September 26th

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

September 26^th…..

That transitional, melancholy time of year which instinctively seems to inspire more regrets than aspirations…..

A bridge between late summer sultriness and the crackling crispness of true autumn…..

The sound of a large flock of loquacious blackbirds, clustered lazily high in the maple treetops…..

Only this time headed south instead of north…..

Seeking refuge from the vile arctic monster soon to come…..

Goldenrods blooming luxuriously in the roadside ditches…..

Late to the party, but quietly spectacular nonetheless…..

Soon to be ambushed and murdered en masse by a stealthy, early morning frost…..

An occasional monarch butterfly still fluttering by on the chill autumn breeze…..

So few now, where once there were millions if not billions…..

Just as my cluster of dashed hopes were, too, for the temperate season just passed…..

The sun shining brightly overhead …..

But shoved way down from the zenith and really not warming anything appreciably as it did a mere few months ago…..

Now only a golden orb bereft of most of its power and no longer a generous supporter of life…..

Did everything—did the world–look and sound anything like this in 1969—today—the day my father’s heart stopped beating and his soul thereupon abandoned his rapidly stiffening body?

I cannot even remember the salient details which attended my patriarch’s demise anymore, so long ago did that earthshaking event take place…..

A beautiful day, today, yet one cloistered in an infamy not of its own making…..

September 26th.

• Where is this leading me??? What is this leading to???  Is there some kind of purpose to all this stuff I’ve been experiencing???  What does life mean to me?  Why am I here?  Where will I go next?  Why are there always far more questions than there are answers to satisfy them???  And then—in the blink of an eye and a paradoxical twist worthy of the apocryphal O. Henry—“Why?” no longer wears the cloak of a question but cryptically morphs into the correct answer to the majority of our transcendent queries.  There are no right or definitive responses.  I guess, in the end, life is just a gigantic riddle…..an intriguing mystery……a puzzle with no clear solution…..

• …..he was just about to escape the sticky situation with only moderate material damage incurred, this to go with a few niggling remnants of his oversized ego still thankfully intact, but just then his conscience decided to make its presence known and raised its (ugly?) head high in the air before rivulets of honesty began trickling steadily out of that accursed, shit-for-brains object. And there was nothing Fred could do to stop this new development, nothing at all; that thing—that fuckin’ hardworking conscience of his—had a mind all its own, and attempting to throw a bridle on it at such a compromised juncture would have been about as futile as stretching a thin Brobdingnagian blanket over the crater of a rumbling volcano in the hope that such action might stanch an imminent eruption.  So honesty prevailed in the end—Yes, pure, God-driven, sniveling honesty!!—and Fred was ashamed to admit that he had allowed himself to succumb wholesale to such an ordinarily docile foe…..

• …..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments–both physical and emotional–but she soon learned otherwise. She discovered fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and go backwards in time either, even if she had been able to which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her–a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm–and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice.  Happiness is at its very core a grand hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator that affords precious little time for such nonsense……

Fran sat hunched over in the old red car with his eyes clenched shut, shivering just a little as he considered what his next move should be.  When he finally looked up again……there was that damned omnipresent time machine waiting for him!!! 

But this time when it cryptically manifested out of nowhere to seize him, Fran discovered with no small amount of relief that  the strange contrivance didn’t grab him quite so roughly and then proceed in reverse at hyper-drive speed as it had done before, but rather just gently nudged him back in time a mere few hours..…to when he awoke this morning and subsequently lay in bed thinking:

 

……..damn right, Fran considered himself to be something of an armchair expert on genetics!

That came from his uncommon exposure to pedigree matching when he worked in the dairy industry milking cows years before, first evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the dam (cow or heifer) to be bred, and then working closely with his herd’s artificial inseminator–in this case older brother Joe Blahnik–in trying to find a satisfactory bull they could breed the cow to that would help offset those obvious physical deficiencies.

In fact, Fran had worked at a small artificial insemination stud–Tri-State Breeders in Westby, Wisconsin–one erstwhile semester when he was attending technical college in Waseca back in the early 1970s.  Somewhere along the way he had even learned how to artificially inseminate cattle himself.

Once he started breeding cows on the Blahnik home farm, Fran got even more keenly involved in the selection of the A.B.S. (American Breeding Service) sires he would utilize to improve the quality of the family’s dairy herd.  His younger brother Fred—still in secondary school–was also rabidly intrigued by the process, and those two would often sit down and hold long, spirited discussions in the evenings on the strengths and weaknesses of each cow in their herd.  The dairy animals’ length, their overall size, their productivity over the course of a lactation, the strength of their hindquarters, their fore and aft udder attachments, their ease in calving, their disposition and relative docility–every aspect of a cow’s body and temperament was thoroughly evaluated and discussed by the pair of Blahnik herdsmen.

A.B.S., for their half of the equation, kept remarkably detailed records for each of their bulls, rating them on all those aforementioned specific categories plus countless more.  Therefore when it finally came time to purchase large batches of semen from brother Joe to store in their shiny liquid nitrogen tank adjacent to the milkhouse, Fran and Fred both had a clear understanding of each bull in the A.B.S. stable and what they might rightfully expect it would do to improve the quality of the offspring born to one of the cows in their dairy herd.

Anyway, from that valuable experience Fran Blahnik knew that virtually every imaginable trait which exists among living organisms is, at its very core, inherited and passed along from one generation to the next……and his thoughts then drifted tangentially to mental illness—a condition presumed but not proven to be distinct among the Homo sapiens species.  He knew there was some evidence of mental illness in his own family, especially on his Mom’s side, but thank God he had so far been spared the humiliation of contracting this dread, inscrutable affliction.

Or had he……???

Fran stared at his bedroom ceiling and pondered that transcendent question for minutes on end, while a simple algorithm kept tracking back and forth in his brain:  Every genetic trait was passed along in some physical fashion, however tiny; there was incontrovertible evidence–albeit not widespread–of mental instability in his own proud Blahnik/Snyder lineage; others in his immediate family kept gently yet vehemently insisting that he personally suffered from some variation of mental illness……yet he knew deep down in his heart that he had somehow been insulated from the possibility of ever inheriting this gene or–more likely–cabal of genes which contributed to the embarrassing mental and emotional anomalies that relentlessly plagued others. 

No—–NO, NO, and NOOOOOO!!!!!!..….…the gratingly persistent bastards who shared a last name with him kept pointing a polite but accusatory finger in his direction while at the same time trying to brand him a lunatic and a nut case—if not so much to his face, then surely by whispering nasty, innuendo-laced things about him behind his back whenever they gathered and invariably got around to gossiping amongst themselves akin to a gaggle of lonely, love-starved widows. 

But HE wasn’t mentally ill, for Christ’s sake; his mind was as fuckin’ stable and unchanging as the Rock of Gibraltar, just like it’d always been and forever would be in the future too……..HE WAS AS ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE OF THAT FACT AS A DAY IS LONG!!!!!

            Yet again……still…….as much as he hated to admit it—–he didn’t have logic serving as his ally on this particular subject…….

Fran shook his head and grunted softly through clenched teeth.

Son of a fuckin’ bitch!!!  Jesus Christ Almighty and the Blessed Virgin Mary too, for Godsakes!!!!!  GODDAMN IT ALL ALREADY!!!!!!!!  Why do things always have to be so fuckin’ complicated and difficult to wrap your arms around?!?!  Why can’t life just be simple and stuffed with happiness?!?!?!

Though Fran would have loved more than anything in the world to deny the hideous allegations he knew were floating around behind his back like a toxic cloud and at the same time prove conclusively that the rest of those condescending, smirking assholes were a misinformed pack of liars…….the pieces to this infuriating puzzle weren’t all adding up to his satisfaction……..

What if they had been right all along about his mental instability and he, by definition, then obviously must have been wrong all along and still was???

What iffffffffffffff…….??????????

Fran turned his head and stared out a window at the rising sun.  It was radiant and beautiful, as was the brilliant azure sky framing it, as were the magnificent one-hundred-year-old white oak trees dotting his farmstead as they poked majestically toward the heavens outside his bedroom window.  There was so much to live for out there, so much to breathe and see and touch and enjoy…….or was there?

And then the issue of mortality, the same issue Fran had been grappling with mightily for the past several weeks, crept into the back of his mind.

He had always enjoyed life…….but he didn’t now.  He had always looked forward to each new invigorating sunrise…….but he didn’t now.  He had always relished the taste of a refreshing cold beer on a hot summer’s day…….but he didn’t now.  He had always savored any opportunities to get together with members of his original family to converse and just share mutual affection……but he didn’t now.  He had always assumed he would play a prominent role in helping his three cherished namesake sons grow up some day to become reputable men and noble citizens……..but he had difficulty foreseeing that outcome now.  He had always planned on growing old with dignity and self-respect and élan, with allegiant wife Julie forever at his side…….but, try as he might, he couldn’t imagine that happening now.  He had always considered the blessing of life itself to be the ultimate expression of love from the Almighty God who had miraculously created him from nothing back in the late 1940s……..but………but………

Fran closed his eyes to block out the annoying bright sun shining through his window; couldn’t a wall of clouds at least form to shield him from that blasted thing’s radiance and fake cheeriness?!  He had a new day stretching before him now, an undisputed gift from God–putty in his hands–a small fragile temporal vessel in which to behold and celebrate this unique thing we call consciousness–twenty four brand-spanking-new hours in which to do exactly as he pleased.

Fran thought long and hard about how he would spend his next few precious finite hours on Earth’s surface.  He then slowly dragged his body out of bed before tediously beginning the task of getting dressed for the new day sprawled out before him not unlike the offertory gifts at church.

Yeah, just like the offertory gifts presented to God down at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Spring Valley every Sunday morning.

Immediately prior to Holy Communion…..pay special homage to God by presenting Him with the ultimate offertory sacrifices—the symbolic body and blood of crucified Jesus Christ–on the supreme altar of the church…..every Sunday of every year, without exception…..over and over and over again, just like clockwork.

Tomorrow is Sunday, isn’t it?

            A day reserved for offering appreciation for the glorious things in life and for rejoicing and for praising and for sincerely thanking God who in his infinite wisdom and compassion chose to honor a select few human beings with the indescribably generous gift of consciousness.

Fran stopped what he was doing for a second to reflect.  What is so indescribably generous about consciousness anyway? He had no say in his creation; why should he then be so obnoxiously grateful to be alive? What exactly makes life so special and inviolate in the first place? Why are some people favored with only happiness while others, through no fault of their own, are condemned to a lifetime of misery? What is the underlying purpose of life if authentic happiness can never be found? What…..why…..what…..why…..WHAT…..WHY…..????

Fran shook his head in despair and tears welled up in the corners of his eyes.

            Just one more sunrise out of the multiples of thousands he had already experienced in his forty six year lifetime and Sunday, that traditional temporal shepherd overseeing solemn thanksgivings and offertory dowries and millennials-long worshipping of some pluperfect but unseen deity, will be here before you know it…..

            Or will it?

Can it?

            Does the sun actually rise if you are not personally present to witness this daily yet eternally transcendent event? Can age-old rituals truly be maintained if you have moved on to another plane of consciousness…..or absence thereof? Will the earthly world go on as before if you no longer own a seat at its banquet table? Is consciousness real or just a cruel hoax?  Is happiness a real entity?  If happiness truly exists, is it grossly overrated?  Does anyone really care about the future when it’s actually little more than a cruel mirage—a repository for dreams that seldom if ever come true?  Are you better off being alive or dead?  Do dead people still feel emotional torment once consciousness ceases to exist?  What constitutes a good life?  What constitutes a full life?

            The middle-aged man shook his head in frustration while staring blankly in the bedroom mirror at this gaunt, hollow-faced stranger who was in turn staring straight back at him. The guy looked extraordinarily despondent—tragic almost; he bore no resemblance to anyone Fran knew.

            Oh well, those are questions for another day and another person, Fran finally decided as he turned away from the mirror and dabbed at his eyes with the heel of his right hand and next began shuffling listlessly toward his kitchen.

For, you see, Francis Edward Blahnik already knew deep down in his heart what the fateful day facing him held in store —this otherwise unremarkable Saturday staking claim to its own two dozen hours well past the midpoint of September 1995 A.D. on the Roman calendar—because, barring a last minute change of heart, he had been meticulously rehearsing in his mind the actions he planned to perform during its afternoon bloc for some time now.

 

Fran let out a deep sigh and laid his sheet of paper on the empty passenger seat of the car he was sitting in.  He next climbed out of the vehicle and gently slammed its door shut behind him.  Fran walked to the front of the car, glanced mournfully through bloodshot eyes at the late afternoon sun ritualistically descending to his left, then slowly closed those haunted, sorrowful eyes a final time…..before inhaling one last giant, drawn-out breath as fully and as deeply into the furthest depths of his lungs as human physiology could possibly allow……..

Fran lifted his head to peer around and was astonished to spot a regal white-tail buck gingerly step out of the woodlot a hundred yards in front of him to the north.  Its massive antlers–sporting ten distinct points encased in purplish shaggy velvet, yet still gloriously polished and jutting well past the animal’s vigilant ears–reflected sunlight from the radiant golden orb now perched halfway down the western horizon.  Fran stared admiringly at the majestic creature as it strutted out of sight around the curvature of the cornfield adjacent to him, estimating in his mind the nuances of the shot he would be required to make in order to fell the trophy brute.  But then Fran stopped strategizing.

That shot would never happen, and he knew it……. 

Tears were streaming down Fran’s face now.  He bent down and hastily finished writing as the time machine enveloped him and chauffeured him away…….

 

………Lenny Mueller wasn’t a naturally nefarious, totally scurrilous asshole; he really wasn’t, I tell ya!!!

Fran had to keep reminding himself of this important fact every time he felt red-hot anger mushrooming within his breast.  No, Lenny was just an ordinary man who committed the cardinal mistake so many other people likewise succumb to:  He went ahead and bit off way more than he could possibly chew!

But then rather than taking the honorable route and immediately admitting this error in judgment, the stubborn little son-of-a-bitch dug in his heels and refused to acknowledge the obvious.  That’s what made Fran so preposterously angry whenever he thought about the subject!

Following the devastating conflagration which consumed his house on August 30th, 1990, Fran Blahnik found himself confronted by a multitude of difficult decisions.  But easily the greatest of them was the dilemma he faced with regard to the next living accommodations for him and his young family.  Fran did possess an insurance policy to cover the financial losses he suffered as a result of his house burning beyond repair, yet it certainly wasn’t of the overly generous variety.  He henceforth needed to be exceedingly careful as he thoughtfully deliberated over what would be the best path to pursue with regard to his family’s future living quarters.

Rebuilding on the same site as before was an obvious decision for him—the proverbial “no-brainer”.  Fran loved his serene, oak tree-accented oasis sequestered far out in the rolling countryside of southeastern Minnesota’s non-glaciated region, and he already had a prohibitive amount of financial equity poured into that forty acre chunk of real estate as well.  Ergo the difficult decision facing him back in 1990 was not whether to rebuild or where–but how???

Going with a pre-fabricated house definitely merited strong consideration.  Those things weren’t nearly as boxy and trailer home mimicking in appearance as their ugly early predecessors—in fact some newer models were fairly chic and irrefutably stylish—and of course the convenience associated with pre-fabs was nonpareil too.  Once a building site was suitably prepared—One…..two…..three…..PRESTO!!!!!—and one could then magically have a nice house erected and ready to move into in a mere matter of days.

You certainly couldn’t beat that sublime temporal luxury with a big stick and a cardboard bucket overflowing with fried chicken!!!

In addition, the cost of a top-quality pre-fabricated home was highly competitive relative to the other options available.  Fran accordingly thought long and hard about pursuing the pre-fabricated route, yet for reasons forever unknown except to him ultimately decided against it.

He elected instead to pursue the strategy of constructing a house—piece by piece by piece—from the ground up.  Somehow the appeal of seeing a large, intrinsically complex house slowly and meticulously morph from a bare chunk of ground eventually won sway over Fran’s train of thinking.  And you should know this by now too:  Once Fran Blahnik made up his mind about something—ANYTHING!!!—and then stop to consider how intuitively refractory he was and how intransigently the guy’s thought processing mechanism functioned ……well, my older brother’s attitude would never subsequently change come hell or high water or, worse yet–even if a better, more logical alternative apart from one he had personally conjured happened to materialize in the interim.

Of course Fran was still working fulltime at that bantam-sized fiberglass factory in Chatfield, nor could the dude rightfully be described as an expert journeyman carpenter either, hence the business of building his new house would have to be subcontracted to another party.  Fran received a fair number of attractive offers covering the construction of a new house for him and his family, including some from reputable contractors boasting extensive resumes and long lists of glowing references.  But let’s not forget either that Fran Blahnik didn’t have any money trees flourishing in his back yard and was working with relatively limited funds too, and many of the cost estimates he received were……well, let‘s just say they were a bit on the extravagant side.

By far the cheapest estimate he received?

The one from a certain Lenny Mueller…….

Not only was Mueller’s cost estimate easily the least expensive Fran received, the fellow also benefitted from the natural advantages of being a distant neighbor, a long-time Blahnik family acquaintance, and a fellow parishioner at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Spring Valley, hence Fran understandably felt that he could trust the overtly religious guy implicitly.

To Fran, the final decision regarding the selection of a housing contractor was not taxing at all; Lenny Mueller’s offer was without question the least pricey out of the multitudes he received, but much more importantly than that–Fran truly believed him to be an honest, upstanding, dependable individual with whom he could easily work.  Thus Fran officially committed to Mueller’s “bare bones” offer with full-fledged confidence and zeal and, it should also be pointed out here—minus any reservations whatsoever about the man who would be factoring so hugely into his and his family’s future..

Unfortunately, Fran’s fateful, ill-advised decision that year so long ago resulted in ungodly disaster, to say the least……

Without vigorously disputing the assertion that Mueller at his core may have been a decent human being—in all fairness, he probably was; I think everyone who knew him well could agree to that–the incontrovertible fact remains that Lenny Mueller most definitely was not the solution to the extensive problems facing Fran Blahnik at that critical juncture in the latter’s life.  For although Mueller was admittedly an excellent-quality wood craftsman, his expertise lay far more in churning out dinky woodworking wares such as picture frames, petite decorative knick-knacks, and birdhouses—not in constructing full-size houses.  And Fran’s architectural plan called for a rather plain yet undeniably large dwelling, not some picayune summer cabin perched atop a toadstool in the middle of a decorative backyard pond.

Now…..so what did Mueller’s “work crew” actually consist of?

Listen closely to this, Reader!!! 

Lenny Mueller’s house-building crew consisted of himself, one elderly gentleman who would show up sporadically and unannounced–seemingly just whimsically and always on the spur-of-the-moment–and lastly Mueller’s teen-aged son, and we’re talking mid-teens here too, Reader, not some sturdy, mature, heavily-muscled young adult.

Mueller himself was a severe diabetic, and that chronic medical condition in conjunction with a host of others too numerous to mention in passing prevented the tradesman from intense labor for much of the spring, summer, and fall of 1991.

Long story short, Lenny Mueller had absolutely no business bidding on the construction of a full-sized house during the building season for the year 1991, yet—personally financially desperate for any and all business to support his mammoth Catholic family—he did so anyway.  And my brother Fran Blahnik wound up being the unlucky sucker who would up holding the nearly empty bag a sickly Lenny Mueller represented that highly traumatic year.

Because of Mueller’s frequent and extensive absences combined with Fran’s understandable desire to get his new house completed just as rapidly as possible so he could settle his family into it before the next winter arrived, my brother ended up working like a sex-starved dog that year from the time the last remnants of snow melted in the spring until virtually the instant it returned again in the late fall–when the first vanguard flakes swirled ominously and performed clumsy pirouettes in the freezing November air while providing an appropriate opening act for the onrushing featured show otherwise known as winter.

Yet no dog I can personally think of ever had to toil nearly as hard as Fran Blahnik did during that exhausting summer of 1991.  He still held down his regular, five-day-a-week workshift as a machinist at the A.F.C. fiberglass manufacturing plant outlying Chatfield, of course, but as soon as he returned to his temporary rented home located just west of Sumner Center Methodist Church in the afternoons he would hurriedly change into grubby clothes and next scramble the three miles over to a nearly abandoned worksite where his brand new house was taking shape with exasperating slowness.  And it was there that Fran Blahnik would feverishly slave away until the sun ritualistically set late in the evening, which in mid-summer in southeastern Minnesota is well past 9:30 p.m.  Fran religiously followed this impossible-to-maintain routine day after day after day after punishing day.

And Lenny Mueller?

Who?????

Lenny…….?????  Who’s he, you ask?!?!?! 

Oh, yes, of course, Lenny Mueller–HIM–the “real” virtuoso contractor Fran had enlisted to work hard on completing the project the previous winter.

Meanwhile……Lenny Mueller—battling his nearly constant health issues—was seldom witnessed at the jobsite.  One erstwhile Saturday he did recruit a posse of fellow Catholic Knights of Columbus members to drive out from Spring Valley to Fran’s acreage and lend a hand with the leviathan construction project; this altruistic group volunteered their labor to Mueller free of charge, it probably goes without saying……but beyond that feeble and isolated effort by Mueller……

Yet when autumn finally rolled around and the house was virtually complete as an almost direct result of Fran’s singular, herculean labors……guess who showed up on Fran’s front doorstep presenting a bill reflecting aggregate charges commensurate with construction of a full house????? 

You guessed it…… 

None other than the same shameless, unscrupulous, deceitful Lenny Mueller!

Tell me now, Reader:  What kind of unctuous asshole would actually have the unmitigated gall to do something so egregiously and clearly wrong as that?!?!

Huh?!?!  Anyone you can reference?!?!

            Didn’t think so, nor can I…..

Fran—who never in his life sought to avoid a confrontation when he knew he was right in principle—didn’t take Mueller’s outrageous sham and flaunting of ethics lying down.  He hired a lawyer and immediately sued Lenny Mueller for breach of contract, and it’s safe to say any judge with half a brain and an ounce of common sense and compassion would have quickly seen the truth behind my older brother’s plain-as-day allegations.

Yet even way back then in the early 1990s, society had taken a ridiculous detour into surreality whereby it was deemed no one should ever be assigned one hundred percent blame for any action, no matter how wrongful or scandalous or obvious their (mis)behavior.….and even if it was clear to the dumbest bystander that such was indeed the case.

In court, Fran ultimately fell victim to such lazy, shortsighted, politically correct, morally uncourageous—Yes, let’s be one hundred percent honest here…..absolutely GUTLESS—reasoning.  The judge assigned to Fran’s case rendered a mixed verdict, finding Lenny Mueller culpable of some of the transgressions lodged against him, while exonerating him of myriad others.

In other words, no resounding, clear-cut victory for the very confident and expectant Fran…….

The incomprehensible verdict from that seminal day in court left a permanent, eviscerating scar on Fran Blahnik’s psyche.  He completely lost confidence in our American judicial system after the puzzling fiasco; his faith in all levels of government was thereafter shattered as well.  The decorated Vietnam veteran became a disillusioned, embittered individual following this compromised verdict at the hands of Lenny Mueller and the kangaroo court system doling out fake “justice” down in languid, Norman Rockwell-themed Preston, Minnesota.

The overriding lesson Fran carried away from his disastrous brush with our much-vaunted American legal system?

Slimy lawyers couldn’t be trusted…….the crooked United States court system couldn’t be trusted…….government at all levels was incompetent and corrupt and couldn’t be trusted……..ultimately—–people in general—even those who appeared friendly and helpful and ingenuous on the surface–were dishonest and could no longer be trusted……. 

It was also about this time that cracks began to appear in Fran Blahnik’s psyche, cracks that only grew wider and more frightening with the slow passage of time……

The amber cornfield to Fran’s right rustled in the slight afternoon breeze.  High in a walnut tree to his left Fran spied a squirrel wrestling with a monstrous nut it would need—one of many–to survive the upcoming winter.  He interrupted his train of thought temporarily to cast judgment on how brutal the upcoming snow season might be.  Wasn’t there some old Farmer’s Almanac truism that associated squirrels and the aggressiveness of their fall nut-gathering with the severity of an impending winter? 

But then  Fran remembered where he was and began writing laboriously again on his sheet of paper, yet as he did so the time machine encroached rudely into his consciousness, hijacked him, and hauled our protagonist away to another side of the world and another side of his character…….

 

……….he enjoyed a good, thick joint now and then.  Not so much lately though, not since he had married and fathered kids of his own.  It had all started for Fran over in Vietnam, where they used to smoke dope all the time.  Prior to that—before he went to ‘Nam in August of 1968–he was just a hopelessly naïve farm boy heavily steeped in the Roman Catholic religion.  Sure, Fran loved to get rip-roaring drunk on cheap beer every now and then and raise a good ruckus, but that was about the extent of the matter insofar as personal vices.

But over in ‘Nam?

…..in ‘Nam?????  

Hell, what else WAS there to do in that godforsaken shithole?!?!

You’d go out trudging through the goddamned jungles and wading through the fuckin’ rice paddies every single day and get randomly shot at by those fuckin’ little gooks hiding up in trees and stumble onto carefully-concealed booby traps—see buddies of yours get blown to bits right in front of you and then, adding insult to injury, get splattered in the face with their guts and their brains and their fresh, sticky blood…….and then you were supposed to go back to base camp, pour a hot cup of coffee, and play tiddly-winks and sing church carols until midnight while listening to Lawrence Welk and his jolly band of geriatric jackass accordion players nattering away on Radio Saigon???

Noooooooooooooooo…….

NO FUCKIN’ WAY!!!!!!!!

A good joint helped take the edge off the day, made you forget—for a few hours, at least—the terrible shit you had been forced to witness earlier in the day.

Therapeutic, is what it was…..

Morally wrong to smoke pot, you say?

“MORALLY” WRONG?!??!?!?!

Fuck you, too, you judgmental asshole!!!

What exactly is immoral about smoking marijuana anyway?????

To Fran Blahnik, smoking dope was completely harmless.  Whatever you chose to put inside your own God-given body was a strictly personal decision and no one else’s goddamned, self-preaching business!

According to the Gospel of Fran (Chapter One, Verse One), it didn’t matter one iota if you lit up a thick joint of lush “Panama Red” and hit a humongous toke……or threw down a whole twelve-pack of Grain Belt beer at one riotous sitting……..or guzzled down the last few remaining drops of whiskey from a liter of Jack Daniels after first killing the rest of the bottle…….or voraciously inhaled two packs of Camel cigarettes a day…….because the end result was undeniably the same.  They—along with every other mood-changer  Fran Blahnik was personally aware of—allowed you to escape the monotony of the daily grind, if only for a few hours; to take a brief, well-deserved “time-out” from the tedium of everyday life and just relax in the moment.

But Fran didn’t really give a shit whether others agreed or disagreed with his moral stance on the issue.  He certainly respected their right NOT to smoke pot or get pissy-faced drunk or live a life steeped in so-called “vices”; that was their business—they could do whatever they wanted with their own bodies so long as they didn’t infringe upon the rights of others–and his business was HIS business and his alone.

Yet, having clarified that, Fran Blahnik hadn’t brought the smoking habit back home with him when he returned from Vietnam, not like a lot of other veterans he knew.

Hell, why should he?

He didn’t need marijuana to live a happy, fulfilling life in southeastern Minnesota, had no use for the stuff there.  Life was just fine and dandy for him sans the cannabis.  He was doing great on his own, wasn’t in dire need of any emotional crutches or artificial highs or dramatic mood changers.

Y’see, Reader, over in ‘Nam that whole experience was akin to living in a debauched fuckshop with no rules whatsoever, so Fran obviously felt no compulsion to follow any.  But back home in the United States–in bucolic, conservative southeastern Minnesota, no less–the laws on the books ordained that smoking marijuana was illegal and a criminal activity, and even though Fran Blahnik personally disagreed with that silly edict and thought such thinking ridiculous and puritanical and old-fashioned, he had been raised as both a strict Catholic and a grateful citizen of the United States inured to faithfully honor and obey the prevailing laws of his native land.

Case closed then; let’s operate exclusively between the boundary lines and not ruffle any feathers was kind of the way Fran viewed the living dynamic he returned to in the United States following his tumultuous sojourn in Vietnam….. 

Yet when Fran moved onto his forty-acre hobby farm north of sleepy Spring Valley, Minnesota and spied verdant copses of towering native marijuana plants thriving throughout his cattle pasture, the temptation became too great for our decorated Vietnam veteran to resist.  In tandem with his younger brother Fred, the grateful pair harvested a small quantity of pungent “Minnesota Green” for eventual personal usage.  Eventually this humble stash found its way into the attic of Fran’s archaic house, where it was left hanging between the building’s rafters to dry naturally for future smoking.

And before long–amidst the hustle and bustle of busy lives and vibrant living–the contraband hanging in Fran’s attic was completely forgotten about…...

 

Fran was standing outside the shell of his still-smoldering house that unforgettable day as August of 1990 plunged perilously close to its rendezvous with September–understandably despondent as he stared implacably at the pathetic sagging structure– when he was approached by one of the local volunteer firemen from Spring Valley.  The guy thrust a small plastic bag under Fran’s nose and loudly demanded, “IS THIS STUFF YOURS?!?!  Found it up in your attic!!!” 

Stunned out of his reverie, Fran peered downward.  His blood pressure subsequently spiked ominously; Fran could feel his heart begin to bounce to-and-fro inside his chest cavity while it disobeyed sinus node orders and skipped a beat here and there, sometimes two or three at a time.  The hack fireman was thrusting a small bag of marijuana at him.

Fran shook his head slowly back and forth and mumbled “No……..”

But even as he did so, as he did his best to plausibly deny the accusation……he already knew his proverbial “goose was cooked”.  There was no way in the world this condescending buttfucker standing before him would ever believe a word he said.

The catastrophic house fire had resulted from a Lilliputian malfunctioning fan in an upstairs bedroom—a fan meant only to help cool the room as the sultry “Dog Days” of August wound down—but of course the sneering jackass currently staring him down would take the next logical step and believe he was utilizing the thing to dry marijuana in his attic.

Fran had felt very much dejected just minutes before, but his mood now plummeted to an unprecedented level of abject depression–a frightening crater of despair he had never come close to experiencing before in his not-short lifetime.  Even as the amateur fireman continued to grill him annoyingly—“Go ahead, Fran……just admit this marijuana is yours to use for personal pleasure and I promise you I won’t tell anyone else about it!”—Fran ignored the persistent noise as he went about mentally connecting the dots to this regrettable puzzle.  He knew exactly in what direction the debacle was undoubtedly headed.

His reputation around Spring Valley was as good as ruined now……

Fran wouldn’t admit a single goddamned thing to the jerk waggling a finger in his face, of course, yet that wouldn’t prevent the guy from hurrying back to Spring Valley and loudly blabbing to anyone who would listen:  “You know Fran Blahnik, that weird Vietnam vet who lives on the small secluded farm seven miles north of town on County Road #1?  Well, the dumb son-of-a-bitch was drying a bunch of marijuana up in his attic and, next thing you know, the stupid bastard accidentally burned his entire goddamned house to the ground!!!”

Hell, Fran decided he might as well personally publish the story of his house fire as a bold headline on the front page of the next week’s edition of the Spring Valley Tribune for as much exposure it was liable to garner, not to mention the staggering speed with which rumors swiftly multiply and thereupon sail around uninhibited in a cloistered agrarian village.

As the volunteer fireman finally stalked away—obviously disappointed and minus the confession he so dearly coveted—Fran stared down at his gravel driveway as tears welled up in his eyes and searing anger burned uncontrollably inside his chest.  Not only had he lost his house today—and with it the overwhelming majority of his personal belongings to boot—he had also irretrievably sacrificed something far more important to him personally:  The platinum reputation he had spent a whole lifetime so painstakingly constructing.

But unlike the house and that panoply of aforementioned material goods, his sullied reputation was something which could never be fully resurrected or rectified by insurance pay-outs or replaced intact…….

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???