Jane Fonda has been in the news lately for her staged ‘civil disobedience,’ in Washington. She gets arrested, and released every Friday. Some environmental protest.

I’m so far left, Karl Marx would think my ideas are little to radical, but Jane Fonda?

I’m still pissed off about the Vietnam War. Still pissed about the guys I knew who came home in a box.

Still pissed at LBJ and McNamara. Still pissed that after all those years and 50,000 dead Americans and, possibly two million civilians and maybe a million North Vietnamese dead, the US military abandoned South Vietnam, took its ball and bat and said, “Fuck it!”

I’m still pissed at the lies, ‘stopping the spread of communism…’ I’m still pissed off about a lot of things regarding that war, but right at the top of the list is Jane Fonda sitting for photos with the North Vietnamese while American boys were dying in the jungles.

Fuck you forever Jane, and when forever ends, Jane, fuck you some more.

“She’s had a rich life…”

I heard that, again, today. “Your mom has had a full, rich life.”

The richness, the wealth, has dwindled to loose change now, maybe a dime, and a few pennies.

Every time a virus hits, even a cold, the fluid in and around her chest compresses her heart and lungs, it leads to heart failure. Her lack of movement, any real movement, then leads to pneumonia. There ain’t much oxygen flowing, this makes it worse, it starves a already dying brain.

Any drug to drain her chest hurts her kidneys, resulting in kidney failure.

The richness of life is forgotten, dulled to moments of abject boredom and sadness. She must feel, daily, the sensation of drowning, slowly…

Each bout with a simple cold results in a measurable loss. My phone rings at 3am, or noon, or 6pm, again…

More pennies taken away…

They always begin the report with, “Mr Lobb, no emergency…”

There is truly no emergency—ever. Not now, not here.

There are no emergencies in this slow, endless march. There are no battles or heroics. Only the slow, deliberate progression of days.

The end, the last day, the last breath is a teasing whore, offering glimpses, maybe a peek—then gone again. The whore never stays.

The robust wealth of life, squandered and spent and leaving only a handful of loose change. After each incident another coin or two is taken away. She never returns to a hundred percent—and last weeks hundred percent is barely a fraction of the life that was.

She gets pissed at me, and I’m happy to see it. It tells me there is still a little of the fire in that mind. The mind that would wake me, as a boy, at two in the morning and say, “get dressed, I’ve packed a bag, we are going to Florida…”

Florida was the promised land. A twenty-some hour drive, accessible even on a long weekend. Ninety miles per hour, top down, whisky bottle under the seat.

I learned to obey the law, whenever practicable, and carefully hide the evidence, from her. From her came some of my piracy.

I wish I’d left her to die in a home Florida, it seemed cruel, but it’s all cruel. The existence is cruel. At least she’d be dying in beloved Florida.

But, Florida or New York, the walls are all beige and antiseptic, and the same. Florida, is only another crumbled construct of a lost mind. Another memory that may or may not be real.

I try to get her to remember a better place. I tell her close her eyes and go there, and be there. I tell her this life is all an illusion anyway, but she gets confused and angry again.

There ain’t many pennies left in the jar, Ma. I wish you’d throw those that remain out the fucking window and let go…

“An unbroken string of days is all that brought us here. Eat some, sleep some, drink some, fuck some and fight some and here we are. An army of scoundrels, like me, like you, pulling’ and pushin’ and sellin’ each other to the highest bidder. Ain’t no allegiance.

There ain’t no plan, never was. No tremendous and awesome high-up power a savin’ ya from Hell’s fury and fire! Just all of ya in it, pushin’ fer what helps you and fuck everyone who ain’t like ya.”

“I learn’t this early on and I know’d they’s money in it. Preachin’ come easy to me boy. Ever man got his ass saddled down with guilt. A man stole some, er fucked somebody he want ‘spose to, or he finds his ass caught in a lie. Ain’t no feelin’ worst than when you know’d ya been caught in a lie, and the waitin’. The waitin’ is the worst.”

“Every man what ever put on a pair of pants got some guilt eatin’ at him. Ya just got ta dig a might ta find it, then offer a way to save his broke-down ass and he’ll foller ya like damn pup—and throw his last dime in the collection plate. Good money in salvation, boy. Damn good money. “

“That’s all we is, boy, just scoundrels fuckin’ and fightin’ and one day rolls inta the next and ya end up right smack here where ya have been all along.”

The summer always ended on his porch, the neighbor, Harry McCabe, down the dirt path dead-end by the water.

Feet up on the surrounding stone and cement wall, leaning back in the kitchen chairs we’d drug out after eating the evening meal, carefully surveying the woods for the skunks. They liked to appear as the sun sets, down by the garbage cans and the blackcap bushes.

The wind rushing under the wings of Canada Geese, landing on the small lake, more a pond, truly a swamp. To Harry, it was a lake, his lake. The thick woods surrounding us betrayed the sun, the last rays of the day fall, and we are borne into a new darkness.

Harry had been my dad’s friend before my old man died. Together they worked on cars together in his driveway. My dad had a job, but he liked to work on cars too. I guessed that was the entirety of Harry’s career, cars, and lawnmowers. He must have had a dozen or so old, broken down lawnmowers around the garage out back of his house.

Harry’s wife left him a few years back. I asked about it, but he said she just went to be with her sister and that was it. Word around the lake was Harry was a mean drunk, but he always seemed pretty kind to me. Some nights I helped him off to bed when he got himself lost in the booze.

A Pall Mall cigarette burning in the enveloping night, he spoke, unintentionally of his insecurities and intentionally the need, come Saturday, to replace the starter in ‘The ‘53’ the Ford pickup, rusting behind his house. “I should teach you how to pop start that truck when your legs are longer… it’s something you need to know.” He said with an urgent sincerity, a critical life skill he needed to impart to me…

He got me drinking whiskey and sweet soda around the age of nine. Harry said, “What with your old man dead, now I suppose you ought to learn to drink and fight. I supposed nine is as good an age as any for both…” so we started to drink that sweet soda whiskey on his porch as the summers ended.

A far off rumble slowly filled the night, every night, right on time, like a clock, then the wail of a train whistle, the rumble became a distant roar. “Diesel motor… when I was your age the steam engines were still rolling. I always had a feel for that trainsmoke in my blood, like a poison. Trainsmoke would make a man feel the need to be away. Not that life ain’t good here, at the summer’s end, drinking my whiskey, but it’s that damn smoke that pulls at you. Somedays I walk out by the trestle and look at them boxcars rolling by…”

He stopped; I saw a man between two worlds. The man who loved his home and his porch and pickup Ford and his lawnmowers, and his mud hole lake, and the man who felt the pull of that whistle and rumble.

“Train smoke, boy… it’s in me stronger than this here whiskey,” and we’d click glasses in some ritual I still don’t quite understand.

I went back to the lake in my later years and tried to find out what happened to Harry. The people who lived there now say he died, I like to think he finally hopped that train.