Beseeching the mercy of God

If you're like me you don't think about God too often.

In fact, you can forget about (and far be it from me to wonder about God's chosen pronoun) Him/Her for years at a time.

Until you're in a jam. Like that time I was climbing the cliffs at the Elora Quarry and it was late autumn and the water was really cold and I was not even half-way to the top and I felt my strength ebbing away...

"Please God..."

At least that's when I remember God.

But I did make it to the top.

It was probably another twenty years or so before I called on God again.

I was driving up the Elora Road with my kids in the car, a Friday ritual we observed religiously every other weekend for years and years.

We're in my baffed out Subaru wagon, and we're driving into what looks like a nasty storm.

The farther we went the nastier the storm got.

It got so bad that just a couple miles south of Mildmay I couldn't in good conscience keep driving. The rain was coming not down, but completely sideways. You couldn't see two feet in front of you! I pulled over and parked by the side of the highway at the bottom of a hill.

I didn't pull the parking brake, and next thing I know, the same wind that's making the rain go horizontal is pushing my Subaru back up the hill.

That's around the time my son, the younger one, burst into tears.

My daughter wasn't long in following.

So what do you do in this situation? My gut instinct was to just join in the crying and hope for the best.

BUT!!... I'm the parent here!

It's up to me to show some leadership!

So we had an impromptu prayer meeting. We all joined hands and bowed our heads, and yours truly had his first chat with the Lord since that time he was stuck on the wall of the Elora Quarry.

Long story short, we made it safely home to my little shack in Mildmay, but that was the storm that poisoned the municipal water wells in Walkerton and put the Walkerton water crisis on the map.

People died because of that.


I've never actually asked God for anything since.

But I make a point of thanking God every day for the completely unwarranted good fortune that I continue to enjoy, and God willing, will enjoy for years to come.

Jesus and Jimmie and me

Can't say for sure who it was got me and Jimmie car-pooling.

Pretty sure it wasn't Jesus.

I think it was his brother-in-law Rod.

That would be the brother-in-law of Jimmie, not the brother-in-law of Jesus.

Rod had a gas station in downtown Walkerton, and he was a big fan of German Shepherd dogs. He actually collected magazines devoted to the German Shepherd dog.

I was devoted to my own German Shepherd dog, but I had not the slightest inkling that there might be magazines devoted to such devotion.

Rod's gas station used to be the Ford dealership in Walkerton. Rod's dad had let that franchise go for reasons unknown.

One day I pulled in there for gas with my beautiful German Shepherd in the back of the truck. It was around the time of the Walkerton water crisis.

Folks were dying from drinking the water.

Rod and I get to talking, and before you know it, he's got me calling up his brother-in-law Jimmie, because Jimmie runs up to Owen Sound every day and by God, that's exactly where I'm going!

That's how the homophobic redneck and the queer-friendly commie got to be car-pool buddies.

The one thing I really respected about the redneck homophobe was that he was the best car mechanic I'd ever encountered. He had parlayed his expertise into a teaching gig at one of the high schools in Owen Sound.

They'd take in an engine transplant on a Monday, do the swap by Tuesday, and by Wednesday evening the customer would be driving the car home with the new motor.

In most high school shops you're lucky to have a tire changed in that time, never mind a motor.

So me and Jimmie get to car-pooling. Turns out he hates fags and I've got half a dozen in the extended  family.

It's about an hour drive to Owen Sound so obviously we have to find other stuff to chat about.

Soon we're doing this twice a day.

Turns out there may be a couple of Sodomites in his family tree too...

But what really gets him is I used to be a welder in a shipyard. Had every welding ticket you can imagine. Eventually he asks if I mind going to his home shop to check out the welds on this trailer he's building.

A friendship is forged out of mutual respect, even though these two guys have nothing in common.

He respects my welding skills.

I respect his mechanical wizardry.

One day we're heading to Owen Sound in the dead of winter and the sun is just coming up in one of those polyglotal cloud-bespeckled skies that lets beams of winter sun poke through and it is all looking surreal and majestic and magical.

We drive in silence for a couple of minutes, clouds glowing ever brighter with the back-lighting of the morning sun... till finally Jimmie, looking at the sky, says "you don't think we're gonna see Jesus, do ya?"

Not long after that Jimmie got a transfer to a school closer to home, and that was the end of the car-pooling. But whenever I had a serious issue with an internal combustion engine, be it in a car or a boat or a snowmobile, he'd be there.

All I had to do was make the call.

Some time early last year I went to his funeral.

He was still a young man; early fifties. Didn't smoke, didn't drink. The cancer didn't differentiate.

Keep a spot there for me Jimmie. I'll be along soon enough.