I spent the weekend in Seattle after the funeral was over. It was nice spending more time with Megan and seeing Laura’s best friend Graham again. It was also really good to spend a lot of time with Zaydeh, who was taking this worse than anyone.
Zaydeh seems so forlorn without Bubbeh around. He’s just about deaf and he’s been that way since I can remember, but without my grandmother around the house he’s having a lot of trouble hearing the phone or doorbell ring.
He took us to see the apartment they had put a payment on in a brand new, very nice retirement community near Seattle Center. It was one of the nicest apartments I’ve ever seen, but knowing it would just be Zaydeh in it, it was too big. He thought so too, and has since canceled his lease on it and is planning to move into a smaller apartment at some point, but not soon. I felt better knowing that Zaydeh would be staying in their condo with all of his things, and walking up to Pike Place Market every morning for fruits and coffee. This, however, meant that Megan and I would not be moving into the condo in July after all. This too was fairly crushing news.
The condo was never ours, and we had done nothing to earn it, but it was the one thing that was fairly solid about my move back to the US. Having a place to live immediately – finding a job and applying to grad schools would come afterwards. Now I will have to do everything all at once, which is a bit stressful. Still, I suppose I counted a lot of chickens before they’d hatched.
Laura’s friend Graham is doing very well on Capitol Hill. We met him and his girlfriend for breakfast (making me realise that I’ve gone almost 2 years without eating a proper breakfast). Although I’m not nearly as close with Graham as my sister, it will be nice to know someone in the city! Also worth mentioning, his cat Leland is adorable.
I spent an entire day with Megan around her neighbourhood in Queen Anne. It’s a residential area primarily with a lot of cute, small houses. Seattle is not afraid of colours either! Purple houses, pink houses, mint green houses. It was really beautiful. I met her roommates Nick and Jonathan and we watched some TV while I battled off my daily jet lag fatigue.
I ate two slices of pizza (one slice too many) and Megan and I walked around her area and talked about the places we’d like to move into in July. We also talked about the general futility of knowing what we want out of our ‘careers’ and how little furniture we own.
Megan and her roommate, Jonathan.
On the last day in Seattle, my mother and I visited Zaydeh’s. Zaydeh drove Laura to the airport and my mother and I rested in the condo for a bit. I had a phone call from someone I’d never heard of and called her back. It turned out it was a debt collector trying to phone me to tell me that I owe $1400 in membership payments to Bally’s Total Fitness in Los Angeles. A gym membership I had cancelled thirteen months ago. Apparently the contract I had signed was good for 36 months, regardless of cancellation. What a crock. After a good twenty minutes of hyperventilating and talking to one of the ladies at the agency who told me “I could settle at $750”, I decided my life was officially bleak. No grandmother, no place to live, and now I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a service I did not require nor use. America is awful.
Dejected, I went to the airport with my mom. Her flight was 4 hours earlier than mine but I didn’t want to do anything or talk to anyone, so it seemed like a good place to feel disgruntled until my flights back to Japan. As it turned out, Sea-Tac Airport is the best place to feel disgruntled as I would soon find out flying standby on Delta Airlines.
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