I was out with a friend last week, and he had a crystal rosary handing from his rear view mirror. “What’s that?” I said, curious because he’s not a Catholic.
“I was at a shrine of the Blessed Virgin, and a nun was giving them out,” he said. “When a nun gives you something like that, I figure you should take it.”
I asked him where the shrine was; he said Clearwater. I started to laugh. “The office building on Rt. 19 with the oil slick on the window?” I said.
“Yeah. Have you been there?” he said. Yes, I said, years ago. I said I was fascinated by the whole thing, because it seemed kind of odd that they’d built a shrine around a madonna-and-child shaped oil slick between thermal windows. “I mean, if you’re really into signs of God, don’t you think you could find it in, I don’t know, a sunset or a flower?” I said. “I mean, why an oil slick, or a burned taco with the face of Jesus?”
And then I told him the rest of the story. Some years after the local faithful chipped in and actually bought the office building to make a shrine, an 18-year-old kid who was pissed off about something shot out the window with a BB gun. Oh well!
I wonder what happened to the building.
