Two Miraculous Gifts

There have only been two times in my life when something has miraculously appeared out of nowhere, as a gift for me. The second time happened just this month. I had been searching up and down town for a 3.5 x 3.5 inch memo cube, since I had finally run out of the one I bought back in probably 1997. I've been using these things every day since the mid-80s (their heyday) and I simply can't switch to any other kind of stationary.

The problem is that Post-it notes seem to have the corner on the square stationary market. Go to any store and all you see is Post-its. Post-its, of course, are sticky and smallish, which is fine if you want to stick a little note somewhere, but what if you need a nice-sized, non-sticky square sheet to write a note on or draw a picture on or fold into a non-sticky bookmark? Do we really need this much stickiness? Anyway I don't think so, and that's why I searched for my special memo cube for many weeks.

I had already been to the Office Max where they had nothing but an aisle full of Post-its: one major corporation scratching another's back. My wife Carrie and I went back a second time to get something else, and we visited the stationary isle to see that only Post-its exist in the world. After both of us looked once more (thoroughly) and gave up, Carrie looked in a spot (that we'd already looked in) and said "Hey, what's that?" She then pulled out a beyond-perfect cube of "Astrobrights" that was wedged behind something. Even the colors were fancy. There was no other cube like this in the entire store (or anywhere else in town, maybe not in the country) and I was pretty convinced that God said "Fuck it" and placed it there for me, maybe out of frustration, maybe out of love.

A Spiritual Book

Let's play a game. Follow my logic. We'll take this simple premise as a starting point: "The Bible is a spiritual book." We'll pretend that anything within it of any value has nothing to do with anything concrete or factual: laws, politics, history, places, people… Whether it's something that seems magical (a talking donkey, an angel) or something that we know is real (the city of Jerusalem, the Red Sea), we'll assume that all of these "worldly" elements are actually just metaphors for something spiritual, something concerning the inner life, the life of our thoughts and feelings. Let's just take this as a starting premise, just to see where it gets us.