I can’t help looking for meaning in tonight’s ‘mystery of a dollar bill’

By David McElroy · July 13, 2018

Humans like to find hidden meanings, even when there’s no meaning to be found. When odd things happen, there has to be an explanation. Right?

Tonight, I’m looking for meaning in a mysterious dollar bill that showed up on the windshield of my car a few minutes ago.

I had been writing at Chick-fil-A for a couple of hours and left about 9:30 p.m. As I started my car, I noticed there was something under one of my windshield wipers. I was dumbfounded to realize it was money.

I got out of the car and looked around. There were other cars all around me, but none of them had stray dollar bills. I asked a couple of people nearby if they had seen anyone near my car, but nobody had noticed anything.

And now I’m left trying to construct a narrative around the mystery of this wrinkled dollar bill.

Maybe somebody wanted to do some small, random good deed for someone. Maybe that’s the only meaning. Maybe someone had a spare dollar in his or her pocket and stuck it on a random car in a fit of good will toward random humans.

Or maybe it was a token of good will from someone who randomly met me tonight.

Anybody who is around me for longs knows that I have conservations with random strangers all the time. Tonight, I talked with a young mother who had a 7-week old baby who had been premature. The baby’s grandmother was also there and the three of us had a pleasant conversation about the baby and the experience of having a premie. They seemed pleased to have a stranger ooh and aah over their little man. I wished them a good evening after 10 minutes and that was all.

Shortly after — right as they were leaving — I ran out to my car to grab my camera for a sunset picture. (The sunset has nothing to do with this story, but I’ll put a copy at the end anyway.) As I got my camera, I spoke to them again and wished them a safe trip back to Atlanta, where they were from.

Then I went off across the street the get a decent angle of reflected light in the clouds.

Could those people have been responsible for the dollar bill on my car?

I realize I’m stretching, but I like a narrative that makes sense to me — at least in some way. The random good will explanation seems more likely, I suppose, but it’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever heard of. Of course, I’ve never heard of strangers sticking money on the car of someone they just met, either.

So I have no explanations that make sense. I guess I never will. And this bugs me.

Does it mean something? Am I supposed to understand a message which I’m overlooking? Is it random? Is it intentional? Or is there some “message from the Universe” I’m supposed to see in this? None of the explanations make sense.

I like stories. I like explanations. I like the endings of stories to make sense — unlike the typical French film, but that’s another issue. So I’m sitting here trying to see a pattern or meaning or explanation, but I’m not finding one.

In a way, this reminds me of a mysterious note that someone left on my car last year, but this one makes even less sense. At least that note was in English, even if its intention wasn’t clear.

Apophenia is the word for the human tendency to look for patterns in meaningless random data. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe there’s no meaning. Maybe I should just pocket my free dollar and happily move on.

But something in me wants meaning and an explanation. It doesn’t appear I’m going to find one tonight.

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Tyler Barnes will never be a basketball star. He probably peaked as a star high school player in Louisville, Ky. But for the last four years, he’s been a walk-on player for the University of Alabama. He’s a chemical engineering major with lots of academic honors who rides the bench because he loves being part of a team. He sometimes gets into games with a minute or two to go, but only if Alabama has a big lead. This Saturday, it was senior day for Alabama basketball, so it was his last chance to play in Coleman Coliseum. Alabama Coach Nate Oats says that one of the team starter’s came to him an hour before the game started — and fellow senior Alex Reese asked Oats if Barnes could start in his place for this one game. Even though the game was huge for Alabama, which is ranked No. 6 in the country and trying to wrap up an SEC title, Oats agreed. Barnes started and played the first three minutes, grabbing what was only the fourth rebound of his career and missing his only shot. Barnes has a great future as an engineer, but you’ll never again hear from him as a basketball player. For three shining minutes Saturday, though, he was a starter for a top-10 college basketball team — and his parents were in the stands from Kentucky to see it. There’s a lot of ugliness in college basketball right now, but this story makes me happy.

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

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