Tree. Also Another Tree.

Even meeting up on Saturday with my friend who is almost exactly my age and therefore still presumably has reasonable acuity when it comes to smelling unwashed lunch companions was not enough to goad me into taking a shower beforehand. I next vowed to do it Saturday night, before my uncle’s memorial service on Sunday, but by evening, I was too tired and crossed it off my list. Oh, well. There would definitely be a lot of old people at that event.

I planned a schedule for Sunday morning that left plenty of extra time so I wouldn’t be in a rush and therefore late for the gathering, then decided sleep was more important and extracted every possible minute from the planned schedule, then reverted to Plan A.

When I woke up yesterday morning, I decided I had better get in the shower, even though that didn’t appear on the schedule, and just make it work. So I was sparkling clean and exfoliated as needed from head to toe when I got in the car, on time, to drive up to Torch Lake. I had even allowed four and a half hours for what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, and arrived exactly on time.

I thought I was going to be dazzled by the beauty of Northern Michigan and charmed by all sorts of picturesque sights, and that it would be emotional, since I spent a lot of time up there in the summer when I was a kid. I don’t mean to be cynical, but it wasn’t notably beautiful except insofar as trees are generally pleasing to the eye; there were plenty of those. I couldn’t help but think that California is way more beautiful. It also wasn’t emotional, except for slightly, when I saw a sign showing the number of miles to Petoskey, the town next to the place where our extremely modest summer cottage (a former garage) was located. I have no intention of going there ever again; it gave me a slight pang to see the name. I don’t want my memories overwritten with whatever is there now.

Also, I thought Northern Michigan was supposed to be cool and refreshing. That’s why a lot of people have cottages there. “Up North” is where many Michiganders are always wanting to go. I suppose if you go in January, it is cool and refreshing, but yesterday it was very hot and very humid. I could sort of see the lake from where the memorial was held, and it did look lovely. That’s as close as I got to it.

Honestly, the most impressive thing I saw was the freeway overpass for the Saginaw River. As you approach from the south (not so much the north), it looks huge and like it’s about five times as high as it needs to be. I almost felt uneasy as I approached: Am I going to fall off the side? The river itself appeared to be just a flat, utilitarian expanse. It looked like an industrial area, with big piles of raw material of various sorts.

The uncle who had died was 17 when I was born, my mother’s brother. She loved him a lot and remembered him well after she’d forgotten much else. He was a genial fellow, but we never lived near enough to each other for regular visits. Unlike my mother’s other brother, he also didn’t live near Ypsilanti, so I had hardly seen him in decades, let alone his three sons, and I had never laid eyes on a single one of his six darling grandchildren.

However, he came once with my other uncle to visit Mom in memory care, and after Dad died, there was a little lunch out with both uncles and their wives. That was in effect my father’s memorial service. It was wonderful to see the uncle I hardly ever got to see, by then several years into neurological problems of his own, not affecting his mind, but affecting his ability to speak. (We also had a little lunch out after my mother died, with the same people plus a cousin and his new wife.)

My uncle’s memorial was lovely; his friends and family clearly adored him and had marvelous anecdotes to share. One of his sons is or was a pastor and did a beautiful job of leading the formal part of the day. All three of my uncle’s sons became tearful when speaking of their father—remembering his sense of humor, his fierce love for his family and his life wisdom. I was dazzled that my uncle and his wife raised three young men who can show up in such a vulnerable and heartfelt way, something we chaplains greatly admire. I appreciated that my mother’s name was mentioned in the write-up about my uncle’s life. It was emotional to look at the photos spanning my uncle’s lifetime and see him in all the different eras of his life and to see my grandparents (and even one shot of myself).

My other uncle and his wife were there, and also my lady cousin whom I rarely get to see. It was delightful to be with them, and the whole thing was wonderful. Literally, I laughed and I cried.

I was extremely sleepy during the entire drive up there and had reserved a hotel room in Traverse City, meaning to stay overnight, but I was rather energized after seeing my family members and meeting a bunch of new people and learning how they knew my uncle and enjoying one of my favorite things in all of life (namely free food, a love I share with my remaining uncle; we made pigs of ourselves; the key technique here is to assume no one is noticing how many times you revisit the buffet table and never to question that), so since it was only about 5 p.m. when I was back in the car, I decided to go ahead and drive back to Ypsilanti.

For the first part of that journey, I chatted with a friend on the phone, which was very engaging. My other sister forced me to buy a battery to recharge my phone after my phone died when I was driving back to Ypsilanti from Cleveland one night. It’s a great thing, but it’s also in San Francisco, so when my phone died right when I was in the middle of saying something extremely interesting about my neighbor’s dog, that was the end of our conversation.

I was sorry not to be talking to my friend any more but was soon very glad my phone had died when it did, because I then noticed that I was about to run out of gas on I-75. I have never run out of gas in my whole entire life. With my phone also dead, I would have been standing on the shoulder of the freeway gesticulating in an urgent manner and hoping someone would stop. Probably not the state police. In the entire 8.5-hour journey (I was going a little faster on the way home) on a major expressway, I saw two state police cars, or maybe just one.

I observed many, many hair-raising moments where someone would roar up behind someone else in the fast lane, closing the gap so as to allow about three feet between two cars going 80 miles an hour or so, in order to communicate that the driver of the rearward car was feeling an urgent desire, namely that the driver of the forward car should remove his vehicle from the path posthaste.

While I was slightly disturbed every time I saw this, and would then slow down myself so as to be a little farther away when the fiery crash occurred, the only time I was genuinely outraged was the one time when this happened in the slow lane. Where on earth was the driver in front supposed to go? Were they just supposed to roll their car off the side of the freeway into a cornfield?

The odd thing is, this behavior seems so belligerent and so aggressive (and certainly was, in the case of the person terrorizing the other person in the slow lane), and yet, the same driver who had done that never failed to use his or her turn signal when subsequently changing lanes. For instance, after chasing the too-slow car out of the fast lane, the overtaking driver would pass however many cars in the lane second from the left, and then him- or herself pull into that second-from-the-left lane, but not before politely signaling the lane change. So it is not that these people are clueless bullies. This is just how it’s done in Michigan, I guess. And I guess no one really cares if you speed here, because there was virtually no one out there monitoring it.

When I got back to the house in Ypsilanti (I would have said home, but you’ll soon see why I’m angry about this whole thing again), I saw there was a new thing on the house: A keypad for the garage door opener my sister got working. Inside the house, on the (not “my”) counter was a little remote for the same thing.

This morning, I had one of those very vivid almost-awake dreams, this one about a naked cab driver and rather disturbing. I was racking my brains trying to remember the moment I’d even stepped into this cab—why couldn’t I remember it?—when I thought I heard a noise at the front door. Yikes! I then remembered that I’d turned my phone ringer off for the memorial and forgotten to turn it back on, and that the window washers were due this morning.

I rushed to the door and saw a colorfully painted vehicle in the driveway. I stuck my head out and asked if they had tried the door earlier and were now returning, but they were just arriving. Whew!

They set about washing the windows. The stuff they used didn’t smell very good, but it aired out quickly. Later in the day, one of them said he was having trouble getting a screen back into the window. I know these windows are old and I imagined he was talking about an ancient screen that was pretzeled out of shape. I told him not to worry about it and just to throw it into the garage: If it doesn’t fit back in, it doesn’t fit back in.

It was horrifically humid today; it still is. The air conditioning has been off all week due to trying to air out the paint smell, which is still not gone. (The air conditioner has a role in removing humidity.) Today the windows were open because they were being washed, letting the heat and humidity freely roll in; nothing to be done about that. After the window washers were gone, I discovered that my efforts to impress upon them that they should not leave the slightest impression on the new paint had been wholly in vain. There are several damaged areas.

I also discovered that they had made every screen but two disappear and the two that they did manage to put back, they had put in the wrong place (outside the storm glass instead of inside). And so instead of having lots of screens available through which paint-dispersing air can come in, even if humidity also comes in, I have window after window where the choice is solid glass or it just being wide open, as in you can stick your arm out.

But not only that, the glass doesn’t go all the way to the bottom of the available opening, so there is a little crack for insects to come in everywhere you look. Why is that? Because they put the panes of glass into the wrong tracks, so the little knobbies on the bottom don’t fit into the holes waiting for them, because the holes are at the bottom of the other track. They put the windows into the tracks meant for the screens.

My sister said she would come over and try to put the screens back in. I said the window washers had taken them (thus getting a rare rise out of my sister). They were not in the garage and I assumed they had taken them to hide the evidence, once it turned out it wasn’t just one screen they couldn’t get back in but every single one they tried to put back in. I called the place to say that our screens needed to be brought back, but it turned out they actually were in the garage.

I had said just to throw any damaged screen in there, but they had taken the time to find some other screens and windows and carefully lean the ones from today next to those. The upshot was that the general manager of the place is coming tomorrow to put the screens back, and my sister didn’t have to worry about it. Out of 13 windows, they screwed up 12. I hope the general manager has a few hours to spend over here tomorrow, and I hope they see the correctness of a partial refund.

So now it is hot, humid, and airless, and I am back to hating this house and this whole thing. I did laundry this evening and noted how blissfully cool it is in the basement. As you walk back up the stairs, it suddenly becomes insufferably hot and humid and your (my) level of irritation and misery ticks up another notch. I spent part of this evening sorting out what screen goes where and putting flattened cardboard boxes on the floors to set the screens on. Plus, every horizontal surface was coated with grit after the window washers left, so I had to wipe or sweep many things. I super hate owning a house and I don’t even own one yet.

Earlier when I opened the door to the cabinet below the kitchen sink, a muscular bug flew out; it appeared also, like me, to be very irritated. I captured it in my bug-catching jar and put the special bug manila folder over the top and held the whole thing against my stomach to keep the bug in until I could release him outside. My sister arrived just then. Neither of us recognized this bug.

We made our introductory remarks and then I looked down, and—no bug. Where the hell did it go? I was holding the jar and manila folder firmly against my stomach. I must have slackened my grip at some point and it saw its opportunity. I was sure it must then have crawled into my apron pocket, but it wasn’t in there. Whereas it made a huge huffy fuss upon leaving the cabinet, it left the jar with extreme stealth, evidently and if so wisely having decided not to call further attention to itself.