"They're All Good Stories"

 

In memory of my grandfather Donald Zimmerman

I can only imagine the waves of nervous wreckage that crashed through my dad as he watched my truck pull up to Black Lake. Your and Nonnie's cabin has been the center of something of an annual family gathering for decades and decades and here I was making a maiden surprise voyage. Uncle Doug, having just found out that I would coincidentally be staying at my girlfriend's cabin just 20 minutes away that same weekend, invited me out to surprise my dad and everyone there. To this day I wonder if he knew the weight of that invite, played mostly as a joke on my dad. A joke of philosophical merit, that's classic Doug. 

I had never been there. In fact, I had only met you and Nonnie once as an adult just a year or so prior. It hit me much later, only recently if I'm being honest, that all of the times I had seen my dad when he was in town, he was likely in town for this exact annual gathering. Oblivious as to what that meant at the time, I drove to the cabin at Black Lake not realizing I was going to meet more people I didn't know existed, some of which like my cousins, who did not know that I existed either. 

The cabin on Black Lake is your kingdom. You cleared 6'6 in your full height and you sat like a king of the giants in your massive chairs. Giant living room chair, giant dinner chair, giant camping chair, all poised in various positions around the cabin that allowed you best vantage point for observing all the fun around you. When I arrived at the cabin, I'll never forget the way you said "oh, Kyle's here" as though my arrival was casually due any minute for the last 25 years. 

The initial visit had me reeling. Meeting all of my dad's brothers and cousins and nieces and aunts and uncles, a welcoming and loving precession of faces who were also confused, surprised, or unreadable was more than I had expected (my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, said she could not tell I was meeting these people for the first time, so it's at least good to know I wasn't exuding any weirdness). It's clear my dad struggled with bringing me up there; he had no idea what my arrival would entail, what people would think of me, how to broach the subject of me to some, how I would understand it, what I would think of everyone - the list is endless. He had no idea what to do or how to start.

You knew exactly what to do. You had to catch me up. One thing I've come to know about you is that you're a - in the most literal sense of the word - gigantic vessel for stories. You collect them and share them and love them. You lived an insanely interesting life from which you can pull stories up like a deep well with a greased-up pully, but you also gather stories from everyone around you and in your commanding, retired police chief voice can get them to retell it while you watch intently for the impact. And I had consequently missed out on a lot of these. 

I was only there for about a weekend, but almost every minute I was there you parked me next to you and regaled me with story after story, sometimes telling me yourself and sometimes inviting someone over to tell one. You told me stories of your days as police chief of Bloomfield Hills, about your  Military Police deployment in the 50s, about your time as a beat officer. You told me stories about raising 4 boys, about my dad, about my mom, about your wife, my cousins. They ranged from the comical - visits my Uncle Doug had to make to the principal's office in school - to the meaningful, like my dad's speech at my Uncle Dan's wedding. And as they oscillated between the range your eyes were alight with tears of laughter or beaming with pride, the stories and their impact had a real power. You couldn't share them fast enough. 

While I wish I could say I remember every story to the T from that day, I of course don't (cut me some slack Chief, there were a lot of them). But what I do remember is how you would punctuate each story with the phrase "they're all good stories". Usually, you would say it jostling my knee or clapping one of your gigantic hands on my shoulder, your voice trailing laughter. "They're all good stories". You probably said it 45, 50 times that weekend. The phrase has stuck with me as a testament to who you are. 

Stories are often analogized as woven fabric; the idea comes from when human civilization used to weave enormous tapestries telling stories of war or family or daily life. The tapestries were woven using millions of threads and the weaving process means the stories can always be added to, changed or continually constructed to portray the passage of time. These are stand-ins for the notion that we are all contributing to a singular, larger story and that stories never die. 

It's in this context that I have come to understand what you meant by the words "they're all good stories". I am a thread in the tapestry of your life and subsequently your family. The phrase is not just a reflection of your own positive feelings toward the stories, but an assurance to me, as a newly woven piece, that my story is also "good". That whatever pain or confusion or mystery that might have been has passed and the story is now just one of unequivocal good because I am here, now, in your presence, being told exactly that. 

So as I say goodbye to you, and I watch the sadness your passing brings to everyone around you, as the weight of your greatness and presence lifts, I am reminded again that they're all good stories exactly because stories never end. And neither, truly, will you. 

Love you Grandpa.