We saw God today and I mean that literally

"I just saw God," Beatrix declared calmly. I looked around the shelves of budget books for a kid's Bible.

"You mean you saw him in a picture," I said.

"No. I saw him."

"You can't see God," I said. I was tired and feeling less imaginative than usual.

Bea smiled. "Yes, you can." She wandered toward the poetry section and pointed. "There he is!"

A man with a white beard and a button-down shirt stared at the spines of books.

"That man there?" I whispered. "That's not God."

She nodded her head and crossed her arms. I'd just read her Aladdin, King of Thieves, most awful of Disney books. I was ready to browse a little myself and go. Martin was engrossed in the poetry section and I'd replaced several pink Christmas books and sat on a tiny chair and sang nursery rhymes as Bea plunked on an electric piano. The books were of middling quality but they were cheap. And God was apparently interested in a deal, because he was there.

"It is God," Bea insisted.

"Let's go ask him," I said, pulling her over to the bearded man. I thought it was odd that Bea had picked out a white bearded man, the classic image of God from Michelangelo to the 1950's, especially because we have never presented her with any like images, preferring to leave the physical God qualities up to her. It's hard enough to explain "spirit" to an adult, let alone a three-year old who demands, "Well, where? I can't see!"

But she had found God now, in the stacks of Half Price Books.

"Sir?" I asked. "Excuse me, sir?" I stepped closer. "Sir!"

He looked up. "Yes."

"Sorry, sir, my daughter would like to know if you are God."

He smiled. Mildly. I was surprised--I thought he'd put his head back and roar with laughter. I would, if someone asked me if I were God. He acted as if he got this question all the time. Bea was just one more in a long line of kids who thought he might be God.

"No," he said. "I'm just an engineer. And I forgot my flip-up tie today."

What's a flip-up tie?

He went back to browsing.

On the way home, as I told Martin about the encounter, Martin said, "If you asked God, would God answer you directly?"

"Maybe not. The man said he forgot his flip-up tie."

"That's probably just what God would say," Martin said, flicking on cruise control. We had thirty minutes to get back for Elspeth's school party.

"He did say he was an engineer," I said. "I guess that squares."

As for Bea, her faith remains unshaken. When I put her down for a nap, she pointed to a picture of a man in a yellow robe that hangs on the wall of her room. "That's God," she says. "And he has a beard."

Which may explain why Merry, who easily feels guilty, was always terrified of men with beards.

On the other hand, Bea has never singled out a bearded man and called him God before, and we see plenty of beards in our parts. If God did make an unexpected appearance at a discount bookstore, I missed the biggest chance of my life. I would have asked him some questions and I would have waited while he answered, even if his answers were as weird as the flip-up tie. And if you've read the Bible, the chances are pretty good that the answers would have been full of bizarre. Still. . . .