The Old Man and the Snow...

It snowed twelve inches yesterday. I was on the road most of the night. I left work early to pick up my fiancee in Oak Park, a bordering suburb of Chicago, where she has an internship at a clinic. After picking her up, I was stopped by an old man about three blocks from the clinic.

He was in his seventies, pear shaped with frazzled grey hair and no jacket. He came alongside the passenger side of the car and I rolled down the window. He took hold of the antennae and the door for support.

He was breathing heavily, possibly from hypothermia, and didn't answer me when I asked him if he needed help. He finally responded when I asked him if he was lost by nodding his head and squeezing out a winded "yes".

"Where are you headed?" I asked.

"Is this Joliet?" he asked with a confused grin, taking his hand off the antennae to wipe the snow that had collected on the belly region of his grey henley.

"You're in Oak Park, Joliet is far south from here. Did you get on the wrong train?"

"No, I'm trying to walk to Springfield," he answered curtly as though I should've known.

"Springfield's in the center of the state, about 200 miles away, you can't walk there in this snow." I now knew that he was suffering from dementia.

Moving his shaking hand from the side of the door to my fiancee's seat belt strap, "Can you give me a ride to Springfield?" Her eyes flashed me a frightened look of alarm.

Getting concerned for our safety, I was hoping to scare him into behaving by saying, "I really can't, but there is a police officer headed that way and he's only a block away. I'm sure he'll give you a ride." There was a patrol car that we passed a block back, so I wanted to get this man out of the cold.

"I'll drive, I've got a license," he said, finally letting go of the belt strap but then was trying to open the passenger door. Luckily it was locked, but I had had enough of this man. I rolled up the window and started to drive away slowly. He was trying to hold onto the door handle but couldn't keep up with the car and slipped into a pile of snow on the roadside.

I drove around the block in hope of informing the police officer and also making sure this old man wasn't injured. Unfortunately, the patrol car was no longer there, so I drove to where the man had slipped. He wasn't there either. I parked the car.

Before getting out of the car, I told my girl to call the police and let them know what had happened. I went to where he fell and saw his footprints in the deep snow. He had gotten up and headed to a park known for housing the Pleasant Home mansion. I followed his tracks to the gate on Home Avenue. From the opening I saw his meandering tracks going west across the pristine snow covered park. This was the only entrance to the park. I stood watch at the gateway, making sure that the man wouldn't escape before the police arrived.

I figured that the officers would bring him to the station and hold him in custody for some time in hope that someone would file a missing person's report. The worst case scenario would be the old man being sent to an home and then on to a hospice. I started to think that a cold solitary death would be better.

The snow was falling quite fast. It was collecting to form a thick coat upon my shoulders. The tracks that the old man had left were slowly filling, leaving only an obscure trace of his path across the field. White pillars of smoke rose from the chimneys at either end of the mansion. Branches from the large trees sagged under the weight of the snow clinging to the many leaves that refused to fall this autumn.

My fiancee called out from the car that the police would arrive shortly and I waved back to her in acknowledgement. I remained as a sentinel for some time, watching the fog of my breath being plundered by flakes. I was surprised that the old man hadn't tried to circle back to escape the confines of the park. Maybe he found his way inside the Pleasant Home mansion and was sitting beside a fire drinking tea. Had he collapsed behind the back porch, losing consciousness to a haze that melded with the snow? Perhaps he had scaled the gate and was on his way to Springfield, trudging through the drifts, defying man, logic and nature.

A smile warmed my face despite the bitter cold. I leaned against the large iron gate, watching his tracks disappear and hoping that he would escape before the cops came.