When miracles are all around us, we don't appreciate their miraculous quality
"Show us a miracle," they said in the Bible. Now we have the long-delayed dream of flying through the sky -- and people complain about food choices and legroom.
PHOENIX — The socialization of babies is one of those miracles we take for granted because it’s so commonplace, as is the very fact of all our daily lives on the surface (or just below it for miners and submariners) of a relatively small planet in a vast universe (or “very vast’ would not be an overstatement in this context).
Or, as is the miraculous development of the infant-size person from only two cells within a few months. Happens all the time, so the miraculous nature often goes unappreciated. Or even perhaps resented.
The wide-eyed little stranger observes and senses everything going on, sights, feels, smells, sounds, faces and places, to figure out a personal spot in an environment far newer to them than the moon is to us, not only because we’ve seen the moon go through its phases time and again, but also astronauts have walked, photographed and sampled its surface for us.
The legendary late financial wise man Jack Bogle wrote a number of books, weighted toward investing but also with important life lessons, such as what he learned about the necessity of checking facts when he was a young newspaper reporter, and also about finding the diamonds in the dirt at your feet. And I don’t mean the kind to cut to carat at a jeweler’s.
Speaking of miracles, I just entered a search question in my laptop about how far is it from Phoenix to Eagle Pass, Texas. (I’ll explain that query in a little bit. The answer probably isn’t what you think.) The computer instantly replied. It didn’t say there are a lot of towns in the United States, or even Texas, and it had to sort through them all. Nor did it say that if I had asked about Phoenix to Houston, it could answer faster, but Eagle Pass isn’t asked about often, so it had to do more research. Instead, it instantly told me there are about 2,560,000 results concerning Phoenix to Eagle Pass, including six ways to travel, the land miles (and kilometers), the highway miles, the routes, the current time to cover the distance, and so on and on and on. I expect that if there was a big backup on a highway for some reason, it’d tell me that.
Eighty years ago, this sort of search for information, and the rapid result, would have been unthinkable. But now it’s available to just anyone like me with a personal computer, or a friend with one. Think of what someone at, say, the White House or Pentagon has access to!
As to why I asked about Phoenix to Eagle Pass:
On February 27 in the back of my parish church I noticed a young woman holding a baby girl maybe nine months or more old. I use that figure because she wasn’t a small sleeping infant carried horizontally, but big enough to be vertical and looking around. She had a big hair bow on the front of her head, just behind her forehead, as baby girls often have if they have a lot more hair bow than hair to hold it, plus a mom to put it in place. I think it looks very sweet.
Two days later, watching a video from the small Texas airport where Donald Trump would be landing on Leap Day February 29 to visit the town of Eagle Pass, with its overwhelming problems of illegal immigration, I noticed a young woman behind a low wall, along with other onlookers behind parked vehicles apparently awaiting Trump. This young woman, too, was holding an upright baby girl with the same type of cute big hair bow just behind her forehead. I think it’s so appealing and a note of parental pride and love for the little one. This is a rather widespread practice of adorning baby girls.
I had checked the distance from Phoenix to Eagle Pass with the remote possibility in mind that the same woman I saw in Phoenix had gone to Eagle Pass. Timewise, she could have done so even by driving the more than 900 miles, although that’d be a challenge with a baby on board and having to cover nearly 500 miles a day. Or flying would be a cinch purely timewise to cover the distance, although it seems safe to say there are no direct commercial flights.
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