Fran felt the crisp September air nipping at his exposed neck. He sat his pen down for a second and zipped the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing all the way up to his throat. He heard the same bluejay from earlier scolding some unseen intruder in the grove beside him. Fran glanced over to see what it might be, but instead his gaze was kidnapped by the rapidly changing leaves on the trees.
The beauty of a Minnesota autumn always captivated Fran and he reminisced to another autumn—a preposterously late autumn—so many years earlier as the time machine roughly grabbed him by the nape of his neck and thereupon escorted him backwards in time through the Nineties, the Eighties, and—finally………
………he wasn’t breathing….….
……..no, for sure, he wasn’t breathing even a tiny bit………
JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY, WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON HERE ANYWAY???!!!!!!!!!!
Julie went to pick him up in the morning to change his diaper and feed him a bottle of milk…..and his complexion was a ghostly blue and he wasn’t breathing!!!!!
They shook him violently, slapped his back, even briefly attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the limp, pint-sized form…….but life had permanently departed his body just hours before..….
Nicholas was Fran’s and his wife Julie’s firstborn son. Born on July 17th, 1978, he had been a model baby for the first four months of his life. Plump, handsome, rambunctious—the lad bore a striking resemblance to his beaming father, who in turn could not have been more proud of his brand new, carry-on-the-Blahnik-name progeny. I had never personally seen Fran happier than during those heady days in the late Seventies. He had taken Julie Fredricksen as his wife the previous September in a jubilant wedding ceremony near her hometown of Wanamingo, Minnesota, and now with Nicholas’s subsequent arrival the pair found themselves on a swift pathway to creating the vibrant family Fran so dearly coveted.
November came, and in the middle of that inherently dreary month Julie hauled baby Nicholas to a local photo studio for the traditional three-month photographs. The young man looked adorable in his little boy outfit, and Fran insisted he wear a miniature cap that day to hide the fact his hair was so short and scanty.
Thanksgiving weekend arrived. Celebrate Thanksgiving with Julie’s whole family up in Wanamingo—a truly festive occasion; the first time the three of them–Fran, Julie, and baby Nicholas–would celebrate a family holiday together…….and tragically—–the last time as well…..
That Saturday morning when they went to roust the little fellow from his slumber…….he was dead…….
Just lying there motionless and noiseless and doll-like………totally lifeless…….
“Crib death” is what they called it back then, and the more professional-sounding S.I.D.S. (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was just beginning to gain traction in the lexicon of medical authorities. Pediatricians of that era still weren’t empowered with the knowledge that S.I.D.S. invariably resulted from babies sleeping on their stomachs, and hence those medical practitioners didn’t vigorously discourage the practice as learned ones do nowadays. And consequently that’s just the way Nicholas’s loving parents laid their baby down the previous evening—flat on his stomach in his crib……..and subsequently found him without life and sans a soul the next morning.
But make no mistake about one thing here, Reader: The boy was already plainly dead when his parents walked into the room that horrible morning; there was absolutely nothing they or anyone else could have done medically to restore life back into the body of the deceased infant.
No, that would have required a bona fide miracle—code for supernatural assistance, code for divine intervention–to revive wee Nicholas Blahnik and breathe vitality back into his lifeless body but miracles, as throughout history, were a scarce commodity and in extraordinarily short supply back in the late 1970s.
This sudden, tragic turn of events totally devastated Fran and Julie Blahnik, as one might expect. They had magically created life together one enchanting evening and then watched incredulously as that new life slowly expanded Julie’s womb until it protruded grotesquely in front of her like the bulbous mid-section of a gluttonous cross-country truck driver at an Old Country Buffet restaurant. And then–after the indescribably joyful epiphany of their baby son’s birth–the couple gazed with unbounded pride as this little boy morphed right before their eyes from a helpless, forever-slumbering blob of human tissue into an active, grinning, three-month-old butterball……with the promise of even more exciting changes in store for the indefinite future and beyond……
And then—OH MY DEAR GOD, THE BLATANT CRUELTY OF IT ALL!!!—to have the dozing boy cruelly snatched away in the dead of night with nary a whimper of protest……
The portraits from the aforementioned photo studio arrived in Fran’s and Julie’s rural mailbox the following week. They revealed a darling, chubby, three-month-old boy, fashionably dressed with his ample belly nearly popping the snaps on the snug white shirt he was wearing, staring off into space with a blank yet amused expression stamped across his cherubic face, a tiny turquoise knit cap nattily encircling his fuzzy head…….and alive….…
So gloriously, wonderfully, bewitchingly, unconditionally……heartbreakingly–and forever–alive, for everyone who observed the photograph to see and exult over such a pluperfect example of the unique miracle we human beings call life…….and how quickly and coldheartedly and unexpectedly that life can then be stolen away in a single passing moment…….
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