Author Topic: barakah  (Read 1673 times)

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Offline franksolich

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barakah
« on: June 12, 2012, 05:31:28 PM »
The property caretaker was eyeing something in the front yard when he got out of his pick-up truck this morning, the steps leading up the front porch, and myself, standing at the top of them.

Then he shook his head; I had done it again.

Unwittingly, and without any actions on my part, I had done it again.

Last Thursday, when the femme drove up into the front yard, I went out to the front porch to greet her.

While standing at the edge, near the first step down, I inexplicably went down.

I have no idea why; there was nothing wrong with where I was standing, and I myself felt no sense of weakness; it just happened in a split-second.

The femme insisted it was as if I dove off a board into a swimming pool; "it was so graceful, as if you were doing it on purpose."

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, like I want to fall five and a half feet, landing on my knees on concrete.

Just before I hit the ground, I had an awful feeling the knees were going to slam down hard, and crack.

I hit the concrete with the bottoms of the palms of both hands first, after which the knees crashed down.

For some reason, the skin on the hands were barely scuffed, but the knees were a bloody mess, a big bloody mess.

Fearful I might've done some damage, I sat up, and moved the knees around, turning them, twisting them, bending them.  Which they both did, easily and flexibly and with no additional pain.  The only pain was from the searing, burning, sensation of the scraped-off skin of the knee-caps; considerable dermatological damage there, and very deep.

Despite that I was standing up and moving around and obviously all together, the femme wanted to take me to the emergency medical clinic, after which a two-day argument ensued (she was hanging around here because she was going around to a bunch of small-town garage sales).

If I'd had problems moving the knees, I would've demanded to be taken, but I wasn't having any such problems; it was just a bloody mess, nothing more.  franksolich is not a two-year-old, or a primitive.

During the days that followed, the ire of the femme grew, because even two days later--and even as present--there's nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with the knees.  I can do whatever I want to with the knees, and there's no pain, not even a twitch.  It's a bitch that the big bloody scabs (each about the size of an adult palm) still burn, but that's lessened considerably as the skin heals up.

When the neighbor came over that evening (last Thursday evening), upon examining the terrain of the fall, uttered "barakah," an Arabic word which I've heard nearly all my life; the extraordinary luck and special protection of God, in which one is apparently not immune from harm, but from irreparable harm.

As those who've read franksolich in the Sandhills forum and elsewhere, it does seem I've undergone some, uh, rather extraordinary experiences in life in which others, having the same experiences, did not fare so well.  I think for example, of the case of my younger brother who did something one time, one single time, and paid with his life because of it.....something I myself had done many times before, escaping unscathed (but quite obviously something I've never done since that happened).

And to make it even more extraordinary, I am deaf, and the world is a perilous place for deaf people, fraught with all sorts of hazards and dangers.  I suppose the tendency is to think one is stupid, when one walks into a sawed-off shotgun, or blurts out something unflattering about a particular person unaware that the person is overhearing, but it's not stupidity.  One picks up most of his clues for how he acts, how he behaves, from what he hears.....and if one can't hear, well.....

I'm not sure if many are aware of this, but many "winners" of the "Darwin Awards," when one reads the in-depth details, appear to be deaf or hard-of-hearing.  This is only from casual observation over the years, but I bet more than half of those "winners" are.

The highest honor came from an FBI agent who was "fronting" as a consular official in Kiev, Ukraine, the day I showed up after having been missing six days (from the time I stepped off the airplane) in a place utterly alien to me, where I was utterly vulnerable with no defenses, whole and intact and undamaged.

The guy had been looking for me for six days, inquiring among the secret police, the local police, the militia, the underworld, routinely expecting that I'd met a tragic fate.  He was also put out because the Nebraska congressional delegation, all five members of it, had been putting pressure on the U.S. Department of State to find out what the Hell had happened to me--people don't just "disappear" like that--and some of the fault for that lay in the negligence of the embassy.

When he looked at me--even before I presented my blue-and-gold passport--he looked as if he were looking at a ghost, and said, "In my 32 years in this sort of business, you're the damned luckiest son-of-a-bitch I've ever seen....."

Babushkii in the socialist paradises, upon being illuminated about the event, used to actually cross themselves in my presence.  Obviously, I had some sort of divine gift.

Despite a rather inauspicious start in life, my Slovakian grandmother when I was an infant insisted I was born with "the mark" of St. Michael the Archangel, the Warrior of God, predicting exactly what "barakah" means, the special protection of God, in which one is not spared harm, but one is spared irreparable harm.

I dunno.  We're all human, and destined to depart this time and place sometime; good luck like bad luck does not last forever.

But even if it were to end right now, well, I've had an extraordinarily long run of it, longer than any chances anybody else I know has had, and am grateful for that.
apres moi, le deluge

Offline SSG Snuggle Bunny

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Re: barakah
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2012, 08:54:46 AM »
I've always said the Good Lord looks after lunatics and imbeciles and I got me a double portion.
According to the Bible, "know" means "yes."