“Needle in a Haystack” was conceived as a joke, but my kids love it. I do too, but only because it keeps them engaged long enough for me to work or talk on the phone. To play “Needle,” you uniquely mark up a thumb-size wood chip, throw it away, and then fetch it. The catch is this: the playground — the entire playground, all 400 square feet of it — is carpeted with an inch-thick covering of nearly identical thumb-size chips.
When my brother was seven years old, he couldn’t contain his joy when he traveled backwards in time for nine minutes. He didn’t experience anything; he just noticed the numbers of his bedside clock repeat themselves, once and for no good reason. For days he spoke of it, as though he had been divinely chosen to stay in bed a little longer.
But once we’re adults, for miracles to be miracles, they have to mean something. We get a choice about what it means, but we absolutely must choose. We can find a penny on the street and think, “This coin was left here meaningfully for me to find, perhaps by God,” or we can contemptuously sneer at it because, after all, it’s a stupid, worthless penny not worth our effort to pick up. Never both. A college friend once dreamed a bowling game in which he got his average score, so we teased him about his wasting a perfectly good dream on an average event. Even today, when I discovered my car with the keys locked in and the windows down, I felt no supernatural breath on my neck. It was dumb luck, that’s all. I have too much on my plate already for me to waste time on a silly miracle.
Children live in a world with no clear boundaries. Everything is possible, especially for grown-ups, who can perform superhuman feats of strength, sensation, dexterity, and intelligence. My children don’t yet understand why cars and paper didn’t always exist, why some things can’t be fixed, or why there aren’t a billion different spoken languages or nearby planets. My children view the world in the black and white of perfection and futility. In that forgettable middle space of grays are the most mundane of miracles, where finding a thrown wood chip is just as ordinary and expected as my having to wreck my pen creating two dozen replacements.
We admire our children for seeing beauty in the world. But to them, I think, beauty is plain ordinary.