A Short Story of Loss

He belonged to a world rich with
heritage, legacy and loss. And fortune
turned him in its unerring direction
helpless to avoid its timeless brunt.
Orphaned by indigent parents taking
untimely leave he fled from his
village's benevolence planning to
install the boy in the poor house
which kept widows and other
orphans from starvation, to Warsaw
in desperate search of his brother
who in the end was treated by the
Third Reich to the liberty that slave
labour promised. Living on the heedless
streets his search unavailing, he was
selected along with other homeless
boys for passage to Canada. At age
fourteen he became an indentured
farm hand, as the other boys with
whom he laboured became family.
When full passage was paid through
their labour they were all free to find
their place in society. He yearned to
become educated, in search of wisdom.
A voracious reader of a strange new 
language he expressed his anguish
by filling blank pages with words that
impressed him. Music appealed to
him and when he played in a modest
orchestra the gleaming bell of his tuba
hid his meager presence. Meeting 
another refugee they married and he
fathered one, then two, three and 
finally four. Heart disease found him.
He worked a factory steam press
dehydrating his wizened form but
it paid their modest bills. Uncertain
of his age, he was certain he had no
intention of dying when cancer called.
He wrote studiously in a neat, small
hand of his life, its travails, his hopes
and his fears. And his struggle for 
justice in the world. A diary became
a memoir, a veritable tome of his
philosophical conclusions. He told
whomever he could he did not want
to die, but god was not listening.
Perhaps that was because his god
rested within the pages of a book,
any book, and sacred text was any
page of any book that held words and
ideas and he yearned for his own words
to be published, to be read and seen
as wise. At his death his son took
possession of his father's precious
manuscript for safe-keeping. So well
concealed that when the son died
the papers were never found. So, is
this a life-story in brief, or is it
a briefly-imagined life? Who knows...