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.
The first miracle was even more miraculous. It was in high school when every ninth grader had to do a dreaded bug collection ("dreaded" because we had heard about it since elementary school). I was trying my best to find my required insects (we had a list), spending my days pinning them to my Styrofoam board, and generally having a miserable time. I'm not a big fan of bugs to begin with, and finding specific kinds isn't exactly easy. One in particular was proving impossible to find. If I didn't manage to get one, I'd get my grade of Q or whatever, so I was getting depressed.
The next day I walked outside and saw the insect I needed sitting on my carport. But it wasn't alive. It was dead, in pristine condition… and it already had a pin through it, ready for mounting! If I had complained aloud about not being able to find this one (and I hadn't), I'd chalk the episode up to someone doing me a favor (though placing it on my carport to be blown away by a faint wind or run over by the family car wouldn't have been wise). The real story is most likely that it was a part of someone else's collection and got lost and somehow ended up on my carport. But that's just the details of the miracle, since a miracle is what it was: a gift from the Universe just for me, nature itself breaking its rules just to make me less miserable and more happy.
In the spirit of these true stories, I figure I can't go too much longer on the God Blog without sharing with you the picture I took of my car window one night after a bird had miraculously crapped an image of Jesus Christ on it. I decided not to sell the window on eBay. Instead, I sprayed my window with a water hose and kept the memory in my heart.
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