Preface

Preface

 

(An Appointment with Destiny)

 

            He barely escaped infancy……. 

Young Franny Blahnik was cursed with severe asthma from the day he was born.  Almost immediately after arriving home from St. Olaf Hospital in Austin, Minnesota in the late summer of 1949, Franny’s breathing was noisy, obstructed, nerve-wracking……and the rest of his mammoth family could easily hear his labored panting at night throughout the entire downstairs of their run-down rural house.  His parents didn’t think much of this intrusion though.  They were dirt-poor farmers fighting to survive financially–locked in a titanic struggle just to pay their all-important everyday food and utility bills–and to seek medical treatment for something so mundane as noisy breathing in one of their kids bordered on the ludicrous. Something “crazy” like that just wasn’t done in those bygone days.

And so that’s the way Franny lived his first full year on Earth, struggling mightily at times to inhale sufficient oxygen to survive, yet always drawing just enough into his shriveled little lungs to tamp down excessive parental worry.  Until the following September, that is—September 1950–when Franny was a mere thirteen months of age.

Oh yeah, things definitely came to an abrupt and chaotic head that fateful night…….

Late summer was fiercely resisting the inevitable onslaught of approaching autumn and hence was still inundating the crisp, afternoon air with giant, seemingly endless regiments of ragweed pollen to enforce her jealous claim to seasonal sovereignty.  Naturally the bounteous pollen did not agree with young Franny Blahnik’s overly sensitive lungs, and his wee body was struggling best as it could to survive this troubling hay fever season.

As a precaution against the ongoing pollen invasion, his mother Mary carried Franny to bed with her each night–propping the wheezing little fellow up against her side because he seemed to breathe a trifle easier sitting upright like that.  She’d been doing this for some time now and the system appeared to be working quite well.  Franny still labored insanely with his breathing, of course, yet together the two of  them seemed to be successfully weathering the hay fever epidemic and it would soon all be thankfully over with the arrival of the first hard frost and concomitant ragweed extermination, even as the month of October speedily approached and assumed undue prominence in life’s windshield.

On this particular night Madam Blahnik leaned the undersized infant against her side and—dog-tired from yet another exhausting day doing farm chores secondary to her husband Louie’s ongoing polio affliction and subsequent physical incapacitation—instantly fell sound asleep.  Runty Franny did not, however…….

When his mother awoke in the middle of the night and directed her gaze innocently downward……Franny was not breathing…….

Mary listened with the acuity of a startled whitetail buck to be absolutely positive of what she was not hearing…….but, sure enough, there was no air passing through her bambino’s miniature lungs.  He was slouched against her side as motionless as the full harvest moon hovering just outside their bedroom window, and Franny’s complexion had mutated to a ghastly ashen blue.

SHE PANICKED THEN…….

Mary snatched the lifeless babe lying beside her from the bed and jumped to the floor, all in one cat-like motion.  Next she began hitting the diminutive lad painfully hard on his back with sharp forceful swats, struggling frantically to will circulation and with it sublime life back into his oxygen-starved body.

Mary continued bludgeoning the boy’s back for what seemed long minutes, but instead must have been mere seconds……five seconds, ten seconds,  fifteen seconds.…..twenty seconds….……thirty seconds………….who really knows how long it is when you’re immersed in the middle of such a horrific, surreal nightmare? 

All the while Mary kept screaming hysterically at the boy child to “Breathe!!!  Breathe, Franny!!!!!  JUST BREEEEEEATHE, DAMMITALL!!!!!!”

Mary was just about to abandon hope, tearfully resigned to the realization her revered youngest son had crossed over the threshold of consciousness and thereupon joined the legions of angels clustered together up in Heaven, when the lad suddenly and quite miraculously began breathing weakly on his own again.  Mary listened cautiously to make sure that in her delirium she wasn’t merely imagining this hoped-for miracle…………

No…..no…..there was definitely audible breathing coming from her son’s pint-sized body, albeit of a faint and labored nature.

Oh my god, how can this be?!?!  YES, GOD, HOW CAN THIS EVER BE?!?!?!  As a devout Roman Catholic Mary was a big believer in miracles, yet she had never conceived in her wildest dreams that her own household would ever be paid a visit by the Holy Spirit…..

The indescribably relieved damsel then collapsed on the rumpled bed immediately to her arrears and corralled her head in her leathery farmwife hands, wiping away tears of ecstasy as she did so.  Mary continued to sob uncontrollably while her body convulsed involuntarily not unlike a freshly-struck tuning fork.  She was overjoyed beyond words; she thought the noisy rasping emanating from her youngest son’s nose, but mostly mouth, was the most wonderful, beauteous sound she had ever heard in her thirty two years of life.

Mary next clenched the little man close to her breast and uttered a short prayer of thanks, nearly arresting his breathing once more, only this time owing to the pythonesque hug with which she engulfed his still-heaving, Lilliputian body.

Our heroine shook her head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth like the pendulum on a stately grandfather clock, before ultimately emitting a bottomless sigh of relief; they had come so close to losing dear little Franny before he even got a fair shot at life……and she couldn’t even begin to imagine what life without her precious baby boy would be like, nor did she care to speculate either……

The lady Blahnik finally cracked a fleeting smile that unfroze her face in but a split second, and the palpable tension which in the midst of the apocalyptic crisis had slavishly spilled into the bedroom akin to an ocean tide at full moon quickly drained away.

Mary shook her head again, this time in wonderment, and stared down lovingly at the no-longer-blue tyke.  She surely had to give her irreplaceable Franny enormous credit; his lungs were undoubtedly awful air receptacles, yet despite them–despite those misbehaving, malfunctioning vital organs that so often turned against him and betrayed him like two contemporary Judas Iscariots–the little rascal fought like holy hell to preserve the one and only life God had granted him.  In fact, Mary thought with a furtive smile, her lastborn son possessed every bit the resilience and tenacity of a caught bullhead flopping around desperately and with seeming infinite determination on a mid-summer’s day riverbank.

And the thought then briefly crossed her mind:  Maybe—just maybe– her Franny was being saved for something truly great…… 

Maybe God had special plans in store somewhere done the line for her third son–her picayune Lazarus.  Maybe Franny’s destiny had already been charted years, if not decades, in advance by forces too great for her to comprehend.  Maybe HIS was a special destiny–a divine destiny–meant for no other…….etched in stone and decreed from above.

Could this possibly be true?

Was Franny Blahnik distinct among mankind…..and in some ethereal way utterly indestructible???