You rarely come across a truly miracle—so much is called imagination or explained as some twist of quarks or physics, but here’s one that happened to me just a few days ago.
I was on the Chunnel train traveling from London to Paris. I was underground, in fact deep underneath the English Channel, with tons of fathoms of water overhead, pressing on the tunnel itself (itself a sort of miracle, to my mind, and bless those engineers and workers who built it in such a way it doesn’t collapse under the weight of water, but that’s another story).
My cellphone had been dead for days, because though I had remembered to pack the charger, I had rather stupidly forgotten that I also needed the wall attachment that allows an American apparatus to plug into a European socket, and being too busy to buy an attachment, my cellphone’s power had slowly faded and died out. (I thought I might buy one when I got to Paris, and meanwhile, the phone was, after two days, quite black and dead.)
Suddenly it rang. I looked up from my book in astonishment, picked it up. “Hello?” The call was from my cousin’s friend, who informed me that she had to go out and would leave the key under a rock in a flowerpot in the courtyard . She gave me the door code and directions to get inside.
Then the phone again went dead. But when I arrived at eleven at night on a dark and empty street, I could thankfully find my way into the apartment. Blessing the angels that watch over us
Oh god! How foolish it all sounds in light of the bombing last night in Paris, the 160 people killed, the wounded, the horror–the horror–the senseless murders and lives ripped to pieces and the fear rippling through the air. Oh god, send angels to us in our helplessness. Write to me. Write to me. We need miracles now.