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| At night, though I've been there only by day. |
We found a tiny lunch room a few doors from the corner and settled ourselves in a booth, propping our elbows on a table that had come to town in a time machine from the 1950's, its yellow surface evidently designed to cheer up citizens from a half century ago by diluting their fear of an Atomic Bomb falling out of the blue sky on a perfectly lovely afternoon. A sunny disposition is always the best way to approach the end.
I began our conversation lightly and we noted our impressions of the weather until a waitress found her way to us. With all the surrounding décor dating to the 1950’s, I might have expected a woman in a white uniform with a tiny cap perched on her head and an order pad in her hand.
But here before us was a young girl with an impatient frown across her face. She wore a sweatshirt with probably nothing underneath and jeans that just about came up over her hips, leaving a wide belt of bare skin. She took our order for coffee and a slice of pie for me and without a word of acknowledgment walked away as I wondered how far the tattoo on the small of her back descended down her backside. I may be a monk, but I’m observant.
The teenager soon returned with our coffee, but no pie. I let her go without inquiring after my dessert, deciding to leave the situation up to God. He might decide I needed to skip sweets. I could overrule him and get up and ask for the pie. Of course, it's entirely possible that God couldn't care less about what I eat, but I like to involve the Almighty so I can blame him later if necessary.
"I never asked you about your car accident,” Sally said. “How do you feel?"
“Don’t you eternals know everything and have no need to ask?” I said.
Sally glanced at me with bit of annoyance across her face, but said nothing.
“Have you been walking in the woods lately?” I said.
She looked down at her coffee cup for a long while and didn’t answer me. I began to think she had found something floating in her coffee.
“Who are you, Jesse?” she asked.
“Who am I? I’m just a poor old monk,” I said. “The real question is Who are you?”
“How did you just appear in the woods like that?” she asked, her eyes coming up from the cup and now looking directly into mine.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Just wait a second ….”
“One minute I’m walking on the trail and I pass a moldy old tree stump,” she continued, “and then I turn around and you’re sitting on it. Just like that.”
“It won’t work, Sally,” I said. “This is probably some technique they taught you in angel school …”
“Stop it!” she almost shouted, slamming her hand down on the table with such force that the older couple across the aisle looked our way. We stared at our individual cups of coffee and said nothing for a moment.
Finally, I said, “It was a picnic table.”
“What was a picnic table?” she said.
“It wasn’t a stump,” I said, “It was a ….”
“They were stumps,” she said with deliberateness.
“Why did you kiss me?” I asked.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Not a good answer,” I replied. “That’s what Eve said when Adam asked her about the apple.”
“There was no apple,” she said.”
“You were probably there,” I said. “flirting with the serpent. How old do angels get to be, anyway?”
Sally resumed staring deeply into her coffee and now I wondered if orders from heaven were appearing down there in the cup.
“You knew my birth name,” I said.
“You knew everything about me,” she said, “that time in high school when I ….” She stopped abruptly.”
There you go with Angel Tricks 101 again,” I said. “Are you going to admit you’re my Guardian Angel?”
She looked up at me quickly as though the message in the coffee cup had surprised her. But just as quickly her face relaxed into a knowing scowl and she shook her head as if to agree with her last thought.
Sally sat back with a bemused look in her eye and didn’t answer. Then she looked down at the table again and said, “Jesse, we’re not …. “ and again she stopped abruptly. I hate it when women do that.
“We’re not getting anywhere … “ I began to say, but Sally stood abruptly, leaned over and once again kissed me on the lips, twirled around and left the restaurant.
She was right about there being no apple. Genesis says only the two were not to eat of the tree in the middle of the Garden. The fruit isn’t specified. Guess that was covered in her basic Angel coursework.
As I walked back to the SUV, I realized I already missed her. I took that to mean somewhere inside me was a sad awareness that I wouldn’t see her again.
The next day I was even more confused. I was not really sure things happened that day in the woods as I remembered them. I tossed and turned at night, going over all the details of our conversation and recalling as much detail as possible from the day in the woods. The answer surely was in one detail or another, if only I could find a key to unlock the puzzle.
I was reminded of the Ogalala Sioux Black Elk, an old Indian made famous in the 1930’s in a book in which the author took a lot of liberties when quoting the old warrior who had been at Little Big Horn, he said. Black Elk put it this way when he would tell a story or parable: “"This is the way it happened. Or maybe it didn't, but it could have. And besides, this is what carries the truth." Maybe the details weren’t important.
I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, struck by the realization that for the past hour I had lain there seeing Sally and myself on that golden afternoon in the woods … on two stumps! I couldn’t bring back the mental picture I’d had for so long of us at a moldy old picnic table. And I was dead sure the stumps were correct. Why had I thought we were at a picnic table?
Angel - The Corrs
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