Trying

It has the quality of the most tiresome and repetitive tasks, unrewarding and unrelenting.  Its reappearance sparks revulsion.  And the more one tires of it, the more it asserts itself, begs to be titled or retitled and generally takes over.  If I was a movie, it would be Grief II or, perhaps, Grief III.  Or in another era, The Valley of Grief, and by this point, Beneath the Valley of Grief.  And so on and on and on and on on on.  There appears to be no off.

A Sunday morning, shapeless with possibilities.  What to do?  Nothing, for I am being done, even done in, by a heavy, sad anger.  I sit pinned in my armchair, trying to remember not so much what I had planned for the day, but why.  I am aware of the weekly farmers market currently underway two blocks to the north.  There is no reason to go there, certainly nothing I need, and diversion is not to be trusted.  I stare at the wall.  A friend has introduced me to Richard Hugo, famed poet of the Northwest, and as much as I can read anything I read him.  But not now.  It's wall staring time.

The more I hate the Miss Haversham qualities of my front room, particularly the New Yorkers unread for months, the more I fuel the fires.  Things have stopped.  I have stopped.  I have even stopped worrying about the stoppage.  There's enough inertia in this front room, and angry inertia at that, to fuel some yet-to-be-discovered power source.  No doubt about the energy storage.  Absolutely nothing is happening, but everything is heating.  And there are things I have to do.

Trouble is, much of the time, I think of my current condition in that most American of ways, productivity.  I have things to do that I haven't gotten done.  How vile of me.  Another day wasted.  I am wasted in the sense an alcoholic gets wasted.  The workday opportunity is wasted.  Yes, Sunday is not a workday, but that hardly matters, for things need to get done.  And I need to get done with this endless replay of Marlou's life getting done, an experience or reexperience, currently in the air.  Literally.  Spring bursting in the outdoor beds, my wife bursting in her indoor one, cancer gone mad, filling her body and squeezing the life out.  All on the same day, at the same moment.  Spring, young man's fancy, thoughts of love.

Paul, still volunteering on loan through Catholic charities' reciprocal agreement with Jewish ones, arrives to help out.  The getting on of socks being an enormous help.  Not only of labor but of attendant stress.  What else?  We wander out to the garden and Paul helps pull buds from the brussels sprouts.  The reason for this has escaped me.  The brussels sprouts have escaped me.  I thought they would march up and down the stem like an ad for Birdseye.  But they are not marching or even forming, and my obsession with picking off the blooms appears to be ill-founded.  For every bloom I pick, another three form.  Removing them is not only impossible, but has utterly failed to stimulate the formation of edible brussels sprouts.  Give up.  Let the plant have its way.  It will do what it wants.  Life and death are equally beyond control.  Paul goes, and I stare at the afternoon.

Naturally, a retired person has to keep active, and journeying to Peet's passes for activity, just barely, so off I go.  Hollow and repetitive, though such a journey feels.  Yet, there it is, Caffeination Central, things looking pretty much the same, although there is an oddity.  A large white pipe is slinking its way out the door.  I see it and do not see it.  Half oblivious to this and any other anomaly, I barge in through the doorway, while a patron rushes to help me.  He's not quite sure what to do, this big floppy white thing half blocking my way.  Eventually, he lifts it, I roll under and head for the barista action.  A quiet moment, spring heat felt through the smoked glass.  Apparently the air-conditioning is not functioning today, thus the silly white exhaust pipe.  In snatches of overheard conversation I learn that Martha said the same thing as Julie.  No?  Yes.

I am out the door in 20 minutes and the Martha has triggered something.  A film Marlou liked.  Mostly Martha, about a high-strung, introverted chef at a haute restaurant in Hamburg.  Actually, Marlou loved it.  The film spoke to her.  She mentioned it often as some sort of guide or explanation for her personality and her life.  Martha, the cinematic chef, pursues cooking as an art form, yet is curiously artless.  She does not possess an insincere bone in her body.  And has trouble dealing with the world.  And was this Marlou?  She thought so, and this must have at least resonated with the inner person.

And as I'm bouncing home, none of this really matters, except that Marlou was struggling to understand herself.  Like any conscious person.  And this was as far as she got.  It stopped.  The road stopped.  They all do, and I know this on some level.  But seemingly the wrong level.  And so they come, bits and pieces, remembrances of life and of death, and I'm trying, really trying, to get comfortable with all of it.