At a guess, the little girl would be about eight years old, her first year as a piano student. When she squirmed up onto the piano bench, her red patent leather shoes hung high above the floor. There was no way she could reach the pedals. 

            She poised one finger to hit the first note. 

            She followed that note with a second, and a third. And she stopped. Something wasn’t right. 

            She tried again. One note, another, a third. And stopped again. She didn’t know how to go on. 

            She froze. Afraid to make another mistake. Afraid to risk another try. 

            Utter silence filled the room. No one breathed. The audience – parents, grandparents, siblings, fellow students – leaned forward as one. Wishing her on, willing her unwilling fingers to continue. 

            The intensity was physical. The old cliché says “You could cut it with a knife.” Well, perhaps not that palpable. But there was certainly something there in that room, a presence that filled the space, a spirit that moved in waves to support the little pianist. 

I got an email from my friend Doug Hodgkinson the other day. Which was odd. Because Doug died seven years ago.

            I wondered where he was writing from. And if they have wi-fi connections there, wherever “there” is. They don’t have gmail addresses, anyway. Doug had a gmail address before his death, but this message came from Hestbript@ibh1mnhk6k.rereprsente.us, which reads like the proverbial roomful of monkeys whacking typewriter keys at random.

            Just in case there’s any doubt, I don’t think the message came from either heaven or hell – unless it’s the kind of hell that exploiters of human weakness and gullibility create.  I gave up believing in hell long ago; I gave up on heaven a little later. 

            The two go together, because they both assume a God who hands out rewards and punishments.

This is the 1172th column I have written for the Lake Country Calendar newspaper. In the autumn of 1995, Jack McCarthy called me. “How’d you like to write a column for us?” he asked. 

            That’s how it began.

            Jack was the owner and publisher of The Calendar, a weekly newspaper serving the four small unincorporated communities of Winfield, Okanagan Centre, Oyama, and Carr’s Landing. 

            The Calendar hadn’t always been a newspaper. It has started as, quite literally, a calendar of local events, started by the Women’s Institute in 1951 and published monthly -- several sheets of letter-size paper, mimeographed and stapled. 

            Jack McCarthy and a partner bought the old Calendar, and turned it into a weekly newspaper. He risked investing in typesetting equipment. For a former plumber, a Nashville musician (who for a while had the great Chet Atkins as backup guitarist!), and a man who planned to be a psychiatric nurse, it was a whole new career.

            But he turned the Calendar into much more than just a newspaper. 

My watch quit, at seven seconds after 5:16 p.m. I can be absolutely precise about the time, because I consulted my watch several times over the next few hours.  I can’t imagine why I kept checking my watch, when I knew it would give me the wrong time, but I did. Time seems, for some reason, to be important for me. 

            Finally, I gave up fighting the inevitable; I went to a watch store and got a new battery. My watch is working fine again. 

So why, I wonder, do some church-goers prefer to live with their clocks stopped? Why won’t they do, for their faith and doctrine, what they do for their watches?

“If I could only go back and do it again,” I hear people lament. “If I only knew then what I know now, I would have done it differently.”

            But, says logic, if you went back in time, you would still make the same decision, for good or ill. Because at that time you acted on the basis of the knowledge you had. All of the knowledge you had. And if you went back, that would still be the same. Because you can’t take 50 additional years of experience and learning back with you. 

            You were what you were. And your decisions were determined for you by your experiences. 

            All of this depends on an underlying assumption – that we humans are nothing more than a product of our environment.

            Or, to put it in more traditional language, that we have no free will.