Author: Fred Blahnik

Fran was startled out of his trance by a loud roar from above.  He leaned forward and stared up through the windshield of his car.  An enormous Boeing 747 was screaming overhead as it began its final descent to Rochester International Airport, located a trifling ten miles to the northwest as the crow flies. 

As Fran watched it hurriedly disappear over a treeline bordering the mythical hilly field known as “Baldy” in the near distance, the time machine swooped in, scooped him up, and transported him far back in his lifetime once more………

 

…….…he was at work when they managed to get a hold of him.  Couldn’t have been at the factory more than an hour—possibly two—when a pretentious messenger from the corporate office came to his machining station wearing a grim frown, stepping daintily over the cement floor in his fancy wingtip shoes as though the manufacturing facility was an onerous dung pile.

Fran instinctively wondered what was wrong.

Had he screwed up on his timecard again…….or maybe someone from management was going to chew him out for being late to work the previous week when his cantankerous old car had rebelled and obstinately refused to start……

But when the snazzy-dressed “bean counter” broke the horrific news to him—that his house had caught on fire and he better rush home immediately—Fran’s heart leapt into his throat.  He suddenly felt physically sick–unbelievably nauseous–though he successfully fought off the first wave of queasiness that urged him to puke right then and there on the corporate guy’s expensive brown wingtips.

Fran hurried home, naturally—screamed home….…he negotiated the normal twenty minute drive in a record fifteen minutes–and felt a ginormous thrill of relief when he spotted all four members of his family—his wife Julie and their three young sons—safely assembled on the grass in their front yard.  Fran stopped to inquire whether they were okay and was gratified to hear a unanimous “Yes!”.  He then turned all of his attention to the stinking, smoldering building in front of him.

August 30th, 1990. 

Up until then just an innocent, self-effacing number on the Roman calendar, but from that point forward an infamous day Fran Blahnik would never be able to forget irrespective of passing time and his mightiest efforts to throw a bridle on the nightmare…..

His and Julie’s ancient house—a modest yet inherently noble dwelling which had been built in 1856 and was the oldest surviving abode in Fillmore County—was completely destroyed.  Staring at the still-smoking monolith, Fran felt tears well up in his eyes.  Everything he owned—every material possession he treasured and held dear—was inside that smoldering caricature of a building.

Amazingly, the shell of the venerable structure still stood tall and proud, and from the outside it really didn’t appear to be in that rough of shape.  But the building’s infrastructure had been gutted so extensively by the fast-moving blaze that when wed to the heinous smoke and water damage the old edifice had incurred during futile attempts to save it, repair or remodeling was wholly out of the question.

No, he would have to bite down hard on his lip and burn down what remained of his nineteenth century house and then rebuild entirely, but where in God’s name would the unearthly sum of money needed to do that come from???

Fran stopped to consider for a moment.  Y’know, it was funny how life operated sometimes..…

He had bought a cheap little oscillating fan at a farm auction earlier that summer—only paid a few dollars for the object, if memory served—and his family was using it to help cool the upstairs of their house a smidgeon during the sultry “dog days” of August.  Fran thought the fan was a helluva deal at the price he paid for it, one that in good conscience he just didn’t believe he could afford to pass up.

IN GOOD CONSCIENCE, YOU SAID?!?!?!

And just what did he get in return for his miniscule initial investment……his prized steal of a purchase?

Burnt their goddamned house down with the fuckin’ diabolical little thing, that’s what!!!

Fran bit down hard on his tongue and desperately wished to God he had never seen that goddamned little fan at that goddamned miserable auction on that goddamned worthless Saturday when he had nothing goddamned better to do with his goddamned fuckin’ free time than go to a goddamned fuckin’ fuckin’ fuckin’ auction out in some godforsaken shithole of a place.  He shook his head back and forth in despair and his whole body trembled like a Saharan shepherd trapped in a vicious Arctic winter.

GODDAMNED IT ALL ALREADY!!!!!!! 

If there wasn’t such a thing as awful horrendously shitty luck, he—Fran Blahnik–would have no luck at all……

Fran finally built up the nerve to venture inside the gutted house to cautiously snoop around.  Almost everything had been effectively destroyed by the cataclysmic fire—walls, ceilings, upstairs, furnishings—except……except miraculously, somehow the iconic ancient twelve-gauge shotgun he had inherited years ago from his father had survived the conflagration.  Fran picked it up, gently opened the weapon’s magazine—peered inside to cursorily inspect for damage–then slammed the magazine shut and was astounded to discover the vintage firearm still seemed to function normally.

Again, the eternally stoic Francis Blahnik fought to stifle a tear.  He had lost virtually everything he owned in this calamitous house fire, but at least all the members of his family were safe–and now to discover that his undisputed favorite material possession in the entire world was likewise intact…….that…….that was completely unexpected and a real good thing to be thankful for, no doubt.

Who knows, maybe preserving his heirloom gun from the horrors of the conflagration was somehow a favorable omen from a newly sympathetic God and a token sign of mercy for the long-suffering Fran Blahnik and his family of five.  Maybe God had something significant in mind for that cherished firearm at a later date, although for the life of him Fran could not imagine just what that might be…….

Fran next set his jaw and stepped out the front door of his house, staring resolutely back at the bleak, burnt-out structure as he slowly shuffled away in the direction of his waiting family.  He would rebuild on this exact same site, he vowed to himself right there on the spot.

And not only would he rebuild in time, but the next house he owned would be superior in every respect to the one that had just gone up in flames…….even if he had to do every bit of fuckin’ work on it himself to ensure that arbitrary outcome!

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…….

The shrill sound of a bluejay in the grove of trees to his left startled Fran out of his daydreaming.  He peered up into the treetops to see if he could spot the raucous bird, to no avail.  He used to both love and hate those damned bluejays back when he was still regularly hunting deer during the Minnesota gun season in early November. 

Love them, because they would frequently warn him when a deer might be approaching……and hate them, because they would frequently warn any deer when he might be approaching.  Fran smiled at this incongruity, a smile left frozen on his face when the time machine appeared out of nowhere and whisked him back at warp speed to an earlier station in his lifetime…….

 

………working with all those fuckin’ mixing chemicals was an absolute bitch, let me tell you!  Fran shook his head back and forth in disbelief at the odious memory……

When Fran Blahnik begrudgingly left dairy farming in the late fall of 1977 and entered the local workforce, there weren’t too many businesses clamoring to hire someone with a two-year degree in animal husbandry, even an individual with a naturally keen intellect augmented by a shitload of ambition like Fran’s.  ‘Twas a buyer’s market for employers back in those bygone days when the hapless, overmatched Jimmy Carter took up residence in the White House at taxpayers’ expense for four interminable years, but that was the closest that uncharismatic miscreant ever came to being genuinely presidential, one might say.

In any event, Fran felt damned lucky to even find what he did:  Entry-level, blue-collar labor paying scarcely above the minimum wage at a small fiberglass manufacturing plant outlying the nearby village of Chatfield.  And then when he did start working at the place, it wasn’t like Fran pompously strutted through the front door of the business and handed his new boss a checklist of all the things–overwhelmingly niceties interspersed with flowery amenities, of course–that he would consent to doing as grounds for employment.

No, Francis Blahnik did walk through the front door of that picayune factory, all right, and his asshole boss was then more than eager to delegate him the distasteful chore of mixing giant batches of resin from which raw fiberglass later evolved through the paltrusion process.

And what the fuck could he–Fran Blahnik, the erstwhile dairy farmer from somewhere over near Spring Valley–do about it???

NOT A GODDAMNED THING, THAT’S WHAT!!!!!

He was the lowest man on the totem pole, for Christ’s sake; if the stupid buttfucker outranking him at the manufacturing plant had ordered Fran to bend over and suck his undersized dick while the bastard scratched contentedly on his own hairy ass, Fran probably would have acquiesced to that demeaning task too, while smilingly volunteering for an encore performance if it meant greater job security for him.  Fran had a wife and young family at home to look after and feed and a multitude of bills to pay every month; he surely wasn’t in any position to be picky about gainful employment back then.

Anyway, so Fran was stuck mixing those fuckin’ hazardous chemicals the first few years he was on the job in the late ‘70s.  The component chemicals for fiberglass–silicon dioxide, calcium oxide, aluminum oxide, boron oxide, plus a few others as well–those were intrinsically okay; those weren’t the ones that scared him half silly.

Oh, you obviously didn’t want to take a big whiff of any of the aforementioned or you would doubtless cough for a long while afterwards like an asthmatic reprobate, and you didn’t want to get them all over your skin either cuz the chemicals in question likely would itch like holy hell for a sizable period of time afterwards too, but the chief ingredients in making fiberglass were generally manageable and benign.  It was the industrial-strength solvents they used for cleaning purposes at the plant–benzene, acetone, and others–that scared the living shit out of Fran.

Believe me when I say this:  Those toxic motherfuckers were SUPER potent and more lethal than an enraged mother grizzly bear…….

But don’t allow your mind to wander too far ahead and wind up drawing the wrong conclusion here, Reader!!!

The modest-sized company Fran worked for was conscientious and legitimately interested in worker safety and religiously followed federally mandated regulations, and federal government watchdog OSHA would naturally pay regular visits to the firm’s chief manufacturing site to further ensure workplace compliance.  Yet those basic protections did little to alleviate Fran’s burgeoning fear:  It just plain and simple was not safe doing what he was doing five days of the week…… 

Fran knew–deep down in the furthest reaches of his soul–that it wasn’t healthful being constantly exposed to insidiously harmful chemicals Monday through Friday virtually every week of the year, even if they theoretically were being closely monitored.  The toll those bastards would extract from one’s body may not happen today……or tomorrow……or the day after that…….or even in the next month or the next year…….but the malevolent cocksuckers would take their pernicious revenge on one’s body some day; Fran was absolutely positive of that fact and it gnawed unrelentingly at his psyche.

After a few years of mixing resin, Fran was offered the opportunity to move up to an apprentice machinist position at the rapidly expanding company.  He leaped at the opportunity.  The starting pay was much better, for one thing, yet more than anything it afforded him the opportunity to leave those dreaded solvents behind and move on to something immanently safer and sans obvious potential health repercussions.  When the day finally arrived to start this new job Fran rejoiced like crazy, knowing full well that he wouldn’t miss the Faustian chemicals he was leaving behind one tiny bit.

Because had he been forced to spend the rest of his professional career continuing to work closely with fiberglass ingredients but especially their treacherous solvents each day for a living, Fran reflected with an inscrutable grin audibly complemented by a humongous sigh of relief, well…….who really knows what untoward things might happen to his long-term physical health stemming from that tsunami of unwanted toxic exposure???

Fran reflected back to the previous Sunday when he had attended church in Spring Valley.  He stopped at his Mom’s place afterwards and she had snapped a cute photograph of him standing on the front step of her house alongside his youngest son Jessie. 

Fran struggled to continue writing while thinking back upon that idyllic morning he had spent at his mother’s farm, and the next thing he knew the time machine suddenly charged in, wrested away control of his thought process, and zipped Fran Blahnik back to a much earlier decade on that same modest Minnesota ranch his materfamilias called home…….

 

……..no, no–Listen up now, Reader!!–it’s not like Fran didn’t love his Mom.  To the contrary:  He loved her very much and without reservations and could well appreciate everything she had done for him throughout his young life.

But work with her for a living?  Manage a farm with her until she died??  Talk with her every morning while trying hard to hammer out difficult business decisions that would be in the best interests of all parties involved???

NO FUCKIN’ WAY!!!!! 

That sort of business arrangement just didn’t work out worth a damn……

After Fran returned to southeastern Minnesota from Vietnam in the summer of 1969 and then attended school in the small community of Waseca for two years while earning an Associate’s Degree in Animal Husbandry, it was every bit his intention to return to Spring Valley and farm the home operation.  This was the same estate he had essentially been managing by himself ever since he was a mere eighth grader with the exception of the aforementioned military and educational sabbaticals.  That was his plan and his lifelong dream anyway.  Turned out there was only one big obstacle which ultimately stood in the way of this lifelong dream, and you can probably guess what that obstacle was…….

            His mother…….yeah, dear old Mom………

            Fran gave it a whirl, gave his plan a suitably long and fair trial, did the best he knew how, did everything he could under trying circumstances–and……and…….it just didn’t work out…..

            No, things just didn’t work out as Fran envisioned.

What more really needs to be said?????

            Who knows, maybe they were too much alike, his Mom and him, maybe that was at the crux of the problem…… 

But whenever Fran would sit down to talk with her on important matters, he felt just like he was back in sixth grade again; his mother would unfailingly treat him like a little boy incapable of making any major decisions by himself.  She refused to relinquish any real control over the farming operation to him.  Rather, she had to keep her nose and fingers stuck in every little niche of their farming enterprise from A to Z.  His mom just wouldn’t let go of ANYTHING farm-related—plus some things that definitely weren’t!

Take the car, for instance…..

They both knew they needed a new vehicle to drive–that fact the pair could easily agree upon–yet Fran didn’t have any car he could call his own.  Not to mention he was fully immersed in a socially active period of his life and therefore needed transportation far worse than his mother did at her advanced age.  So when the two of them went and picked out a really nice “used” car–a snazzy, two-toned Pontiac sedan showcasing a jet-black roof–their joint understanding was that it was supposed to be Fran’s vehicle.

HIS car, mind you, not their car!

Yet because Fran was still living at home at the time and accordingly parked his new automobile in their communal driveway, his mother felt absolutely no compunction about going outside, jumping into the vehicle, and driving off whenever she felt the urge–and without ever asking for permission from Fran either.

In HIS car, remember!!!

Yeah, I know, I know……alleged ownership of the new vehicle was in theory only and resided  somewhere far off in the province of Fran’s wishful thinking, I guess……

But dear old Mom’s frequent and cavalier “borrowing” of my older brother’s car was an apt microcosm for her domineering attitude insofar as the management of everything else on the farm as well.

Yet despite his extreme frustration and sometimes outright anger, Fran could kind of understand where his matriarch was coming from.  After all, she had started from practically nothing and subsequently worked her ass off her entire adult life just to purchase that treasured modern farm north of Spring Valley with her late husband Louis.  And through all the blood, sweat, and tears members of the Blahnik family–including she–had poured forth over the previous ten years, they had collectively managed to put Mary Snyder Blahnik in a relatively stable financial position for the first time ever.

But the legendary Silker farm—its house held the distinction of being one of the oldest surviving dwellings in Fillmore County–wasn’t hers quite yet; there was still major debt owed on its original mortgage.  The last thing in the world widow Mary Blahnik wanted was for some cocksure, inexperienced novice to come shouldering into the picture at this late stage of the game and mismanage her cherished piece of land, thus jeopardizing her enormous lifelong financial stake in it.  To Fran, it seemed as though his mother was unnaturally paranoid about losing “her” farm, but when he stepped back and thought about the situation for a second–he could grudgingly appreciate her concern.

Okay??? 

There, the guy came right out and expressed sympathy and empathy for his life-giver; are you satisfied now???

Yet that rampant paranoia of his mother’s certainly didn’t make Fran’s job any easier!!!

He was a grown man, he was soon to be married, he wished to immediately start a family of his own, he had fought for his country overseas with bravery and valor and garnered a shitload of gaudy medallions to show for it in concert with a tranche of metal shrapnel which remained in his hip and would be his constant companion for life, he had gone to college and learned all he ever needed to know about farming plus more…….he was ready to run the damned Blahnik farm all by himself RIGHT NOW, for Christ’s sake!!! 

Fran sure as hell didn’t need or appreciate having some other person around every waking second snooping over his shoulder and second-guessing his every move.  That had surely NOT been a part of the dream he had long envisaged as a boy.

So–after days, months, and eventually years of enduring perpetual torment and demeaning maternal bullshit—the emotional weariness which had been accruing over that time period finally reached a breaking point.  Fran didn’t want to permanently wreck the collegial personal relationship he continued to enjoy with his mother, but he could certainly envision that invariably happening–And quite soon too!!–if he continued trying to wrangle a business relationship with her that obviously hadn’t been working out and doubtless ever would.

Actually, as the days of frustration accumulated over time and then piled slavishly upon one another and as his wedding day rapidly approached and then came and passed, the agonizing decision to quit farming hadn’t proven that tortuous after all.  In fact, you might say the unique set of vexing circumstances Francis Edward Blahnik faced in the mid-1970s ended up making the decision for him.

Ergo, in the late fall of 1977—on November 10^th, a gorgeous, sun-drenched Saturday that culminated with a megatherian dairy cow dispersal sale on “his” farm north of Spring Valley—Fran Blahnik walked away from his lifelong dream.  He felt immense relief at the conclusion of that momentous day……but also a gnawing, remorseful regret.  After all, dairy farming had perpetually been his life’s dream; Fran had no “Plan B” in mind because he never thought he would need one, but now that idyllic dream of his was officially over.

As the last bellowing cow was herded onto a waiting livestock trailer and its new owner drove away with his lucre, Fran stared morosely into the freshly vacant barnyard, suddenly facing the grim realization that his boyhood yearning was now irretrievably shattered.  He recognized with stabbing despair the fact he would almost certainly never return to his first love of farming on a fulltime basis, and this staggering epiphany smacked him hard in the face and sucked all the air from his newly unemployed lungs.

Fran continued writing.  As he did so, tears started forming in the corners of his eyes before creeping tentatively downward onto his cheeks.   Fran swabbed at them semi-successfully with the heel of his left hand.  He sat his pen down for an instant to think about the previous few weeks.  The time machine unceremoniously interrupted Fran’s reverie at that point, transporting him back in time several decades earlier……….

 

……….they didn’t trust him on point.  No, not a fuckin’ brand-new greenhorn, just new to the country!!  It was nothin’ personal against him, though, mind you, nothing to suggest the quiet kid was an obnoxious asshole or a prick for the ages or a fount of dissension…….. 

Just too goddamned gung-ho and reckless, this Fran Blahnik from some hick town in……….Iowa, was it?????…..no no, the newbie was from Minnesota actually; hell, the two states border on each other and grow a lot of corn so they may as well be one and the same, right?  Anyway, this Fran Blahnik kid was like all the other “fresh meat” who came on board.  Why, the damned naïve fool could lead you straight into a fuckin’ enemy ambush without ever realizing it or even suspecting a thing!!  New pieces of shit like that were more dangerous than the fuckin’ Cong, at least until they got their feet “good and wet” and got shot at a few times and got the living shit scared out of ‘em to make them suitably cautious and think twice before they went charging into a jungle clearing like some modern day version of John Wayne! 

But the rookie sure didn’t deserve to be way in the back of the formation either.  The young buttfucker hadn’t paid any dues yet, hadn’t done anything to earn that distinct honor.  Why should he get a cushy position in the relative safety at the rear of the platoon while longer-tenured soldiers risked their necks up front dodging bullets and absorbing Cong shrapnel???

Correct answer:  He shouldn’t!!!!!!!!!! 

NO FUCKIN’ WAY, JOSE!!!

Nah, let’s just stick the jittery son-of-a-bitch second to the guy on point in our classic “V” field formation.  That way the careless rookie won’t go mindlessly barging onto any landmines and fucking everything up for the rest of our platoon, yet he’ll be right in the thick of the action earning his keep if anything nasty does flare up. 

And hence that’s where nineteen-year-old Francis Blahnik found himself on that stultifying afternoon in the steaming Mekong River delta of South Vietnam in September of 1968—tucked safely into the second position of the sweeping “V” platoon formation behind an experienced hand on point.  It was Fran’s first mission into the field, and he was scared more shitless than Gramps had been heading into the clinic for a colonoscopy following a night encamped atop his toilet.  Fran had arrived “in country” just two weeks prior and had spent all of his time since then safely ensconced behind the base camp’s concertina wire perimeter performing tedious labor.

But not now..…..

Now the time had finally come for him to “earn his stripes” in the field.  Now the time had arrived for him to display his mettle and to find out whether he possessed the true makings of a bona fide soldier inside his stout frame. Fran shook his head nervously and stared balefully at the foreboding, sweltering jungle surrounding base camp; it was as though that amorphous mass of trees was smiling back at him with a sinister grin, inviting him to come take a leisurely stroll under its thick, lush canopy and indulge in whatever pleasures it might hold in store.  Fran eventually sighed and yanked his eyes away from the tranquil treeline.  He couldn’t pinpoint precisely why, but he had an uneasy, nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach that fateful Oriental morning. 

But if it was any consolation—and, truth be told, it definitely was a huge consolation to a combat neophyte–at least the soldier in front of Fran that day knew what he was doing.  The guy was a grizzled veteran, had been “in country” for a long time and knew all the ropes by heart; it wouldn’t be long before the cool-as-a-cucumber dude’d be going back home to America “victorious”, if simply being alive while not missing any of your limbs could or should ever be categorized as “victorious”.

Yeah, the combat veteran on point that day would soon be catching a plane homebound for the United States, and new-to-Vietnam Fran Blahnik already envied the hell out of him and feverishly wished he could trade places with the man.

Life is unfair…..that lucky goddamned bastard!!!

Or so Fran believed, until halfway into their mission–way out beyond the security of base camp—Fran watched in horror and disbelief as the guy destined to go home shortly literally disappeared before his eyes; a massive landmine erupted immediately in front of Fran, obliterating the experienced sergeant on point while sending a stream of searing-hot metallic fragments straight into the Minnesota newbie’s left side.  Fran collapsed in a bloody heap on the jungle floor, the sounds of screaming men and chaotic hollering volleying over his head like so much enemy gunfire.  The pain in Fran’s side was excruciating and unlike anything he had ever felt before in his nineteen years on Earth, yet that scorching fire in his abdomen didn’t even cross his mind.

You see, Fran Blahnik was hopelessly paralyzed with fear……. 

As he lay bleeding on the jungle floor, writhing about not unlike a felled, mortally-wounded whitetail buck and too scared to even cry out for help, the thought raced back and forth through Fran’s mind:  What the hell am I doing lying here half-dead in a goddamned shithole the politicians back home in Washington, D.C.. call a “country”……..halfway around the world from everything I love and hold dear? 

Just a month earlier he had been back home on the dairy farm on which he grew up in extreme southeastern Minnesota, celebrating his nineteenth birthday with his family and relatives, lounging under a big box elder tree in the front yard while clutching a cold bottle of Stite’s beer on a comfortably familiar northern latitude afternoon.  Fran was scheduled to ship out of country immediately following that idyllic furlough, and it was his last opportunity to luxuriate in life’s better things before the “clock struck midnight”. 

And now……?

Now he lay in a strange, tropical jungle with gargantuan, ever-hungry, twenty-five-foot Burmese pythons slithering around on the same forest floor where he lay suffering, while fuckin’ enormous, fiendishly savage Indochinese tigers prowled unrestrained and unseen within the dense foliage surrounding him.  A thick canopy of exotic trees blocked out whatever sunlight was feebly attempting to peek through such an unwieldy mass of vegetation.  Fran was bleeding profusely from his left side as he waited impatiently for help to arrive………all the while praying frantically and with a newfound zeal akin to Jesus during his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness spent rebuffing Satan.

Fran glanced out the window of his old car.  The late September sun was shining down brightly on a tan, sparkling landscape; the air outside was crisp and aromatic and smelled distinctly of fall.  He continued scribbling away on his notepad.  Fran then closed his eyes briefly, and the time machine quickly ambushed him and whooshed him away to a new destination……… 

 

….…..ya know, the more he thought about it…….Joe did make an awful lot of sense this time!

The poor shit had been drafted into the United States Army and would be officially inducted in January—the year we’re talking about now is A.D. 1968–and he was damned near certain to wind up in that hellacious shithole otherwise known as South Vietnam.  A war was raging non-stop there at the time and nearly everyone who was drafted into the military was being fed into that horrific, never-ending meat grinder; the odds of coming home from the ‘Nam in a body bag via the Philippines were about as good as those of scoring a terrific fuck this upcoming weekend–not overly strong, yet imminently possible.

And now Joe, his next oldest brother, was grouchily informing Fran that he had indirectly drawn this “short straw” of misfortune; the luckless bastard had been conscripted into military service and consequently his civilian life was in critical condition and teetering tenuously on life support until further notice.

Fran thought about his own situation, but not for long.

In his mind it was clearly a “no-brainer” decision.  Joe was absolutely right; he—Joe–would go into the Army first, be quickly trained, and then get shipped off to Vietnam to suffer whatever outcome fate held in store for him there.  If Fran enlisted after Joe was drafted—and with a “Mercy Rule” now strictly in place within the various branches of the U.S. military, a regulation which forbade no more than one sibling in any nuclear family from being deployed to a site of high-risk combat–he would more than likely wind up in some tropical paradise–Hawaii and Guam sprang immediately to Fran’s mind, yet even Germany wouldn’t be so bad……sucking on pina coladas or a zesty local lager and getting paid decent money to just kill time and goof around and play around at soldiering while fucking the eyes out of the exotic native women come the weekends.

Why sit around and wait for Joe’s two year military obligation to expire, have the goddamned war in Vietnam still be steaming along strong and unabated—and then be drafted himself and almost certainly be deployed to that miserable southeastern Asia civil war…….with absolutely no personal say in the matter at that delayed juncture?

Fran shook his head and smiled.  Joe was totally right for a change; it all made perfect sense to him now.  He would heed the officious asshole’s advice for once.

Only things didn’t quite work out that way, as is so often the case…..

No, not by a fuckin’ long shot, believe me!!!

Joe did in fact enter the U.S. Army first as planned, his innate abilities were duly assessed, and the military “powers-that-be” decided they could best be utilized as a communications specialist.  Fran subsequently enlisted in the army per the two brothers’ informal agreement–after Joe, but not by a substantial number of days–and was assigned to training in mortars, the raw equivalent of infantry duty.  Fran’s training regimen was markedly shorter than Joe’s; Fran would therefore finish his training program first…….and ergo be sent to Vietnam first as his just reward.

Upon discovering this highly disturbing fact, Joe was every bit the gallant, protective older brother one would expect and hope for in a close-knit Catholic family.  He immediately sprinted to the administrative headquarters where his commanding officer was located and filed a written request asking that he be transferred to Vietnam upon completion of his technical schooling.  Begged for this assignment, in fact, as the dumbfounded C.O. leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and read the just-filed request in amazement while Joe earnestly pled his case in front of the guy.

The expression on the lieutenant’s face at that moment was priceless:  Is this dumb bastard completely out of his mind?!  Is he a fucking moron??  Who in God’s name wants to go to Vietnam??  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear and can empathize with his heartfelt, Hallmark card-worthy story about his sheltered younger brother who he somberly promised to shield from harm’s way, but how many families are THAT close and really care THAT much about each other when their own life is at stake?????  None that I can think of…….

The C.O. lit another cigarette and stared blankly at this husky, Elvisly-handsome draftee who continued to speak shrilly and gesture animatedly in front of him.  The taciturn military veteran’s facial expression remained emotionless throughout Joe’s spiel, yet his eyes betrayed the plain truth:  I think we better keep a real close eye on this strange guy just in case he turns out to be a psycho who can’t be trusted with a gun in his hands…….

Hence Joe’s frantic beseeching ultimately fell upon deaf ears as the ensuing official military explanation was repeatedly quoted back to the frustrated, guilt-stricken older brother:

Spec. 1 Francis E. Blahnik will be done with his skill modules first, infantry personnel are desperately needed in Vietnam to help placate the insatiable appetite of the war beast—the American military effort was already deeply advanced into its climactic downward losing trajectory by this mid-1968 juncture—and therefore Fran will be deployed to Vietnam just as soon as he is done with his formal training.  There was nothing—absolutely NOTHING—that Joe Blahnik or any mortal being could possibly have done at that point in time to change this etched-in-stone army decree.

But for the eighteen-year-old Fran, the emotional shock of this revelation was earth-shaking and traumatizing.  He had enlisted into the United States Army primarily on the advice of his trusted elder brother in order to safely discharge any potential military obligation while performing “easy” duty on the soil of some benign foreign location……and now THIS……..to be unexpectedly targeted for shipment off to a diabolical torture chamber otherwise known as the Vietnam War……

Fran would ultimately go to Vietnam, of course–in August of 1968—because like so many other young men his age, he had no say in the matter.  He left his pastoral home as a fresh-faced, idealistic lad……and would return home almost a year later a man matured greatly beyond his years. An astonishing metamorphosis took place during Fran’s relatively brief absence.  The battle-hardened and battle-scarred Fran Blahnik who returned from the landmine-infested rice paddies of South Vietnam bore scant resemblance to the innocent, laid-back farm boy who had reluctantly departed backwoods Fillmore County in southeastern Minnesota just eleven months earlier.

A Hijacked Destiny…..

 By Frederick J. Blahnik

Author’s note:  The seminal events depicted within this upcoming chapter, in concert with much of the supporting documentation, are all true and based exclusively upon actual historical happenings.  However, many of the details, imagined thoughts, and scene-enhancing descriptions also found herein are not predicated solely on fact and were largely created and contrived by the author to support the manuscript or to add flesh to an otherwise flimsy literary skeleton.  That said, the stories are presented in as accurate a manner as the author could possibly recollect, envision, imagine, or at some point in his life was told by reliable sources–oftentimes a combination of all four scenarios hybridized together as one.

The other chapters of this book are all based strictly upon historical fact, keen observation, and the author’s unbiased memories.

 

Part 1—-Into the Time Machine…..

 

As Fran sat alone in his car—occasionally jotting down thoughts on a solitary piece of paper—the ubiquitous time machine wrested away control of his psyche and spirited him back to a much earlier time and a much earlier place..…

 

………the rest of his Blahnik family was gathered up in the house—all fourteen of them, when you included Mom and Dad—waiting impatiently for him.  But hell, he was just a kid himself—barely a freshman in high school—and yet the whole group waited anxiously until he was ready.  It was Christmas Eve, 1963.  Fran was down in the barn milking the herd of Holstein dairy cows by himself.

No one else in the family bothered to offer help, nor should they either.  Milking cows was his sole responsibility; he understood and accepted the reality of the situation, despite the fact he wasn’t large or physically imposing and had just turned fourteen years of age the previous August.

Thus he hurried along—all alone in the cavernous barn—mightily willing the Holstein-Friesian animals to release their milk quicker so as not to make his family wait any longer than necessary.  While the remainder of his brothers and sisters sat up in the house telling jokes, drinking beer, and sharing holiday fellowship–Just enjoying Christmas Eve, for God’s sake; what else would you expect them to be doing on a festive holiday evening?–Fran plugged away tirelessly down in the barn.  After all, he didn’t wanna keep the rest of his gigantic family waiting longer than they had to.  That would have been unbearably rude and inconsiderate of him…….

Lazy……???

LAZY?!?!?! 

Are you fuckin’ kidding me???

Are you fuckin’ serious??? 

Fran clenched his teeth as his face contorted in fury.

Hell, no, his siblings were NOT lazy!!!!! 

He was growing sick and goddamned tired of people intimating that.  They–his brothers and sisters and he–were all in the same boat together, for Christ’s sake!

Why was that so fuckin’ difficult for everyone to understand?!?! 

His Blahnik siblings were all hard workers and ambitious too, just like him; there wasn’t a slacker amongst the whole group.  But they had their own work assignments, their own chores, their own designated responsibilities to attend to…….and he had milking the herd of cows as his.  Simple as that.  No rocket science or profundities involved in this thinking process.  Milking a herd of cows all by himself was a helluva big responsibility for a gawky adolescent boy–no argument there, okay?–yet Fran willingly accepted the burden and knew it was a cross he must bear in deference to the “big picture” his dirt-poor family faced.

Fran involuntarily grimaced as he contemplated the past, the present……and especially the future.  Hell, obviously every member of his Blahnik clan would forever rue the day their dad had succumbed to the ravages of spinal-bulbar polio back in the fall of 1950 and was thereafter physically incapacitated, but there wasn’t a goddamned thing you could do to alter that fact now!  

No, when all was said and done and after all the armchair apologists in their hometown of Spring Valley had finished loudly voicing their concerns, expressed dismay regarding the “overworked” Blahnik children, directed undisguised contempt toward parents who would allow and enable such a deplorable situation, and therein cleared their collective consciences of some misplaced form of guilt…..there remained a farm to operate, regular bills to be paid, a large hungry brood to support, and a crippled father who was unable to help out with any physical labor other than occasionally operating an antiquated F-20 tractor during the non-winter months.

Therefore, those Blahnik family members who remained healthy had to dig down deep best they could, pick up the extra slack, and make do with the circumstances they faced.  Nothing too tricky or nuanced about this “predicament”, really, that hard work and a little willpower laced with a large helping of stubbornness couldn’t solve.

And so that’s what they—the elephantine family of Louis and Mary Blahnik—had been doing the past thirteen years, and that’s what they would continue to do into the foreseeable future too.  Work your ass off until your fingers bled profusely and you were too tired to stand upright anymore……and then get up absurdly early the next morning and go outside to do more of the same.  It sure as hell wasn’t an easy, cushy life for a teen-aged boy, yet it was the only life youthful Fran Blahnik could ever remember.

Fran stared down the wide middle gutter of the nineteenth century barn–brimming with stinky cowshit and overflowing with yellowish piss that reeked so strongly of ammonia it temporarily arrested a person’s breathing apparatus and made one’s eyes water unchecked—a shallow, sunken trench flanked on both sides by long rows of grimy black-and-white dairy cows flicking their piss-drenched tails back and forth.  No, he better hurry along now, finish up quick, and hustle up to the house so the business of opening presents could commence soon.

Now that would be awfully fun, Fran surmised…….

The young man grinned at the thought of what surprising gifts he might expect to receive from his siblings, and then what presents “Santa Claus” might think to leave him the next morning under the Blahnik yuletide tree tucked into one corner of their disgustedly unkempt living room (“Mom” Blahnik suffered from Compulsive Hoarding Disorder, but that’s a story for another day).  A frown suddenly darted across Fran’s acne-pocked face as he continued to follow the path of logic.

Yes, Santa would leave him some nice presents overnight, no doubt, but those presents would have to wait a few hours to be opened……

Because early the next morning—while his parents and each of his siblings could at least entertain the option of sleeping in luxuriously late to celebrate Christmas morning and the birth of our most holy and blessed Jesus Christ–That surely didn’t mean they would, of course–just that they could if they truly wanted to!…….he would have to trudge back down to this stinky fuckin’ barn again, where those damned, eternally bellowing Holsteins would be waiting for yet another hour-plus-long milking.

Just as he would the morning after that……and the next……and then the next one after that also…… 

In only a week’s time a new year would arrive to greet him–1964–yet just what would he actually be celebrating?

Surely no break from the tedious, physical, twice-a-day chore of milking cows, nor any respite from the sundry other tasks that forever awaited completion on their primitive Blahnik dairy farm in order for those all-important milk checks to continue rolling in from the nearby Racine Creamery.

And then with startling abruptness, Fran’s face steeled and he determinedly set his square jaw just like one of those stony countenances you see on postcards of Mount Rushmore.

Damned, he was starting to feel sorry for himself again!!!

Poor little Franny Blahnik!!!  The poor little overworked baby!!!  A sniveling little asshole being singled out for unjust punishment!!!

Wah!  Waahhh!!  WAAAHHHH!!! 

The whole world was ganged up against him and only him, and he just couldn’t seem to catch one single fuckin’ break in life, could he?!?! 

The sinewy youngster down in the primeval barn all by himself well after dark felt humiliated that he had caved in to self-pity, and next he instinctively glanced around the dingy, cobweb-lined building to see if anyone was watching him.

No, no, you paranoid fool, of course there isn’t anybody down here with you at this hour.….and on Christmas Eve, too, of all nights!! 

Fran shook his head dejectedly.

Don’t be such a goddamned crybaby, Fran!!! he berated himself.  Just do the goddamned work that’s expected of you without any more complaining!!!  Grow up already, Kid!!!!  ACT LIKE A MAN, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!!  YES, THAT’S RIGHT, A MAN……NOT LIKE SOME FUCKIN’ BIG, OVERSIZED BABY WHO CRIES AND WHINES OVER EVERYTHING AND PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE A PACIFIER JAMMED INTO HIS MOUTH JUST TO SHUT HIM UP!!!!!!!

Fran momentarily stooped down beneath a skittish cow to rinse her four teats prior to suspending a milking machine from her back–and promptly got swatted in the face with a piss-soaked tail by the cow standing immediately behind him.

The young man thereupon gushered an inhuman, blood-curdling curse and instantly wheeled around as his face donned a fearsome, homicidal expression.  He instantly seized the tail of the offending bovine and doubled it over into an absurd arc until he could feel the small bones within it on the verge of surrendering to the maniacal pressure he brought to bear.  Then reason thankfully found our youthful protagonist in the very nick of time, and Fran released the tortured extremity mere millimeters shy of a sickening, stomach-turning CRUUUUUNCHHHH.

Fran pursuantly breathed a huge sigh of relief, gulped down a healthy dose of anger-cleansing air, and somewhat embarrassingly turned his attention back to the docile brute standing before him.

That cartoonishly hulking cow towered over a kneeling Fran by two feet at least as it nervously shifted its weight back and forth from rear hoof to rear hoof—back and forth, back and forth, to and fro, to and fro, little different than an autistic child rocking away nonsensically in front of a droning television–still caught up in the noisy tumult from moments before, staring back with terror-stricken eyes at this puny, two-legged creature yanking away at its four teats while occasionally feigning a kick with its powerful, twelve-hundred-pound-supporting hind legs.

Fran Blahnik was not yet fifteen years old as he cowered visibly beneath the petrified beast……

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???

If……….

 

If……….

I had ten million dollars……….

I would never have to work another day in my life.

I would be so happy.

Life would be so easy.

 

If………

I had ten million dollars and could live to be one hundred years old……….

I would be guaranteed an almost infinite number of days to do as I please.

I would be so happy.

Life would be so easy and so long.

 

If……….

I had ten million dollars and could live to be one hundred years old and could travel the world over……….

I could experience firsthand everything our wonderful planet has to offer.

I would be so happy.

Life would be so easy and so long and so enriching.

 

If……….

I had ten million dollars and could live to be one hundred years old and could travel the world over and could always be healthy and forever avoid illness……….

I would never have to endure pain and misery again.

I would be so happy.

Life would be so easy and so long and so enriching and so pain-free.

 

If………

I had ten million dollars and could live to be one hundred years old and could travel the world over and could always be healthy and forever avoid illness and never again have to face the trauma of a loved one’s departure……….

I would be so relieved to be shielded from the grief and loneliness of love abruptly ripped away.

I would be so happy.

Life would be so easy and so long and so enriching and so pain-free and so compassionate.

 

If……….if……….if……….if…………………..

I would ever stop obsessing over what I don’t have and focus on what I do have instead……….

I would realize life itself is the ultimate endowment and should be cherished as such.

I would realize I have already been gifted with multiple blessings, none of which should be taken for granted.

I would be so very happy.

Life would be so easy and so long and so enriching and so pain-free and so compassionate and………and….…..and…………….so truly appreciated……………

 

By Frederick J. Blahnik

Forward

 

I enjoy writing—A LOT!— but this is one story I never intended to write.  In fact, I would give almost anything in the world for it to have had a different ending.

But it didn’t…….

Akin to a runaway train, the thing had a mind all its own and no amount of continuously pumping the brakes could ever derail it or stop it from running amok.

Life happened as it is wont to do, and my brother Fran chose to get up one ordinary morning in the autumn of 1995 and go out and voluntarily die an early and untimely death.  I was decidedly close to my older brother and happened to have a unique perspective as his life–at first very slowly, but then with ever-increasing rapidity and wantonness–lost its true compass setting and tumbled recklessly out of control.  I witnessed the early subtle warning signs that key facets of Fran’s life were creeping beyond normal, and of course I stood helplessly by later on and watched aghast as glaring warning signals indicating something was terribly amiss in my brother’s well-being became more and more common until becoming ubiquitous.

Ultimately Fran’s life moved like a Shakespearean tragedy to its ill-fated, violent conclusion, and it became a story that mushroomed in size over time and begged to be told.  I happened to have a close-up view to the hellish internal battle that consumed and tormented Fran for the better part of four years, and therefore I will be today’s storyteller.  But in the spirit of unvanquished mental health, let’s be one hundred percent honest here:  It certainly gives me no sense of pleasure or undue self-importance to crown myself with this unwanted role of narrator.

Yet I must also admit the task does give me an overriding sense of closure, inasmuch as the last three years of Fran’s life were like a hideous open wound–plainly visible to anyone on the outside who might be peering in, yet not clearly understood or appreciated by anyone.  I loved Fran very much and everlastingly will.  The two of us were exceptionally close after I achieved adulthood, and we lived only half a mile apart and spent considerable time together even after he later married, moved away, and started a family of his own.

The 1970s were a carefree, nostalgic decade that jointly filled our memory banks to overflowing, and the ‘80s which immediately followed were yet another half-score where Fran and I celebrated life to the fullest, created extravagant memories on an ongoing, virtually daily basis, and looked with unbridled optimism toward a future we shamefully took for granted and just knew would always be bright, promising, fun-filled…….and of course stretching off in the general direction of that distant horizon which heralded old age and, with it—a relaxing and inherently satisfying retirement for both of us, one surrounded by family members and loved ones and adorned with every other element indigenous to Shangri-La.

Moreover, the hours and days which loomed before us back then increasingly became our subservient slaves–meekly appearing on a regular basis from out of the blue, constantly available to us to be used and budgeted at our personal discretion, obedient indentured servants that could be ordered around on a whim…….as though life itself, with its myriad temptations and entrapments, was our own private fiefdom and we–and WE alone–wielded climactic control over each and every aspect of our daily sorties.

If only that were true, although certainly my brother and I weren’t the only two mortals on Earth guilty of thinking in such an arrogant and imperious manner….. 

Fran was Best Man at my raucous Silver Bay, Minnesota wedding to the comely Carla Warm in the summer of 1987, and I proudly agreed to be the godfather for his youngest son Jessie when said infant was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at hometown Spring Valley, Minnesota in a winsome ceremony several years later.  Fran was busy raising a family of three boys by this point, but we still spent a lot of time together and shared abundant laughs and more than a few beers during those unforgettable halcyon days of the late 1980s, now long since passed and seemingly part of a distinctly different lifetime for me.

But as the ‘90s dawned and everyone started to inch cautiously forward into that nascent decade, circumstances started to change…..and a troubled stranger began to mysteriously yet inexorably sprout from the older family member I knew so well and dearly loved.  At first the changes were barely perceptible and not overly concerning, but as time wore on a frightening, unrecognizable persona bullied its way to the forefront of my brother’s body and gradually stole control of that body away from the person I grew up knowing and loving until—one day–this new guy residing within Fran’s skin was no longer Fran Blahnik at all, but rather an unrecognizable, unwelcome imposter masquerading as the older brother who also happened to be my best friend in an earlier, happier era.