Innehållsförteckning för February - March 2016 från Mysterious Ways

Several years ago, I tired of the bachelor lifestyle in New York City. My closest friends were pairing off, getting married. I wondered if I was destined to stay single. My roommate urged me to meet a friend of his girlfriend. But I’d lost faith in “the setup.” I doubted the abilities of any matchmaker, human or computer. My aunt once gave me the number of a girl who would be “just perfect.” I gathered my courage and made the call. “I’ve been dating a guy for two years,” the girl said. “It’s pretty serious.” Online dating seemed fruitless too. One friend had gone on two dates a week for some time. He’d spent a fortune on dinners, but his heart still hungered. It was God himself who brought my…

Dad’s first New York Mets game since Grandpa died and we were stuck in the security line at Citi Field. The game had already started! The line to the far right of us was the only one that seemed to be moving. We gave up our spots and headed for the other line. What choice did we have? At this rate, we’d miss the entire first inning. If only I hadn’t wasted so much time studying the engraved bricks that lined the plaza outside the stadium’s main entrance. But I’d been on a mission. Searching for Grandpa. He’d been the Mets’ biggest fan. A native New Yorker who’d stood by his team through thick and—mostly—thin. He never got a chance to see the Mets’ new ballpark, but Dad had honored…

Three years is a long time to quit speaking to someone you love. Mom was right about that. She had called me that morning sounding more fatigued than the day before, when she’d said pretty much the same thing: “I just want my girls to get along.” Not likely. Not after what had come between us. Oil and water. That’s always been my younger sister, Shelly, and me. She’s outspoken, tenacious and strong-willed. I’m quieter and maybe a little too sensitive. I never imagined, though, it could get so bad. No e-mails. No texts. No phone calls. For three years. I tried not to dwell on the past. I focused on the day-to-day. I was a nurse with a hectic schedule; my husband, Gary, and I also ran our own…

Check behind the couch and the chairs in the living room; look in the fireplace. Open the coat closet, the hall closet; walk through the laundry room, the family room, the kitchen. Go through Steve’s office, check under the bed in our daughter’s old room; push back the clothes in her closet. Same with our son’s room and his walk-in closet, our closet… I stood at my bedroom door, ready to begin my nightly rounds, looking in every possible hiding place in our California home. Steve, my husband, was away on business and this was more than my usual anxiety. But even if he had been around, I would have done my checking anyway. We had an alarm system and a large dog who barked at the least disturbance, but…

Jan Adamson Caldwell My oldest son had worked the night shift, so he was still asleep that morning. I made breakfast and rushed off to work. After I left, the kitchen phone rang. Again. And again. All the ringing woke my son up. He headed down the hall to get the phone. That’s when he smelled it—smoke coming from the kitchen. In my haste to get to work, I’d left tea bags boiling in a pot! He turned off the stove and answered the phone. There was no one on the other end. The number on the caller ID was unreachable. When my son recounted what had happened, I was curious. I called the number back several times, but the recording I reached was always the same: “We’re sorry; the…

New York, New York NYPD officer Man Yam was so engrossed in reading a news story on his phone that he didn’t even look up as he got on the subway. It was about a missing New York City Marathon runner from Italy, Gianclaudio Marengo. He’d finished the race, then never showed up for his team dinner. His teammates had returned home without him. He’d been missing for close to 48 hours. Officer Yam tapped the link to the next page. But his phone lost reception in the subway car. Gianclaudio had fallen behind his teammates and lost his hotel key and subway map during the race. He didn’t speak English and didn’t know where to go. He stayed in the park overnight, then hopped the subway to the airport,…

Have you ever walked in on a conversation and felt like it was meant for you to hear? That morning at the diner where I was assistant manager, I caught my coworkers talking furtively, their backs to me. “It was so sudden.…” “He came in for coffee just last week.…” I drifted closer, not sure what they were talking about. “The baby was born just hours after he died.” “A little girl, their second.” “I can’t imagine how that young wife of his must feel.…” The conversation stopped. I’d been spotted. The waitresses went back to their tables. I tried to count receipts, but I couldn’t stop shaking. I can’t imagine how that young wife of his must feel… The receipts fell to the floor. I ducked behind the counter…

I collapsed on my bed. It was 10 o’clock at night. Grigoris, my date, would be here any minute to pick me up for an evening out in Athens’s hot Psiri district. I yawned, forced my eyes to stay open. I’d been living in Greece for three months and I was exhausted. I had moved to Athens from Boston purely on a whim, after college graduation. I’d gone through a bad breakup and needed a change of scenery. I’d always been fascinated by Greece, so I jumped at the chance to be an au pair for a well-off Greek family. I packed my bags and headed for the Mediterranean. It wasn’t easy adjusting to a different culture, learning a new language, a new alphabet, and also chasing after three kids.…

Rylan was my saving grace. All 7 pounds, 11 ounces, 21 inches of her. Just three hours old, my daughter looked up at me, innocently, not touched at all by the trauma surrounding her. I wheeled her bassinet toward the double doors of the ICU, gripping the handles for support, following Nurse Ashley and my mother- in-law, Lisa. The dull beige walls of the hospital corridor seemed to close in. This couldn’t be happening. Nurse Ashley led us through a maze of corridors to the room where my wife, Shelly, was hooked up to something called a last-chance ventilator. We were there to say goodbye. This was supposed to be the best day of my life. Our life. On Friday afternoon, 12 hours earlier, Shelly and I had arrived at…

The saddest day of Trudy Brockett’s life was when her grandmother forgot her name. Living in a nursing facility not far from Trudy’s home in Hampton, Connecticut, Granny had lost practically all memories of their special bond: a shared love of root-beer floats, reading, and Granny’s secret Thanksgiving stuffing recipe. Even the nickname she always called her granddaughter, “Sweetie,” was gone. How could she forget that? For Granny’s ninetieth birthday, Trudy put together a scrapbook of old photographs, hoping to recapture what Granny had lost. She paused at a photo taken with Granny at her sister’s wedding reception 12 years earlier and gasped. Right above Trudy and Granny was a vintage sign with a familiar name: Sweetie. Divine proof, or perhaps just a reminder, that love is never forgotten.…

It was a dead oak. Barely more than a sapling, four feet tall and spindly. Its branches bare, its bark all crumbly. A real eyesore. Dead. “Wait until we’re done with it,” my friend Kerri said. “It’ll look glorious. Trust me.” She set it down on a table at the community center of Vine Life Church, where we were going to be hosting her baby shower the following weekend. Kerri had picked the decaying tree up from the nursery down the street. They hadn’t charged her for it, big surprise. But Kerri had this idea. A coat of latex paint, some clothespins attached to the branches, and it would be transformed into a “money tree,” where guests could pin their gifts and messages. I just wished it would be so…

Where does inspiration come from? Notes were strewn around the aspiring songwriter’s apartment, fragments of ideas that even the man who wrote them couldn’t quite put together. It was 1967, the Vietnam War in full swing. After serving a year in the Army Reserve, he anxiously awaited his discharge papers. He took out a small journal he’d just bought to get his thoughts organized and turned to the blank opening page. A moment later, he wrote two words. He didn’t know where the words came from. What they meant. Why he wrote them. All he knew was that they sound-ed right together. That there was something behind them. Not long after, his honorable discharge arrived. He was so relieved he did a flip on the front lawn. Now he could…

Thump, thump, thump. Was my friend trying to wake me? I groaned, knowing the kind of day I was facing tomorrow. At work nothing had come easy lately, and I needed my sleep to stay sharp. I had volunteered to stay overnight at my friend’s place in case she needed help after a bad fall. Had she fallen again? I felt my bed shaking at my feet, then by my pillow. I opened my eyes. Over my right shoulder, a dove-like figure appeared, floating, crossing over my chest and suddenly turning into a hand…my mother’s hand, smooth and manicured, the way I remembered it. She’d passed away several months earlier. “Everything will be all right,” she said. A light filled the room. It shone from a thousand softly falling rose…

“You swallowed a what?” Illinois mom Julie Van Rossum thought her four-year-old, Ellie, was old enough to know better than to put something small in her mouth. Ellie sat in front of her toy cash register, looking mortified. “A penny, Mommy!” Ellie wasn’t choking, and didn’t look sick. “Did you really swallow it?” Julie asked. “Why would you do that?” “I didn’t mean to!” Ellie said. “It just went down!” Now Julie was concerned. Her daughter didn’t seem to be in pain, but Julie dialed her pediatrician, who advised her to keep an eye out to make sure the penny made its “natural exit.” Ellie would be fine. But the coin didn’t appear, that day or the next. Julie and her husband brought Ellie in for X-rays. The doctor held…

“I don’t know why it didn’t burn.” One look at Fred’s face told me that he took this very seriously. All my previous conversations with our neighbor had been about light stuff—our gardens, the weather, our kids. This was something different. Something had shaken him. My husband, Gary, and I were in the yard when Fred came over that summer afternoon. He joined us on the patio and stood with his hands in his pockets. Didn’t even want to sit down. He’s an engineer, like Gary, and with an engineer’s attention to detail, he started in on a long story about the notebooks he had kept over a career that spanned some 30 years. He had dozens of them, and now that he’d retired he had to destroy them because…

The Initiation Well in Sintra, Portugal, wasn’t designed to draw water from or make wishes on. It was meant to take visitors out of this world—to purgatory and back. It sits on Quinta da Regaleira, the fantastical property of António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, a Brazilian-born billionaire and entomologist who in 1910 built a home as eccentric as he was, a Gothic palace with grottoes, secret gardens and hidden tunnels. The well’s staircase winds nearly 90 feet into the ground. The number of landings—nine—may have been inspired by Dante’s Inferno. At the bottom lies the cross of the Knights Templar. It’s said that whoever enters and exits the well will be reborn—a journey from darkness to light. Follow one tourist’s journey to the well at guideposts.org/initiationwell…