beliefBelieve? I believe in angels, especially the one who is hanging on to me, sometimes with her knuckles turning white.
I always suspected she was there. She grabbed me by my buckle when I was a young schoolgirl and pushed me out of the alley where a predator was beckoning, shoving me toward the safety of my home. I remember the pressure.
She once tangled up the bus schedule making me late for work so I wasn't walking by the parking garage when a car burst through protective cables and landed on the sidewalk, pinning down pedestrians minutes before I arrived.
She once kept my four wheels on the asphalt as my car spun around and around and around totally out of control on a freezey, rainy morning -- with four wide-eyed kids clutching each other in the back seat.
She kept a street in Paris car-free as I tripped in the middle of it and sprawled flat-out, trying to hurry across without the aid of a stoplight, thinking I was in some small town in Kansas.
Every dozen years or so, she puts love right in my face, in the form of a small child, a poet, a frail old woman, a student, a less than perfect man. Someone who loves me, whom I love with comfortable, gleeful abandon -- for a moment in time. They come, these loves. They go. But they leave behind the exquisite proof that I am loved, that I am able to love in return.
For years I have been saying "thanks for that" when some of these mystical salvations occur -- when anxiously behind schedule, all the lights turn green as my car approaches each cross street on a busy thoroughfare; when, without cash, I find a twenty dollar bill secreted in last season's coat pocket; when on a particularly lonely day, flowers are waiting at my door; when the phone rings with a long ago friend on the other end.
It had occurred to me that this assigned protector must have a name. How gracious it would be to be more personal with him/her/it.
"It" is a her. I met her last month, finally, while soaking up the oils and mists of a massage room. As she worked my skin and muscles into butter, she talked of politics and religion and life, assuring me that we will be OK, we will make it through the lines if we just believed in goodness.
Religion and politics? Is this the stuff of a massage? Stress relieving conversation? But she soothed me outside and in with her repeated promises that everything will work out fine. This unconventional monologue and the well-being it was instilling prompted me to ask her to repeat her name -- suddenly significant. Had I met my angel after all these years? I think so. Her name? Karen Love. Care and love. Who wouldn't believe?
