74

So, what generally happened is that my father got cancer, was treated for same, went on hospice and died. Five weeks before he died, my mother, with her brilliant, alert mind, and her keen interest in nearly everything, and her splendid sense of humor, had to move to memory care, where she in turn went on hospice and died, two years to the day after my father did.

(I guess I previously mentioned that about the two years to the day. It is a fact that frequently comes to mind.)

(Possibly every post from now on will start with that same news.)

(I had thought that it was lucky that my parents had me when they were so young, because they remained alive until I myself was old: I only have to live without them for 20 (?) years. But then it occurred to me that we were talking about, as Yiyun Li writes, every single day, for the rest of my life. Every single day, for the rest of my life, the two people I love most won’t be here. Not just one. Not just the other. Both. Both! Both!?!)

This entailed 74 flights on my part (so far) between San Francisco and Detroit, and I spent fully fifty percent of my time in Michigan over the course of three and half years (so far), so there may be more to say about all of that, but let’s get on with what happened today!

I had gotten an email in regard to the internet service for my parents’ house in Ypsilanti saying that if I switched the payment method to a transfer from a bank account, I would save $10 a month on the bill from now on.

That seemed good, but also, it seemed good to stop using a credit card, anyway. Not long after my mother died, I walked into a Chase branch in Ann Arbor to tell them the terrible news. They said they would close her accounts, including her credit card, and I would receive notice of this by mail. This of course did not happen, so I called Chase in early December to try again. I had taken the precaution of freezing her credit card online, and was startled when it incurred a charge. It turns out that automated payments still go through even if a credit card is frozen—just one of many very interesting things I have learned in the past three and a half years—the charge was for another year of virus protection for my father’s computer—and so I needed to actually close this credit account.

However, Chase, instead of reporting my mother dead and closing her credit account, reported me dead and immediately closed my one and only credit account, as I discovered two minutes later when I tried to buy a little something online.

This was late on a Friday afternoon, needless to say. Fortunately, I was able to get it straightened out first thing Monday morning, when I discovered that I’d been dead all weekend and hadn’t even known it. (It wasn’t so bad being dead.) The person who helped me mentioned that the difficulties had “trickled down” into the checking account I’d opened for my parents’ trust after my mother died.

I don’t know if my premature but fortunately brief death had anything to do with the fraudulent use of the trust’s debit card that occurred a couple of weeks later, but that unauthorized use caused the debit card to be immediately canceled, and then anything using that card for automated payments had to be updated, which struck me as a time-consuming nuisance until I realized that some things were already using the bank account itself rather than the debit card, so there was less to do than I thought.

So changing Xfinity to use the trust’s checking account itself would also make life easier in the event of future troubles with the debit card. It took a degree of persistence to achieve this: The website was down, or that part of the website was down, or they just didn’t feel like it, day after day. Finally I made the change, and thus was extra annoyed when the next bill proved to be the exact amount it always is.

I briefly considered letting it go, since we were talking about $10 a month, but that is not in my nature, so I went to the website and had a word with Mrs. Chat, who disavowed any knowledge of any such offer and asked if there was anything “else” she could help with. So annoying. The proper question is not, “Is there anything else I can assist with?”, given that no assistance was offered, but rather, “How much more of your time would you like me to waste today?”

Easily finding a customer support phone number is of course a rarity these days, but increasingly, you can’t even email a lot of places. I went online to see how to get a human on the phone at Xfinity. I soon found a possible customer service phone number and the advice to try cursing and using the word “human.” Yes! Well within my wheelhouse, especially the cursing part.

I called the number and when the machine listed the few things I was allowed to say, I said, “I don’t give a fucking fucking fuck what you want me to say. I want to speak with a human. I am angry.” I wasn’t angry; that was theater, at least the first time I said it, but the second time I said it, it was a little bit true, and by the third time I said it, absolutely the case! And voila, about 30 seconds after the machine had answered the phone, I was speaking with a human.

The human asked how I was, and I sunnily said I was quite well, as indeed I now was, and I in turn asked how he was. He said, “You’re the only person who has asked me that.” To make a long story short, I did secure the discount and also signed up for a promotional offer that will last for a year and lower our bill even further. At the end of our conversation, the human said, “I wish all customers could be like you.”

I called my close associate in Cleveland to report this, starting with our customary greeting: “Is this the Complaint Line?” However, the Complaint Line actually was not open, an extreme rarity; my associate claimed she was “working.” I then tried my close associate in Michigan, who evidently was engaged in the same unsavory activity, and that’s why I had to write this entry.

Several weeks ago, I noticed the building next door appeared to be preparing to rent the apartment where the fellow was murdered. I saw workers turning up in the night, perhaps to clean. They set a coffee pot on the kitchen counter; lately a French press appeared next to the coffee pot, and I finally figured out that the people who sometimes appeared in the kitchen were not late-night cleaners but the actual new neighbors, two people so short all I can see is the tops of their hairdos. Also evidently two people who never, ever cook because there has been nothing whatsoever in their kitchen except that coffee pot and now the French press. Not a refrigerator magnet, not a painting on the wall, not a little plant on the windowsill. Nothing.

So I was enthralled today when I saw cleaning products lined up on the windowsill and one of those diminutive persons cleaning away (presumably). I had vaguely discerned that these were a man and a woman, but the one I saw today, whom I had thought was a man, is a woman, so we are talking about two teeny tiny lesbians (I guess). The person cleaning caught sight of me and gave me a blinding smile and waved. I smiled back and waved and gave her a thumbs up.

Then after that, I walked to Noe Valley for a haircut (a tidy bald fade with a two on top), home to take a shower and have dinner, and back to Noe Valley for yoga.

I imagine the two nice very small lesbians don’t know someone was murdered in their beautiful new apartment. They won’t be hearing it from me. I believe a landlord is legally required to disclose such a thing, but since the San Francisco medical examiner inspected a person covered from head to toe with stab wounds, bent into a pretzel, wedged into a hole in the back yard and buried under a ton of bricks (details altered to preserve the privacy of the dead) and discerned that there was no sign of foul play, I guess that absolves the landlord of that responsibility.