99 Stories of God

63. Apropos of Nothing

The Vandewaters were extremely beachy and boaty. Their den walls were lined with the tops of smashed champagne bottles mounted on plaques of teak denoting the many wooden sailboats they’d built to specification and launched.

Dick Vandewater was commodore of our little yacht club as well as being a deacon in the church. He was quite the sailor and preferred to make his trips solo. He claimed that once at night he saw God amidst the dark waters and God spoke to him but he couldn’t remember what he said.

We were at a garden party last week — it’s been a fantastic year for the hydrangeas — and there was an intense young man from the Merchant Marine Academy there. Dick was having a good time, recounting his adventures, and the boy said,

What is it you wish to say, perhaps you wish to tell us something.

Dick exclaimed, I remember! and at that very moment he was felled by a massive stroke, a shrimp on a toothpick still between his fingers.

His wife said that on two other occasions, Dick had recalled what this apparition had said but had been interrupted, once by a ringing telephone and once by a terrific crash in the streets, after which he could no longer remember. Of course these interruptions were not at all meaningful, not like this massive stroke, which proved for poor Dick to be fatal.