Zimmernan's Urn

Cold darkness of winter twilight took the city in its icy grip. Depressant ever-grey west-Michigan winter sky issuing a false promise, morphed to high altitude cirrus formations, teasing hope for feeble attempts at brief sunshine, then descended once again into maddening grey, laughing mockingly at all who wished for resurrection of Spring.

The old man, perhaps on secret mission, with gnarled fingers painfully clutching flower-filled Urn, paid in cash, dropped his wallet into his outside coat pocket, and set his face toward the door.

Evidently on a stealthy mission of his own, Ben raised an eyebrow. Winking, nodding toward the old man sent his conspirators, like cobras, slithering quickly outside; untied shoelaces trailing wildly like tape worms on a trapeze, pants crotches waggling goofily between their knees, baggy underwear flapping stupidly in the breeze. Jackal fell in, unnoticed, behind.

Making his way along a row of parked cars, old man, suddenly jolted forward. Jackal’s foot planted in his back and blindsided by cobra slithering out to interrupt his stride, he crashed to the asphalt like a dead tree in a winter gale.

Gasping, face planted in grey plowed snow, hands still tightly clutching Urn, mind in white panic of disbelief, he lay motionless while wild beasts greedily clawed at his pockets. After a micro-eternity of frightened silence and possum-like inaction, hearing cynical laughter of young voices receding, he listened as footsteps skittered away like leaves in a Fall wind, leaving him in a spiraling nebula of confusion.

Silence fell.

Mental presence began to emerge from the spinning universe. Head slowly rising from the dirty snow, left hand urgently lifting Urn from the ground, right hand painfully grasping bumper above him, feet tentatively finding rightful place under him, body shakily struggling upright; old man oriented himself toward his battered pickup truck. A relic, warn out from years of overloaded labor, afflicted with carsickness from a long period of neglect and merciless etching from countless winters of road salt, it awaited his command.

Tentatively opening the squawking driver’s side door, and unexpectedly seeing keys lying on the seat like an old friend rediscovered, he jolted in a rare moment of thankfulness for the absent mindedness of old age. Placing Urn carefully on the threadbare seat, grasping steering wheel with left hand and edge of the seat back with right, reaching stiffly for seat bottom with his knee; he dragged himself into the faithful old servant, twisted slowly to sitting position, closed and locked the door.

He sat, methodically taking stock.

Old man chuckled.

Chuckle changed to loud belly laugh as the irony dawned on him. The evening’s purchases of Urn and two gallons of gas, enough for the drive to his destination, had lifted all cash from his wallet. Accounts supposedly represented by credit cards flashing in his wallet moments ago, tantalizing the Jackal’s lecherous eyes while he was at the cash register, had been closed days before transmuting the young thugs’ evening labors into an inverted joke on them.

At last, grudgingly, like a hibernating old lion being awakened, the engine started, and he drove his belching, rattling servant out of the lot and onto the highway. He shadowed the apparition of a Highway Department snowplow clearing the shoulder in a madcap race to its next coffee break. The plow’s blinking, jaundiced eyes peered eerily into its past through a gossamer grey-white snow scrim trailing behind the dark green ghost as if tentatively tethered to its tail. Billowing skyward, the scrim violently assaulted the stolidly waiting white road edge reflectors. Then it lost its grip on the wind and tumbled limply into the ditch, continuously replenished.

While time lost count, old man matched speeds with the monster, holding a steady distance behind. His over-active right brain was mesmerized by the sinister appearing image of the plow’s orange flashing lights projected on his degenerated retinas. His left brain occupied itself with a retrograde reverie of recurring ruminations regarding rest home residency, where he had found himself thrust with no one to care for him. His son, a patriotic champion, had been blown up by an Iraqi IED. His now divorced daughter was away on a feminist binge of self-discovery in the Alaskan tundra, having abandoned her children to her drunken and abusive ex-husband. Old man had alienated all his friends with ugly opinionated tirades on everything from wrens to warblers to watercress to wilderness preservation. He was now unwillingly surrounded by wretchedly rotund old women rudely wrangling over the unwritten rules of Rook, recurrently running on in redundant recounting of the relative repercussions from side effects of drugs thrust upon them last month, to mitigate the side effects of ones prescribed the month before, to cover the side effects of drugs given them the month before that, to camouflage the side effects of medications supposedly ameliorating the symptoms of some real or imagined malady, but having no impact whatever on the underlying causes of the original distress. A paltry practice that provides fodder for feverish finagling and futile fussing in Washington over exponential rise of healthcare costs and excuses for inexorably pressing the confused country toward the sadness of socialism: sapping strength from individual responsibility and personal freedom that made the nation strong.

Eventually, the pickup, as if guided by some mysterious homing device, and with its fuel gauge at E, found its way to the long-abandoned homestead. After spinning and zaggy zigging like an inebriated rabbit up the unplowed drive, it quietly sat down with finality in front of the empty farmhouse, as if satisfied upon terminating a faithful term of service.

Clutching Urn protectively, old man entered the decaying house, standing momentarily to orient himself in the darkness. Then, making his way in shuffling gate to the dilapidated kitchen table, he catapulted his keys onto it, awakening a ghostly dust cloud from its ancient slumber, making it rise into the faint moonlight and then collapse softly back into the dark abyss of its origin. His olfactory memory captured the scent of onions and garlic in meals eaten there decades earlier after long days of planting and harvesting.

Slowly, methodically, he exited, leaving the door flapping in the wind like a tailless kite. Finding the long unused trail barely discernable beneath the overgrowth, his labored footsteps squeaking in the frozen snow, he made his way into the field. With loosened coat flaps protectively surrounding Urn, stooping painfully forward against adversarial wind, muttering doggedly, verbally urging his body forward as if somehow detached from it, pressing steadfastly toward his objective, he struggled up the hill; a knowing old friend now bent on thwarting his urgent purposes. Chest heaving vainly for air, heart pounding loudly in his ears, weeping, tears fogging his vision and freezing against his cheeks, he brushed the snow away, and with violently shaking hands carefully placed Urn on the stone’s top surface. Bending over, with trembling forefinger he traced the words etched in the stone’s weathered face:
“Sally Zimmerman, Beloved Wife”.

He stood rigidly immobile for a time, silently observing Urn who was now valiantly holding flowers in place. He listened as the howl of wind in the trees drowned the sound of his breathing and his pounding heart. Transfixed, he watched through the distorting lenses of tears as Urn with his flowers seemed to merge into the stone and descend into the grave.
He heard her voice. Felt loving fingers caress his cheek. A sudden shiver shot up his spine like honeymoon anticipation. Lifted gaze skyward. Through barren trees he saw her face in clouds glistening in the diffused moonlight smiling on him like beckoning angel.

At last, resolute as a Marine on guard duty, lying down in the snow in front of the stone, arms folded across his chest, lips bending into a smiling formation they had not known for years, Arnold Joseph Zimmerman passed silently and alone but expectantly, into the life beyond, finally home with his beloved.