The Boiling Miracle

My dad is a salesman. In the glory days he sold a navy to Saudi Arabia, and by the time I was in elementary school he sold reusable heat pads to nobody in particular. They were really neat little things; liquid-filled plastic pads of various sizes to fit various body parts. Each had a little metal button floating inside, and when you snapped it a chemical reaction would crystallize the liquid and the whole thing would heat up. As the pads cooled they got hard, and all you had to do to reset them was to boil them for about 20 minutes. We had a lot of these heat pads around the house, and it wasn't unusual to have a big pot of boiling water going in the kitchen to reset them. One night my sister started freaking out over a batch and said to me across the kitchen, "Matty! Matty! Come look!!"

After the newly-rejuvenated heat pads had been removed, my sister pulled from the pot a large sea shell. On the outside it was rugged and rocky like the bottom of the ocean. On the inside it was a luminescent rainbow. "Oh my god! Where did it come from?!" my sister cried.

She went on to theorize some magical reason for the shell appearing in our pot of boiling heat pads, and I totally believed her. I started to get scared, even, contemplating the ramifications of such an obviously supernatural event.

After the initial excitement, I put the magical shell in the back of my mind. It was amazing, but for some reason I didn't feel like spreading the story around. Having grown up in the Catholic church, I was simultaneously initiated into the sometimes antagonistic ways of logic and of mystery. To this day I value the scientific method and the power of critical thinking, but I am also willing to accept the possibility, at least, of supernatural explanations.

In this case, looking back, I am fairly certain that the miracle was supplied entirely by my miraculous older sister.