When strangers tell us things we want to hear, we want to believe

By David McElroy · April 13, 2019

I’m having a late lunch at a McDonald’s near my house. There aren’t many people in here at this time of the afternoon. I noticed a woman come in and head to the restroom near me. She was talking on her iPhone, so I didn’t pay much attention to her.

As she left the restroom and walked near my table, she asked the person on the phone to hold on. She walked right up to my table and I started wondering whether I knew her and she was coming to talk to me. But she stooped right next to my table — about 18 inches from my feet — and picked up a penny from the floor.

“You have an angel thinking about you,” she said as she extended her hand with the penny.

I smiled and gave a friendly little laugh as I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I felt it as I walked past you and this is confirmation. You need an angel today and she’s thinking about you.”

And with that, she went back to her phone conversation and went to the counter to order.

As far as I know, I’ve never met the woman. She was Hispanic, well-dressed, well-spoken and seemed to be about 45 years old.

I wondered whether there was some superstition about pennies and angels, so I did a quick search and discovered several instances of people writing about such things.

“They say when an angel misses you, they toss a penny down from heaven,” one writer said. “Sadly, not everyone knows how much truth there is in this old adage.”

Another said it’s a sign from an angel that a loved one is thinking about you. Some of the writers were religious. Some claimed it was a psychic or spiritual idea from some other perspective. There seem to be several variations of the superstition.

It sounds just as silly as any other superstition. I don’t toss horseshoes over my shoulder. I step on cracks and walk under ladders. They all seem like silliness or metaphors to me.

But here’s the thing. When this woman told me that, I wanted to believe her. So the interesting thing here isn’t the penny or the woman or any angel or a loved one. The interesting thing is that my heart wanted to believe.

I have a feeling this is how a lot of superstitions spread. People made dubious associations between events — a crow passing overhead, followed by someone’s death, maybe — and then jumped to conclusions about what signs meant. Then they repeated their conclusions — and others believed the things which they wanted to believe or maybe the things which scared them. And the superstitions spread.

Today hasn’t been a good day for me. There’s nothing specific that happened, but I’ve been dealing with acceptance of something I haven’t wanted to accept. It has me down.

So when this woman told me an angel is thinking about me today, I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe someone has me on her mind. (I think of angels as female, for some reason.) I have no rational reason to want to feel this way, but it’s somehow comforting. Just like Fox Mulder in a different context, I want to believe.

As I was finishing this, the woman who found the penny and started this came back to my table. She’s apparently been eating and she’s leaving now.

“God is sending you a miracle,” she said. “You need to save that penny. When your angel tells you why you’re on her mind, that penny will remind you of what happened. Trust me.”

It sounds crazy. It’s just silly superstition. I know that.

But I want to believe.

I’ll keep the penny — just in case.

Share on Social Networks

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

Related Posts