Sometimes I read a little bit of the Bible before bedtime, mostly because I don’t know what’s in it. Growing up Catholic, we didn’t go to vacation Bible school, and if we did read the Bible, we tended to stick with the New Testament. So lately I’ve been reading Exodus, and it’s a lot different than the Cecil B. Demille version. For instance, I didn’t remember Moses’ wife being named Zipporah and his father-in-law being Jethro. I think they were called Susan and Bob in the movie. And I thought there were only seven or eight plagues but, no, there were 10. Some of them were just redundant. In the seventh plague, huge hail rained down from the sky and then caught the ground on fire. You could assume that that would pretty much obliterate all the crops, but then the eighth plague, locusts, devoured whatever was left. And what was the frog plague supposed to do, anyway?

But what’s surprised me most is the part about manna, the bread that fell from heaven. It would appear in the morning with the dew and melt in the midday sun. If you left it out too long it would get wormy, but it tasted like honey. So it was more like cookies from heaven. But here’s the line that really gets me: “The Israelites ate manna for forty years.” Holy redundancy, Batman.

I was thinking about manna yesterday as we picked up pecans out of the back yard. An autumn wind blew hard and steady all day, raining pecans from the heavens. Hispanic ladies walked up and down the street with their buckets. Cars pulled over on the side of the road by Highway 90 so people could scour the roadside park. Forty years ago when the October wind blew hard, people in this county picked pecans. They’ll be doing it 40 years from now.

I drive an old BMW. Only it’s new to me. We bought it from a dealer a few months ago. It’s 8 years old with about 100,000 miles on it. Why did I do this? Oh, do I really have to go into that? I bought it because it goes VROOM VROOM VROOM when I step on the pedal. Do I really need another reason?

Anyhow, this Beemer has some electrical problems. That sounds negative, so I’ll just do like we do in corporate land and refer to them as electrical concerns. Electrical issues. The little panel that’s supposed to tell me if there’s something wrong with the car has some bulbs missing. So when I’m driving with the trunk lid open, it flashes “TRIIIIK LID OIIN” which I can pretty much decipher, but sometimes it’s just a one-word warning, like “IIDIIII” and I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Today I hit a bump and a little triangle that looked like a nuclear bomb symbol flashed for a split second –a sign of the apocalypse, or at least, engine failure?

So here I’m going to make some big fat metaphor about how driving is like life and the little flashing messages seem to be like garbled signs from God. For instance, I ask God for direction and I meet an old friend and she tells me how happy she is being a teacher and I think, huh, maybe it’s a sign from God that I should be a teacher, but then I think about it for a while and decide, nah, I don’t want to do that, and so, was it a real sign or just a little flashing light that I don’t need to pay much attention to?

If I’m driving down the road and a symbol for a burning bush pops up on my dashboard, I’ll let you know. Only with all those bulbs missing, it’ll probably look like a squid. Or a tiny little oil spill.

Yesterday I was sitting on a bench at a crowded Walmart, waiting for Boy to get out of the restroom, listening to a rambling message on my work cell phone, telling Girl “No” for the nth time for some reason or other. From the corner of my eye I could see a woman waving at me, trying to get my attention.

“Miss, are you going to be here for two minutes?” she asked. She was a young Hispanic woman holding a six-month old baby. I could tell in an instant what she wanted — she was asking me to look after her baby while she went to the restroom.

“No,” I said, standing up, phone still to my ear. Boy had just stepped out of the restroom, and I motioned him to come with an angry wave.

I could see the woman head into the bathroom holding the baby with one arm, and I felt bad for her. I remembered what that was like, holding a baby while peeing. Not fun, but I always chose it over the alternative — having a stranger look after my baby while I was in a vulnerable position.

It was a snap decision, made while I was in a foul mood in the middle of a stressful place. But I thought about it all day. Why did I so abruptly say no? Why didn’t I help the young mother?

I decided that it was because we were at Walmart on a Saturday. I had threatened both of my kids before we went into the store not to run away from me, giving them the stranger danger scare. I wanted to give that lecture to the woman with the baby. “Don’t you know better? This is Walmart! On a Saturday!” I wanted to tell her.

More than that: I didn’t want to be mistaken for a kidnapper. What if the woman never came back? Or what if she came out of the restroom screaming, “She took my baby!” I could picture the Walmart cops hauling me away in handcuffs.

So I don’t really have a punchline to this story, only that I wasn’t Christian enough to help a stranger, but just Christian enough to feel guilty about it all day.

I don’t believe in ghosts because I don’t want to. I hope the dead have better things to do than linger here like permanent spectators, never to be actors again.

How impotent to be a ghost — to see the hand reaching out for the scalding hot pan and not be able to scream, “Don’t touch that!” To see a loved one cry, broken hearted, and not be able to pat the shoulder. I hope the dead are not watching us.

I hope the dead are not listening to us, either. Catholics believe that the dead become our own personal saints, able to intercede with God on our behalf. I hope they aren’t relegated to that job.

It’d be like this — “Aunt Mary, I lost my car keys again. Can you just ask Jesus to give me a little help here? I’m late for work. Amen.”

After a while of toting and fetching for her yuppy nieces and nephews, Aunt Mary would want to say, “Find your own damn keys,” only she can’t because she’s in heaven and they don’t say four-letter words there.

I hope the dead have nothing to do with us. I hope they go on to fulfill their own hearts’ desires and that their dreams are born anew each day.

I hope the dead aren’t left to trod the same old ground but go on to discover new places, new friends, new loves.

I hope when they reach God, He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Now let’s set all that aside and move on, shall we?” And all the hurt, pain, fear, despair, loss is washed away and the soul becomes a new being — fresh and clean and alive.

Never a moldy old ghost.