my mom

[Drunk Monk]

I dread being in this house alone. My parents bought it 50 years ago this year. It’s in terrible shape, falling apart from every angle. I see ghosts of my life and family everywhere and hear echoes from the corners of the past. I crank up the ol’ magnavox - a turntable/radio with a solid wood cabinets the size of two footlockers stacked on top of each other. It has incredibly warm bass like only solid real wood can produce. I suspect it’s driven by tubes. It weighs a ton, but it masks those echoes. As for the ghosts, I avert my eyes from dark nooks and mirrors. I love my parents and the home they built here for me to grow up inside, but now it’s haunted.

For years, I’ve faced the burden of this house. Don’t get me wrong - I’m grateful I’ll inherit it - but it is so full of reminders. At the meeting this morning I set up on the dining room table which is strewn with documents my mom thinks are important. Some of them are. Behind me were my mom’s dolls that she made as a youth. Two peachlings and one magnificent Renjishi - mythic Japanese figures - in large glass cases. Spying them in the background, one of my coworkers said ‘you’re in a museum?!’ They are beautiful and surely shaped me into following the warrior way. But what am I going to do with those? They’re fragile and huge. I don’t know how my folks transported them from Hawaii to Pennsylvania to here. 

As I was searching for my mom’s magnifying glass that she uses to read, I found caches of food everywhere - mostly sweets - tucked under piles of papers and such. There are reams of papers with scribbled notes all over. It’s such a mess. I fear it.
 
I hope my mom can come home. But it’s inevitable that one day, she won’t be able to again. And then it’ll just be me with tons of detritus of my parents and mine.