Bad Saturdays

Bad Saturdays continue to haunt me.  I still look forward to them, but they hardly perform for me anymore.  Yesterday was no exception to this sad rule.  I had hopes.  And then I had none at all.  Nothing tragic, just more of the hideously mundane.  

At nine-thirty my mother was still in bed.  I should say, she was back in bed.  She got up at eight screaming in pain, shuffling through the house with her walker and baggy underwear.  She looked at me with urgent eyes crying, "I won't be able to go to that doctor's appointment early in the morning.  You are going to have to cancel it.  Oh. . . oh. . . .oh. . . . "

There is nothing I can do to relieve her pain, and so I have had to become inured to it.  She takes four Percocet a day and three Gabapentin.  The only thing I can think of is to keep her permanently on morphine, but I haven't the ability to do that.  

She took her pills and went back to bed.  It was Saturday, and I had plans that didn't include staying inside at my mother's all the live-long day, so I told her I was leaving and asked if she needed anything.  She looked at me in a panic. 

"Where are you going?  Oh. . . oh. . . oh. . . ."

I got her settled down and left, but I was carrying a lot of it with me.  

I thought about going out to breakfast, but I have become a bit of a penny pincher of late, so I decided on an "egg a muffin" as Eddie Murphy dubbed it, instead.  Back home with breakfast, I took a look at the milk in the fridge.  There was no way it could still be good, right?  I looked at the sell by or good until date on the carton.  Nov. 4.  No way!  I smelled it, then poured some into a glass.  I stuck my tongue in it.  I took a small sip.  It seemed fine, so I filled the glass and drank it with my egg a muffin.

What are they putting in the milk, I wonder?  

It was still morning.  I decided I needed to get out with my camera, so I jumped in the car and drove to a spot I thought to park and walk, but when I got there, nothing intrigued me.  Maybe Gotham.  I drove on.  Gotham was dead, the sidewalks empty, the shitty businesses shuttered.  Downtown Gotham has become a gangsta crime scene at night, and it looked like many businesses had just closed up shop.  Entire blocks.  There was no use stopping.  I drove by the big lake park where the Farmer's Market is on Sundays.  The day was overcast.  Nobody was moving.  Onward, toward a small hipster part of town.  Nope.  I turned toward home.  

I'd driven a big loupe through Deadsville, but it had given me time to digest my breakfast, so when I got back to my house, I changed into my gym clothes and put out my yoga mat and went through the core exercises I started doing a week or so ago.  I am so bad at them, I will only do them at home.  I look truly hideous but I feel better afterwards, so I suffer through them with some small notion that I will get better.

When those were over with, I head out the door for a long walk.  Well. . . long for a cripple man.  3.3 miles.  I limped down my street to the lakeside sidewalk, then on to Country Club College.  Nobody was out.  I limped across campus painfully trying to walk upright without much success.  My back, hips, knees and now one ankle were sharply painful.  

I thought about my mother.  

Leaving campus, I crossed the busy four lane road against the light hoping I wouldn't see a car in the distance that would make me need to hurry.  

I didn't.  

Onward down the long street that parallels the Boulevard past the Palm Beach sized mansions, or at least, in some cases, reasonable approximations.  Here was the Heath Bar heiress' house.  Here the house of the descendant of an old cattle family.  And here, a new house built by the "kids" who lived across the street from me years ago, she the daughter of the man who started Netscape in the early days of the internet.  By the time I passed the former NBA player/now announcer's house, I was close to the golf course where I cut over along the fairway and through the old Gamble Rogers mansion that is now a city venue for weddings, etc.  

Then down the Boulevard back home.  

Clomp, clomp, clomp.  I walked on the park side looking across to the shops and restaurants.  First past the Catholic Church, past an alleyway to the Hidden Garden shops where a good bar and restaurant is tucked.  There was my buddy's hippie shop and further up my friend's new place, a pub-like restaurant with live music in the evenings, this next to my ex-wife's jewelry store, a big, expensive place where we were once registered for our own wedding.  Further, past the good new bar that I go to with "the boys" across the street from a hit and miss sushi restaurant.  Then back across the big four lane road and onto the college campus where once I taught.  Half a mile now until I'm home.  

The point?  It is a town I know, a town where I'm known.  It is home.  Almost everyone I know wants to leave the state, but most of them are not so rooted, I think.  People move to the new hippest places if they can, or near to them if they can't.  But where they go, the locals complain.  

"Austin (or Nashville or Santa Fe or a thousand other places) used to be so such a great place.  Now all this outside money is moving in and the city is just sprawling.  You can't even drive here anymore. It is impossible."

I don't know.  Maybe it is better to be the new people ruining the old place than vice-versa.  

"Oh, we just love it here.  They have great shops and some really high end restaurants.  This town is booming." 

Ten years down the road, though, they will be complaining, too, and looking for the next good place.  

I don't know, really.  I'm just saying.  

When I got back to the house, I was ready to collapse in pain.  I drew a hot bath from my new tankless water heater.  Endless hot water.  I sank into the tub and fell asleep.  When I woke, I ran more hot water into the tub.  I don't know how long I soaked, but I could have stayed all day.  

After a soak and a shower, I got dressed for the day.  It was past noon now.  Maybe I'd go back for more boiled peanuts and a beer.  Or maybe I should go to the Irish pub and try to make some pictures.  I went into the office and sat down at the computer to check my mail.  I began going through hard drives looking at photos.  I was lingering.  No. . . I didn't have it in me to go to the Irish pub.  Not today.  

When I got out of my office chair, it was 2:30.  Holy smokes.  Time to go.  I'd drive by the liquor store and get more Negroni juice, then head on to the brewery.  I would loop back by the good bbq place and pick up a rack of ribs for dinner.  I had my Leica.  Maybe I'd get lucky.  

By the time I'd gotten the car to the end of the road, it began to rain.  And then to pour.  And then it was a monsoon.  The sound of the rain on the car overwhelmed the stereo.  It was a downpour and the streets were running streams now, soon to become rivers.  I drove slowly.  When I got to the liquor store, all the spots in front of the door were taken.  I sat in the car and waited.  After five minutes, someone walked out, then back in.  The rain was horrible.  Finally someone ran to their car and backed out.  I turned into the space. . . and waited.  But the rain was not letting up.  It was only getting worse.  Nervous, I couldn't wait any longer, so I slid out of the car and limped toward the door getting soaked along the short way. 

There was no use in going to the brewery at this point, I thought.  And so my plans made a sudden turn.  I drove on to the bbq joint to get the ribs.  The handicapped parking near the door was empty, so I pulled out my mother's hang tag.  

Don't judge me.  I should have one of my own.

It was just after three.  I was the only one in the restaurant.  I sat at the bar and waited for my order.  Some of the staff kibitzed with me until the ribs were ready.

"Be careful in the storm."

Back out into the monsoon and across town, back through my neighborhood and onward to my mother's.  Even on the main highway now, cars were throwing up rooster tails.  The rain, it seemed, would never end.  I knew that certain streets would be flooded, so I went the long way around to get to my mother's house without taking any chances.  

I pulled into my mother's garage.  And just like that, the deluge was done.  

Shit piss fuck goddamn.  

I hadn't eaten since the "egg a muffin," so. . . fuck it.  Early dinner.  

The ribs were good but greasy.  I was covered in pig grease real quick.  My mother picked at a few ribs to get all pig slick, too.  I'm getting too old for some things now, and really fatty pig grease is probably one of them.  After only two ribs, I was full.  It was four.  I had the Negroni juice.  I made a Negroni.  

The rain began again, not the torrent it was, just rain.  It came in waves now which made me feel a little better about being in.  I asked my mother if she wanted to sit under cover in the garage and watch the rain.  Nobody was walking now, of course.  We looked at nothing but slick green lawns and shrubs and hedges.  We talked about old times.  

The rest of Saturday would be watching television and an early bed.  

And that's it, darlings.  That is all I have to report.  I did take photos, a few, of lights shining through rain splattered car windows.  I just liked the feel of pressing the shutter, of winding the film.  It is very satisfying and the disappointment of making a nothing photograph is delayed rather than immediate.  Only later when the film gets developed and scanned will the nothingness of those photos be apparent.  For the moment, though, after the shutter snaps, there is still the hope that you have made a masterpiece.  

It is rainy this morning.  It will be rainy all week.  New construction now is all in low lying areas, and they are beginning to flood.  That is, if you are not in the wealthy parts of town but have come to live here recently and have bought in one of the bright and shiny new developments with their own Walmarts and Targets and Publix grocery stores and the same chain restaurants you see lining the highway everywhere.  You have been duped by corrupt politicians and con men developers, and now the city or county or state will have to try to bail you and them out with more and better drainage that may or may not alleviate the problem.  You might take solace, though, that this is happening everywhere in one way or another.  

It is time to get my mother's morning meds together.  She takes around twenty pills a day now, half of them in the morning, for they fall into three categories: once in the morning, morning and night, and three times a day.  All three categories, of course, are taken in the morning.  Her afternoon doses are far fewer.  

She is pushing her walker down the hallway now, so I must go.  Maybe I'll go to the pub today with the Leica.  

Wouldn't that be something?