Tale of a Small Miracle

 In my last few blogs, I told stories about what seem like supernormal rescues.  That occasionally an unknown agency is said to intervene in human affairs and pull off something impossible to help someone is an intriguing idea.   Coincidentally, while writing up these posts, I had an incident that looked like a supernormal rescue.  My story is not as dramatic or poetic as the previous posts, but it counts as physically unexplained, as far as I can see.  If you have a possible explanation, please share.  

On the evening of January 8^th, 2025, it was remarkably cold and the ground almost everywhere you walked on was solid ice from a snowstorm. After dinner with a good friend, I mounted the ice-covered stone stairway up to the door of my house.  I realized then that I forgot to turn the outside light on.  I was stuck in total darkness and had to grope to find the doorknob. I noticed the key wasn’t working.  Finally, after finagling, I inserted the key, but it was jammed.  I could not open the door to my house. I then walked to the front door; the key was equally inept at opening my front door. 

Why, I wondered, go rogue on me on this precise  night when the temperature was 19 degrees Fahrenheit? I looked around and saw no lights on in my neighbor houses.  How could they help anyway?  What I needed was a locksmith.  Maybe I could make an emergency call, I thought, and reached for my phone.  Then I realized I left my phone home too.

I tried again to get into my house, but the key failed to do its job, first time in many years of unfailing use.  What was I supposed to do? The best I came up with was to spend the night in my car. I looked at the door that had me locked out in the cold.  The top half of it consisted of four small windows. I decided to break the lower left-hand window, assuming I could then reach inside and open the door, and let myself in.  I then proceeded to hit that window with my elbow, four very hard, focused blows—but, to my amazement, nothing broke. But the blows shattered the inside of the glass, the surface remaining perfectly smooth. Totally frustrated, I decide, once more, to try to open the door.  I insert the key and lo! it slides right in, and the door opens!

Inside my house, I feel grateful but somewhat amazed.  It was strange the way the key did not quite fit, jammed and failed to open the door.  I had tried about ten times at least to make the key work, but always failed. The one time it worked, there was no problem at all; the key slipped perfectly in, as it always did.  Why then did it work exactly once when I desperately needed it to work?

Let’s entertain an antique myth and suppose we have a guardian angel, or, as we might say, a subliminal self, a being with a life and logic other than everyday life and logic.  Suppose we sometimes intersect with a world where the impossible sometimes miraculously becomes real.  I told the story of my key to the locksmith who came to my house the next day, adjusted the lock and provided me with two new keys.  No matter what he did, he could not get the original key that failed to work.   All I could do was conclude that maybe I do have a guardian angel. And there’s something else.  After the locksmith finished—I didn’t recognize him--I asked how much I owed him. He smiled and softly said something I took to mean he was already paid. I assumed I would later receive a bill in the mail.  I never did.