- …..and then, straight out of the blue—in the midst of an otherwise enchanting evening—a text message from our next-door neighbor back in Minnesota arrived without warning and struck with the raw power of a thunderbolt. And in its wake? That evening post-message was the best of times, that evening of October 25th, 2019 was the quintessential worst of times. That evening was insanely incongruous and surreal…..zany…..extraterrestrial even. My emotions were put aboard a roller coaster that dispiriting duskingtide—an unexpected, bumpy journey which tested one’s soul and belief in God and all things wise and wonderful. The dinner entrée at Bordeaux’s Cajun Grill consisting of blackened catfish smothered in crawfish ettoufe lying atop a luscious bed of brown rice, fitfully complemented by a small bowl of fried collards—served while my longtime soulmate and I were sitting jacketless on the restaurant’s patio deck immediately adjacent to the delta backwaters of panoramic Mobile Bay in extreme southern Alabama, with late season dragonflies flitting around and swooping about aimlessly as sandhill cranes strutted along on cartoonishly spindly legs searching for maritime prey in the swampy morass not more than a long stone’s throw away to our west—was at once the most delectable food I have ever tasted and the most bland food I have ever stuck inside my mouth too. The company I had that fateful evening—Carla, my enamoring wife of thirty two plus years—was at once the most interesting person in the whole world and the most petty, distracting individual known to inhabit our region of the cosmos as well. The prevailing weather that evening—with newly formed Tropical Storm Olga raging and dumping torrential rain just off to the west near New Orleans even as that same late season storm system mischievously spawned multiple small tornadoes in our immediate Mobile, Alabama vicinity—was at once the most exhilarating weather pattern I had ever experienced in my life, but also the most treacherous and deceitful and loathsome. The wait staff that evening at Bordeaux’s Cajun Grill was unfailingly polite and helpful, yet at the same time those inveterately friendly people were cloying and annoying and overly intrusive under grim circumstances they could not possibly even have imagined. Nothing made any sense that fateful evening……NOTHING, I TELL YOU!!! Incongruity ruled the day, and for all I knew in the next instant I might be snatched up by a squawking pterodactyl, stripped of all my clothing, held for public ridicule over downtown Mobile, before finally getting ignominiously deposited in the nearly Gulf of Mexico and, honestly, an event that farfetched and ridiculous wouldn’t have come as one bit of a surprise to a traumatized and shell-shocked Fred Blahnik given the abominable news my wife and I had just received from a thousand miles away…..
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