The old joke about the flood, sorry, the parable of the drowning man, goes:
A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”
“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”
God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”
That’s longer than it was in Readers Digest. But.
I mentioned in September 2024 that I received a packet from an heir hunter outfit who informed me, with some degree of truth but the exact amount of which I remain uncertain, that a distant relation with an estate died without a will, and I could sign with them to put in a claim. Well, the heir hunter managed to gather 12 or 13 of my closest distant kin to sign on–including my brother, but not my mother’s sister. The estate published for the required weeks in the Mound City News. A claimant put in a charge for an unpaid bill in January 2025, but the online court docket shows nothing since.
Well, we must be getting close to some sort of resolution, because we received a second packet from the heir hunter last week, telling us we still have to time to sign on.
I have spent a sleepless night overthinking it, but my beautiful wife has conducted some research that indicates that if I don’t put in a claim, that bit of money might go to the state’s Unclaimed Property fund. So maybe we will look into introducing ourselves to the Holt County Court after all.
