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“Do you believe in God?”

The first day I met the man called Preacherman, I was sitting in front of the scone place at St. Clair and Christie as he preached the word of God.

That’s if God was having a really bad day. He stood on his crate, impeccably groomed. He wore a beige cashmere coat—quite fancy for a street preacher—and a fedora with a black scarf under his hat to keep his head warm. Up on his crate, he loomed large to passersby.

Sitting there eating my scone, I had so many questions. What was the first day you decided to come out to the street and preach? Has your yelling converted one single person? And why do you never see a woman standing out here on soapboxes?

It was 2014, and I was glad to be back in the city, in the thick of things. I had my new old dog, Gus—a fourteen-year-old shih tzu with a severe underbite that made him look like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

I moved back to Toronto a few months after I found out my brother Kevin was sick. I had been perfectly happy living in the woods with twelve acres of forest behind me, the Cataraqui Trail to walk on daily and Varty Lake nearby for daily dips in the summer. Within a few months of receiving the bad news, I began to tell everybody that I hated trees and my landlord smoked on the back porch. To top it off, the long driveway was never plowed, and I was constantly snowed in. I only got snowed in once, but I was making my case to pack up and go. I didn’t think there was any connection between Kevin’s impending death and my impulse to move yet again. I just gave my notice, packed up Gus and went to Toronto—the opposite direction of Ottawa, where Kevin lived. He had his own family to take care of him, so it wasn’t that. I wasn’t running away either. I’ve lived long enough to know you can’t out-run trouble. Trouble knows your forwarding address and will be snoring in the spare bedroom before you’ve unpacked the U-Haul. 

Whenever you start over, everything is shiny and new, worthy of a status update on Facebook. A short period when you look at even the most arcane things with the eyes of a tourist. Did you see that rock? That rock is historical. Did you know our founding forefathers rolled that rock up here from the States? It’s a short window of time before your eyes will adjust to the view and soon even the most beautiful surroundings will become wallpaper, pasted onto the background that you walk by on your way to work.

It had been years since I’d lived in an apartment building, smelling other people’s dinners. Hearing people partying and crying babies squawking at all hours of the day. All that noise was why I had left the city the first time. But all wasn’t serene in the country either: there, it was the sound of coyotes killing their prey that kept me up. Most nights it sounded like Kandahar out there.

After living in the wilderness for nearly twelve years, I decided that if I were going to wake up before dawn, I’d rather it be from the sound of human beings.

Back in Toronto, I was happy to hear people shutting apartment doors, going to work in the morning; at night, screaming soccer fans honked horns when their team won the cup, and rap music pumped from cars in the heat of the summer. I didn’t even mind fire engines racing by at three in the morning. All that urban energy made me feel like at any moment something could happen.

Within days, I knew everyone in the neighbourhood. I’ve retained the small-town quality of talking to everybody that has a minute to spare, even the ones who don’t. Over the years, I’ve developed a collection of guaranteed icebreakers: “Can I just say? Your dog is the cutest. What kind is it? A lab mix? Gorgeous. By the way, your shoelace is untied. I don’t want you to trip over your feet.”

For the most part, people want to talk to me as well. It’s something about my face. That wholesome, well-fed farm face; a face that looks like I drink a lot of cow’s milk. A face that, when I was younger, I had tried to contour out of existence.

Right on cue, Preacherman interrupted my musings and yelled again, “I SAID DO YOU BELIEVE IN ONE TRUE GOD?” I know this was likely a rhetorical question, but I found myself thinking about it—although the word “God” is the one I yell out when I stub my toe in the middle of the night.

I’d spent fifty years wrestling with that three-letter word. But it sounded like the God he was selling would have to be small enough to fit inside the lyrics of a country music song.

Let’s pretend for a second that I did answer him and say Indeed I do believe in the one true God. How would that go? Would your God be the same as mine? Are you assuming I believe in Jesus’s dad? Or Allah? Or Yahweh? Tell me, sir: What sort of one true God are you looking for?

Over my lifetime, I’d bowed down at the feet of them all. Jesus, Buddha, Kali, Krishna. The real gods and the false. Booze, men, self-help and Facebook. I had danced with witches, whirled with Sufis and explored The Power of Now like there is no tomorrow. After all that time and money, you’d think that Amazon would’ve delivered me a deity in which I could believe with complete certainty, but it had not. And any faith I had cobbled together over my life had been waning, ever since my brother was diagnosed with a Glioblastoma tumour. Which is not one of those tumours. Not a my-second cousin-twice-removed-had-a-tumour-and-drank-sheep- urine-and-got-it-cut-out-and-now-she’s-fine tumours.

A gB tumour is aggressive. It doesn’t care about anyone’s spiritual credentials. It was like the landlord had given him notice and developers were coming in and tearing the building down. We could beg and plead and say he’d been a good tenant, but that kind of tumour doesn’t care. The wrecking ball was coming. My brother, who had always believed in the one true God, had less than a year to live.

But when a man on a soapbox screams at you, you know there is no point in giving him your spiritual resumé, because you can’t convince a zealot of a god-dang thing.

Adapted from Window Shopping for God: A Comedian’s Search for Meaning, Deborah Kimmett. © 2024. Published with the permission of the publisher, Douglas & McIntyre.

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Learn more about Window Shopping for God:
Window Shopping for God is a memoir by your average people-pleasing, meaning-of-life-seeking, downward-facing-dog-posing stand-up comedian. Whether describing her teenage fear of demonic possession (and wardrobe hack for thwarting the Prince of Darkness), the perils of a comedy career (alcoholism, alienation, sexism, etc.), or her reconciliation with her estranged brother as he faced terminal illness (just to up the stakes), Kimmett's writing is unflinchingly honest, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply relatable. As she says, “if you disassociate from your body, it’s called trauma. If you disassociate and get paid for it, it’s called a comedy career.”