Part of yesterday’s rockin’ good time at the auto insurance broker was getting to know said broker. He was the only worker in a tiny office with a constantly ringing phone, so the normally long and tedious process of writing up a new policy was brutally attenuated by a hundred interruptions, and was made even more mindnumbingly delightful by the Nut’s repeated escape attempts. Yes, always bring a one-year-old who’s hungry, tired, and high on bathtub enamel fumes (just kidding, I would never let that happen) to a paperwork-filled hour in a hot tiny office with a man whose victim-of-Catholicism mother, it turns out, had eighteen children, and once this probably-terribly-ignored-as-a-child insurance agent discovers that you’re not bringing your child to church every Sunday he’ll start with the panicky questions:

“How are you going to do it?!”

“Do what?”

“Bring this beautiful child up without faith? He’s going to be a wild animal!”

Golly, what fun we had with this conversation. And it’s impossible to explain to most churchgoers that you do have some faith, that God isn’t out of the question even though church is, that you once had a vision of the Virgin Mary in a motel room outside of Sandusky, Ohio, so you feel that things are going to be okay even if you never watch Going My Way again. Fortunately, religious conversations don’t horrify me the way political ones do*, so my stomach didn’t get all jumbly, and once we were done I was able to wrestle Jackson back into his car seat and drive home with steady hands. But not before insurance guy stretched out his arms toward Jackson as we were leaving and said, “May the Lord bless and keep you! God bless you! God bless you, Jackson!”