Top shelf, inside door, normally where the eggs would be

See that jar of Cherry Preserves up there? Sure you do. There's a story attached to that jar, and now I'm gonna tell it.

I had a friend who lived in this town many, many moons ago in a very cool place, a sort of Eagles Nest of bachelorhood, (minus the Wehrmacht dinner plates) a cubbyhole tucked away in the dense urban underbrush of Ann's Arbor. It was above a bar, which gave it an unintentional animus in the evenings, and much quiet during the day. My friend filled it much music himself, two good keyboards worth. It was modern and came with a sunporch which gave the grandiosity of a nice downtown view of nearby buildings while keeping you grounded by the stench of the bar trash cans in the alley behind it. It came with strong Anti Evil Spousal Defense Shields, (and cable) which were necessary for my friend to recoup his energies. He was emerging from a Gallipoliesque marriage, and this fallow time was necessary for his later Churchillian marital triumphs, a good thing on many fronts.

But what it didn't have was parking. Oh, yeah, a block down (and down a hill!) and a block over, which was bad enough in good weather, but in rain? with groceries? Or how's about the Sunday when there's rain, groceries, and a friend (moi!) in tow? The triple whammy of anti-parking! So what does my friend do? He parks across the street from his place in the lot for the gardening/oddments store, the lot with a sign that says "Customer parking only, even on Sundays."

Does my friend do what most of the world would do, just park and unload? No, he has to buy something! Yep... that jar at the top of the page. He would not be struck by a thunderbolt from an angry Jehovah; he was a customer! Did he want Cherry Preserves? Hell no, he tossed the jar to me.

What I wonder is: Why did I keep it? I honestly don't know; I could do worse than to say that I somehow feel that the fates will tell me, that he and I and this jar are connected. Is it our Cask of Amontillado? If this were a Hitchcock film, is it a Macguffin of madness and murder? If this were a Kurosawa film, is it what gets found on a wind swept field after we both get killed defending the fortress of Lord HungaDunga? Is it the prize of an unspoken tontine, with the last one left opening it up to find a long lost ruby, ("Of course! A ruby in the Cherry Preserves!") placed there by the infamous pirates of....of...[reads label] Traverse City, Michigan? I'm not sure I want to open it; it looks like what comes out of the crankcase of an Indy car after a "pit" stop on lap 482! So in the fridge it sits, awaiting its unknown and unknowable future, like the rest of us