The other day I asked M what she would put on a vanity license plate, if she were to be so bold. I suggested “SSSYGRL” out of respect to her pink “Sassy Girl” bumper sticker.
When it was my turn to talk about me, I said I’d choose “GDBDI,” out of respect for this here blog. “But maybe people would read it as ‘good body,'” I said.
“That’s a happy coincidence,” M said.
Coincidence? Maybe. Some might say instead that it is a Godincidence.
Regardless, I had another whateverincidence this morning on my way to my jog. It was just after 5:30, still dark, and I’d pushuped and crunched already, and labored up the stairs past our sleeping car. From within the dark fuzz of my glasses-free atheletic (ahem) attire, I thought that one of the moonlit railroad ties that border the mulched drivewayside seemed out of place, as if it had elongated, or maybe scooted downhill three feet. And it looked a lot darker.
I turned on my little LED flashlight that I generally use to ward off approaching cars or apprise myself of trail twists and turns. The little black elongation scurried away, its tail fluffed, its little white markings barely visible, restraining its olfactory punch for some other, less innocent victim.
I kept a vigilant watch on every other shadow along my route, my light on always except under streetlights.
This could have been a horrid situation, perhaps on a similar albeit very different scale as last month’s (whateverincidentally only near-) scrape with ownership of a vacant and therefore uninsurable townhouse.
See, our homeowners’ insurance was to expire on the last Saturday of the month, at a time when we had only one tentative prospective renter. Our only option appeared to be buying a special and expensive insurance policy to cover the empty house, and the application for such a policy was a daunting historical analysis of the property.
I was desperate, frantic, panicky–a jogger with bare ankles in a dark room full of rabid skunks. I didn’t fall to my knees or anything like that, but that’s not to say I didn’t then or never take Paul Simon’s “Wartime Prayers” to heart. Praying when they’re in pits of despair is just what people do, when they’re, well, desperate.
And the next day, we had a renter and therefore could purchase a landlord policy. Talk about relief!
Now, I don’t claim or disclaim any of these happenings to be (or not to be) Godincidences. Rather, I find that the strategically placed whatevers above cover that possibility without arrogantly claiming divine favors in these potentially bad situations (although those situations are totally not majorly bad, which is why I hesitate to claim divine intervention, since so many other people have it worse of with no apparent action).
That said, by most accounts, avoiding misconstruable vanity plates, smelly rodents, and the occasional financial ruin are all wonderful outcomes. What dubbs them coincidences or Godincidences or whateverincidences is inevitably in the eye of the beholder. Thus was the situation of Gideon Mack, protagonist narrator of The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson.
(Don’t read more, if you want to know nothing about the book.)
Testament is the gripping tale of a nonbelieving minister’s uninvited spiritual journey towards belief in God, not a chummy sort of God, but a bored, irrelevant, now-gone-away deity. The minister’s brush with death and friendship with the devil, who pulled him out of the waters of the Black Jaws, lead him to confess his (now no longer un-) belief and to play “no more games.” Indeed, he doesn’t play any more games, speaks and writes his truth, and is written off as mad.
Gideon finally lays all bare, and seems to treat himself as critically and with as much brutal honesty as he treats everyone else, and I blithely accepted his account as fictional truth.
Until. (And I should have known there would be an until, since M’s aunt, the person who recommended the book to me, had said that the ending was a cop out, an easy-off-the-hook for Robertson.)
Until the epilogue, when the book’s “publisher” casually notes an egregious error of fact in Gideon’s testament. The impossible oversight in Gideon’s own retelling makes the testament collapse, collapse, collapse from an intensely personal, intensely real, intensely ground shaking experience into nothing more than a glimpse into increasing mental disarray.
But even this assessment holds deceiving clarity, for that impossible error on Gideon’s part is accompanied by an acknowledgment–by the very person who corrects his error–that at least one major component of Gideon’s perceived impending disintegration was, in fact, at one time fact.
This all does leave everything up for debate, in the book. What rubs off the page into reality is the pervasive inevitability of the human everyday tendency to search for, glimpse, and even find something far beyond but perhaps only of ourselves.
Coincidence? Godincidence? Your call.
