A Moment Home

The world is a scary place.  Gaza, Iran, Minneapolis, and weekend nights in Downtown Gotham, just a few minutes away.  People are jacked and crazed.  WTF happened?  

Dana White, TRT, MMA, muscle crazes MAGA, and--TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!!!!

I'm guessing they give testosterone injections to ICE and Border Patrol agents.  They just don't act right.  But the protesters I've seen in the million videos from Minnesota are not the peaceful protesters of before.  They are not part of the Thoureauvian/Ghandi/Martin Luther King protests.  Today's protests look nothing like that.  No sit-ins.  No hunger strikes.  

As I've heard so many times about the conflict in the Middle East, "a curse on both your houses."

I am tempted to post a Christopher Hitchens piece here, but I'll leave it to you to search for his views on Islam and the Koran.  I'm afraid I see echoes of this in the conflict in Minnesota.  

To wit, the little portrait I post today.  Oh for gentle peace and quietude.  A hot beverage, the space to make things away from the ravages of circumstance.  

I went to my own home yesterday.  For the first time in forever, there were no workers there.  The carpentry and the siding and the roofing and the painting are all done. The house was imbued with a lovely peace and beauty.  The house and the apartment and the space between.  Everyone had done a wonderful job.  There is still much to do, but it is all stuff that I can do by myself.  There is the mulching and re-rocking of the drives, the pressure washing and filling in the gaps between bricks with a polymeric sand on the patio off the bedroom, the taking up the walkway from the driveway to the deck that has been uprooted by the camphor tree and the levelling of the path with soil, replacing the stones and planting mondo grass around and between, the tearing up of the garden gone wild and figuring out what to replant. . . oh, there is plenty of work to be done, but it is grunt work that I can do alone.  

I decided to cook my mother's dinner at my house.  I haven't cooked there for nearly a year.  Small red beans and pork in the Instapot.  Yellow onions, salt, pepper, red pepper, and 3/4s bottle of a cheap red wine.  I went to the grocers and got it all, then, setting it to pressure cook, I took a long walk for the second day in a row, the only exercise I was confident in since getting the bad vertigo.  

When I walked on Friday, as usual, I cut across the campus of the Country Club College.  Do you remember what a Friday afternoon on a college campus is like?  The joy is palpable.  And seemingly on this afternoon, Country Club was a women's college.  They were everywhere, tall and thin and athletic, relaxed and laughing and smelling of recent showers and sundries.  The sun was shining and the air was perfect.  Good God, it was a day to be alive.  

On Saturday, though, it was a different scene, something out of Girls Gone Wild.  I don't know the reason why, but scantily clad girls roamed around in thong bikinis, some carrying towels, others just straight up cruising.  As pleasant as it might have been, I was feeling myself an intruder and kept my eyes averted not wanting to look like. . . well, anyway. . . . 

Across campus and onto the Avenue of Mansions bordering the lake.  A hundred walkers on the sidewalk, throngs of people headed for the famous Boat Tour.  On to the golf course, cutting through the grounds of Casa Feliz, designed by James Gamble Rogers in 1932, and on to the Boulevard.  

It was jammed.  Across the park in the pasture, the Farmer's Market was still alive.  Long lines formed in front of a breakfast restaurant, something I have never understood.  The sidewalks bustled while many of the weekend hoi-polloi picnicked in the park.  I heard a voice call my name--"Hey professor!"  It was Black Sheep, tall and shining and casually preppy as is his natural state.  Small talk, then onward.  I decided to avoid crossing the campus once again.  

Back home, I smelled the cooking meal.  I dropped half a carton of Epsom Salts into the tub and turned on the hot water.  I poured a Lagunitas IPA I had picked up at the grocers and sank into the hot tub.  Oy.  

A soak, a shower and shampoo.  I was limp as I dried and put on my clothes.  Dinner was made.  I needn't hurry.  I took the rest of my beer to the deck to sit as I used to oh-so long ago.  I watched the squirrels and birds and thought about the missing cats that used to come and loll about together for my amusement, now gone.  

I thought about taking a phone pic of my beer as I used to make pictures of my drinks and send them to friends.  I realized I really didn't have anybody to send them to now.  Life had changed radically in the past year.  Where had it gone?  Where had my life gone?

And then something occurred to me.  I was thinking things that I don't think at my mother's.  The entire process was different.  Different synapse were firing, or so it felt.  I was relaxed.  I wanted to sit and watch the sun sink, watch the sky turn flamingo with the dying light, eat my dinner before the television sitting on my big leather couch, then decide how to spend my evening.  

Yes, I remembered how it used to be.  

But I had to get the Instapot to my mother's house.  Her cleaning lady had been there.  It would feel fresh.  As I began to drive away, the tenant pulled into her driveway.  She walked to the car.  

"Smell that?" I said as she stuck her head inside.  "You want to come have dinner at my mother's?"

I made the jasmine rice and opened a bottle of wine.  The tenant showed up in half an hour.  I put on some music and we ate and talked, the three of us, until eight.  I poured a scotch.  

And then the night became what it has been this past year.  My thoughts turned.  I prepared my mother's meds.  I sat on the couch and turned on the television.  

"Your a good son.  She's lucky to have you."

By nine-thirty I was bored and exhausted and began to get ready for bed.  

I'd like to spend my days with that lady in the atelier.  And nights.  I would cook good meals and there would be beer and wine and whiskey, and the days would be pleasant and lovely, and. . . . 

. . . turn it down low and grab a book. . . it is liquid, not solid, a new kind of Muzak that won't get in the way, won't intrude, requires nothing. . .