Divine intervention, on the road

A seriously theological discussion is taking place in the car, on the drive back to Bloomington from Chicago after Thanksgiving. It’s just me and my sisters in the car, a three-armed-power-team.

We all pray for different things. To a little girl, the stakes of losing her lunchbox is just as high as when I prayed for god to make sure Pluto’s eyes were okay, or for my Ogilvy job interview to go well. 

We talk about how we’ve prayed over the years, and to who. Both Ferret One and Ferret Two switch around specific gods, from Hindu ones to Abrahamic ones, just seeing what’s effective, who’s listening. I’m more a purist, I don’t know exactly what’s out there but I’m too awestruck to give them a name. I just spell god with a lower g letter and it/it’s pronouns. Don’t want to leave any room to gamble. 

The discussion isn’t more about if god exists, but if god listens. We agree it’s a serious thing to pray. I realized early on, probably from reading some Scripture, that if you only pray when you need something, it’s ineffective. So when I’m grateful, I tell whoever is out there that too. But that’s not enough. Whenever I do something good, particularly something selflessly hard for me, I document the feeling. See me? See me being good, being caring. And it doesn’t matter if the maxim is corrupt, as long as my action is good. All my life, I’ve been a utilitarian. I’m the one they call for the dirty work, always. 

Ferret Two is talking about her cat, Pluto’s infected eyes, the haunting image of which will forever be razor burned into my memory in Technicolor, when the object appears in front of us. The darkness had fallen over the empty cornfields a while ago and the highway was littered with the neon pinpricks of car headlights. 

My eyes widen, and I can’t hear it coming out of my mouth, but I swear I’m screaming my sister’s name. 

An unknown distance in front of us, close enough to show clearly, one of the cars has spun around, belting out a golden shower of sparks, with another car bouncing back off, smoking thick gray. We zoom closer, spinning through the night at over 70mph, and Ferret Two, in a sheer stroke of what we call Nascar driving, swerves around the nose of the red car that’s perpendicular to us, tires screeching, mouths screaming. 

“Ferret One!” 

The loss of connection to reality in a situation like that is truly extraordinary. I knew something bad was happening, but also there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The steering wheel spins so hard our bodies are thrown to the left. I could swear the two right wheels left the ground for a second. The two cars in the crash flash by us in a stream of smoke and fire and the highway is clear again. Ferret One is also screaming, as me and Ferret Two turn around to look at the wreck we so narrowly avoided.

“Holy shit! I can’t believe you dodged that!” 

We’re in silent shock until Ferret One exits out of the next mouth coming up on the right side and we sit there on the side of the road, reeling, chattering, shaking to our core. Ferret Two calls 911 and reports the crash. 

“That was divine intervention for sure,” we declare over and over again. A clearer signal could not have been had. Later on, one of our friends jokes that the highway is the last place to be debating the existence of god. 

When Ferret One has collected her nerves, we get back on the highway and a police car immediately pulls us over, flashing red and blue. He gives her FOUR warnings in lieu of a ticket: nine month expired license plate, speeding, left headlight missing and no registration (she’d left it at home). We’d never heard of anybody getting four entire warnings and no ticket before.