Road Apples
Sept. 15, 2008

Well, bless my socks

By Tim Sanders

There was an interesting article by Austin Miller in the Sept. 6, 2008 Ocala Star Banner.

The story involved 27-year-old Mario Oscar Carlos, who lives in the small northern Florida town of Jasper. On Friday evening, Sept. 5, Mario called the Marion County Sheriff’s Office from the Kangaroo Express convenience store in Ocala. He told them that a man and a woman had flagged down his car, robbed him at gunpoint of $8,000 in cash, and then escaped down the highway. After deputies searched the area for the robbers, detectives began questioning Mario about details of the crime. When they mentioned checking the front passenger door for fingerprints, Mario said that dusting for prints would do no good, since the gunman was wearing gloves. Of course the fact that it was a very warm September evening in Florida made the comment about the gloves seem a bit odd, and after more questioning, Mario admitted that his story wasn’t entirely true .... exactly.

This, he said, was what really happened:

Mario said he had indeed lost $8,000, but not to highway robbers. He said he’d visited a spiritual healer in Sarasota to get a blessing for his $8,000, and the healer told him to roll the cash up and put it in a white tube sock before the blessing could proceed. Apparently that is the protocol when it comes to blessing large sums of cash. Reporter Austin Miller does not explain exactly what the blessing of the $8,000 in the sock was calculated to produce. Perhaps the bills were supposed to be fruitful and multiply in that sock, or maybe the blessing was simply a way of encouraging Mario to spend this small fortune wisely and not blow it all on lottery tickets, loose women and cheap wine. Whatever the case, after the sock blessing, Mario said he was told to place the sock in his trunk and to leave it there, unopened, for a week. This apparently seemed perfectly reasonable to him at the time, but on the way home he began to worry about his blessed sock full of money in the trunk. Something, he wasn’t sure what, bothered him. Maybe he should pull over and make sure his sock was still there. Maybe his sock would be safer in the glove compartment. And maybe he could just take a quick peek inside his sock, to make sure all was well. Mario was no fool, after all. So there in Ocala, Florida, 130 miles north of Sarasota and 100 miles south of his home in Jasper, Mario Carlos pulled over, opened his trunk, and inspected his $8,000 sock. SURPRISE, It contained only about 50 $1 bills. Had Mario been a scientist he’d probably have concluded that the carbon emissions from his exhaust had seeped into his trunk and globally warmed his sock full of cash, turning the blessing into a curse and shrinking that $8,000 down to fifty bucks in just a few, brief minutes. But Mario was no scientist, and he instead concluded that the spiritual healer had switched socks on him and his $8,000 was somewhere in Sarasota, being spent on cheap wine, lottery tickets, and other fleshly pleasures by a spiritual healer so unethical that she made all the other honest, upstanding, FDA approved, board certified, licensed, cash-blessing spiritual healers look bad. So Mario called the sheriff’s department and made up the phony highway robbery story so that his wife wouldn’t think he was a moron.

Understandably, the Marion County Sheriff’s Department was none too happy about spending all of those man hours and wasting all of that gasoline scouring the highways around Ocala for what turned out to be at best a dishonest spiritual sock healer in Sarasota, and at worst yet another figment of Mario’s overactive imagination. The officers charged Mario with making a false crime report and took him to jail.

I would not dismiss Mario’s second version of what happened to his $8,000 out of hand, but it does present some puzzling questions:


1. Even in these days of exorbitant gas prices, who drives around with $8,000 in his wallet?

2. Aren’t there any spiritual healing sock blessers in Jasper, Florida?

3. Did Mario drive all the way from northern Florida to Sarasota just to get his cash blessed? Or was he simply cruising the streets one night with $8,000 in his pocket when he spotted that spiritual healer standing at an intersection, wearing a very spiritual outfit including a miniskirt, fishnet stockings, and spike heels, and realized how much he needed a blessing?

4. If not, then how does one find a spiritual healer in Sarasota? Do they have signs outside their homes reading: "Ernestine Bass, Spiritual Healer. We specialize in blessing socks full of cash. Hours: Monday thru Friday 9 to 5, Saturdays ‘til noon. You bring the cash, we provide the socks."?

5. Are white tube socks better, blessing-wise, than black dress socks or argyles?

6. For that matter, in an emergency could a spiritual healer bless a large sum of cash stuffed into a pair of briefs, or a shoe?

7. Does the length of the blessing depend on the denomination of the bills?

8. Was Mario’s big mistake not leaving his sock unopened for a week as per instructions and giving the blessing time to really ripen and take hold?

9. Was the moral lesson Mario Carlos learned worth $8,000?

10. What about the moral lesson his wife taught him with that hammer when he got home?


Those questions are too deep for me. I only pose them in hopes that someone else will answer them. In the meantime, if you have a sock full of quarters and are looking for a spiritual healer for some serious blessing, beware. Check your healer out with the Better Business Bureau first. You know, so that when your week is up you don’t find yourself at the car wash with nothing but a sock full of stainless steel washers.