Nothing Ventured, Nothing Lost

I have been yawing back and forth between feeling like I’ve been remanded to the gulag and having some excitement about moving to Michigan, with the former being the majority of the experience because that is my natural temperament.

However, at the moment I am feeling pretty excited about the move. I am kind of noodling along, at one moment thinking of doing this, and at another moment thinking of doing that. If there is sufficient momentum, then the next step happens, and so I actually now have an appointment at the Michigan Secretary of State office to get a Michigan REAL ID and driver’s license. I have been there a few times now and have found them to be wonderfully efficient. I love Jocelyn Benson. I think she is running for governor. She has my vote. I also hope to be registered to vote in time to vote for the United States senator from Michigan.

I went through a pre-registration process, including identifying the two documents I will bring to establish my residency. It turns out I would have a pretty hard time establishing my California residency if I had to, despite being here for 44 years, since I don’t have a car or a mortgage. Fortunately, I put the DTE bill in my name quite a while ago; that will be one of the documents. And the car registration / title will hopefully be the other. I see that the registration itself has my Michigan address on it, but I have to take a look at the title. If that has my San Francisco address on it, I’ll have some additional steps before I can get the new ID.

If the title does have the Michigan address on it, then Michigan has a slight problem in their process—don’t tell them I said this—given that the only thing I had to show them to register the car was a DTE bill, meaning that, really, you ultimately only need a DTE bill to prove residency as long as you go to the trouble of registering a car; this works better if you have a car.

Thinking about the car’s title made me think about the house’s title. Do I have that somewhere? Is it like a car’s pink slip, where if I leave it in plain sight and someone else walks off with it, they now own the house? I don’t recall anyone handing me a handsome embossed document with touches of gold leaf on it. Seems like after you put that big of a crater in your 401(k), you should get something like that.

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention, regarding my Deadguy-athon, that not only did they produce only two albums in the course of 30 years, the first is 30 minutes long, and last year’s is 36 minutes long. That was extremely thoughtful of them.

Pursuant to my move to the Midwest, I am letting various supplies dwindle. At this point, I likely will not use up 96 rolls of toilet paper or even two entire containers of toasted sesame oil. I put one of the latter in the lobby and it disappeared right away.

I also now actively hope I get there with both cats, whereas I had often half hoped that the inability to achieve this would prevent me from having to move at all. After spending quite a bit of money in the past few weeks on medication that will never get used—not enough to buy a yacht, but enough for a pretty nice rowboat, I would think—I am hoping the vet tech will be able to medicate Marvin, and I am also thinking of other means of ensuring that we all get there, such as asking Tom if he thinks this will happen. He said he does think that. That pretty much guarantees it, then, though I also asked my friend whose prayers always come true to pray for this. I ask her to pray for something for me only once in a great while; I don’t want to abuse my privileges nor drain her supply of cosmic good luck. Regarding our move, I went ahead and asked her, and she seemed amenable, though she also texted, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” which had a slightly ominous ring to it. In the context of traveling with cats, what does that mean? (I hope it does not mean I will end up in Michigan with more than two cats.)

I lately came upon someone’s notion that there are people who say yes, who are rewarded by the adventures they get to have, and people who say no, who are rewarded by feeling a sense of safety; I don’t think the person was saying one was better than the other, but that it depends on people’s psychological makeup. I’m definitely a no person, which is why all these giant yesses have been so hard.

There are a lot of people who don’t even know I’m moving, the process has been so riddled with chaos. A coherent process would have been: Make decision. Then tell people. Accordingly, I just mentioned next week’s move to the friend I’m having lunch with tomorrow and got back a texted “Whaaaat?????!”

I forwarded my note to my work team to a very early chaplaincy mentor and soon received an email with her best wishes for good luck in the future, as if this was the end of our relationship, but since a whole lot of connections these days are maintained by text and / or email and / or Zoom and / or phone, anyway, it kinds of seems to me it hardly matters where you live, except for that small (in my case) handful of relationships where you do need to meet up in person now and then.

So I wrote back saying I hoped that we will still keep in touch and emphasizing that I was not saying goodbye. My letter to my team mentions weeding, and it turns out that this friend also finds weeding therapeutic, so we are at the moment having a very engrossing exchange via email all about weeding and gardening. On her recommendation, I ordered another couple of weeding tools. She said you do not need to use Roundup; Wirecutter in The New York Times had lately averred that you do. She said that she weeds all winter and for a second, I thought, “I’m going to do that, too!” Then I realized my friend can weed all winter because she lives near Seattle. I will not be weeding all winter in Ypsilanti. That’s when I’m going to sit on my sister’s couch and read the many unread novels that have been patiently waiting for me to get to them.

My weeding friend suggested that I volunteer at a community garden and / or join a gardening club. She said I will learn a lot and will enjoy hanging around the kinds of people who do these things. She also said to be careful of my hands (and back and knees ... ). This was a good reminder. My hands are increasingly arthritic, with various knuckles taking turns having painful flare-ups that so far abate after a bit. I actually had been wondering how all the snipping was going to affect my hands, so I will now look into how an aging weeder takes care of her hands as well as the rest of her body. My mother had a fantastic wheeled thing you can sit on while gardening, but it is gone now. Maybe I will end up getting one.

So I am excited about weeding and about all the lovely Midwesterners I am going to meet at the community garden and / or in the gardening club, and about my new weeding tools that are coming, and also about doing some cycling there, though I have not decided whether to ship my one bicycle there now, or ship it later, or just buy a bicycle there, or buy an e-bike. One way or the other, I will need a rack for the car, so I have been discussing this with a knowledgeable friend. There are also two houses on my little block that have lately changed hands, plus one more than is maybe on the market now or will be soon; I am excited about going to welcome all my new neighbors. Maybe I will join a rowboating club! (Say its name: Lake Ontario.)