99 Stories of God (5 page)

I was in jail for shoplifting. It was so stupid. Really, I must have wanted to get caught and I was. It was a ring.

But the point of my story is that there was a woman in my cell. She was there before I got there. I was afraid she’d been arrested for something heinous.

Are you acquainted with the Bible? she asked me.

If I had had something to pull over my head like a hoodie and be concealed I would have, but I didn’t.

I know the Lord’s Prayer, I said.

What about the Book of Q? she asked.

There is no Book of Q, I said.

Vanity, vanity, she said. All is vanity.

Oh yes, I said. That’s Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes just means one who assembles. Qoheleth was the assembler. So it is the Book of Q. Most modern scholars use the untranslated Hebrew name of Qoheleth, who was the writer. I bet you think
vanity
means pride or conceit, I would bet that.

Yes, I said. Sure.

In the original the word means “breath,” the merest breath, vapor, something utterly insubstantial and transient. Some translators even suggest the word means futility or absurdity.

Yes, yes. I don’t know, I said.

The Book of Q invites us to contemplate the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life and the inexorability of death.

Help, help, help, I thought. Please.

She stopped talking for a few moments. But still nobody came. Then she said,
Chrysalis
is the same as
pupa,
but the one word is so much more lovely and promising, wouldn’t you say?

Then she seemed to fall asleep and said nothing further. When someone finally did arrive, it was her they came for. They let her go first.

The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg wrote a book called
Heaven and Hell
in which he describes the afterlife.

After dropping the physical body, souls transit into an intermediate realm where they meet dead friends and relatives.

Following a period of self-examination, they are compelled to go to a particular afterlife world—either a “heaven” or a “hell.”

Hell is unpleasant.

Heaven is more pleasant.

In heaven as well as hell, people work, play, get married, and even indulge in war and crime. Both realms also have social structures and government.

One may progress through various levels of heaven or hell, with the exception that one is never able to leave heaven or hell.

They had been married for thirty-five years.

When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word
pantomnesia
,
he the term
déjà vu
.

She argued that
pantomnesia
has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”—
panto
—and “mind” or “memory”—
mnesia
—and therefore is a more technically accurate term.

He suggested that she was a snob.

She said that
déjà vu
simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar.

He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.

A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree.

The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road.

In 1994, in Beverly Hills, California, a former football star, O. J. Simpson, was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a luckless young man who had gone to her house to return a pair of sunglasses she had left at a restaurant. The murders were particularly brutal. The woman’s throat was cut from ear to ear, resulting in partial decapitation. The young waiter, Ronald Goldman, also had his throat severed.

During the course of the trial, a molecular biologist and director of the nation’s largest DNA-testing firm, Dr. Robin Cotton, testified that the blood found near the victims could have come from only one person in 170 million people. That blood matched O. J. Simpson’s blood.

Further, blood found on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom was consistent with that of only one person out of 6.8 billion— more people than there were on earth at the time—and that blood matched the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson.

O. J. Simpson was, nonetheless, found not guilty and was acquitted of murder.

Courtroom analysts have concluded that most jurors find DNA analysis “boring.”

Ted Kaczynski, who sent a number of letter bombs through the mail to individuals he believed were harming the environment through technology, hubris, and greed, was arrested shortly after two major newspapers in the United States, the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times,
agreed to publish his ten-thousand-word manifesto in their pages. Kaczynski, in his brief career, killed three individuals and maimed a few more with his bombs. He is now serving what is described as
several
life sentences at a maximum-security federal penitentiary.

Recently, some of his personal items were auctioned off by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the proceeds of which would go to the victims’ families, who had no intention of ever forgiving Ted Kaczynski. It must be said that Ted Kaczynski did not ask for their forgiveness.

Some of the items offered were the notorious hooded sweatshirt he often wore, a number of tools, including a wrench, and two Smith Corona portable typewriters, one of which he had used to type the manifesto. The FBI would not verify the authenticity of the other typewriter. In other words, they could not unquestionably state that Kaczynski had written anything of note upon it. Nevertheless, the winning bid for this other Smith Corona was well over eleven thousand dollars.

An employee at AJ’s Fine Foods, 2805 E. Skyline Drive, said two females had approached the store’s outside Christmas display area. The younger one grabbed two plastic lambs from a Nativity scene, and both women fled.

Law enforcement was able to obtain an address using the vehicle’s license plate number; however, the address did not actually exist.

A nursing home is not like one of those exclusive institutions like a Mountain Oyster Club or a Wharf Rat Club, where it’s only members (and only men) and where accomplished and important people dress down and pretend to be ordinary fellows.

Of course not, might be your response.

A nursing home is more progressive. Both men and women are represented, some of whom even fall in love of a sort. Formerly very important people mingle with former homemakers and mechanics.

They tend not to talk about their previous lives, neither the little hens nor the senators, because it does not matter now.

Whereas members of the elite and transitory clubs
on the outside
of the door, which will prove to be very much unlocked, are only pretending to be modest.

One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable.

We can only know what God is not, not what God is.

We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.

Dr. Lucas Mix and his wife were driving in their car outside Laramie, Wyoming. The next thing they knew was that they were in the wilds of Mexico, thousands of miles away, although only twenty-four hours had passed. They had no idea how they had come to be there.

Of course, the usual questions arose: Who are we? What have we become? Wherein and why have we been cast? Whereto are we hastening? From what have we been freed?

The only clue was that their car was scorched on the outside.

South Korean scientists say they have engineered four dogs to glow red, using cloning techniques.

The four, all named Ruppy—a combination of “ruby” and “puppy”—look like typical canines by daylight. But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and their nails and abdomens, which have thin skin, look red even to the naked eye.

Professor Lee Byeong-chun of Seoul National University, the leader of the research team, called them the world’s first transgenic dogs carrying fluorescent genes, an achievement that goes beyond just their glowing.

“What’s significant in this work is not the dogs possessing red colors but that we planted genes into them,” the professor said.

Some parents of children with cognitive disabilities are seeking out cosmetic procedures to make the children appear younger than they are.

Parents who inquire about surgery want either to align the child’s visual appearance with his or her mental capacity or intellectual age, or erase a “delayed” appearance altogether, such as altering the face of a child with Down syndrome.

In one case a few years ago, a child named Ashley, with profound cognitive disabilities, had her sex organs removed and went through other procedures to prevent puberty and growth. Her parents did not wish to institutionalize her but felt they could not care for her at home if she grew to adult size.

Jack and Pat were in their seventies now and had no pets, although they had had several in the course of their days, mostly dogs, but once a bird as well. Their most remarkable dog, Jack and Pat said, was
a pit bull, Peggy. She was the sweetest, smartest dog, they said.

This was long ago. The boy they adopted as an infant is in his thirties now. When they brought the baby home, Peggy was curious about him and protective and adoring in a way Jack and Pat increasingly found to be alarming. Jack, a physician, decided that for everyone’s peace of mind, Peggy should be
put down
. From the pharmacy at the hospital where he worked, he procured a large amount of expired valium. The plan was to mix the crushed valium with a pound of ground sirloin. Ground sirloin was Peggy’s favorite food. When she was a very good dog she received it, and Peggy knew that when it was presented to her she had been a very good dog or for one reason or another had pleased Jack and Pat.

Jack and Pat discussed at length the sad necessity of
putting Peggy down
for everyone’s peace of mind, but when the moment came, Jack could not bring himself to lace the ground sirloin with the crushed valium. Nor could Pat perform this act. Peggy was a good dog, she would not harm their little child.

Relieved to have made their decision, Jack and Pat filled Peggy’s bowl with the untainted meat and placed it before her.

But Peggy would not touch it. She gazed at it, then gazed at Jack and Pat and left the room.

Sometimes, for years, when Jack and Pat had friends over for dinner or cards, they would put a bowl of ground sirloin before Peggy and she would never touch it. Of course the story was told again and again. The guests were always amazed.

CANCER DOESN’T STOP HUNTER, 86, WHO KILLS MOOSE FROM HIS RECLINER

“My son and I cried because it was a miracle … there’s no other explanation.”

The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.

I do, He said. It explains so much.

What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.

On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.

We were in the bar after golf and this acquaintance of mine says, “My gardener said the damnedest thing to me today.”

And I say, “Yeah, well, gardeners.”

“He’s from Czechoslovakia. He was somehow involved in the shooting of all those giraffes back in the seventies. Forty-nine giraffes. It was the largest captive herd in the world at the time.”

What can you possibly say in response to something like that? I said nothing.