MIRACLE ON 24TH STREET

A young man with a black beard lifts the head of St. Francis, a test of virtue brought from Magdalena. If you can lift the statue, that means you're in good favor with the saint. The proper way involves standing at the saint's head and cupping his head in both hands--the one-armed bicep-curl method is ineffective.

Donna Vasquez lives with this spiritual hotbed next door, watching without any surprise as an old man shuffles on his knees from the parking lot to the saint's side, his breathing labored and painful to hear.

"I guess it's his kidneys," Donna says, because after struggling to his feet, the man had held the saint's rope belt around his waist briefly.

Donna makes the miraculous seem quite ordinary by fretting about how to pay the tax bill due in February, and complaining about the people who make that more difficult by bringing their own candles to the chapel rather than buying hers at $2 apiece. The people who bring their own candles bugged Donna so much, she put a sign on the chapel door.

"No outside candles," the sign read, but people thought it meant not to put the candles in the little garden in front of the chapel, and continued to bring their own.

For a while this fall, Donna and her son Glenn were regularly visited by Tim Archibald, the staff photographer for New Times. Tim discovered the St. Francis Xavier chapel as he was exploring his new neighborhood, hiking along the canal around 24th Street and Baseline Road.

Tim spotted the white structure from the back, went in and asked if he could photograph the building. Over the next few months, he would stay for hours, chatting with Donna and Glenn and the people who came to light candles and pray, hearing their stories and taking their pictures.

One day Tim accidentally left his camera bag at the chapel. When he returned a half-hour later, the bag, full of cameras and lenses, was gone. The next day, Tim went back to the chapel to post a notice he'd written, offering a reward for the return of his equipment. Donna came out and told him not to bother.

A family that had been at the chapel had accidentally walked off with the camera bag, thinking it was the diaper bag. When they discovered the mistake, they drove back to the chapel long after dark to return it.

Tim gave Donna some money. She told him to put it in the box for the saint.