Everything is Illuminated

I was going to blog about a road runner today because I saw one at the park and I couldn't remember seeing one since I lived in New Mexico. He had a beautiful black tail that would elegantly raise and lower as he stopped and started his progression across the hillside from shrub to shrub. I was going to compare him to a gazelle, so elegant and quick were his movements. No one else seemed to notice him.

Including the two women who approached my car about ten minutes before I was going to head back to work after my lunch hour. I was reading and I didn't see them until they were right next to my window. In my hurry to accommodate them, I lost my place, but as I opened the car window I thought it best to keep my elbow wedged into book to keep the cover flat against my stomach.

"We saw that you were reading," the younger of the two started, "and we just wanted to give you something else to read as well." She handed me a wallet-sized, color pamphlet titled "All Suffering Soon To End." I manipulated my elbow to land between the back cover of the book and the blank page that separates the cover from the title page.

"Thank you." I exclaimed, keeping her eye focus while I smiled genuinely and reached out with my unoccupied arm to retrieve the pamphlet.

She went on to explain to me that as the world gets more and more chaotic and sad, God sees us all and will soon choose to end the suffering.

I thanked her again and wished them both a lovely afternoon. They returned the salutation and strolled away together to look at the ducks. I watched them in my mirror before I turned to the pamphlet. It was a compilation of several passages from the bible recounting God's plan for the end of the world of man. The back page had some information about the Jehovah's Witnesses should I require any further literature.

I checked my mirror again before I tried to find the page in the book where I had left off.

I am early in the novel still, but I am pretty sure that there is an amount of irony that I am currently using a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet as a bookmark for "The Da Vinci Code."