• True problems never just “go away” like a case of the sniffles. They sometimes go into remission for a while, yet they unwaveringly return to haunt you—stronger and buffer and more determined than ever.  It is therefore best to address legitimate problems in their incipient state before they have an opportunity to grow and metastasize.  Once you allow this to happen, problems that were trivial and insignificant to begin with swiftly morph into unmanageable monsters boasting insatiable appetites for mischief.

The following nonfiction literary composition is excerpted from the book “Leftovers from the Feast”; the piece was authored by Dorothy (Blahnik) Denisen and extensively edited by Fred Blahnik.

 

 

Beyond the Eerie Darkness

By Dorothy (Blahnik) Denisen

 

“Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money.”

 

—Anonymous

 

Lightning flashes outside, thunder crashes menacingly, a screeching wind beats hard against the windowpanes, and–oh, shit……the damned power just went out!!  Everyone around you suddenly descends into an uncontrolled panic because there is no electricity!

What are we going to do now?!  How can this be?!?!  I’m scared of the dark!!! EGADS……HOW LONG IS THIS NIGHTMARE GOING TO LAST?!?!?!

Now, Reader..…imagine for just a second if this desperate situation was the norm for your household all the time…….

Well, as a child I never had to worry about this scenario happening, due to the fact we had no electricity throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s in the ancient house I grew up in back by Austin, Minnesota.

Oh, sure, I know you’re probably snickering among yourselves and whispering right now that that was an awfully long time ago and, well, let’s face the brutal facts here, Dorothy, you’re a grandma many times over and not a fresh-faced ingénue anymore–but it isn’t like our family went out foraging for food from the Ice Age landscape while competing against hostile bands of nomadic Neanderthals, or that we older Blahnik kids were forced to evade hungry saber-toothed cats when we were gathered back behind the communal cave inventing the wheel and, no, Fred Flintstone actually wasn’t one of my close playmates during recess from the primitive school where we were some of the first fortunate few to use abacuses for learning arithmetic.  Fire had already been discovered for a handful of years before I was born, and–just to set the record straight once and for all–I wasn’t one of those intrepid souls who migrated across the frozen Bering Strait to first colonize a virgin North America.

You see, in all honesty, almost all of our close neighbors and nearly everyone else in southeastern Minnesota already possessed the omnipotent “luxury” of electricity when I was a girl.  But secondary to my dad’s monumental bout with polio in late 1950 and the sobering fact our megatherian Blahnik family was nearly destitute following that cataclysm and could scarcely afford the proverbial “pot to piss in”, no electric wires were ever strung to our isolated farm while we lived there.

We had no streetlights, yardlights, or electronic lights back in those antediluvian days, so when the sun went down in the evening the moon and stars were all we had available to combat the overbearing darkness.  My family did own a kerosene lantern which we hung in the barn to provide light for doing our livestock chores and for milking the cows.  We also possessed an array of battery-powered flashlights to help us do our farm-related tasks and to find our way around outdoors in the nocturnal world.

Inside our preposterously crowded house, a lone Aladdin lamp sat on the kitchen table to provide lighting for our Blahnik family in the evenings.  Obviously we went to bed much earlier than kids do nowadays, because there were not a lot of things to do in the weak light issued by just one solitary Aladdin lamp.  Sometimes we played games of cards; we also listened to a wealth of ballgames and a surfeit of old-time music on our beloved battery-operated radio.

With a quarter mile driveway extending off the gravel road we Blahniks lived on and an imposing grove of trees literally surrounding its patchwork of buildings, our farm site was exceptionally remote and pitch black at night.  Owing to this fact, prowlers were often attracted to our yard.  I do not know if it was purely curiosity or whether they had some different, more sinister motive in mind, but the scoundrels never seemed to vandalize anything and nothing obvious was ever discovered missing from our rural property.  In fact, it seems strange intruders would choose our place as a chief target, because we really owned very little of value that was worth stealing.

Yet—And I’m not kidding one bit here either!!!–there were still sundry occasions when my parents would see or hear these unwanted visitors in our farmyard.  One evening Dad stepped outside our front door around 10:30 to void his bladder.  It was a beautiful moonlit night and as our Blahnik patriarch looked casually in the direction of the nearby granary, he witnessed a person saunter out from behind the building.  Obviously, when the trespasser saw Dad staring directly at him he reacted like a scalded Siamese cat and quickly disappeared back into the black void wherest he came.  The next morning when it was light out we urchins immediately checked behind the granary for signs of malfeasance, but nothing was damaged and no items were missing as far as we could tell.

Another time my older siblings Joe and Darlene were in the midst of making a crude fence in our grassless farmyard.  The pair took some binder twine—this farm-friendly stuff’s original purpose was/is to tightly secure dried alfalfa for our dairy cattle to eat over the wintertime into medium-sized rectangles of compacted roughage that were easy to handle, otherwise known as bales of hay–and tied a bunch of those lengths together, followed by stringing this new skinny rope they had created from tree to tree.  Don’t ask me now why the two Blahnik progeny did it (Bored to death farm kids, I would imagine!), but the exuberant duo got so lost in their work that when evening ultimately came, they forgot to take down their temporary yard “fence”.

Well…..our mother was unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the succeeding night when she heard someone cursing and cussing up a storm outside her bedroom window.  Mom peered outside that window and, lo and behold, there were several people sneaking around our yard in the inky darkness and the scurrilous recreants had gotten entangled in Joe’s and Darlene’s temporary “fence” and apparently were none too happy about it.

Deserved the trespassing shysters right, I would say!! 

As Mom continued to stare out the window, she subsequently saw the flicker of a flashlight as the noisy intruders struggled to figure out exactly what was going on and, by the way:  Who the hell were the devious fools who had capriciously strung a rope between some random trees at just the proper height to trip them up and send them sprawling on their faces in this nocturnal hillbilly wasteland?!

Those trespassing knaves had probably “visited” our place in the past and were wholly unprepared for the new obstacle they encountered on this particular occasion.  But once again, we Blahnik children could not find any vandalism or evidence of missing items upon investigating the “crime scene” the next morning.

Another time a handsome golden retriever showed up at our secluded hacienda totally “out of the blue”.  He was a gentle, loving dog and my little brother Donnie fell head-over-heels in love with the fabulous creature.  Our Blahnik family named the dog Sandy and gave him a good home, until one night he mysteriously disappeared from our premises without a clue.  As you might expect, Donnie was devastated by this strange turn of events, but then a couple days later the dog returned every as bit as inscrutably as he had previously departed.

We Blahniks were uniformly thrilled to have Sandy back with us again, naturally, but one night shortly thereafter, Mom–while lying in bed unable to sleep–heard loud footsteps come running right up to the front door of our house.  You the reader have probably guessed the ending to this sad story by now:  The next morning we discovered Sandy missing from our property once more…..and tragically this time the sightly cur never returned to grace our presence…..

Donnie was devastated all over again, only this time the pain and sorrow was slow to heal and lasted a long, looooong time.

Once I reached the benchmark age of fourteen years (This benchmark was set by my strict but fair parents), I babysat around our Blahnik neighborhood almost every weekend.  For the most part I enjoyed babysitting, even if it meant I oftentimes did not arrive home until two o’clock or three o’clock in the morning.  When the weather was temperate during the spring, summer, and fall seasons, I was chauffeured right up to the front door of our rickety old “mansion” out in the country when my services were no longer needed, which obviously was very nice and copacetic.

But winter……yes, when winter came……well, THAT, my friends, was another story altogether!!!

Winter was a true, spirit-sapping bitch!!!!!

Since our Blahnik driveway back by Austin was so long and my parents could not afford the necessary equipment to adequately remove or push aside snow that would accumulate, we would just allow the proximal portion of the driveway to drift shut and then park our family car halfway down the driveway by the northwest corner of our grove of trees.  This copse of varied species hardwoods constituted a mixed blessing for our backwoods clan:  It thankfully served as a gigantic windbreak and buffered our house and barn from the flagitious northwest winds of wintertime, yet it also stood as the principal reason why our yard would get hopelessly snowbound in the first place. 

In any case, this situation meant that after a night of babysitting and then being dropped off on our Blahnik property–in the wee, wee, wee hours of the morning–I would have to make my way alone and chart a path through the deep snow and that malevolent grove of trees in the general direction of our house.  But the worst was yet to come.  That occurred when I finally reached the “security” of our ancient monolith sitting portentously in the pitch blackness.

Please allow me to explain the trepidation I felt:  We of the Blahnik lineage had a little entry room to our house that we called “the shanty”.  The shanty had no actual external door attached to it, but it did possess a doorway to the outside world which “opened” to the west, and the antechamber itself was small, spooky, and VERY dark.  Having to traverse this dungeon-like room before entering our house was inveterately a hair-raising experience.  And knowing in advance there were sometimes documented prowlers and n’er-do-wells lurking in the dark shadows of our yard did not make the spine-tingling foray into our Blahnik house any easier, let me assure you!

As the reader has probably already surmised by now, reaching the inner safety of the jet-black sanctuary we called a house was always a huge relief as well as a Jupiterian irony.

Our Blahnik farmyard was occasionally home to another form of visitor too.  The Great Western and Milwaukee Railroad tracks cut a narrow swath right next to our Lilliputian ranch.  The time in question wasn’t that long after the Great Depression unofficially ended, and homeless men called bums would still frequently hitch fare-free rides on trains throughout the United States and would then sometimes jump off the railcars near our property.  These unfortunate individuals never really caused any harm, but on not infrequent occasions they would cast about looking for a warm place to spend the night, especially during the chilly late autumn and winter months.

On one such instance, my uncle Fred Blahnik (who was also a close neighbor) pulled up a bale of hay in his hay mow that he intended to feed to his cows, only to discover a bum sleeping contentedly beneath the thing.  I imagine Dear Ol’ Fred probably very nearly shit his pants when he spied the benign intruder leering back at him with a drunken grin!

Another time Mom and Dad heard this perverted fellow scolding our pet male sheep, Woolly, down by the barn; he wanted Woolly to move closer to him so he could sleep next to the friendly ram and stay warm.  I believe Woolly demurred on the creep’s generous offer……and who could rightfully blame the self-respecting ram for protecting his dignity in the face of a filthy lecher!!

Y’know, to this day I often wonder what the secret attraction was that drew all those unwanted visitors to our unpretentious place in the country back by Austin.  I guess you could say we were fortunate in that they never seemed to cause any trouble; the biggest damage they did was psychological, and that was by putting the holy fear of perdition into the minds of us sheltered, impressionable Blahnik kids.  That said, I am amazed at how brave and stout-hearted I am as an adult when one considers the bizarre and disconcerting environment in which I grew up as a penniless farm urchin.

• A giant bear had been terrorizing the primitive, Third World village for several months now, marauding for food on a nightly basis and mauling any person who dared stand in its way. The townspeople grew weary and finally had enough of this continuous torment; they arranged a communal powwow, and from this freewheeling confab an ingenious solution was hatched.  Which was?  Well, just outside the village on the route the monstrous bear religiously followed during its pillaging missions, the menfolk of the village dug a massive hole in the ground approximately twenty feet deep, or just shallow enough to avoid the subterranean water table.  After completing this arduous task, the men of the hamlet next dragged fallen trees and fallen branches and anything else that would burn up to the hole and pitched the flammable stuff into the huge depression in the ground.  Finally, these same men lit the humongous pile of brush in the hole on fire and allowed the debris to burn for several days thereafter.  The end result of this peculiar activity?  When the fire was ultimately done burning, a mammoth pile of ashes was left standing at the very bottom of the hole.  Well, as it turns out that very evening the villainous bear came wandering along the well-worn trail on its way to the village to do some marauding and, as it approached the gigantic hole in the ground, curiosity naturally got the best of our massive beast.  It walked right up to the lip of the hole and peered straight down at the enormous depression carved into the soil.  Big mistake, Bruin!!!  Because at that exact moment a brave villager—the guy had been selected beforehand in a democratic show of hands—snuck up behind the troublesome bear and gave it a swift kick in the ash-hole!

Thanksgiving

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

And so Thanksgiving came to our Blahnik house yet another year this last Thursday in November

A time for giving thanks and counting blessings and wholesalely distributing accolades without blushing or feeling self-conscious

And I don’t even know where to begin today, this official day of giving thanks, but I shall try anyway…..

 

Thank you for the sun in the heavens which lights up my whole world every day of the week

Thank you for the beautiful azure sky which serves as a permanent backdrop to our paternal sun, along with helping illuminate the daily pageantry which swirls around us

Thank you for the fresh air I breathe which I all too often take for granted

Thank you for the birds that sing in the trees outside my house; they constantly remind me good cheer can and should be contagious

Thank you for Alexander Fleming and his paradigm-changing medical breakthrough

And thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for my extraordinary wife

And thank you for my three pluperfect daughters who I love beyond all comprehension

Thank you for the legion of brothers and sisters who I grew up with and still harbor mucho affection for

And thank you for that miserable job which nonetheless helps pay our family’s monthly bills and provides my home brood with generous ancillary benefits as well

Thank you for squiggles and squirrels and long-legged girls

And thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for rain in the springtime and for the exquisitely delicious taste of cherry nut ice cream

Thank you for the absurd fealty of dogs and for rainbows which swiftly follow violent summer storms, psychologically lessening their malevolent impact

Thank you for creating Abraham Lincoln and for the Northern Lights which sometimes, when we are astonishingly lucky, haunt the nighttime skies during the Dog Days of late summer

Thank you for road-grabbing, all-season radial tires and for allowing me to grow up slavishly poor on a Minnesota dairy farm, learning invaluable lessons about relativity I surely wouldn’t have otherwise

And thank you for the miracles of modern medicine which prolong and save so many lives and for classic 1970s oldies music

But, above all else, thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for tulips in late march and for sun-drenched picnics during the sweltering temperatures of summertime and for football in the autumn

Thank you for generosity and compassion and veracity and—especially, most especially—for love

Thank you for tilting the Earth on its axis so that people in both hemispheres can experience four decidedly different seasons

Thank you for the laughter of little children and for the stupendous wisdom of gray-haired elderly savants

Thank you for luscious Braunschweiger to nibble on at my leisure and for the transcendent beauty of a sunrise just as dawn erupts

Yet, above and beyond everything else, thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for the wondrous gift of knowledge and for the ability to experience both pain and sorrow; one cannot appreciate good health and joy if you have not experienced their polar opposites

Thank you for January thaws and for July cool-downs and for putting tails that wag on dogs so one can unfailingly know when they are happy

And thank you to those two magnificent people who conceived me during a moment of ecstasy and made my terrestrial foray possible

Thank you for instilling a conscience within my brain so that I can nearly always differentiate right from wrong

And thank you for the hapless Minnesota Vikings and Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Gophers and Minnesota “Everything”, who collectively invent new and ingenious methods each and every year to break one’s sporting heart

But, superseding all these facile reasons to an exponential degree, thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for fishes and wishes and disposable Styrofoam dishes

Thank you for science and biochemistry and physics, but especially for metaphysics; life would be unbearably boring if we trifling humans were granted answers to all the mystical questions

And thank you for that glut of glorious memories which have taken up residence in the back of my brain over the years; without this fulcrum of past experiences, the present and future would not have a critical touchstone for comparison

Thank you for delectable ripe tomatoes and for the mouth-burning taste of habanero peppers

Thank you for the vastly different cultures of the world and for their joint intelligence and capacity—USUALLY—to get along with each another and eschew needless, mutually harmful conflict

Yet, most of all, thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for Mars and Jupiter, but particularly for the pusillanimous little moon; our nighttime skies would be appallingly monotonous without its constant shape-changing

Thank you for Albert Einstein and Jim Thorpe and Bob Dylan and Leonardo DaVinci and for prodigies of all forms and stripes who have helped make this world such a fascinating place to live

Thank you for the satisfaction that comes from doing a job right the first time

And thank you for spring showers and for that first enchanting snowfall of the winter season, when frozen particulate falling from the sky has not yet become one’s mortal enemy and daily snow shoveling has yet to become a valid reason for hate-mongering and prolonged cussing

Thank you for grizzly bears and robins and daddy longlegs, and for ALL the unique animal and plant species we hominids share this fantabulous planet with

However, on top of everything else, thank you for the sublime gift of life itself…..

 

Thank you for hardboiled egg sandwiches smothered in lots of mayonnaise and for Saturday mornings to sleep in as late as I want

Thank you for a regular heartbeat and for the ability to communicate verbally with my speciesmates about virtually anything I want

Thank you for the orioles hanging in their weirdly constructed pendulous nests and for those devious cottontail rabbits hiding in the bushes next to our garden and for the exhilaration of making love in the afternoon atop a freshly washed quilt

Thank you for…..thank you for just about everything on this esoteric ride through we humans’ unique plane of consciousness

Still, most of all…..yes, by far most of all…..thank you for the sublime gift of life itself!!!

Those Were Tears of Joy…..

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

 

Those were tears of joy you saw as you left home this morning.

That’s right, tears of joy…..

Not tears of sadness

Not tears of mourning

Not tears of farewell

No, those were tears of joy you witnessed as you drove off all alone this morning.

And that’s the absolute truth too and the way life always should be…..

 

Those were tears of joy you saw as you left home this morning.

That’s right, tears of joy…..

My expression may have looked sad and grievous

And my body language may have suggested forlornness and despair

My voice doubtless sounded tremulous and unnaturally emotional when I opened my mouth to speak

But, trust me, those were tears of joy you witnessed as you drove off all alone this morning.

And that’s the absolute truth too and the way life always should be…..

 

Those were tears of joy you saw as you left home this morning.

That’s right, tears of joy…..

Is it possible to be happy and sad at the precise same time?

Can one’s heart be bursting with pride and splitting apart tumultuously at the exact same instant?

Can an integral part of you die deep inside…..even as new growth simultaneously germinates and begins to flourish in a different part of your body?

Can the long-term departure of a loved one ever be a certifiably happy occasion?

I don’t have any answers for the preceding questions, but I do know those were tears of joy you witnessed as you drove off all alone this morning.

And that’s the absolute truth too and the way life always should be…..

 

Those were tears of joy you saw as you left home this morning.

That’s right, tears of joy…..

Joy that you feel such overwhelming confidence in your natural abilities that you possess no qualms about moving fifteen hundred miles away from the house and town in which you grew up

Joy that you are leaving of your own volition and not because of a major, non-negotiable rift that developed between the two of us and tore our relationship apart, rendering a severance inevitable

Tears of joy that where once stood a trembling, uber-dependent tiny lass in our pastoral driveway now stood a magisterially self-assured young woman

Yes, those were indeed tears of joy you witnessed as you drove off all alone this morning.

And that’s the absolute truth too and the way life always should be…..

 

Oh yes, that is definitely the absolute truth too and way life always should be in an ideal world…..

Because, pray tell, what is the alternative?

What would serve fitfully in its stead?

Possible answer:  A progeny raised under my roof and under my direct tutelage for eighteen years who would now only futilely yearn for the spunk and courage to live exclusively on her own–a three-hour plane flight away from the very comfortable nest in which she grew up–using strictly her wits and her best judgment to solve the myriad problems she will most assuredly face as she navigates a ragged pathway through a life far from home?

No, thank you…..

I strongly prefer the former

Those were tears of joy you saw as you left home this morning, yes, but I must confess I’m not telling you the full, unadulterated truth here either.  That joy and consummate pride I alluded to earlier—real, sincere, genuine as a toddler’s hug–will nonetheless take a fair while to sink in and register with me.

Indeed, there were other emotions at play as you drove away this morning also, and those rogue emotions may well have contributed partly to the tearfall…..

• …..he’s part of the past; they’re part of the future. He’s yesterday’s stale news; they’re tomorrow’s bold headlines.  His body is failing piece by piece; theirs are young and limber and nubile.  So I ask of you then:  Who would YOU focus the lion’s share of your attention on now???  Him or them???  Where should your instinctive priorities lie???  Why is honoring the past more important than struggling valiantly to ensure a better future for your own descendants???  All valid questions—these—and short of an honest, logical answer (and obviously there is none) volleyed back by you, I will continue to respect my transcendent responsibility to mankind by riding the arrow of time forward rather than setting my feet hard in the dirt, sticking my head in the sand akin to a befuddled ostrich, and thereupon subserving some weird paradox by struggling to crawl backwards against the will and nature of time.  That course of action makes no sense, no sense at all!!  Give me one good reason why the past—and not the future— should be deserving of idolatry?!  There is none.  Nor does it feel right deep down in one’s gut either.  But for those of you superannuated geriatrics (along with any others) who vehemently insist on doing this, of honoring the past at the expense of the present and, more importantly, the future, I can only offer you these few choice words of “encouragement”:  FUCK YOU!!!!!  Yeah, fuck you all the way to perdition and beyond!!!!!  That is ALL you are deserving of today, which is probably way too much anyway!!!  Prioritizing the past over the future is just about the most selfish thing any sentient person could ever do, and I wish no good intentions to any misguided individual who consistently insists on committing this cardinal sin at the expense of today’s youth…..

• …..truly, words—almost as much as tears—will hold people back from doing whatever it is they want to do, so I will stop speaking immediately, dry my eyes, and allow you to go on your way into this great big world we share to accomplish great things sans the burden of personal guilt hanging about your neck. To follow any other course of action would be inordinately selfish of me and unfair to you, and—gratifyingly—my enormous unspoken love for you would not abide such callous selfishness on my behalf for any appreciable length of time.  You go, I will stay behind, and our lives will now diverge—probably permanently—even though my feelings for you have not abated in the least.  Yet, paradoxically, that immense unrequited love is the very reason I must not stand in your way and attempt to influence your life-changing decision in any fashion…..

The following is excerpted from a book entitled “The Promise”, authored by Fred Blahnik

 

…..Nick Stier wasn’t really a close friend of mine per se; he was instead a classmate with me in grade school back in Spring Valley, Minnesota and more like a casual acquaintance. We had been thrust together that early June in the mid to late 1960s (probably 1966) wholly by Catholicism, by the commonality of our religion.  You see, when all the other kids in Spring Valley got out of school for the summer back during those bygone days of Lyndon Johnson’s troubled presidency, which corresponded in parallel fashion to the heart of the United States government’s disastrous Vietnam War adventurism, the Catholic children who called Spring Valley home still had to attend an additional week of catechism instruction immediately afterwards, taught by a group of unsmiling nuns in the same elementary school our public education classmates had just abandoned for the next three months.

And if that thought sounds as though it may have been depressing for a frisky, impatient boy with his heart and mind set on exploring every square inch of our heavily-wooded Blahnik family farm located seven miles north of town over the winsome upcoming three months of summer, believe me…..IT WAS!!!!!

So, anyway, Nick Stier and myself and a handful of other Catholic boys had ben lumped together for this extra week of religious instruction at Spring Valley Elementary School, and give us credit for doing our very best to make optimal use of the limited free time made available to us by the phalanx of nuns.  I no longer remember the panoply of exact details which inform the story I am about to relate to you, but it happened some time over the course of that catechism week when we students were granted a recess by the stern but compassionate band of clergywomen, or it might even have been when we were let out a little early from our catechism classes for the day.

Alternatively, I imagine the incident could easily have transpired in the late afternoon when we Blahnik children were waiting for the ever-tardy Mom to come pick us up in her run-down, beat-up jalopy so we could thankfully finally go home and enjoy the early summer evening like every non-Catholic kid who resided within the Spring Valley school district–free of pontificating and all things religious.

In any case, Nick Stier, myself, and I believe a few other boys from our grade in school were in downtown Spring Valley just hanging out and loitering on Main Street when Nick pulled the rest of us aside and whispered some exciting news in our ears.  It seemed he had somehow made or otherwise come into possession of a trove of glass slugs that could be used in vending machines without having to waste real coins in the process.

WHHAAAAATTTTTT?!?!?! 

Gumballs for free?!?!  Ya wouldn’t even have to pay one brown cent for ‘em?!?!  Something for nothing?!?!  

AMAZING!!!!!!

It all sounded way too good to be true……

I’m sure somewhere far off in the back fringes of my brain—right in that vicinity where a conscience should be emplaced and is in fact situated—alarms started going off and red lights started flashing, warning me of the inherent dishonesty of what we were about to attempt.  But said were feeble sentinels with weak lungs and tiny biceps, and as such their muted protests were soundly overruled by less scrupulous gladiators heralding the glimmering prospects likely awaiting us resourceful boys if we were only to raid the penny and nickel vending machines located in the fronts of the V-Store, Ben Franklin, and perhaps one or two other variety stores in conjunction with a modest–sized supermarket, all sited in three-block downtown Spring Valley. Minnesota.  Hell, we were all but guaranteed to make off with a windfall of gumballs and penny candy that we could then share fairly and democratically with each other (And you were wondering there for a second about a working conscience, weren’t you?!).

Who knows…..maybe we could even score a much-coveted miniature super-ball if we experimented with the “expensive” nickel machines and Nick’s crude slugs, bolstered by a healthy dose of good luck and additionally fortified with a few ill-directed prayers, ultimately prevailed.

Remember now too, Reader, before you start passing hasty, overly severe judgment on my reprehensible thought process:  I was just a dirt-poor kid at the time from a ramshackle farm who had to constantly stand back and watch other well-off kids who lived in Spring Valley delight over expensive toys because my Blahnik family had zero free money to afford the same.  So while I surely understand the cruel irony of the situation we group of boys faced that summer day—mendaciously pillaging gumball machines at the same time we were attending nearby religious classes taught by strict, altruistic Catholic nuns who constantly evangelized on the importance of veracity and leading an honorable, praiseworthy life—the idea of getting something for nothing nonetheless held tremendous appeal to me.

Well….you certainly know by now what they say about best-laid plans…..

It turns out that Nick Stier, despite all of his pre-teen cockiness and earnest assurances and boastfulness, didn’t have glass slugs that fit precisely within the contours of the designated coin slot in any of the gumball machines we perused, and then I suppose you can probably imagine what happened next (and PLEASE don’t ask me to explain why Stier used glass as his preferred substrate for making fake slugs instead of a soft metal like brass or aluminum).

I can’t recall anymore whether my misdirected classmate might have been successful in extracting one goodie from a store vending machine or possibly even two, but I do vividly recollect that shortly after our looting mission began, Nick Stier turned the crank on one store’s vending contraption and his move was answered with a loud CRAAAAACCKK as that glass slug shattered instantaneously within the machine’s designated coin slot.  Obviously there was no way of getting the damned thing (or hundreds of partial “things”, as it were) out of that particular vending apparatus, so we next did what any group of red-blooded American boys would have done under the same dire set of circumstances:  We ran like terrified rabbits out the front door of the store to get away from the scene of the crime as expeditiously as possible…..

Now, granted, it doesn’t take a lot of high-tech, professional sleuthing to figure out what transpired after that.  The owner of the local mercantile in question had witnessed a small gathering of prepubescent boys guiltily huddled around a vending machine in the front of his store, and then a few minutes later they mischievously sprinted away en masse as though someone had approached them wearing a hideous mask while brandishing a blood-smeared sword.  A cursory inspection of his now-disabled vending machine instantly revealed the reason for their speedy departure.

Well—long story short—in most small communities in southeastern Minnesota, then as well as now, everybody knows everybody else, and the proprietor of the store had recognized one of the boys in our party as we were milling around in the front of his business.  He had contacted that boy—or more likely the boy’s parents—and pursuantly the accused boy, probably scared to death and not wanting to take a giant fall all by himself (And who can really blame him?), quickly ratted out each of his co-conspirators in this mini-heist which never bore any substantial fruit worth bragging about.

Next it couldn’t have been a matter of more than a few hours before Mom received an urgent phone call at our primitive hacienda on County Road #1 north of Spring Valley, and when she hung up the telephone and thereupon came looking for me with a frighteningly chagrined look on her face which suggested thoughts of prolonged torture followed by eventual murder……I knew instantly that my proverbial “goose was cooked”.

Let me assure you, the tempestuous, long-ago incident I just described in detail hatched inside of me one of the finest lessons in honesty that I have learned in my entire lifetime, this despite the fact the object(s) in question that was the cause of all the commotion was worth literally one penny.  I will never forget the sadness in my mother’s eyes that afternoon—a look of pure, unadulterated disappointment reflecting the sobering reality that one of her sons had attempted to commit larceny, however teensy—and I felt as ashamed and embarrassed as anyone who has ever walked the face of the Earth.

And, truth be told, I don’t even remember if Mom raised her voice one decibel when she lectured me about honesty and the importance of living a godly life that seminal afternoon, because she really didn’t have to utter a single word; I had learned an invaluable, transcendent truth about going out and earning what you wanted in life as opposed to lazily stealing it from someone else the moment I saw that pained, crestfallen expression on my birth fount’s face.

So when my middle-aged mother looked me straight in the eye at the conclusion of her vituperative harangue and demanded in an uncompromising tone, “Fred, can you promise me that you’ll never steal from anyone else again in the future?”, my response was as immediate as it was heartfelt.

“Yes, Mom, I can promise you that……”

• …..he struggled out of bed in the morning with exaggerated effort. He had barely slept two winks the night prior, his left shoulder was killing him, overall he felt like shit half-rewarmed only it’s impossible to conceive shit could ever feel so depressed and despondent and abused, and he was then left wondering what to do?  Yes, what course of action can and should one pursue when feeling so ungodly miserable at such an infantile hour?  And, after but a few seconds of intense contemplation, he realized there was only a single thing he could do in that dolorous situation:  He thusly went and sought out his favorite recliner and carefully contorted his body into a delicate position where–Can you fuckin’ believe this?!–his left shoulder stretching down through the biceps didn’t actually ache throbbingly like the Second Coming of Lucifer.  Thereafter, in not too great a length of time, he drifted off into a somewhat fitful sleep–wholly unlike the night previous–intent on waking up from this small slumbering respite marginally recharged from a physical standpoint, in better spirits (Realistically, they couldn’t have been any worse!), and ready–No, eager!–to face the still basically new day sitting before him like a luscious ripe plum…..

The Savior Who Could Not Beat Death

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

He thought he had beaten death.  The arrogant son-of-a-bitch REALLY TRULY thought he had beaten death, stymied death, outfoxed death…..

But no one—and I mean NO ONE—ever beats death.

The arrogant son-of-a-bitch is finding that out now, and finding it out in a slow, methodical, unforgiving, drip-drip-drip fashion.  Death is catching up to him now, day-by-day-by-day, and the pace is accelerating and making up ground quicker than he ever thought possible.  And still—and still, in full acknowledgement of this fact—the death he is experiencing is of the slow, torturous, unrelenting variety, akin to an old-fashioned Chinese water torture assassination.

But who, might I ask, is more deserving of such a cruel fate??

Oh, he was “beating” death at one time—as recently as a handful of years ago even—when he was pouring a shitload of money (not HIS money, mind you, but society’s money i.e. Medicare payments that could and should have been dedicated to suffering individuals much younger and more deserving than himself) into this personal crusade of his.  He was gonna do everything humanly possible to extend his life well beyond the threshold that God in all His divine wisdom had set for him.  Those extreme measures taken in his mid-eighties included new heart valves, new pacemakers, uber-expensive medications, egregiously expensive therapies meant to turn back the clock, ultra-frequent doctor visits, new this, new that, new this, new that, new…..EVERYTHING, I tell you!!!

EXPENSES BE DAMNED!!!  Those shouldn’t even be a consideration for a person so essential to society, should they?!?!

Everyone who was anyone knew that his continued presence on Earth’s surface was of the utmost importance to humanity and therefore no expense—And I mean NO expense!!—should be spared in order that our irreplaceable hero could go on living for time immemorial.  And if that meant the public coffers needed to be raided time and time again to ensure our paladin’s continued survival, well…..wasn’t such promiscuous spending immanently worth it to society?!

Well…..wasn’t it?!?!

After all, there is only one of this guy, and once he’s gone there’ll never be another to replace him (forget for a second that this argument applies to anyone who has ever walked the face of the Earth).  He is special; he is pluperfect; he is a gift to mankind handed down from God above; and thus every measure known to modern medicine should be undertaken to assure his maximum duration of survival on our Lilliputian planet.

But that charade is over now.

Yeah, thankfully, it is finally over…..

Boy, is it ever!!!

Purveyors of modern medicine have finally succumbed to the obvious (and perhaps to their financial consciences as well) and withdrawn all “curative” treatments from our erstwhile gilded individual.  They are continuing to offer him full palliative assistance, certainly, as anyone and everyone in a compassionate society such as ours should be tendered during times of suffering, but insofar as those ridiculous lengths they were bending over backwards to accommodate just a few years ago in order to artificially extend his lifespan…..those are gratefully now merely a vestige of the past.

And so now he can feel his life slowly slipping away, this self-anointed savior of mankind—day by day by slow, ruthless, excruciating day–and just a single glance in the bathroom mirror each morning at his atrophying shell of a body, his wan complexion, and his sunken, zombie-like eyes definitively confirm what his mind has been screaming at him for weeks:  He is nearing checkmate in this long-running chess match that he has been engaged in—a  morbid contest which has teetered agonizingly back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, while our “indispensable” champion’s very life has whipsawed precariously in the balance–and there isn’t a damned thing he or anyone else can do anymore to alter that grim, preordained outcome.

He thought he had beaten death.  The overly conceited son-of-a-bitch REALLY TRULY thought he had beaten death, stymied death, outfoxed death…..

But no one—and I mean NO ONE—ever beats death.

Not even self-anointed saviors of mankind…..