This one thought has been popping into my head everyday, and I feel it is time to explore it. The way I figure this whole thing out, my life pretty much ended when Ma died. I really don’t know why I feel this way, but it has been about five and a half years since she has been gone and I am still feeling this way. It is something I just can’t help. The thought is as crystal clear as anything I have ever thought about, and keeps ringing in my head. I loved Ma as she was a big part of my life. I stayed home with her when she was all alone, because with her is where my heart was. There are some things that you just cannot change and this is one of them. It makes me tired to think about it because there is such a huge emotional content here. When you give so much of your life to someone, it is hard to recover when they have passed away and you are left with this tremendous and powerful feeling of being alone. Granted I have said that I felt alone mostly all of my life, but since Ma has been gone, the feeling has been compounded to an even greater degree. It just will not leave me alone. I am sure Ma felt that giving so much of her life to every one else was the same thing. Then again, I don’t know what she felt because we never really talked about it that much. I was always too wrapped up in my own grief and isolation to ever feel what someone else felt. Or maybe more to the point I felt so much of what others feel that I found a way to survive by fooling myself into thinking that I was isolated, when in effect I was really taking on the feelings and pain and suffering of all those around me. I can’t really tell anymore, except for the fact that it has been really hard to carry on since the day may died and left our world.

Misinterpreted dreams take to me to places I have never been, just about every night now, I don’t know where I have been and I don’t know where I am going. Bizarre as bizarre is it is just the way things unfold before me last chance along this highway I am the current of current times I am a filter for things phenomenal that i can never imaging just start writing and the abstract flows out before me born again a bald headed little kid I pop out of the womb and see before me a womb alive again in a desert wasteland hot and steaming alone someplace just as I was born, I see the sunrise or is it a sunset or is it just a midday sun I can’t be sure but I know I am here I remember this tan-brown atmosphere, just sky and sand carrying me two hands hold me outstretched reaching for the sky there is no sound just silence there is no smell there is image brightened highland I am just a newborn baby in a place I cannot remember.

I was sitting out in the backyard the other evening watching the dog run around and noticed the old pear tree was dying from the middle up. The fat trunk in the middle seemed to be dead with just some new growth around the outside of the tree. Last year was a banner year for the old tree, as banner years go in this late stage of life. The tree has to be over 70 years old. Maybe this is its last hurrah.

Ma was my best friend for a very long time. The only person who would listen to all my baloney. We did a lot of things together went to many places and had a  lot of fun. It just about killed me when she started to get sick. One day she was sitting on the couch when I got home and she told me she didn’t feel good and that she needed to go to the hospital to get checked out. That was the beginning of the end. It was not like her to complain. The only problem she really had was when she had to get a pacemaker put in because her heart was not pumping correctly. After that she did good for a long time. I remember when she said her heart rate was low and that she needed a pacer. It was almost like she was asking my permission. What the hell did it matter what I thought. If she needed it she needed it. I am just an insignificant speck of dust on a universal scale. Ma was the one that mattered. That day when she said she didn’t feel good started a string of events that led to cancer surgery, chemo therapy, and an eventual sickness that took her away from us. I can still hear her say “goodnight Johnny” into my ear when I bent over to give her a kiss and go home for the night when she was in the Matthew House, a place for terminally ill people to g die. What a fucking lousy time that was. I always had the feeling that she was not ready to go, but that she finally faced the fact that her body was quitting and she finally let go. I always got the feeling that she was still hanging on even though she was gone. The night she told me “goodnight” I thought she would never speak again. I don’t know how she roused herself and said something. She died a few days later. When she said those two words to me it was like she used to do when I was a little kid and she would put us to bed, saying our prayers and listening to the soothing music of studio 51 or some show like that on the radio back in the 1950’s. It killed me to see her body bloat up from sickness and it killed me to hear screaming every time somebody touched her because her skin was so tight from the swelling and the pain was unbearable. Then it all went away, the swelling went down, and we decided to take her to the Matthew House when she said she didn’t want to go home. Why the hell would she want to go home? What the hell could we do for her? The house is a big empty place now, with just me and the one cat. I have Ma’s pictures and a lot of memories, but she is gone.

There are just too many things all around me these days. Like the paint on the light switch on the back porch that used to serve as my art studio, where I painted all my masterpieces; the pine kitchen table that I took upstairs because it was too big for the kitchen, but it served us well for so many years after Ma and I went to buy it at the House of Kirk north of Marcellus by the Tuscarora Golf Course. Life was simpler then, a time I crave more everyday, yet a time that is gone forever and that will never come back.

On the way to work this morning I had that feeling again that something big is about to happen in my life. I really don’t have a clue as to what it might be, but the feeling keeps getting stronger and stronger nonetheless. i can’t shake it. I don’t know if my time here on earth is just about up, or whether something else is going to happen. At any rate I am prepared for anything, no matter what might come my way. If it is over it is over, there is not a hell of a lot I can do about it. I just have to keep smiling and keep things going my way. I cannot let other people have an effect on my. Just keep looking forward and into the future, which is the now, and let it take me wherever and whenever that now might be.

Ma