man with the orderly mind

Despite the downward screech that is the Michigan housing market, B’s house in the Detroit suburbs closes tomorrow. It’s located off what must have once been a farm road; there’s a Steinway showroom a mile away and the predictable replication of chain restaurants and grocery stores. To get into the housing development, you carry a device, much like a garage door opener; when you press the button the gate zips into the air at such a speed that makes it a tempting catapult launch. Lacking such a gadget, you speak to the man sitting in the sentry-house. “6400 P–,” I say, but this is not enough. “Mrs. H–. The house is selling tomorrow.”

“Oh yes,” he replies. “Mrs. H–.” The gate flies up.

B and her husband lived in the condo association for over twenty years; they kept up with the couples on their semi-circle, but now B runs through the ailments and the deaths. Alzheimer’s. Stroke. Deceased. And now B, a year after her husband’s death, has officially moved away. The house has that flat, forlorn look—carpet exposed for the first time in years, walls bare but for hooks and smudges.

A man comes to haul away the residual items and refuses my repeated offer to help, even after a large metal desk crashes off his dolly, so I slip into the house to give him some privacy. (One would think that with such a peculiar name as “Kosher Garbage,” employees might have a sense of humor, but he didn’t appear in the best of spirits, even after I reassured him that I really was kidding about the “Oh, I forgot—there’s a couch” comment, which I had saved up for the moment he began pulling tie-downs over the overflowing bed of his pickup truck.)

The garbage cans are stuffed with hangers and headless broomsticks and rusting screws harvested from the toolbox. A frequent mover of homes, I am loathe to leave the garbage and cannot believe my luck when I spot the garbage truck lurching its way through the neighborhood. “You saved the day!” I exclaim, fearful that the garbage man will be annoyed with two stuffed cans and my poorly parked car. But this is indeed a day for miracles. The M– Village garbage man, who must not be unaccustomed to medical rubbish and the non-bodily remains of the deceased, looks at me, upends one of the cans into truck and replies, “You know, with the way people are leaving this earth, I’m just grateful for every day I get.”

           What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are

            sterling, whose lunge is straight?