Jesus Sightings: People See the Lord's Face in Unusual Places

I don’t know about you, but when I’m standing in line at Walmart or Kroger, waiting to check out behind someone who’s bought half the store, I pass time by glancing through the tabloids. My favorite, since I’m not into celebrities, is The National Inquirer, which provides me with really important newsworthy events that I might otherwise miss, for instance, not only alien abductions but Jesus sightings. Yes, that’s right, Jesus sightings.

Google Images 2019

Seriously, I kid you not. People actually see Jesus, or at least his image, in the most interesting places. Take Dave Simmons, for instance. He saw the face of Jesus on a restroom stall door. It’s true. I mean, would The National Inquirer lie? In this case, no, since this particular occurrence was also reported by sources you might consider more reputable, including The Huffington Post and The Daily Mail in the U.K.

Apparently, Dave was shopping for curtain rods in an IKEA shop in Braehead, Glasgow and needed to make a stop in the restroom, where, lo and behold, he spied Jesus’s face staring back at him from the stall door. I kid you not, and Simmons claims it’s true. He said, “I went to the toilet, and there it was on the main door when I put my hand out.  I said, 'Oh, my word, it’s Jesus.'” Moreover, to squelch any doubt, Dave provided a photo he took with his Smartphone, as incontestable proof of his “Jesus sighting.” Of course, some folks say the face looks more like that of one of the tree people from Lord of the Rings than it does Jesus, but I guess that’s open to debate, and perhaps depends upon the lighting and the angle you’re standing at while looking at the face.  

Anyway, Dave isn’t alone. Through the years, there have been other sightings of the Lord’s face, most famously perhaps in a taco, a piece of toast, a frying pan, and a Walmart receipt. Plus, although it didn’t make any headlines, probably because it happened well before Smartphones or even the Internet had been invented, there was a Jesus sighting in a kudzu field in Fairburn, Georgia back when I was a little girl. It was the talk of the town for years.

Granted, Fairburn was a small town back then, so any event the least bit out of the ordinary would be rehashed for years to come, but still, this event was rather noteworthy. See, my Uncle Louie, who liked his liquor perhaps a bit too much, was relaxing in a kudzu field (Folks said he tripped, hit his head, passed out for a spell, and finally came to) when he glimpsed Jesus staring down at him from a kudzu-covered tree. Well, Uncle Louie jumped up, shouted a few “Praise-the-Lords,” and staggered home to tell folks what he’d seen there in that kudzu field. Not that anyone believed him, but that Jesus sighting, while not traumatic enough to make my uncle give up drinking, did lead to his being baptized for the third time, or maybe it was the fourth; I forget.  

Images from Google Images 2019

How to Tell When You're Getting Old

Google Images: Photographer Unknown

How do you tell when you’re no longer a spring chicken or, in other words, getting old? I have given this question the serious consideration it deserves and, in the process, which, by the way, was quite exhausting, devised a checklist by which you can measure exactly where you rank on the “chicken” scale. 

You’re no longer a spring chicken but instead an old hen or rooster when you notice certain phenomena beginning to occur; for example:

1.       You receive a compliment that is either preceded or followed by a qualifier related to age, for example:

1. You’re in really great shape for your age.
2. I hope I look as good as you when I’m your age.
3. When I’m your age, I hope I have half as much energy as you.

2. Waiters, waitresses, store clerks, and other total strangers call you “Sweetie" or "Dear."
3. People tell you that you’re “adorable” and “cute” instead of “beautiful,” “handsome,” or “sexy.”
4. Men in their mid-to-late 30’s and early 40’s ask, “How’re you today, young lady?” (Or “young man,” as the case may be)
5. The skin on your upper arms and thighs reminds you of a Bloodhound. Come to think of it, so does your face.
6. Your eyebrows disappear.
7. If you’re a woman, you no longer have to shave under your arms but find your legs need shaving twice a day.
8. If you’re a man, you have to keep trimming these black, wiry hairs not only from your nostrils but also your ears. 
9. If you’re a woman, a really stiff hair begins sprouting from your chin, and although you pluck it out or shave it off, it keeps coming back, sometimes overnight.
10. If you’re a man, your chest hair becomes virtually nonexistent.
11. Even though you’re wearing bifocals, you cannot read the fine print.
12. You clean things solely by touch.
13. You apply polish to your toenails by dabbing in their general direction and hoping at least some hits the mark.
14. You regularly receive advertisements in the mail for hearing aids, Scooter chairs, walk-in tubs, assisted-living homes, and funeral plots.
15. You wake up in the morning and realize everything hurts, but when you go to bed at night, it still hurts.
16. You look in the mirror and see your mother or father or maybe crazy Uncle Harry or eccentric Aunt Fran staring back at you.
17. You have to write down the number of the lane where you park your car at the mall or else you’ll never find it again.
18. You have to think for a while when someone asks your spouse’s age, the date of your wedding anniversary, or your children’s birthdays.
19. You can’t remember your neighbors’ first names, let alone their last names.
20. You have almost as many crowns in your mouth as real teeth, that is, if you’re lucky enough to still possess any real teeth.
21. Your little toenail is merely a nub or else has disappeared entirely.
22. You see your scalp in places where you used to see hair.
23. At night before retiring, you put the cat in the refrigerator and the left-over tuna casserole outside on the doorstep.
24. When you read this list, you recognize yourself in at least half of the items.

I Survived a Trip to Dante's 10th Circle

Google Images, 2015

You’ve probably read The Divine Comedy. If not, I’m sure you at least heard about it in passing during some college lit course, that is, if you were paying attention to the professor instead of eying the curvy blonde coed or muscle-bound jock in the next row.

In case, however, you have forgotten the book entirely, let me provide a brief refresher:

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in May 1265. He finished The Divine Comedy shortly before his death in 1321. and the poem is divided into three parts: Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). “The three divisions of the poem correspond in number to the Trinity, and nine, the square of three, figures centrally in the interior structure of each of the three divisions” (Norton, 1987, p. 753). Finally, in the Inferno, there are nine different circles, most of which are subdivided, and progression is from the least to the greatest type of evil. So that means after you die, the more serious your offenses were while you were alive, the lower the circle to which you are condemned. 

Got that? Okay, then here’s the point I want to make: Although Dante came up with some pretty chilling ideas for punishments in his various circles of hell, which are described in the Inferno, I think if he were living in the here-and-now, Dante Alighieri would definitely include a trip to Walmart, possibly making it the lowest circle and, therefore, the most extreme form of punishment to which any poor, tormented soul could ever be subjected. 

“Why?” you ask. 

Well, in return I ask, "Have you ever been to Walmart?"  Then again, I guess that’s a foolish question, for who among us has not been to Walmart?

Google Images, 2015

Anyway, I shop at the local Super Walmart here in Lafayette. You know, it's one of those stores that's the size of a small city. In fact, come to think of it, we have three Super Walmart stores in town, since Walmart is like kudzu (Georgia’s state flower, or at least it should be), which begins as a solitary patch of green and, before you can say, “Jack squat,” has covered not only the surrounding fields and woodlands, but your house, your car, your dog, and even you if you didn’t have since enough to run when you first glimpsed it. By the way, my daddy called kudzu the "mile a minute vine," and for obvious reasons. 

I shop at Walmart because the prices are lower than at other stores and I’m not rich; but whenever I walk through that entranceway and the Greeter says, "Welcome to Walmart," I cringe because I feel like I am journeying into the deepest, darkest bowels of hell. There are wall-to-wall shoppers, half of them yakking, texting, or surfing on their cell-phones; screaming kids with runny noses and germy hands (That’s why I use a sanitizer to wipe down that nasty buggy); acres of under-stocked shelves; a noise level several thousand decimals above a 747 on takeoff; people blocking the aisles with those aggravating motorized shopping go-carts; employees who don’t know where anything is, say they'll find someone who knows, and then leave you waiting for help that never appears; and only three out of two dozen checkout lines open for business, which means the shoppers who are waiting to checkout are lined up halfway across the store.  

Each time I make a trip to Walmart and finally stumble out dazed into the Louisiana sun, I feel like I have just run a gauntlet. I am exhausted. My feet hurt. My head aches. My legs are weak. My stomach is churning. I am also deaf and so frazzled that I’m on the verge of a meltdown. And that’s why I think that the employees who stand there at the doorway to welcome you as you enter then check your receipt as you exit (They do this to make certain you aren’t walking out with something you didn’t actually buy), should hand you a button that says, “I survived Hell-Mart." It’s also why I think Dante Alighieri would include a trip to Walmart in the Inferno if he were writing The Divine Comedy today. 

Source:  

Norton’s Anthology of World Literature (1987) New York: Simon & Shuster

Bug Bites with Big Papa C

Note: This is my darling hubby Chet's "rebuttal" to my blog entry about waiting for hurricane Gustav.

Preparing for Gustav: The Real Story

Preparing for Gustav by Chet Rzadkiewicz

My darling wife Carol’s “Waiting for Gustav,” though amusing, contains so many factual errors, overstatements, and outright fabrications that I feel compelled to set the record straight. I have, however, changed a couple of names to protect, as they say, the innocent.

The story begins two days before Gustav roared into Louisiana on Labor Day at around 9:30 a.m. (CDT) near the village of Cocodrie in Terrebonne Parish. Except for the fact that a hurricane was bearing down on us, it was a rather typical Saturday for Carol and me.

I rose from bed at 10 a.m.—not 11:30 a.m., as Carol wrote—admittedly rather late in the morning, but for a good reason. Carol, you see, had kept me up until nearly 5 a.m. “Why?” you ask. I’m a gentleman, so I won’t explain but will simply leave the matter, dear reader, to your imagination.

Still groggy, I put on gym shorts and went to the kitchen where I poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed the metro section of The Advocate—yes, Carol’s paper of choice, but surely not mine—not the sports section—as Carol claimed—which generally "sucks moose," as my sister Pat likes to say, and headed for the living room. Once settled on the sofa, I turned on the TV, not to ESPN—as Carol asserted—but to the Weather Channel to hear the latest dope on, you guessed it, Hurricane Gustav.

I‘d opened the paper to the editorial page and taken perhaps two sips of coffee when my darling stormed into the room. She was wearing sandals and a faded blue bathrobe—her “writing robe,” she calls it—fastened at the waist by a belt I’d fashioned from a stretched-out jockstrap. An unlit cigarette dangled beneath her upper lip, and she was holding a beer mug half-filled with white wine.

Hmm. Was it her first, second, or, even third drink of the morning?

Please don’t get me wrong. Normally Carol doesn’t have her first glass of wine until much later in the day, and rarely before three in the afternoon. But she was in her pre-hurricane mode, meaning she was flipping out.

I put on the captions and muted the TV.

Carol removed the cigarette from her lips and glared at me.

Cranking up for a tirade?  I braced myself.

“Well, are you just going to sit there all day?” she said. “That hurricane is coming. We have to get ready for it, now. Gus and Dolly will be here any minute. They’re bringing that generator Gus told us about.”

Good old Gus, coming through with a generator, as promised. He and his wife Dolly, each over 60, are our neighbors and close friends.

C’mon, dress up and get to work,” she said.

“We have forty-eight hours, give or take,” I said. It was the first thing the dude on the Weather Channel said after I’d turned it on.

“How do you know when it’s coming? So now you’re a psychic.”

“Be cool. I have a plan.”

“A plan? Now I know we’re in deep doo-doo.”

Bug, our kitten, poked his furry, gray little head out from under the sofa as if to see what the fuss was about. When he spotted Carol, he yowled then shot back under the sofa.

“Look, darling,” I said. “As soon as I eat something, I’m going out for sandbags and gas. You just hang around here and do whatever needs to be done.” We always clean the house together on Saturdays. But with a hurricane on the way and much else to do, we’d cut some corners with the housecleaning today.

I didn’t want to freak her out even more by telling her what the weather guy had just said, that Gustav might drop nearly a foot of rain on Lafayette, making it likely that the waterline would reach our front and back doors. So, sandbags were a priority. Of course, going over to the sand distribution center and filling the bags would take a while, and I knew I’d have to spend a good bit of time searching for gas, since it quickly becomes scarce before a hurricane. We needed it for our two vehicles—we hadn’t yet decided which one we’d take if heavy rain from Gustav forced us to evacuate—and the generator.

Just then, Beanbag, or Beanie for short, our basset hound, began barking, indicating that Gus and Dolly had arrived. They were on our patio, which rests under a metal canopy and is surrounded by a three-and-a-half foot high wooden fence. Gus was positioning the generator while Dolly tried to shoo Beanie off the patio.

I walked out of our French doors onto the patio and exchanged pleasantries with them. I also thanked Gus for bringing the generator, which he had filched from a neighbor whom Gustav had frightened into evacuating. (The neighbor would return to town sooner than expected, a major complication. but presently irrelevant.)

But where was my darling? I guessed she’d gone to reload. Seventeen years of marriage and she still hid her wine bottles, a carry-over from her first marriage. Her ex was a teetotaler who had strongly disapproved of Carol’s drinking.

Soon Carol came out on the patio, a full mug in hand, and I went back inside for I had a lot to do.

After putting on my work clothes, I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich, which I ate in the den in front of the French doors. From there, I could see nearly the entire patio and much of the back yard.

Gus turned over the patio chairs while Dolly gathered wind chimes and yard tools—anything that could become a dangerous projectile in a hurricane—and brought them to the patio. Carol, waving her mug, appeared to be supervising.

I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying because Beanie, who was running from one end of the patio fence to the other, continued to bark. Several years ago, Beanie had accompanied Carol and Bogart—our recently departed spirit dog—home from a walk. We’d searched hither and yonder for Beanie’s owner or owners. We’d placed signs in key locations, called local veterinarians, checked lost-and-founds, to no avail. By the time our search ended, we’d concluded that Beanie had been abandoned, and we had a good idea why: he barked constantly, a loud, obnoxious bark; he dug holes; and, even by dog standards, he was stubborn, selfish, and vulgar. Yet, aside from these shortcomings, he was a fine pet.

But I’ve digressed.

Soon Dolly began stacking everything she’d gathered against the right side of the patio fence. Meanwhile, Gus concentrated on the largest objects that needed attention. The first was the swing in the back of the yard. Gus unhitched the seat and set it down on the ground. Then he turned the frame over on the seat. That way, the swing would stay put when the strong hurricane gusts blew through the yard. Then he headed for Beanie’s doghouse.

I glanced over at Carol. She had put her mug down on the plastic chest that contained Beanie’s bones and dry food. Her attention seemed focused on a rake that Dolly had leaned up against the fence. When she reached for it, she stepped on the prongs. Thwack. She recoiled from the blow to her forehead and muttered something I couldn’t make out but could probably guess. Then she repositioned herself and reached out again, but stumbled forward, once again stepping on the prongs. Thwack. This time she rubbed her forehead, scrunched up her face, and extended her hands, aiming for the rake.

It made me think of Charlie Chaplin and I Love Lucy. It also demonstrated that my darling had crossed the line between tipsy and loaded. That mug on the chest was likely her third or fourth, I figured.

Before Carol could complete that third try for the rake, Dolly snatched the malevolent tool and set it down in the corner with the other yard tools. Then she pointed at Gus, who was dragging the doghouse—a large, round thing—to the patio.

The purpose of the patio fence, a recent addition to our backyard, is to keep Beanie, who can be quite destructive, off the patio. But there was no way we were going to leave him out in the open, protected only by his doghouse, in a hurricane.

The problem was fitting the doghouse through the gate, something no one had tried until now.

Gus moved it into position while Carol held the gate open. He pushed, but the darn thing was stuck between the gateposts. He looked over at Carol and said something. When he shoved again, Carol, bent over and, clutching the opening of the doghouse, heaved. But it didn’t budge.

Carol readied herself for another try, and it was at that moment that I noticed something. Her belt had come undone. I wondered what, if anything, she had on underneath her robe.

This time, Carol yanked hard, and most of the doghouse slid through the posts. But the effort threw her back and her robe burst open. And there it was, the answer to my question.

Gus’s jaw dropped and he stared, but only for an instant. Then he spun around and began shouting.

I could almost make out what he was shouting because Beanie had finally quit barking. I moved closer to the French doors and craned to get a better view of Gus, and I saw why. Beanie had clasped his front paws around one of Gus’s legs and was doing what untrained, uncouth male dogs are wont to do.

Hell if I could remember why Carol and I had never gotten the critter neutered.

Dolly, who had disappeared from my field of vision, now reappeared, rambling past Carol. Then she clambered over the doghouse and lunged at Beanie.

Suddenly, I sensed a presence and glanced down. Bug was sitting beside me, staring at the patio.

I checked my watch. Nearly one o’clock. It was getting late. Since everything appeared to be pretty much under control, I decided it was time to set off on my errands.

I’ll spare you most of the details of the rest of my afternoon. Suffice it to say, I spent much time driving around, searching for a gas station that was still selling regular unleaded fuel.

The most difficult part of my afternoon occurred during my stop at the sand distribution center in Youngsville. After a twenty-minute wait, I was allowed to back my vehicle into a spot across from a humongous mound of sand.  The guy in charge said I could fill as many as twenty bags, which I did in the hot sun with the temperature at 94º. I estimated that each bag weighed between 35 and 40 pounds.

After I loaded them into the bed of Carol’s Tundra, unlike most everyone else, I followed the directions I was given and moved the vehicle away from the mound without having fastened the bags. I soon found a shaded area where I stopped and performed that chore, which took a lot longer than I’d expected.   

When I returned home, I immediately unloaded the sandbags from the truck and positioned them around the front and back doors as well as the door to our utility room under the carport. It was going on six when I finally went inside.

I walked into the den where Carol was sleeping on the sofa, her favorite resting spot.

I moved quietly and looked around. I saw that she had dusted, vacuumed, mopped, and cleaned the bathrooms. Heck, she had even taken out the garbage.

But there was more. In the dining room, on Carol’s souvenir bench from Underground Atlanta, I saw all the items she’d collected since the last hurricane: battery-driven fans, lights, and lanterns. Alongside them was a medium-sized box containing batteries of various sizes.

All that, and then there was the generator.

We had never been so well prepared for a hurricane. I was almost tempted to say, “Okay, Hurricane Gustav, bring it on!”

But that would have been stupid because a hurricane is a lot like a war inasmuch as you can’t predict the damage it’s going to cause. And a truly rational person would never desire either one.

Thinking about such things, I recalled something I’d overheard that afternoon while waiting to pre-pay at the gas station where I’d filled up the Tundra and two five-gallon cans for the generator. A young woman told another that she had been praying that Gustav would strike somewhere else along the Gulf Coast, Mississippi or Alabama, for example. That struck me as wrongheaded, not to mention immoral, because what she had actually done was ask God to inflict nature’s fury and destruction on the people of another area. I would like, however, to give that young woman the benefit of the doubt and assume that she simply hadn’t thought things through.

Nope. If a hurricane was coming our way, it was meant to be, and we had to deal with it as best we could.

I crept back into the den. A big toe stuck out from under the afghan that covered Carol, and Bug, perched on an armrest, swatted half-heartedly at the toe whenever it twitched.

Carol’s mouth was open, emitting a soft but steady snore. Nevertheless, she looked rather angelic. Over the years, she’d added a wrinkle or two, but she was still my bride, and I loved her more than ever.

© 2008 Chet Rzadkiewicz

Chet Rzadkiewicz

A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dr. Chester M. Rzadkiewicz has been affiliated with the History and Geography Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette since 1995. In 1996, he was awarded the Southwestern Historical Association’s Walter Craddock Prize for Best Paper in European/Asian History for "N.A. Polevoi and the Moscow Telegraph: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Early Russian Liberalism.” He is also the author of, among other works, “N.A. Polevoi's Moscow Telegraph and the Journal Wars of 1825-1834," which was published in Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Deborah Martinsen, ed.; 1998; Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64-87). Currently, however, Dr. Rzadkiewicz is working on an historical account of Moscow Telegraph, an early 19^th century Russian journal, as well as a sociological and historical study, The Higher Immorality: C. Wright Mills, American Ideology, and the Cold War, in addition to a novel, Red Garters, about the impact of gossip on lives in Small Town, America.