Note:  My father-in-law, Don Warm, passed away (So, yes, let’s wander off on a tangent for a moment here and address an annoying, albeit trivial, subject:  People do not merely “pass”; they pass away.  After all, how many people who die have been seen or heard from since?  The expression “pass away” is one hundred percent correct and appropriate.  If you insist on using only the word “pass”, you could just as easily be referring to bowel gas) a year ago, on October 19th, 2017.  He was undeniably a great man.  As his erstwhile son-in-law, I can truthfully offer Don the greatest compliment that could ever be passed along to a father-in-law:  He treated me exactly as he would a son.  The following poem is a personal tribute to him and is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, which was organized and published in 2017 by me.

 

Giants

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Giants aren’t all eight feet tall while boasting biceps larger than ripe watermelons

And giants don’t necessarily tower over everyone around them in physical stature

Giants don’t sing their praises incessantly and beg everlastingly for attention and adulation

No, giants can be reserved, unassuming, and of normal size and organic composition

Don Warm was a true giant.

 

Giants don’t have to be larger than life and impose their will on everyone they come in contact with

And giants don’t always have to set out to create legends and to carve their names indelibly in the annals of history

Giants don’t have to stand out from the crowd with loud, obnoxious, garrulous behavior

No, giants can oftentimes compensate for their physical averageness with intellectual or creative genius

Don Warm was a true giant among men.

 

Giants don’t feel an obsessive need to prove their gigantism every second of every day

And giants aren’t invariably the obvious solution to every problem that arises

Giants aren’t fashioned from blocks of granite and thereafter immune from the slings and arrows of mere mortals

No, giants can bedazzle with their industry, their resourcefulness, and their astonishing problem-solving skills

Don Warm was a true giant among his myriad contemporaries. 

 

Giants aren’t always found as the featured protagonists in ancient myths and storybook fairy tales

And giants don’t have to unfailingly rescue drowning children or damsels in distress in order to validate their invincibility

Giants aren’t molded from cosmic super dust and ethereally pre-destined for greatness

No, giants can be normal people, lead normal lives, perform non-heroic deeds….but nonetheless leave an extraordinarily favorable imprint upon those fortunate people who happen to cross their paths

Don Warm—a smallish, bespectacled, uber-humble father of two unobtrusively hidden away in the far-off reaches of northeastern Minnesota for the overwhelming majority of his adult life–was a true giant standing tall and proud amongst a thriving, albeit perpetually quarreling and squawking, colony of big-talking pygmies.

 

Yes, with nary a doubt or even a reservation, Don Warm was every bit a giant and cut from the same transcendent cloth as any biblical or mythological figure who was ever conceived or imagined.

…..if she wasn’t the most beautiful, delicate thing he had ever seen in his lifetime, then…..then……well, upon further consideration, she definitely WAS the most beautiful, delicate creature he had ever seen in his lifetime. So he fantasized about her for a major part of every hour which make up those twenty four equal components comprising each new day on our Roman calendar, finally worked up the courage to ask her out on a date, and was rewarded for his otherworldly patience and uncommon bravado with a condescending sneer and a terse “Go fuck off, loser!!!”…..

……they argued perpetually over the relative merits of dogs and cats, yet he could never come close to understanding her point of view. Cats were loathsome creatures–sterile and implacable and sans emotions–yet she still defended them as though they were affectionate and deserving of loyalty.  Tell me this: Why would anyone love a cat?  You could just as easily say you loved your table-saw sitting out in the garage as saying that you loved a cat.  Sure, both of these objects serve a useful purpose–the table saw for trimming lumber to size, the cat for catching an occasional mouse–but there is nothing innately lovable about either.  In his mind, love and loyalty were interchangeable entities, and he had never in his lifetime claimed fealty to a table-saw, let alone a cat that refused to come rushing up wagging its tail and slobbering all over everything when he arrived home from work at the end of a particularly stressful day…..

Some days are just plainly and simply harder than others, and you have to accept this reality and adjust to it. Assuming all days are the same is naïve and foolish and ignores the barest of facts, which is this:  Change is the ONLY real constant in life, starting with our birth and ending with our death.  Life itself is purely and inarguably a bridge from one benchmark to the other, and every step of the way is somehow different and in some fashion more nuanced than the one preceding it.  Every stride we take is a little different from those previous–be it length, steadiness, angle of implantation, pressure downward, etc.–and consequently every impression we leave in the sand is a wee bit different as well.  Individuals who cannot readily adapt to change struggle with life; individuals who do never have to worry about a thing.

We’re all just here on Earth as renters; we don’t truly own anything we come in contact with. Human lives are frighteningly transient; the world we leave behind less so.  How can you claim ownership over something that will outlast you by millennia, if not longer?  Human beings are by nature parasites.  Do the fleas own the dog?  Do the barnacles own the ship?  Do the remoras own the shark?  Do the lice own your skull?  The thought of these paradoxes and others like them is silly.  The only thing we genuinely “own” are our flesh-and-blood bodies, yet even those are left behind to rot once we die and our souls take forever leave of their organic captors.

…..and so, my friends, until we meet again to break bread and sip wine and exchange lively stories, may you always tread in the shadow of good fortune, may the wind always be at your back, may the sun always be warm but not hot on your exposed skin, may your path always lead downhill but not at too steep of a grade, and may the ground beneath your feet always remain firm and non-treacherous. I leave you in the safe comforting hands of God now, my dear brethren, with far more reasons to live than to die…..until the next time we should happen to cross paths…..until we meet again…..

You are what you pretend to be. Play a role for a long enough period of time and you ultimately become that person.  Remember, you are not an automaton that was factory-built and pre-programmed to behave in only one fashion.  Your brain is plastic, your personality is plastic, your usage of time is plastic……your future is plastic.  Yes, your future is whatever you want to make of it, because you can reinvent yourself in an instant and subsequently beeline off in a totally new direction any time you feel the urge.  Don’t blame anyone else for the failures in your life; there is one–and only one!!–captain of your ship, and that is the person you look at every morning in the bathroom mirror while you’re flossing your teeth.

Note:  The following poem is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The

Changing Seasons of Life”, which was written by Frederick J. Blahnik and published in 2016. 

 

“You Can’t Go Back…..”

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

And so the small-town newspaper reporter asked the grizzled old man who was living in a nursing home and celebrating his one hundredth birthday:

“What do you think about turning one hundred years old?”

No doubt expecting some flowery soliloquy or long-winded response espousing all of his gratitude for having lived so long

But the old man was taciturn to a fault and surprised her with his brief reply

Inasmuch as he expressed his whole philosophy of aging in a meager four words…..

“You can’t go back…..”

 

“You can’t go back…..”

 

What extraordinary profundity in just four words!!

He could have rambled on indefinitely about the nature of life and the invaluable lessons to be learned on a daily basis and the importance of nurturing critical relationships and the transcendence of a stalwart spiritual faith and his anticipation for advancing forward into a better, eternal place once his time on Earth ends

Yet he didn’t mention any of those things

“You can’t go back…..”

Truer words were never spoken!

 

“You can’t go back…..”

 

We can always look back…..

And think back

And wish that we had done some things differently along the way

And maybe changed or reprioritized some of our intimate relationships from past years

Changed everything, even

We always wonder about how differently things may have turned out had we only done this or done that…….done this or done that..….done this or done that…….

And yet, at the end of the day…..and at the end of a life…….

“You cannot actually go back and do things over…..”

 

“You can’t go back…..”

 

How many times in our lives have we hoped and prayed that we could just turn back the clock and relive parts of our lives and change the course of history–not world history, mind you, but just our own picayune, miserable, inconsequential little lives?

How many times have we laid awake at night commiserating over a bad decision gone awry?

How many times have we found ourselves bellyaching to our subconscious:  “If only I could have a mulligan on that lousy decision I just made……”

Ain’t never gonna happen, my friend……

“You can’t go back…..”

 

“You can’t go back…..”

 

The wizened old fossil could have said anything to the newspaper reporter and, coming from the mouth of a centurion, it would have naturally sounded prescient and profound.

Yet by volition he limited himself to a succinct four words

Four words that should resonate with anyone, which is to say EVERYONE, who has ever made a poor choice in their life.

Sagacious words to live by every day of one’s earthly transit, words that you should definitely not have to age to the dizzying number of one hundred years in order to understand their sublime relevance.

Words that transcend nosy reporters’ inane questions and speak to the very essence of life itself.

Incredibly splendid words by which to live every day of our preternatural existence.

“You can’t go back…..”

 

No, you can NEVER go back………

 

The past is timeless, just as the future—That vast warehouse of worthless, unrequited dreams!—is also timeless.

 

Only the present comes with form and boundaries.

Only the present can be trusted.

 

Today is your only guarantee……and therefore your best–and only–hope when pitted against an unchangeable past and a future sans warranty……

Do not commit the cardinal mistake of being too frightened to pursue TRUE happiness! Comfort derives from rote routine; it is a function of bland repetitiveness.  This routine doesn’t necessarily have to be one of happiness and pleasure though.  Conversely, it may just as easily be grounded in drudgery and despair.  The salient point then becomes this:  Human beings, akin to any of our animal cousins, are archetypal creatures of habit, and that habituation—irrespective of whether it is pleasurable or not—then becomes our baseline for living.  We become inured to whatever we are doing or whatever lifestyle we are living to the point where it becomes comfortable and our familiar frame of reference.  However, that doesn’t mean there may not be greater opportunities for happiness lurking somewhere out there.  In fact—deferring now to the omnipotent Law of Averages—commonly there is.  What we need to do—And, understand, this is NOT an easy thing to accomplish!—is break those stubborn bonds of familiarity and not be afraid to strike out on a new and completely different path.  Do not let blind fear stand in your way!!  Kick it in the testicles—HARD!!!–and force it to flee!!!  If you sense that you are not truly happy and that you are missing out on some integral aspects of life, then you probably are.  Trust your instincts on this!!  Cast aside those burdensome shackles that are holding you back from real elation and thereupon follow your heart wherever it chooses to lead you.  After all, you have only been granted one life; do not let fear of the unknown sabotage and despoil this ineffable gift from our cosmos creator.

…..he found himself wandering aimlessly through this thing called life, lost without a roadmap, unsure what his purpose was for being alive, conjecturing about possibilities yet woefully nescient when it came to probabilities, stumbling clumsily through every happenstance he encountered not unlike a drunk in an opera house…..and he didn’t have one fuckin’ clue what the next day might hold in store for him. Because, after all, without a plan for life–without goals and dreams to objectify and then target as part of a much greater mission…….what is the value of owning a life anyway?…..