…..while it is a well-known fact everyone’s eyes are mysterious and the true windows into one’s consciousness, hers very easily exceeded that basic standard.  Peering into their depths was exactly as one would imagine it would be like staring into the Stygian abyss of a crevasse bisecting an Arctic ice-field, knowing that there has to be an end to it somewhere…..but not having any clue whatsoever where that end might lie.  Such was the nature of her bedazzling, inscrutable eyes, and they immediately took me hostage and drove me absolutely crazy with desire.  Those dark brown windows which served as portals into her inner consciousness were the most enigmatic, unrevealing things I have witnessed in forty-plus years of living, and I can easily surmise they are what made her the most intriguing person I have ever known as well—by a country mile!  Doubtless they were the chief reason I fell hopelessly in love with the beguiling tramp, a love that went forever ignored and unrequited despite my humiliatingly persistent entreaties. Do understand though, Reader, that for as mind-bogglingly deep those enchanting eyes of hers were, the wench’s personality and intellect were commensurately shallow…..

And now I sit trapped—a prisoner of both distance and time—a thousand miles and three and a half days away from my best friend of nearly fifteen years, who lies slowly dying on a grassy patch of land back in Minnesota as the outside temperature prepares to plummet to winter-like levels and the days shorten by leaps and bounds, ostensibly still on “vacation” even as I was assailed by horrific news and the proverbial walls came crashing down around me the evening last.  And what viable options remain open to me now?  Really, what options of helpful consequence?  None that matter, I tell you.  None that would make any sense to a person who is thinking rationally, which I currently am not.  All I can think of now is getting back to Minnesota as expeditiously as possible to nurse and attend to my dying friend, but expense and logistics render that option grotesquely impractical and therefore not worth pursuing.  And so I sit here in a seedy motel room in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana, rhythmically clenching my hands into balled fists and gnashing my teeth for want of anything better to do, wishing like a lovelorn sailor that I could immediately be back home in Minnesota but grudgingly resigned to the fact no amount of such wishing will alter this dreadful fuckin’ predicament that currently holds me hostage, at least until my wife’s and my regular airline tickets become valid in three plus days. And at that point in time…………..….well, by that point in time my quest to see and console my old comrade one last time will undoubtedly be too late…..

…..no one makes an indelible mark on humanity.  We only think we do.  Humanity is bigger than any single person.  Our lives—even those of mankind’s greatest recognized icons—are like sand castles on the beach, standing proudly for a little while before the next incoming tide washes them away.  But remember, the sand comprising a sand castle is not destroyed, it is simply redistributed elsewhere, and thankfully so are we.  No one ever truly disappears; their essence is merely reconfigured in a different form.  Trust me, we’ll always be around somewhere in the Universe.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…..no truer words were ever spoken.  Greatness is overstated, overrated, overly deified.  People are not connaturally great; it is the world around us that is.  People come and people go, but the world around us forever remains the same.  No one makes a permanent mark on the world, because humanity and permanence are diametrically opposite concepts.  The best anyone can hope to do is to try to positively influence the direction humanity is headed during that ludicrously brief sojourn of time one is granted an audition on Earth’s surface.  Any pretensions bigger than that—greatness, lasting marks, legacies, etc.—are nothing more than that…..hubristic pretensions.  The root word for pretensions is of course pretend, and those who ascribe anything more to mankind than temporariness and cosmic insignificance are just horribly naive pretenders lost in a world of make-believe…..

…..a shard of information adventitiously came my way last evening, and although it definitely wasn’t information I welcomed or could readily embrace, I nonetheless had to acknowledge its veracity and take steps to appropriately address it.  The receipt of information oftentimes works in this fashion, that is, it is frequently malodorous and undesirable in nature, but our sentiments regarding said information does not alter the underlying scaffolding and superstructure on which reality is constructed one iota, and we henceforth have to accept any “new” data at face value and do our utmost to be flexible and hastily rearrange our lives to accommodate constantly changing circumstances.  Absolute rigidity in the guise of “principle” is unacceptable; it amounts to a death sentence in the arena of sound judgment…..

…..I looked backwards as I stood at the threshold of the daycare lady’s front door and my three-month-old daughter Sam was staring back at me with large, sorrowful eyes, equally alarmed and incredulous that I would be leaving her alone in a strange place with a friendly, yet altogether unfamiliar, lady.  And right then she began crying—just bawling her lungs out hysterically at an unearthly volume.  I felt awful…..traumatized…..distraught…..abusive.  Truth is, I couldn’t have felt worse than I did at that exact moment and still been drawing breaths and classifying myself as a feeling homo sapiens.  My heart was being ruthlessly ripped out of my chest and stomped on savagely by the purveyors of fate, and they were evidently having loads of fun doing so. This was Carla’s first day back at work following a three-month maternity leave, and thus it was Sam’s first morning experiencing out-of-home daycare and I was the party responsible for getting her there safely. I blinked reflexively.  Shiiiiitttt……..this horrible nightmare can’t honestly be happening to me, can it?!?!  Is this for real?!?!  I SWEAR THAT I AM INNOCENT OF ANY WRONGDOING, AND YET THAT FACT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER ONE STINKIN’ BIT!!!!!  The day obviously wasn’t getting off to a good start, and I was feeling even more dispirited than before if that was in fact possible.  At a nerve-wracking time such as this you just recite all the predictable appropriate platitudes to yourself in an attempt to feel better:  That you have to go out to earn sufficient money in order to properly support your dependents, including Sam; that she has to be exposed to the Big Bad World by herself some day—so why not now??; that the person you are leaving her with for the upcoming day is compassionate and congenial and Sam therefore was in wonderful hands; that learning to properly socialize is critical to a child’s emotional development and at this place Sam will be surrounded by a phalanx of other young people roughly her age; that eventually she’ll be going off to official pre-school classes followed by kindergarten so she might as well get used to spending days by herself outside our cozy abode now; that…..that…..that…..that……  And yet none of those eminently logical reasons made a shred of difference as I stood there in that infernal doorway seeing my tiny, beloved daughter staring back at me uncomprehendingly like a caged animal while hearing her shrieking away hysterically at the top of her lungs.  The only thing I could think of—and which weighed on my mind right then with the mass of a blacksmith’s anvil—was that I was both the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the world as well as far and away the worst father—Take your pick, Reader!—and it was the last thought that crossed my mind as I tearfully peered backwards one last time at my woefully distraught daughter before heading off to my job at the Mayo Clinic.  Not surprisingly, the day that ensued measured thirty six hours in length and turned out to be the longest and most introspective day of my life…..

…..and another day came, and another day went…..and another day came, and another day went……and another day came, and another day went…..and another day came and another day went…..and after a while they all started to resemble one another, irrespective of the weather outside and the varied menagerie of individuals who populated these days and whatever random worldly events transpired within them, and in the grandiose scheme of things time flowed along in a slow, methodical pattern which defied the very idea that entropy could be the basic transcendent stricture governing all things on Earth.  If chaos was the final definitive answer, then why did homogeneity seem to rule with an iron hand over the present?…..

Okay, you’ve been assigning blame loudly and scornfully for the past ten minutes—That part we’re absolutely clear on now!—but next let’s move on to the more difficult aspect informing this problem we’re jointly facing:  Finding a workable solution for the damned thing!  And all of your cursing, name-calling, and demonstrative finger-pointing isn’t moving us one scintilla closer to this desired end.  Can’t you see that?!   Is that point too difficult for you to fathom?!   Are you some sort of illiterate dumbkupf?!  Ranting may feel good inside your viscera for all of thirty minutes, but when you’re done throwing your childish tantrum we still have a gargantuan problem sitting before us and all the bitching and blaming in the world ain’t gonna alter that reality or move the needle in a rightward direction one iota.  So let’s roll up our sleeves, call a temporary truce, and get to work this second rather than hollering back and forth at one another not unlike two cartoonishly-muscled, steroid-enraged contestants immediately prior to a fake professional wrestling match.  Nothing has changed, let alone improved, as a result of this non-stop bickering, but the problem that precipitated our brouhaha is a sneaky cocksucker at heart and just grew a trifle larger and more intractable while we’ve been sitting here arguing back and forth like mortal enemies instead of mutually respectful siblings!  Peace already—Okay?!?!—so we can join forces to defeat this common foe!!

Note: The following paragraphs are excerpted from the book “The Hardest Life I Could Ever Love”, a chronicle of Mary Blahnik’s life edited by Fred Blahnik

…..A week before Thanksgiving, I received a telephone call from Sister Kenny Institute with the thrilling news that Dad could return home.  I cried crocodile tears of unadulterated joy after receiving that personally historic message. 

Mrs. Race Crane drove me to Minneapolis the following day.  When I first looked at Dad, I was shocked and felt my earlier exuberance hastily evaporate; this man did not appear to be in any physical shape for returning to normal family living!!! 

But since space was at an alarming premium at Sister Kenny Institute that autumn, every patient was being discharged as early as possible to make room for the many others languishing on the institution’s long polio waiting list.  So despite my skepticism and grave misgivings, Dad rode home with Mrs. Crane and me that gloomy November day.  

Dad’s happiness to return home was heartbreakingly evident as soon as Mrs. Crane turned into our long rural driveway; he gave each of our children passionate bearhugs the minute he stepped out of the Crane car, nearly squeezing leviathan smiles from their faces in the process.  But in his weakened, de-conditioned state it was difficult for my husband to move around freely, and in fact he never left our house until late March of 1951. Before leaving Minneapolis, I had been studiously instructed by Sister Kenny staff on the rigorous physical therapy Dad would need to perform each and every day at home in order to optimize his health.

          Just a week later—on Thanksgiving Day, 1950—“Old Man Winter” blew into southeastern Minnesota with pure vengeance.  As the day slowly progressed, weather conditions which originally started out as benignly snowy rapidly deteriorated into a genuine howling blizzard, and my attention became wholly focused outdoors on some requisite, last-minute winter preparations that needed to be accomplished.  I believe we had fried chicken for our Thanksgiving feast that year, as I had succeeded in nabbing and subsequently chopping the head off one unlucky fowl.  But all I can really recollect anymore about that memorable day is the unbelievable help I received from our older children—especially precocious little Mary Agnes as she slaved away in the kitchen not unlike a crazed lunatic.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.   —Edward Teller

Dad was finally safely home with his family, it was Thanksgiving Day, our children were thrilled to have their patriarch back with them, and we….we…..we were all just extraordinarily thankful fortune had thought to smile on our penniless family for this  grand occasion.  After witnessing firsthand the depressing permanence of those carefully-ordered rows of “Iron Lungs” up at Kenny Institute with desperate people imprisoned inside them for a near eternity, things could have easily turned out infinitely worse for the dear, gentle man we called husband and father.

…..when she unexpectedly left him standing all alone on the altar like a flagpole in the center of a sprawling suburban mall, she at least was sufficiently generous to leave behind a token present in his honor as well:  A gaping hole in his soul that no amount of mortar or putty or spackling could ever hope to repair or gloss over.  He became an emotional cripple following her surprise disappearance, albeit through no fault of his own.  To wit:  How can you ever hope to function as a normal human being once your soul has been publicly ripped to shreds and subsequently left lying exposed for all the vultures of the world to peck on and fight over?  Yes, indeed, he was truly a pitiful creature in the aftermath of being jilted on the altar, and his pursuant life—or what posed for a life, that is—was pitiful and sickeningly brittle too.  About the only thing he could think of doing after she abruptly abandoned him at the front of a church packed full of eager celebrants was to begin counting down the days until his forgettable sojourn on the surface of this planet would prayerfully come to an end.  Just hurry up and wait. Accelerate the timetable, maybe, which was something that was easily within his physical capabilities?  Nah.  Nah……nah…..nah, only crazy, unhinged lunatics would do anything that extreme.  He wasn’t to that desperate juncture yet, although he filed a mental note that he couldn’t absolutely rule out this nuclear option in the future if his life continued on its downward spiral…..

Save for the future, but whenever in doubt prioritize today first and foremost in every instance, especially when it comes to the allocation of your finite resources. Translated:  Spend some or all of your money today if you REALLY want to buy something or do something or go somewhere special, because tomorrow and next week and next year are all crapshoots with no guarantee of ever reaching fruition.  They are shadowy intangibles in a world teeming with tangibles, nonpalpable wraiths luring us with impossible promises and then racing away from us at the last possible second.  You have today for sure, but anything beyond that is pure speculation.  Thus don’t hesitate to spend money on yourself at present even if you might host legitimate reservations concerning the purchase—reservations which typically spawn reflexive pangs of guilt—since it is unfailingly better to wager on a sure thing, namely the moment at hand, as opposed to pooling your earnings and casting your lot with an extreme longshot, namely the future.  Myriad accident victims and cancer victims and war victims and pandemic victims and victims of any color or stripe can and will confirm this fact; they disappeared from the pantheon of humanity with little pageantry and oftentimes nil advance warning through no fault of their own and consequently were never sufficiently fortunate to experience the fruits of their careful, meticulous planning.