Since then I have tried out versions of Christmas: serving dinner at a homeless shelter; having the youngest son and daughter-in-law up to Santa Barbara as our guests; making a tiny roast turkey for Steve and me; cooking dinner for other people, friends, who don’t have a family to go to. This year our family has invited us, and I am happy.

When the invitation comes, Steve and I discuss where to stay in Los Angeles. I am in favor of a hotel, but we decide on the apartment of Steve’s oldest son, who has gone to New York to see his children. We get there at three in the afternoon, in time to pick up the keys from the building manager. She grumbles at us about having her day off interrupted, even though, as she says, we are “the guarantors” of the lease and have paid the rent a couple of times. She tells us that “the next time” we should not rely on her but should get the keys from John. At the door of our son’s apartment, she says, “Good luck in there.”

This son is a screenwriter who used to make a million dollars a year and now has lost wife, children, girlfriend, dog, New York apartment, beach house, cars, probably reputation, respect, self-respect. He has stuck everything up his nose or, lately, swallowed it down as prescription opioids. He keeps on writing, though, so his mother, his father, and I are willing to go the next little mile to keep him afloat until he sells a film treatment or gets an option on a script. His wife, etc., are less kind.

We go into the mid-afternoon twilight of our son’s apartment. It is filled with debris: empty fast-food containers, wastebaskets overflowing with trash, unopened mail, coffee grounds and mysterious stains on the carpeting, refrigerator with old, old food sending out a powerful smell. The sink is full of dirty dishes. The bathrooms are filthy. A toilet is stopped up. The closets are overflowing with piles of clothing.

I notice a zone of order within the mess: books on shelves, CDs in orderly piles, and his work, his scripts, in orderly stacks in his office. Books that have to do with his work, his writing, are ordered in a glass-fronted bookcase. The screen of his computer is covered with icons of scripts in progress. I imagine the son coming back to this room to work after a walk in the neighborhood or a trip to the local Border’s or a visit to the doctor who prescribes the Oxycontin. Coming back after anything at all, any excursion that isn’t work, when work is the only meaning, and trying to survive.

Even though I admire this constant returning and surviving, I sit down at the computer and start looking for hotels in Westwood or Sherman Oaks or West Los Angeles. There aren’t any unbooked rooms, so we will have to come back here after having dinner with the youngest son and his wife and daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend, and sleep on the fold-out bed and try to ignore the smells and debris and how we feel about them, the symbolism of them for a life, Steve’s oldest son’s life.

When we get back, the fold-out bed won’t open. We struggle to wrench the metal frame open, but it is hopelessly stuck. We push the two lounge chairs together to make a bed for me—fortunately, they are deep, and if I take out the back cushions, I can almost stretch out. Steve will sleep on the couch. I arrange the clean sheets and pillowcases I brought with us and put the towels in the less disgusting bathroom.

What I didn’t bring is Ambien, sleeping pills, which would help me get through this night. A little panicky feeling starts to rise: a night without sleep, in the two chairs pushed together, with the smells and debris and things underfoot in the dark. A big day tomorrow, cooking, socializing, on no sleep. I look in the cabinet in the bathroom, and there is a bottle of our son’s drug, Oxycontin, 40 milligrams. Without thinking too much, I take one, as a substitute, I think, for a sleeping pill, and get myself into my improvised bed, kind of a nest, with a clean sheet and an old rug and Steve’s old college windbreaker to keep me warm.

I don’t sleep. I lie in a daze, observing what I suppose are the effects of the drug. After a couple of hours I get up and Google “Oxycontin overdose symptoms”: anxiety, trembling, slowed breathing, cold sweats, hallucinations (rats running over the countertops: I saw them out of the corner of my eye). The Web page says it is easy to overdose on Oxy if you’re not used to it. I am not used to it; I have never taken one in my life. Though I feel a little sleepy, I am afraid to go to sleep, in case I die. It is three in the morning. I get up and dial 911. I tell them I am overdosing on Oxycontin.

The EMTs arrive in a cozy rolling emergency room, red lights flashing. They have all the machines and they do all the tests. Everything physically measurable is normal. They would rather not take me to the hospital: I am a 69-year-old woman who swallowed somebody else’s prescription opioid, and taking me to the ER will mean filling out a lot of forms. They explain that a person can’t overdose on 40 milligrams of Oxy. They ask how my stepson happens to have this drug. A prescription, I say. For what, they say. I think for a second about the pain in his knees and then I say, “He’s an addict.” One of them says, “Oxycontin is very hard to kick. A friend of mine is thirty thousand dollars in debt trying to kick it.” That is the exact amount I had already figured we would have to pay to put this son through rehab. Not that putting him through anything will save him.

The EMTs take a little poll among themselves and decide I don’t have to go to the emergency room. I get out of the cozy red van and Steve takes me upstairs and I get back into my chair-nest that is only inches too short and sleep and wake up and sleep and wake up. Then it is Christmas Day. We do all the things that families do on Christmas Day: eat, open presents, discuss the family members not present, argue about politics. We even talk about Jesus, in a secular sort of way. All day the conversation keeps returning to the oldest son and brother, to the drugs and money problems, to the lost wife, the lost girlfriend. Steve is beyond sad.

All day my mind keeps returning to the trashed, desolate apartment, where I have to spend another night. I can’t do this without sleep, so as we are leaving I ask these people, who don’t smoke or drink booze or take drugs or eat anything not organically grown, whether they have a sleeping pill to give me.

Bless their essential ordinariness, they do.

When we get back to the oldest son’s apartment, I Google “panic attack.” The symptoms are exactly the same as for “Oxycontin overdose.” Then I take the Ambien pill and sleep in my nest for ten hours. And then we drive home along the glorious flashing ocean in the glorious bright day of December 26 in southern California.                  

Getting ready for Christmas, I started looking at her wish list on amazon.com. I noticed a book on craftsman houses. I didn’t know she was interested in this style. Today I see that there are two more such books on the wish list–one is about exterior paint colors–and I realize that the house Jim and Ellen are planning to have built for them is a craftsman-style cottage.

If it were me, and I were moving into my craftsman dream bungalow, I would want to decorate it in craftsman-bungalow style.

Is it possible to figure out what someone is thinking by studying her amazon.com wish list?

She was ready for us: wreath on the door, tree set up, strings of lights and boxes of ornaments ready to be hung, many presents stacked around. But what she wanted most was for us to stand on her balcony and admire her new car parked in the lot below.

It was a dark blue Toyota Camry. It was eight years old, and it had 8,000 miles on the odometer. My mother had bought it for $8,000 from a woman who had given up driving. My mother was proud of herself for having found and bargained for and bought “the Camry,” as she always called it. She drove it around Sarasota for five years, until it came time for her to give up driving.

I didn’t know that time had come until my mom called me one night in California–it must have been midnight in her time zone–to tell me that she’d had an accident in the Camry. She’d been on her way home from a cocktail party, and she’d gently rear-ended another car on Midnight Pass Road. The police had come, but they had not picked up that she’d had some drinks, and she’d driven herself home. She wanted me to know about the accident–she did not remember exactly how she got into it–and she wanted me to promise not to tell my sister and brother about it.

The next time I visited my mother, I noticed that there were unpaid bills scattered about, and a lot of pill bottles on the kitchen table. She could not remember which pills to take when, and often she skipped one or another just because she felt like it. But she still drove the Camry to the grocery store, to the doctor, to the hairdresser.  Later that year she moved to a retirement community, and the Camry sat in front of her villa because she could not figure out where she lived. I drove her around in the Camry, and finally she suggested that I take it home with me, and I did.  That Christmas I found my mother standing in my driveway, in the moonlight, stroking the Camry with her hands and wondering out loud if she would remember how to drive it.

My mother died in 1999, and by then the Camry had moved with me to Santa Barbara. I’ve put some money into keeping it running well, and I’ve had it painted. The trunk leaks, and the paint is scaling off again. Steve finds the Camry embarrassing, and indeed it probably qualifies for the $500 California subsidy for getting old stinkpots off the road. But I am thinking, instead, about getting another paint job and buying seat covers.

I don’t believe that my mom is looking down from anywhere watching me drive her Camry around the South Coast, but on the other hand I do not plan to junk it anytime soon.

The clocks: the glass-front painting my grandparents Blackmun had made for their wedding gift around 1900. The French clock my husband received as the marker of his 20 years as president of Rockland Community College: 1983. The Charlie Chaplin alarm clock my mom gave us (1995?); I’m not sure where this idea came from–she had unusual intuitions.

The wristwatch Steve gave me, which is smaller twin of the wristwatch he gave himself. Mark of a long companionship, and love: tick tick tick tick tick, steady.

I wonder what will happen to all this evocative stuff when I die, or have to move into a much smaller place in a retirement community. Will this stuff end up in a thrift shop? What emotional charge will it have then?–Maybe none. The evocations will go with me.

It might be revealing to look more carefully at the stuff left in thrift shops. What are the emanations from those things? What happened to the people who owned them? Is that what’s going to happen to me? To all of us?

bbrrrrrrrrrACKKK-ETT-ing

Very ugly.

eh-poh-shay

Beautiful.

Does the meaning or importance of a word have anything to do with how beautiful it sounds (or looks)?

Are beautiful words more meaningful?

Are beautiful sentences more meaningful (than ugly ones)?

Hussert’s idea was to “bracket” every idea or perception or whatever-you-want-to-call-it that proceeded from presuppositions we hold dear (or just can’t put aside). One of mine was a package of prescriptions about being a well-mannered middle-class white Protestant. There were things I could and couldn’t do. They were based on cultural theories springing from my parents’ and grandparents’ and so on back to the beginning of time. Is it possible to bracket and get free of these presuppositions? Is it desirable to do this? What happens to our inherited culture when we try to do this?

If we could bracket everything that is presuppositional, could we become transparent, invisible, insubstantial, ephemeral, free?

Is this a theory of sorts?