B-Dry

I realized that what I said about my entrepreneurial great-grandmother could have left the impression that I grew up amid a lot of money. (Three out of four of my great-grandmothers were entrepreneurs, and I’m positive the fourth would have been, too, if she hadn’t died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1920. That was my mother’s father’s mother. My grandfather’s one sibling died, too, and his father had to be hospitalized. He returned from the hospital to find that his wife and one of his sons were gone. There a family photograph of that great-grandmother lying dead on what appears to be a table in their house.) 

It had never occurred to me until literally yesterday evening to wonder what became of the money my great-grandmother evidently had, but I am pretty sure my father didn’t inherit any of it. That great-grandmother outlived her daughter by five or so years—my father’s mother—and so perhaps her remaining child inherited her whole estate, or maybe her second husband did.

That first house my parents bought because they were going to have me was a pleasant, serviceable place in a working-class neighborhood. The next door neighbor was a house painter and the one across the street drove a taxi.

When I was seven, we moved to a fancier neighborhood, but that was due to my father’s own efforts. There a next door neighbor was a professor at the University of Michigan and the one on the other side was a doctor who pioneered a radiation treatment for prostate cancer. My father was later one of his patients and reported that Dr. L. had a superb bedside manner, taking my father’s hand, gazing tenderly into his eyes, and saying, “We’ll get through this together.”

Because my father grew up poor, it was important to him to live frugally, and by this I mean the bottle of shampoo in the bathroom he shared with us three kids was a container of Joy dishwashing detergent, and we drank powdered milk. He learned about investing and got his offspring started early with saving and investing.

Money is not usually a preoccupation of mine. Every now and then, I run around to the various websites to add up my holdings. Sometimes it’s six months since the last time I did it; sometimes it’s two years. I did it recently and was rather pleasantly surprised. (I guess I have also lived frugally, in a small apartment for a long time, with no kids, no car, no expensive travel or vices.) In addition, though we did our very best to spend every last cent of our parents’ money on our mother’s care, there is a little something left for each of us.

I actually could buy my siblings’ shares of this house I am sitting in and stop working, as well. I verified this by speaking the other day with a financial advisor. However, I can’t imagine I’d have the same carefree attitude about spending I have had in recent years. I have suddenly begun tearing paper towels—the ones that are already only half the size of normal paper towels—in half, and when I leave a room, I make sure to turn off the light.

I also put a cloth handkerchief everywhere I had a box of tissues, but had to rescind that when all my hankies began filling up with blood due to the low humidity.

Today I put on my fleece-lined flannel shirt and my base layer warm pants and tucked my shirt into my outer pants. Earlier in this adventure, I often forgot to do that last thing and regretted it when the cold wind blew right up the front of my stomach. I took my parents’ walk and felt toasty warm throughout.

I think this blog was a little more interesting when it was about people with cancer rather than about whether I took a walk or not, and the decision one oldish lady is trying to make which is of no consequence to anyone else on earth, but here we are; it’s helping me to write it. It moves the energy in some way.

Yesterday evening I felt gloomy, thinking that buying this house is a ludicrous idea: I don’t want to worry about money, and it seemed clear that this is really all about trying somehow to assemble one living parent from the combined artifacts of both, when of course nothing will bring even one living cell of either of them back, and then I cried and cried, which was good. I don’t think there has been enough crying because in some way, after my second parent died, I sort of felt, “I already did that,” but I didn’t, actually.

However, today I feel kind of bullish about this idea again, possibly thanks to my visit earlier today from the retired B-Dry fellow regarding the basement.

Not to make this even more boring, but there are three major repairs the house needs: The roof needs replacing, ditto the air conditioning system, and the basement floods every time there is a good rain or substantial snow thaw. The basement has seven distinct areas and I have seen water in every last one of them, which appears first right in the middle of one large room, which was a bit mystifying until earlier today, when the B-Dry fellow explained that the water is coming in where the floor meets the wall, not following its proper path because the clay tile under the house is somehow compromised, and then popping up through the floor and settling in the low spots.

Only the roof figured in the recent appraisal of the house, so replacing the air conditioning and fixing the wet basement would not mean we could sell the house for more, but not doing those things would almost certainly mean having to reduce the price we list it for by a substantial amount.

The B-Dry fellow retired just within the past year from actively installing these systems, which fix the problem from the inside. He said there will not be a need to dig a trench all the way around the outside of the house, which was good news. He was an absolute font of interesting information, including that once upon a time Lake Erie reached to as close as a block or so from here. He examined the storm drain in the basement and pointed out that it is bone dry: Water is not reaching it. Maybe keeping the basement dry is just a matter of opening the pipes up in the area of the drain; cross your fingers. He gave me the name of a drain place and I have an appointment with them on Monday.

He explained how a B-Dry system works and what installing one would entail, and gave me a ballpark price which is not actually out of the question. At any rate, it was less than half what the first roof place quoted last week; I will meet with two others after the roof is no longer covered with snow.

Furthermore, the B-Dry fellow said he wouldn’t even bother fixing the wet basement. He said just to disclose it to potential buyers. When I said that might be me, he said that even so he wouldn’t necessarily fix it because the water is only seen at the bottom of the walls: The problem is not the eaves overflowing and soaking the whole walls. The basement does not smell funny. There is no sign of mold. The walls aren’t bulging. While water can lead to mold, mold does not grow on concrete or tile. It grows on drywall and wood, so the B-Dry fellow said he would recommend removing the bottom six to eight inches of wood paneling in the one room in the basement that has it; you can see that bottom expanse has been touched by water repeatedly.

I asked about what we would do if fixing the drain doesn’t do the trick and we decide not to spend the money on the B-Dry system. Nothing?? Yes! He said he personally would do nothing, once we remove the bottom of the wood paneling and any items on the floor (ahem) that could grow mold. 

My father long ago set four or five box fans on the floor in the area that most often gets wet, and we turn those on when that happens. I asked the B-Dry fellow if we should upgrade our fans, maybe getting one or two of those powerful fans that blow right along the ground, and he didn’t even think we should do that, though I probably will get a couple of those if we don’t do the big repair and if I buy the house.

I-94

Last night I stayed up way too late fiddling around on my father’s computer; it was nearly 3 am when I lay down to rest, so I didn’t set an alarm, and woke up at about 12:45 pm.

I went over to Metzger’s, which opened in downtown Ann Arbor in 1928, to try their Reuben, as part of my ongoing Reuben Extravaganza. Several weeks ago, I tried the Reuben at Max’s Opera Cafe in San Francisco and was sorely disappointed. It was great looking but bland tasting. If I hadn’t spoken the words “corned beef” twenty or so minutes before the item appeared in front of me, I would have had no idea what the generic meatlike substance in the sandwich might be. It was nothing like the corned beef I remember now and then eating as a child.

I arrived in Michigan last week with a plan to try all five of Zingerman’s Reubens; it turns out there are actually eight. Some of them don’t say “Reuben” in the name, but that’s what they are. Zingerman’s Delicatessen opened the year I moved to California. I never went there to eat until a few years ago, with Amy. Next to the deli is a café called Zingerman’s Next Door. When my parents were first married, they lived in an apartment in the house that is now Zingerman’s Next Door.

I began, last week, with Zingerman’s tempeh Reuben. While I waited to pick up my order, I looked over at Zingerman’s Next Door, at a window in that house: Did my mother as a newlywed gaze out that very window once upon a time? I sat in the upstairs seating area and realized the view outside was of my own former high school, Community High, where I transferred after Huron High shared their (accurate) opinion that I had a drug problem. The Reuben was not very good. Seva’s tempeh Reuben leaves Zingerman’s in the dust, and I almost aborted my project right there, but decided I should at least try their basic Reuben, which turned out to be fantastic. It had about two pounds of corned beef in it that was even tastier than I remembered from childhood. (Unfortunately, even if you eat there, your meal is served in a plastic basket, so I had to bite into the sandwich, as many routinely do, but it caused my chronic TMJ soreness to flare up painfully.)

I did master the route to Zingerman’s and where to park and how to pay for parking. On my third and final trip there, I got the cowboy Reuben, which uses a softer roll, beef brisket, coleslaw instead of sauerkraut, and BBQ sauce instead of Russian dressing. The delicatessen is also a highly regarded grocery store, full of carefully curated and extremely expensive items. The sandwiches are pricey, too. The cowboy Reuben, with a side order and 18% tip, cost nearly $40. Thus I was astounded to find it mainly consisted of the large roll. The coleslaw was not a good substitute for sauerkraut, I thought; too bland. The BBQ sauce was overly sweet. I had tried a sample of brisket over at Ricewood on Packard in the past year and was dazzled by its rich flavor. Whatever that was inside the cowboy Reuben at Zingerman’s, I can scarcely countenance that it was brisket. It was a little flap of mushy, stringy beef that tasted like something you might encounter in beef stew. Not untasty, but not what I was expecting, and there also wasn’t much of it, nor of the other fillings, so this was definitely the most expensive piece of bread I ever ate.

(Zingerman’s, among other things, has a bakehouse where they make really wonderful bread of all sorts. No complaints about the quality of the roll that encased the otherwise unsatisfactory cowboy Reuben.)

Metzger’s, where I went today, is now in a little strip mall near I-94 and Zeeb Rd. It’s full of German memorabilia, including those blue plates of which my mother’s mother had several affixed to her kitchen wall. I had never realized those were German until today. My grandfather was German; his father was born in Germany, but my grandmother was Irish and English, and I had always thought of those as being something to do with her heritage, but I guess they weren’t.

My server was very sweet and the food was fine, nothing special. I will place Metzger’s Reuben above Max’s but several notches below Zingerman’s. The meat did vaguely taste like corned beef. Next week I plan to go to Knight’s and to have the Reuben there, when my father’s high school classmates have their monthly lunch. I’ve had it before, but having had so many other Reubens lately, it will be interesting (at least slightly) to see where it fits in the rankings.

On my way to Zingerman’s or Knight’s, I pass an apartment building on Huron in Ann Arbor once owned by my father’s grandmother. My parents also lived in an apartment there for a bit after they were married and before they bought their first house. They bought the house after they’d been married for two years because they were about to have a baby, which was me. Right across the street from that apartment building is the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, usually just called Rackham. The land it was built on was sold to the University of Michigan by that same great-grandmother of mine, who also ran her husband’s corset factory when he became unable to continue, and she served as the general contractor for a house she had built for herself in a nice neighborhood which now probably goes for two million dollars, though I can’t tell you for sure, because I can’t remember the address off the top of my head, and that’s enough about my forebears for today. My father had deep roots in Ann Arbor. He went to one of the same elementary schools I later attended. (My mother was born in Detroit and lived in Dearborn until she came to Ann Arbor to go to engineering school at the University of Michigan, where she and my father met at a summer job.) (So I guess that wasn’t enough about my forebears for today, after all, but now it is.)

I took I-94 home, which was a hair-raising experience. The Michigander on I-94 in rush hour goes 80 miles an hour even if the car ahead of him is going 50 miles an hour, which I didn’t really have any choice about because the big truck ahead of me was going 50 miles an hour, and what’s the big hurry, anyway?

I had virtuously intended to take a walk after I got home, but it really was miserably cold. I went about half a block and then turned around and came home. It would have been more bearable if I’d had my warm base layer pants on and my fleece-lined flannel shirt, and I guess there was no law stopping me from putting those things on and going back out, but I didn’t. I put in a load of laundry and carried some of my mother’s bins of craft stuff up from the basement and sat on the couch with a comforter over me and read for a while and then passed out on the couch due to my heavy lunch, which besides the sandwich also featured onion rings and German potato pancakes.

Blood Transfer: The Beginning and the End and the Beginning

Today I called DTE, the utility in southeastern Michigan and, for all I know, the entire state of Michigan, to see about changing the email address associated with our account from my father’s to mine. The Probate Department was happy to do this; it required putting the gas and electric services in my name.

I moved from Ann Arbor to San Francisco when I was 20—43 years ago—and had always assumed I would live out my life in San Francisco. I have lived in the same apartment for 28 years, a tiny little place which perfectly meets my needs, and yet it also had started to seem a little sad: A youngish lady in her little studio apartment, then a middle-aged lady, then an old lady, then a dead and forgotten lady who for some reason had six brand-new hinoki cutting boards in a box in her closet.

The city has changed profoundly in those years. It feels a bit alien now, with one driverless vehicle after the other rolling by and Sam Altman just blocks away plotting the literal destruction of humanity at the hands of AIs. (Since they know what’s going to happen, why don’t they stop?)

I have spent a lot of time in Ypsilanti for almost four years now, and have noticed that I feel much more relaxed here. When you step outside (depending on the season), you’re actually outside, where it smells and looks like trees and flowers and grass. When someone now and then strolls past the house, they smile and say hello, unlike in San Francisco, where anyone under 50 appears to be terrified when addressed by someone they don’t already know.

Yesterday I had lunch with Amy at Seva. She asked if I’d been walking. I was temporarily confused and had to think about what she might be referring to. Walking? As in outdoors? Where it’s 23 degrees?

I got here a week and a day ago to find snow on the ground, where it remains, because only once has it gotten as warm as freezing temperature, which was a great day because the block of ice the car’s windshield wipers were encased in thawed enough that the wipers could be used again. It was the 31-degree heat (known elsewhere as the 31-degree cold) plus the warmth of the car’s running engine plus having the car’s heat and fan turned up to maximum that eventually did the trick. I was in Better Health buying some supplements and mentioned that it was 31 degrees out, and the store’s employees got all excited.

So, walking. It came to me that I had in the past asked Amy about the gear she uses for walking in the winter, and that that’s what she was referring to at Seva, where I had the extremely delicious vegan version of their tempeh Reuben. I had to confess to Amy that even the notion of walking had long since ceased to cross my mind, but that actually is a factor in my decision as to whether to reoccupy my childhood territory, now that I think about it, because I don’t have a car in San Francisco and get around by bike or cab, or on foot.

I ride my bicycle to work and to Rainbow for groceries, and I can walk to yoga, so at least some exercise is built in. In Ypsilanti, it is possible that I could not walk a recreational step for six months of the year. I would have to make myself do it, and until today I hadn’t. Indeed, another thing I explicitly love about being in Michigan is driving up and down in my father’s Subaru listening to music. (Pretty much forty percent of the cars in Ann Arbor are either Subaru Outbacks or Subaru Foresters. When I went to Arbor Farms the other day, more or less the Rainbow of Ann Arbor, I parked Dad’s Subaru in a row of four of those two models.)

Amy, in an admirably casual and low-key manner, mentioned how she herself stopped walking for quite a while, and how the day came when she reminded herself that she didn’t have to be ambitious about it; she could literally just walk around the block. I asked her how many days a week she walks, and she said she tries for six. Six days out of every seven?!? At zero days out of two, three or four months, I was clearly falling behind.

I decided to start putting “Walk” on my daily to-do list, even if it was just aspirational, and then I decided, on this very day, to exit the house, walk to the sidewalk some 15 feet from the front door, and come right back inside. But once I’d put on all the gear needed to walk 15 feet in the 23-degree weather, it was clear that I was equally well equipped for a somewhat longer walk, so I went on my parents’ walk, which takes about half an hour, and I enjoyed it: the bare branches of the huge trees reaching into the sky, the mindfully trying not to break my neck on the ice, the fresh cold air, the occasional bird chirp, the two kindred spirits who passed me going the other way.

I went on this walk in the company of my parents a few times. When I first started doing it on my own, sometimes I couldn’t exactly remember the route. Where precisely did they cross this street? Perhaps at this tree? When I pivoted at the tree, I knew for sure that was the spot. Every cell of my body could feel my father doing the exact same thing.

After my mother died, with the next and final big task being to sell the house or buy it myself, deciding which to do took on more urgency, and for a while, I drove myself crazy trying to figure it out with my head. I was in a constant state of gloomy anxiety for weeks, and finally realized ruminating was never going to do the trick, because I could easily and convincingly think one thing and then its exact opposite all day every day.

I set that aside, and a period of great ease took its place: House? What house?
The first time it crossed my mind to move home was in 1989, just seven years after I’d moved to San Francisco. I’ve been stewing about it ever since, for 37 years. I probably can’t stew about it for 37 more years, but there’s also no way I can think of to hasten clarity. I no longer necessarily see myself living out my years in San Francisco. Though I still think cities are generally better places for old ladies on their own than small towns or suburbs are, I’m starting to feel that I do not wish to die on foreign soil.

My friend Lisa M. now and then says: Discover, not decide. That has become my approach. The great current of life is carrying me along in a certain direction even if my own rudder has fallen off. One day I will discover that I still live in San Francisco and work as hospital chaplain. Or perhaps that I live in San Francisco and am retired. Or I live in Ypsilanti and am retired, or work two afternoons a week as a hospice chaplain or grief counselor. Or live somewhere else entirely; my Cleveland associate pointed out that there are a number of places in the United States that are neither San Francisco nor Ypsilanti.

As I walked today, it seemed to me that putting the DTE in my name had been some kind of small but actual step toward moving here. I did not expect to find myself, so close to my end, rerooting where I first sprung up. I also wondered if this whole thing is a psychologically unhealthy attempt to keep my father alive by literally taking up his life: Living in his house, eating my breakfast at his dining room table, going on his walk. I once saw a movie called L’invitation au Voyage where someone important to the protagonist dies. The line I, probably incorrectly, recall is, “If you die, I’ll make you live again,” which the protagonist does by stuffing the body of his dead loved one into the hard case for a double bass and carrying the case around with him.

Another thing I did today was to call the City of Ypsilanti, which I have the highest admiration for, to see if the property taxes would go up when the house changes hands, as my Michigan associate had warned could be the case. When you call the City of Ypsilanti, you immediately are connected with an actual human being, and this person is always friendly and helpful. The friendly and helpful person in the assessor’s office today said the property taxes would not rise because this would be a “first-degree blood transfer.”

I had thought at moments that if I did buy my parents’ house, I would get rid of their stuff and put my stuff in it, but I don’t have very much stuff and I am also not much of an interior decorator. I now think it’s kind of pointless to get rid of a nice antique so I can put my crappy plastic folding table there instead, or to empty their junk drawer and fill it with my junk, when their junk appears to be of the same excellent quality as my junk.

When my parents arrived back at their own driveway at the end of their walk, my father often continued on past the driveway for a bit and went around a nearby roundabout in the street, maybe doing a little jogging. My mother would turn into the driveway; twice she fell there. When I look up the hill at the driveway as I am finishing the walk myself, even though they are gone now, I see them clearly still: My father breaking into a jog,  my mother at the driveway, turning, falling …