A peculiar experience: I was in the apse of St. Pat's, perhaps after the morning Mass, perhaps later, when a small fellow wearing a deacon's stole over an alb came up to me and handed me a small, inexpensive miraculous medal. I demurred at first, but he insisted. This was shortly after the election of the cleric who was head of the church as of this morning, in the short period before his work began, when he was consolidating his power in the Santa Marta house. The fellow in the apse was a foreign fellow--at first I thought he was alone, but after he handed me the medal, I noticed that two of the senior priests at the cathedral were watching him carefully from the recessed door to the passageway some distance away, and they seemed to be standing at attention (one was the MC, I think), and looking at the deacon with a sort of reverent awe.
I was never entirely sure what to make of the event, but I allowed my imagination to suggest what propositions it thought right in its free and harmonious play of thoughts, and took them as suggestions of imagination. People give miraculous medals--that wasn't the only one I was unable to refuse. I placed the medal behind the band of my hat, and carried it everywhere for a few years, until one night the hat itself was lost in a blizzard in midtown.