We make our own beds and then we lie in them.  Distilled down to life’s bare essence, this is as elementary as it gets.  You act and then God…..life…..destiny…..fate…..kismet…..an unknown, unnamed deity…..the Universe incarnate…..whatever you want to call the all-powerful entity that governs every circumstance associated with the passage of time—or perpetual ungoverned chaos, if such is the case as it may well be—will react to what you have done.  You are powerless then.  At that juncture the ball is in another’s court and completely out of your hands.  Never forget that every person alive exercises some degree of free will over the direction their life will follow, but that “free will” only extends so far and weighs so much.  The rest belongs exclusively to Somebody or Something Else far mightier than thee.

Gramps was loudly holding court down at the small town coffee shop, regaling anyone within earshot with tattered, worn-out stories from the previous century when he was still a boy growing up on the farm.  Everyone inside the Lilliputian café was forced to sit and listen to Gramps’ rambling reminisces regardless of whether they wanted to or not.  Gramps finally reached that familiar point where he started in on his favorite story, referencing the period of time back during primordial days when he attended a miniscule, one-room country schoolhouse.  “Y’know, People, when I attended elementary school back in the early Fifties, we weren’t such panty-waists like kids are nowadays.  Why, seldom a winter morning went by when the temperature outside wasn’t at least twenty five degrees below zero Fahrenheit; then I had to struggle at least two and half miles through at least four-foot-high snowdrifts with the wind howling at least forty miles per hour out of the northwest just to get to school, and the primitive path I followed to school and then back home just so happened to be uphill both ways……”  A little girl who was sitting nearby with her parents exclaimed loudly at this last comment, and a look of profound wonderment crisscrossed her cherubic face.  “Uphill both ways…..?!?!”  The amazed lass looked both dumbfounded and skeptical at the same time, before deciding to confront the aged windbag.  “Uphill both ways…….?!?!   Uphill in both directions…..?!?!  Are you kidding me???  Old man……is that the reason why you walk so stooped over now like the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!?!”

A razor-thin line exists between genuine curiosity and unwanted snoopiness.  Don’t cross that line…..EVER!!! So what is the crucial difference separating these two, you ask?  Curiosity is asking questions to learn and further educate oneself.  Snoopiness is asking questions that do not enhance one’s being, but instead just furnishes one with prurient information about somebody else that has no bearing on one’s own life whatsoever.  Curious people ask honest questions, while snoopy people ask mendacious questions with the goal of gaining some degree of leverage over another person.  Curious people are exemplars.  Snoopy people, on the other hand, are the putrid dross found at the extreme bottom of a recently emptied stink barrel.

…..the goal, as always, is to make incremental progress.  Not a specific target, not an arbitrary benchmark, not some unreasonable expectation—those stated objectives are all unnecessary and too daunting in nature.  No, just make satisfactory progress today and if you do that you can consider the day to be an unqualified success.  Same for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.  Setting and then predictably falling short of unrealistic goals is the perfect recipe for disappointment and, more insidiously, eventually quitting a worthy crusade altogether as the result of perceived failure and the dark depression which invariably accompanies same…..

…..so I went this morning to set up an on-line account for a soil testing kit I recently purchased through Amazon, and you would not believe the security measures those feckless sons-of-bitches subjected me to.  For a benign soil testing kit, no less!  Why, you would have thought the paranoid bastards at MySoil thought they were protecting the front gates to Fort Knox or the uber-secret recipe to Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried  Chicken or Elon Musk’s personal cell phone number, so stringent were the safeguards and password-creating protocols the MySoil folks forced me to follow just to register a pedestrian soil sample from my backyard garden into their data banks.  I can see the blaring front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune right now:  SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER HACKERS STEAL VITAL INFORMATION BELONGING TO A MULTITUDE OF BACKYARD GARDENERS!!!  And the secondary headline:  The Nefarious Thieves now have Access to the pH Levels of the Soil in Many Thousands of North American Food Plots!  A bona fide national security emergency, for sure…..

…..the head shrinker asked me if I was happy, but what frame of reference exists to reliably answer a question like that?  Seriously.  None that I know of.  The issue of happiness is so visceral, so subjective, so contextual…..that one can go through an entire life without ever knowing whether you were truly happy or truly miserable or, more likely, residing at some point falling between those two extremes until many years—decades—have passed and you can then look back with a degree of objectivity.  You always have a rough idea of how you are feeling inside at any given moment in time but that idea is impossible to quantify with any semblance of accuracy.  You may as well be throwing darts in the dark at a target situated fifty yards away.  We’re talking nothing but guesstimates here.  But this train of thought gets worse, however implausible the thought of that may be:  You have NO inkling how someone else might be feeling—irrespective of how close or even intimate you may feel your relationship with that individual is—and, what’s more, you will never be privy to vital information such as that which might appreciably advance your own happiness and emotional well-being.  If you are an even-keeled person and grossly unsure of your own level of rapture, how then would someone else similarly normal be able to measure theirs any more reliably?…..

(Excerpted from the book “The Hardest Life I Could Ever Love”, a memoir chronicling the life of Mary Blahnik)

Grandpa Snyder became critically ill in the summer of 1922, and I can recall Papa was seldom, if ever, at our own house at night after that.  Following a hard, physically exhausting day during grain harvest, Papa would sit up all night with Grandpa tending to his physical needs.  Grandpa died on August 1^st, 1922, and I can vividly recollect the strange activities that took place at our farm following his demise.  I was kept very close to our house throughout all those proceedings. 

Back during that antediluvian era, an undertaker brought a casket along and performed whatever preparations were necessary for burial right at the deceased person’s home.  The wake–or reviewal, as it was referred to back then–was held in the deceased person’s home, and friends and relatives maintained a constant vigil with the lifeless body throughout the night.  People—strange faces, people I did not recognize or come close to knowing—streamed into my grandparents’ home for hours on end, and I remember Grandma Snyder walking around her yard sobbing uncontrollably early on the morning of the funeral. 

At that time I did not comprehend yet what had truly happened, and it was not until after Grandma was alone—and then gradually as days, weeks, and eventually months elapsed while Grandpa never made another appearance within their diminutive house–that I finally came to realize my Grandpa was “dead”……and that he would never, ever return to be with us again.  Comprehending the grim, desolate finality of death left a tiny girl feeling terribly fearful and shaken…… 

            Following Grandpa’s death, Grandma would sometimes visit Uncle Matt, who was a bachelor and lived near Braham, a small town located between the Twin Cities and Duluth in upstate Minnesota.  Papa would transport her to Austin with the horse and buggy, and Grandma would then ride the train north from there.  I remember one time it was bone-chilling cold outdoors when she returned to her home following one of those visits; the incident I am about to describe must have occurred right in the heart of wintertime. 

Anyway, Grandma wandered over to our house shortly thereafter and announced in no uncertain terms that she smelled a skunk odor.  Papa checked the cellar under her house–old houses always had the entrance door to the cellar on the outside back in those days—and, sure enough, spotted “Mr. Skunk” loitering down there in the relatively warm environment.  Papa left the cellar door wide open, and soon the skunk–being ravenously hungry in the frigid weather–found his way outside.  Papa scrambled to retrieve his gun from inside our house, and then in his unthinking haste shot the stinky scoundrel right in the middle of our immediate yard. 

Big mistake, Papa!!!!! Inexcusably stupid for one so intelligent!!!

Not surprisingly, Grandma’s house, our house, and the whole yard surrounding both abodes reeked with that terrible, unmistakable skunky odor for days, if not weeks, afterward! 

• It’s NEVER about the words and creeds that you outwardly profess; it’s ALWAYS about the actions that you take and the examples that you set for others, especially youngsters or naïfs who may be closely observing you and holding you up as an exemplar. Show me, don’t tell me.  Act, don’t mime.  Lead, don’t follow.  Do, don’t talk.  Words may have consequences, but they are not lasting ones; they are mere puny surrogates wobbling precariously on spindly legs.  Contrarily, the consequences stemming from actions can be significant, long-lasting, life-altering, and sometimes even permanent.  Never forget that!   Words may help shape opinions, but actions shape lives.

Gone

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Gone…..

They’re all gone now…..

Scattered to every corner of the Earth…..

Our own little Blahnik diaspora…..

Like so much dandelion fluff caught up in an early May gale…..

My daughters have flown the coop…..

But I never expected them to fly so far away.

 

Gone…..

They’re out on their own now…..

Blazing a path in uncharted waters…..

Their exodus from our home is complete…..

Like so many forest animals fleeing a fearsome conflagration…..

My daughters have taken leave of Carla and me…..

And left behind nothing but faded memories of good times gone by.

 

Gone…..

They’re testing their wings now…..

But those wings must be strong and well-feathered, inasmuch as they’ve logged thousands of miles already……

Too far to be considered a mere test flight……

I don’t expect my three girls to return to our nest anytime soon……

At least not as the needy, shrill-voiced fledglings they once were…..

When they do return—and they eventually will, of course, if only for ephemeral feedings–they will be mature and stalwart and in full bloom.

 

Gone…..

 

Yes, our three daughters have flown the coop and are gone for good.

 

• A gift only becomes a gift when it is used for the first time. Prior to that point in time, a so-called “gift” is nothing more than an official transfer of a commodity; usage is what confers value to an item.  So too with natural talent.  If or until a natural gift is utilized, it is nothing more than a latent ability lying dormant just waiting to be ignited by a catalyst—in most instances the beneficiary’s inner drive—although there is no guarantee such a thing will ever happen; too frequently it doesn’t. In truth, squandered natural abilities are more commonplace than grains of sand on a three-mile-long ocean beach.  More commonplace than the stars in the sky.  More commonplace than mosquitoes on a muggy July evening.  The fact someone is born with immense talent does not mean that talent will ever be realized.  Potential does not equal fruition.  Fire requires a match to ignite it, and minus that match oxidation and the phenomenal power harnessed therein will never occur; it will forever remain just so much potential untapped energy.  Same thing with natural  human prowess. A gift unopened is a gift wasted.