15 Jan 25

Another sleepless trap, tonight in my mom’s 15th-century house, below freezing outdoors and not much different in. She wasn’t joking about how cold it gets. There’s no heat to speak of that makes it to the bathrooms so it feels like you’re in an outhouse, tough for anyone but my mom’s almost 76. The thought of shedding your cloths to bathe is unthinkable. We shuffle between rooms to the one that’s warmest. This must be what it felt like to live in the 15th century.

My body wakes from a dream about Eberhard but it’s only 1 AM. He’s become the Santa Claus figure we keep on the mantel back home and just gave me some socks that fit just right. There’s a motorcycle revving on the 27 and maybe that’s what woke me, the picture of Eberhard in his motorcycle cop uniform posing on the bookshelf in mom’s study, where the two of us hunker down with our blankets and books, mom stabbing the touchscreen with a knobby finger, me trying to stay awake to Proust.

The house is as close to silent as can be. The heater, if it’s on, doesn’t make a sound. It’s like I’m snow camping I have so many blankets and layers but it’s better than running the portable heater because the fan makes my tinnitus squeal; now I have my bad ear jammed into the pillow to squelch it.

Mom’s part-ferile cat Lucy has been known to pee on my bed, my laundry, my shoes, whatever’s mine she can mark to signal her contempt for me. The feeling is mutual. Now I hear her trilling, creeping closer, the soft creak of the house, and detach my phone so I can get her with the flashlight, maybe lure her into my room with its soft glow so when she gets to the doorway I can blast her with it.

Once I would sleep on the uppermost floor but now I sleep on the middle one, around the corner from mom; her Hungarian lodger Laszlo is up there now though he makes not a sound, which seems impossible in this old house, and how is it even normal she has a 50-year-old mechanic coming and going with his shaved head and big hands and Eastern European worker’s bib? I’d stay on the top floor but it’s too lonesome up there anyway; that’s where we stayed when the kids were young. This room was my mom and John’s but I couldn’t sleep in it for a while, and mom never has since John died. We helped her make a bedroom of John’s office the first year we lived here, in 2009. It doesn’t appear the heater in this room works so I have to leave the door open for any hallway heat, and risk the cat.

After flying for thousands of miles and staying up 24 hours there is nothing better than a big plate of warm pasta in a small Italian restaurant handmade by the couple who owns it, off a small side-street in a small German village and a small dining area that seats less than 10, surrounded by shelves of Italian dried pasta and tomato sauce the owners hauled themselves. That and a doppio with a pack of raw sugar sucked down in one slurp and a hunk of tiramisu. With that I am undeniably alive. Let them find this when I am old and withered to prove it, I was here.

In the morning, if I can keep myself in bed until 4, I will creep downstairs in the dark like a mouse and light a candle, turn on the portable heater fan, make a coffee and write. I’ll even close off the hobbit-sized door to this room, my favorite, and play old U2 songs from my wireless speaker. The one with the song for Bukowski about his troubled relationship with his dad: “I’m in you, more so when they put me in the ground.”

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Bukowski, Creative Nonfiction, identity, journal writing, Memoir, prose, travel