The Immaculate Conception It Wasn’T

They don’t make miracles like they used to.

Time was, a guy would have to make wine out of water or at least walk on it to be considered miraculous.

Part the seas. Heal the sick. Raise the dead…

The supernatural had standards.

But this is the low-rent 1990s. We live in a jaded age of Jerry Springer and Clintonian dilly-dalliances.

As with good taste and virtue, the ol’ miracle bar has been, well, lowered.

In the old days it was fishes and loaves; today it’s booze and no condoms.

That’s the message from the epistle of Rome. Sonny Rome, that is. The Spokane man mailed the following letter to this newspaper just in time for the happy holidays.

“Do you believe in miricles?” asked Rome, 43, who apparently has an uncommon command of the English language, particularly spelling.

“Some say that miricles are true. Some say they are fiction. I have a possible miricle for you.”

A beloved editor laid the letter on my desk with a single word scrawled in black ink over the top of the envelope: “Doug.”

I opened it, steeling myself for one of those “and that’s how little Sally’s long-lost cat, Fluffy, showed up under the tree on Christmas morn” kinds of tales.

I started reading. Rome opened his letter explaining that his wife died of cancer three years ago.

Then things got bizarre.

“On the same day she died, a woman I never met before met me at the Comet bar in Hillyard,” he wrote. “We fell in love and instantly went home to my house and made love.”

Kerthump! That was my jaw hitting the floor.

I read on.

Nine months and seven days later, he wrote, she gave birth to a baby girl. It was Easter.

“Miricle?” he asked. “I would say. I have been steril for 40 years.”

So, to recap:

With his wife’s body barely cold, Sonny boy goes to a bar, has unprotected sex with a woman who later gives birth to his child out of wedlock.

I hate to burst this balloon, but if Rome is, in fact, really sterile, two words come to mind: genetic testing.

I had to meet this guy. I had to see if he was putting me on. According to his letter, Rome wouldn’t be too hard to locate.

“If you wish to talk to me,” he wrote, “I am being held in the Spokane County Jail.”

Go figure. I set off to get a firsthand look at the Miracle on Mallon Avenue.

Rome was on the sixth floor of the hoosegow awaiting a court date when I met him. He told me he’d cut a deal to plead guilty to residential burglary, hoping to get off with time served.

“I’m going to walk the line so straight you’re not gonna believe it,” said Rome of the future. Word on the cell block is that the penitentiary “is not a fun place to be.”

Rome is a compact man with sad eyes. He has short hair and a tattoo on his right forearm that says “(Bleep) happens.”

That’s probably the best explanation for all this.

I asked him what happened to the blessed child.

Rome looked down at his hands. “She’s in a foster home,” he said, refusing to elaborate.

Will the wonders never cease?

The inmate said he wanted to share his story to encourage others to believe in God or an afterlife. “Put it in the church section so people will read it.”

Rome always knew he was sterile, he added, because “I’ve had women for years and none of these women I ever got pregnant.”

When he gets out of the slammer, Rome said he intends to move to Seattle.

If anybody out there has any similar miricles to brighten the season, keep ‘em to yourself.