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, 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 a Subaru Outback or a Subaru Forester. 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 did 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 …