She, like so many others, could be an actress or a movie star.  That is the world that surrounds me.  

I take a photo of my dinner set up with my phone.  The waitress brings the sake as I am doing that and I am embarrassed.  But when she leaves, I take another.  

I can't help myself.  I will text them to people I know.  There are two lives, the one people believe you live and the other one.  

But my life is wearing me down.  It is wearing me out.  I have tried to emulate the hero's life.  I have believed you wore your experiences, that they are visible.  I am not living heroically now.  I'm afraid that shows, too.  

Dinner arrives.  

I take pleasure in the meal.  The owner passes and says hello as he always does.  

"Welcome back," he says.  "It's good to see you."

Dinner done, sake gone, I pay the bill.  I stand slowly, back, hips, knees all barking.  I walk slowly through the tables of diners.  I've have taken note.  I have been the only one dining alone.  

The sun never goes down.  It is near seven-thirty.  I pour the last of the good whiskey C.C. has brought me from Scotland.  I call to check on my mother.  I hear the television blasting in the background.  I let her get back to "her shows."  

At ten-thirty, I realize I am going to need milk in the morning.  I drive to the 7-11.  The parking lot is full of fire trucks.  Medics are loading a woman on a stretcher into an ambulance.  Crackheads sit on the not so decorative planters by the door.  A woman approaches the car, waving.  I lower the window.  

"Do you want to make some money?" she asks.  

"What?"

"My sister will give you a hundred dollars if you take me to. . . " she names a place twenty minutes away.  

"What?"

"Two hundred," she says, leaning her head against the door.  "Three hundred," she fairly weeps.  "I've got to get there now."

This is a new one to me.  Of course, there will be no sister, no money.  It is obvious.  But someone, surely, will fall prey to this before the night is up.  

I was about to go to bed.  Now, at the corner of The Boulevard, I feel the pulsing of a Friday night.  I feel humbled and ashamed.  

I take a Tramadol and go to bed.  I wake often.  Not a good night.  I get up, defeated, at 5:30.  I put on the coffee, sit down and read the news.  The phone rings. It is 6:00

Uh-oh.  

It is my mother.  She weeps into the phone.  She has made up her mind, she says.  She could not sleep for pain all night long.  She has called 911.  

"I will meet you there," I say.  

This is her life.  This is mine.  There is the life people believe you live. . . .