Ordinary Miracles

Source: Downtown Lebanon history

Saturday mornings in Lebanon, Missouri, my hometown of almost 10,000 people, were a special time for my mother and me. Around mid-morning, we often made our way to Main Street.

Burley’s, the plush high-end store, mid-way down the block, was often our first stop. Our purpose was not to buy, but to peruse. I learned, at a tender young age, to say, thank you, we’re just looking. I always locked my hands behind my back, never imagining I could touch anything in the store. That was the reason it was such a satisfying delight the day my mother surprised both a bored, tired-looking clerk and a fifteen-year-old me, by making a purchase. She put a heather green cardigan and plaid coordinated skirt, both my size, on layaway one hot August day just before school started that fall.

Mother made her first deposit from a spool of cash that was secured with a rubber band on the inside zipper of her pocketbook. I watched carefully as she peeled off an old ten-dollar bill that was almost the same color as one of the greens in the plaid skirt and put down the payment. I watched as she ran the belly of her palm over the bill to flatten it for the clerk. Her long fingers and broad knuckles would one day become my own.

When the two pieces were eventually mine, I wore them with thick cable-knit tights and trendy brown loafers until they both balled up into ugly. But I kept them, even after they were too unsightly to wear, tucked around mothballs in an old cedar chest at the foot of my bed. There was something special about the two pieces that couldn’t be purchased with one plunk-down of money or check.

If the day was a little bit special, we’d have lunch at Conner’s drug store on the corner. It was there that I discovered egg salad with olives on lightly toasted white bread. I’d take a bite and twirl once around on the red-topped counter stool, barely braking in time to halt a second spin.

Our last stop was always Commerce Bank at the far end of the retail fair. This was the site of a moment that had changed my life forever. A sprinkling of divinity that more than six decades later, still replays with disciplined precision each time it comes to mind.

We stood at a crosswalk. Traditional traffic lights were sparsely distributed on the narrow two-lane street. My mother’s attention must have faltered as I pulled my hand from hers and began to cross the street alone. Perhaps my five-year-old tummy was anticipating the candy dish that rested just inside the bank door.

I cannot remember what was on my mind, but I stopped right before an oncoming car could hit me. Tires squealed, Mother screamed, and a throng of shopkeepers and casual Saturday drifters rushed toward us from all directions.

The newly formed crowd closed in around me. When they saw me standing erect and fine, they released a synchronized breath.

I was jolted from my daze when my mother fell to her knees and pulled me close and hugged me so tight, I thought I might die from the squeeze.

And then she cried, sobbed to be true, in the midst of the crowd, tears cascading like flood waters across her face, the size of which I’d never seen.

Suddenly she pushed me away and cupped my face in her hands. She was searching for a reasonable explanation as to why I had abruptly stopped just short of the car’s speeding path.

“But I thought it was you, Mother. I felt a hand push me back. Hard, Mommy, it landed cross my chest, like a thud.”

And the crowd whispered and awed, for they’d seen my mother behind me, out of reach.

“God,” some said.

“The hand of the Lord,” declared another.

And the distinctive talk faded to a murmur as the crowd dispersed and resumed their Saturday morning chores.

Mother told and retold the story to family and friends. She always included my guardian angel’s lifesaving touch.

And from that day forward, I pictured a bouncy blue-eyed angel resting on my shoulder. Delicate, but strong, she stood watch over my activity. Not that a tiny toy flying around like a butterfly could stop or ease my accidents. I imagined that the small tyke could whisper in God’s ear when I needed help out of a tight spot or when my life was in danger.

I wish I’d kept a book filled with all my little miracles, coincidences, and flukes. Some are answered prayers, others I tag as God winks, and I think a few show up just to see if I am paying attention. One of our ministers once said that people who pray tend to see a lot more coincidences than those who don’t.

Even though I haven’t logged them all with rigorous precision in a small black book, I do remember many. A few months after my late husband died, I gathered a faint whiff of his signature scent in the hall of our Westchester house. While rock climbing in the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, I experienced an irresistible urge to retreat and head back to the waiting Jeeps. While others encouraged me to move forward on the narrow ledge high above the rock floor, I knew, with 100% certainty, that I was destined for a deadly fall if I continued.

My rock-climbing retreat could have been pigeon-holed as a lack of courage. I could have also reasoned that my balancing skills were not quite up to snuff and common sense prevailed. But I have always deemed the flight as a God whisper.

In James Martin’s New York Times bestseller, Learning To Pray, he points out that Jesuits are trained to recognize what is coming from God and what is not, a practice known as discernment. He points out that God is not talkative; his answers are often terse or delivered in small silent wonders that require attention to notice. Because God’s voice does come to us through our minds, it is our obligation to distinguish our own considerations from God’s messaging.

Determined to sort my own internal chatterbox from the voice or small stroke of God and to better turn my attention to small miracles, I carved out time for ample prayer. I punched the white noise button on my phone, settled my dog, Bleu, on the chair next to me, and utilized Martin’s suggestion of imagining God in the chair across from me. God’s answer to Moses, I am who I am, rolled by like a repetitive subtitle to a foreign film. The verse was on my mind because I’d read recently that a group of theological scholars had suggested that God’s answer could have been shorthand for it’s none of your business. I loved the irreverent cheekiness of that perspective. I smiled as I thought about it, when another very clear message moved in from the left.

Who are you?

Whoa! I caught the query square in the middle of my gut. Almost a decade past early retirement I’d begun to wonder the same thing.

The question pestered me for the rest of the day. The rolling subtitle was relentless, so insistent, in fact, that I began to put sound to the question. Who are you? Who are you?

Only divine silence purred back.

The next morning, I remembered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night when he articulated his most dreaded fear, “God, am I like all the rest, after all?”

Who are you? came the God murmur.

Ordinary, now, perhaps? came my own dreaded response.

To be only ordinary has always been one of my greatest fears.

But my attention was stuck like a needle on an old vinyl 45 record, as I pondered my plainness. If I had answered the probe in the moment, I would have said that I am more prosaic and ordinary than I have ever been. I pushed the inquiry away. I couldn’t bear to articulate my easy life of reading, writing, and romantic travel only once in a while, while living mostly in Florida.

I had never lived by the traditional bell curve rules, where excellence was measured by being in the top two or three percent.

My gauge always went straight to the top and when I didn’t reach the 100% mark, I chalked it up to failure. Good, even excellent, was never good enough for me. Ninety-nine good decisions did nothing to assuage the embarrassment of one bad one. If I didn’t have the track record of Carol Phillips, founder of Clinique, or Jenson Huang, CEO of Nvidia, then all of my triumphs were null and void.

Meanwhile, in the very middle of all this mediocre, ordinary chatter with myself, who are you now continued to scroll from one side of my eye-view to the other.

On the last day of my most recent New York City visit, I fixated on the view from the window of my 34^th floor Manhattan apartment. The apartment was totally empty. All the furniture had been cleared for storage the day before.

We’d made a head decision to sell the co-op as we had only spent seven weeks there in the past year. It was one of those right & responsible decisions that breaks your heart. While we planned to rent another place, we had not found the right one yet; thus the framed photos of my 10k finishes, past beloved dogs and Paris weekends were wrapped and packed tightly in storage crates on the outskirts of Manhattan.

From the window, I looked southeast to the American flags on the Plaza Hotel and west to the Hudson River, where golden hour was just emerging.

The little girl in the smalltown crosswalk, over six decades before, didn’t know views like the one in my scope existed, but she somehow knew she would occupy one. She didn’t know then that she would run a company, in fact several companies at one time, nor did she know she’d travel several times to most countries in the world. She didn’t know she would give and receive love, nor did she know her heart would be broken several times over.

She knew none of it with clarity. In truth it moved like a vapor that she could never quite grasp, but now it had all mostly occurred, and she understood that a special passage had been designed all along; perhaps born on the day her life had been saved.

And she realized then that all the angst and the worry and the struggle could have been boxed and sealed and sent out for dumping. She could have worked at the same frenetic pace, with objectives in mind, and never stressed over the mere excellent grades.

If only then she had known that life was not a scavenger hunt for items on a list, but a patient observation of destiny being delivered in small-dose miracles and God smacked flukes. And that the only requirement was to work diligently hard, keep eyes wide open, and to turn a discerning ear to God’s celestial channel.

And then, in the comparative timepiece of her mind, her past life shriveled to a year and her future to ten minutes or less.

And because the discrepancy was large, the answer became urgent and important.

Who are you? God asked. And who are you now? he added.

I am patient. I am kind. I am content. And all on the upswing since living a quieter life. All ordinary traits, but rarely applied with excellence, I countered in my mind.

I am, at the moment, on a contented and somewhat ordinary path. I no longer believe I have to wrestle with fate. For we plan and we store and we tend to our future, only to eventually see there is another ship coming with cargo of a whole other sort, sometimes good and sometimes not.

And when it comes my turn to talk in my sessions with God, I ask for strength, resilience and grace to receive the cargo that is delivered. I check, too, to make sure, that my little blue-eyed angel still hangs around.