What's He Saving For?

I think I may have told this story from my childhood before. If so, forgive me for telling it again. I've  got some new data.

When I was a boy living outside New York City in (or as we said, on) suburban Long Island, I remember riding in my father's car as we headed to Arcadian Gardens, The City of Glass, a large greenhouse nursery where my mother would get her regular green-thumb gardening fixes.

Or maybe we were driving to Walt Whitman Mall, a shopping center on Route 110 in the town of Huntington Station. We would pass what I remember as a low brick savings bank — although that was probably simply my interpretation of the building given its rooftop billboard.

In huge, white, block letters on a red background, the billboard read...

I thought it was a bank advertisement, like:

Jesus Saves. So Should You.

Open A Savings Account Today!

It wasn't until years (and years) later that I realized the error of my ways.

But yesterday, as I walked along the paseo in the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine, I discovered I was right in the first place.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE.)

Jesus was saving for a sailboat!