Taxes, Movies, Baby Showers, Strokes and God, Oh My!

I didn’t go to the Movie and Lunch Club this week. Normally I’ll go even if the chosen movie isn’t one that particularly excited me, but this time they picked Miracles from Heaven, a faith-based film that from all accounts is preaching to a choir of true believers. The trailer alone was enough for me to know I would hate the ‘lunch talk’ that would come after. Having grown up in The City of Churches that over the decades turned into The City of Parochial Colleges I can go along to get along with the best of them but I draw a line at paying to see a movie that, as one reviewer put it, has only one objective---to reiterate “that God exist, heaven is real and miracles happen.” Yes, I know the film is supposed to be based on a true story of a little girl with a mysterious disease who falls out of a tree and gets cured and in true Heaven is Real fashion she gets to sit in the lap of the Lord along the way. Call me cynical but I have a real aversion with the personification of God especially coming out of the mouths of children and along with that aversion comes a huge fear of voicing that in public. The little girl inside me who was rejected on the playground because my parents didn’t “have a church” is still there worrying that all threads of friendship will get cut if I let my non-Christian leanings show. I did find a bit of cuteness in one of the movie reviews, though, that made me smile: “The part of God was played by a fluffy cloud.”  

Thursday was a lead-gray day. The sky was working itself up to a good cry that never materialized except for just enough sprinkles to make it annoying and necessary to have the intermitting wipers on as I drove the expressway down to see my CPA. Income tax season is so much fun. I got behind an old foggy maybe a year or two younger than me who was driving 52 miles an hour. It’s dangerous to be so pokey! At the first opportunity I sped around him vowing I’ll never drive slower than my age on that highway. I could find someone closer to home to do my taxes but I have a history with my guy. Years ago, before Don and I started going to the man, Don got audited by the IRS resulting in him getting an unexpected tax refund of $7,000. Getting a big refund after an audit was a neon clue that it was time to change tax preparers.  

I sat down across from the CPA and the conversation got around to politics, Don and how much he would been engaged in the circus going on. “I miss that guy,” he said. “He used to stop sometimes when he was finished plowing snow and we’d give him a cup a cocoa.” Besides that nugget from the past the large jar of Tootsie Roll Pops sitting on the desk also churned up memories. Don would open the jar and search for a two chocolates before he'd sit down and in my silly mind that meant I couldn’t have a Tootsie Roll Pop. One per customer and he ate mine! Yes, I’m the kind of person who always buys something when I stop at a gas station to pee. Fair is fair. But I digress… When my taxes were done, the CPA made a remark about life changing and only God knows what comes next and I blurted out, “And sometimes even He doesn’t know.” Crap! Not only did I personify the God Power I gave my CPA the impression that this widow was having a crisis of faith. 

The crème-de-crème of my week was Saturday when I went to a baby shower where all of the women in my family and our five new babies---my great-great nieces and nephews---were in attendance. I’d say I was in seventh heaven but after what I wrote above I probably should come up with another platitude. Let’s just say I had a good time. There’s no one else in my or Don’s family left to have their first baby so this was likely the last baby shower I’ll ever attend, a bittersweet acknowledgement if there ever was one. 

The mother of the last baby born, who was the guest of honor, had a difficult birth and emergency surgery all in the same day. What little miracles babies are! Love plants the seed and a baby grows in mommy’s tummy; I read that in a where-did-I-come-from book. The guest of honor is also the most religious person in the family. She and her husband met at a Christian college and both work in a Christian conference center.  She’s a lovely young woman but every time I see her I’m reminded that Don had his massive stroke the day she got baptized. That week prior to the ceremony Don was trying every which way to get out of going so when we got to the church and he didn’t want to go inside---complaining of a headache---I really didn’t believe him. Still, I left him in the truck and went inside while he was out in the parking lot getting pulled into a ‘black hole’ that would change the trajectory of our lives. There's a lot of what-ifs attached to that day and even an on-going joke (?) made about the stroke being a punishment from God for not going inside the church. But the only what-if that counts now is the what-if we’d never met in the first place…what a dull life I would have led without Don. ©