It’s a Tuesday. Monday was bleak. Neither Bill nor I had a good night’s sleep the night before so the both of us started the day groggy. It was a Monday and that is usually accompanied by depression and though it was there on the fringes, it was compounded by a phone call Bill received.

It seems his very good friend Kirk told Bill that his dear wife Pat had died the night before. I’ve met Kirk a dozen times, he is a good man and his wife was a sweetheart. Bill yelled into the phone, his disbelief but it was true. We felt awful for Kirk. Bill and I attended their wedding back in the day in our early years of courtship and I believe Bill sang at it.

That set a gloomy tone for the day. I suggested that Bill phone our friend Margaret who knows Kirk and who had gone through the same thing months ago with her husband passing away suddenly. I suggested that Margaret might be able to phone Kirk with some words of comfort or consolation.

Margaret is a Reverend and Kirk is a believer so solace might be found in that. Bill also called his friend Kevin with the news and it turned out Kevin had upsetting news as well, that his brother had passed away the day before. The gloomy tone intensified.

Death is always nearby. I tried explaining it to Rafe Dais and Shahabudeena Khan long ago but they didn’t seem to get where I was coming from. Death is part of life. Y mother passed away on Mother’s Day in 1991. No one saw it coming though she was a smoker and she was overweight, I guess no one wanted to see it coming.

My father and my mother were in their living room chairs on that Sunday morning talking about who knows what, my father could’ve been the dick we’d all known him to be and saying something douchy. Next time he looked at my mother she was gone. No one knows what he might have said and he never brought it up.

My mother was doing the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle, and I used to joke that we should sue the New York Times since 27 across turned out to be a real killer.

Months later my sister in law Karen was at her job, having a smoke outside the office with a co-worker. The co-worker asked if it was alright to ask Karen something about her mother in law. Karen said sure, it was OK.

The co-worker reportedly described what my mother was wearing that day and Karen was surprised at the accuracy. Karen asked how did the co-worker know this and the co-worker said because my mother was standing next to Karen with a message. My mother supposedly said she was sorry she left the way she did but her time was up and she couldn’t stay any longer.

That’s a great story and I wish I could know how true it was, the whole thing about spirituality and visitations from the afterlife. Being 62 myself, just 3 years younger than my mother when she passed, I am aware of the slender thread between this world and afterwards.

I used to watch Six Feet Under back in the day, a show about life in a funeral home and each episode would open with someone dying. It didn’t pull any punches and it didn’t sugar coat it. A lot of people died alone sing mundane things. And thats how life and death seems to be. Mundane and awful for those left behind. I miss family, and friends.

Not sure if we will meet again, I’m in no hurry to find out. I can’t imagine leaving Bill, it’s too painful to contemplate.

Sunday. Dreary. Morrissey was right about that. Not cold though, everything is damp. Mike came over on Friday and left this morning. Bill was on the road, and then home, and then on the road again. Gotta work when you can.

I’ve been trying to get work, not aiming as high as I was and I seem to know, deep down that I will have to take more of a pay cut than I wanted. Mike is the one with the steady job, Bill has intermittent work and I have fruitless interviews, online, on the phone, and coming up this week: Wednesday, 3:00 PM at 14 Penn Plaza.

I’m jaded and ambivalent. That will turn around by Wednesday, I hope. Mike and I spent most of the weekend, watching TV and taking photos. He’s photogenic and knows what he wants to see. I give occasional direction and it works. And Mike loves listening to Bill’s stories about the theater world as well as bus driving. So Mike has two dads.

We watched the last episode of Ted Lasso, knowing that the day before a fourth season was going to happen. Bill and I were amused by Mike’s questioning of what would happen next, why did they do that? All it took was a reassuring tap on the knee to let him know his questions will be answered and to be fucking patient. We didn’t say fucking. He is, after all, our son.

We also watched Watchmen and The Sandman. Both have episodes so we didn’t get too far in those. We also watched Yesterday, the movie about after a 12-second worldwide blackout, only a handful of people remember the Beatles. I figured that the movie, Attack the Block would engage Mike away from his phone and it did mostly. Could’ve used subtitles though. South London dialects could be indecipherable sometimes.

Mike is very much connected with his phone, as is Bill. I am more on the computer which is the way I prefer to use the World Wide Web and its social medias. Is it snobbishness or just my eye having difficulty reading things on my phone? Everyone is on their phones everywhere.

Adults pushing babies in strollers pay more attention to their phones than they do with the child. This is going to be interesting when the kids grow up. Soon even younger children will have phones, some already have tablets.

There are also the seemingly grown children being pushed around in strollers. Sometimes they seem older than five. I can only relate it to my own upbringing, where the baby carriage was given up at a certain time. I had older siblings to corral me and the occasional parent with a vice-like grip on my hands.

I’ve heard that these children might be unmanageable or perhaps on the spectrum. Bill and I agreed that we were from an age where if a child were misbehaving, a public smack on the face would soon set things straight.

I’m not saying that that is a good thing, it’s just how it was for Bill and me. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction and we will see how that turns out.
Maybe.