angel – follow your nose

Last weekend I saw a Medicine Woman / healer.
A friend in Owen Sound had called me up and insisted I needed to come see this super-talented, up-and-coming, currently bargain-basement healer from the local reserve, quick, while the getting was good, before she becomes famous and unaffordable.
She was indeed magnificent – fun and funny and the most radiant, loving human being.
At the end of a long and powerful session, back upstairs in the kitchen, she asked me to pick a card from a divination deck. The one I chose said something about the protection of angels – a soft pale image, yellows and pinks, an image of light, illumination and feathers. As gentle and delicate and full of light and love as the image was, I felt resistance – I’m just not into angels. They have never appealed to my sensibility – they feel to me like princesses and unicorns and other girly fantasy-land entities. My own inexplicable prejudices – I try to hide it, but there it is.
So the Medicine Woman wrestled with me a bit over just accepting the concept, the idea of the angel image, as protective gentleness, as divine serendipitous light, synchronistic interventions, then had me do a 9-card spread from Jamie Sams’ Medicine Cards deck – all animal cards, much more my speed.
Of course I got a whack of cats – no surprise there, I am KAT, after all…
The next day I took the bus back to Toronto and, loaded down with many heavy bags, grabbed a cab at the corner. I had this idea of killing 2 taxi birds with one stone, and before going home, asked the driver to take me out to the art supplies store, the really big one with lots of cheap deals on paints and the big sizes of watercolour paper, cause when I go there I always have to take a cab home anyway.
When I explained to him, First I want to go here and then I want to go there, he pressed down hard on the gas, and called out, Whatever you want to do, we will do it! I laughed and glanced at his eyes in the mirror – they were small with the years, not a young man. Accent African, English not first language. As his face turned slightly with a right turn, I could see several thin scars on his cheek, as if he’d been slashed across the face by a very large cat.
Huh.
He was a chatty fellow, and we talked about this and that on the way to the art supplies store – Why did I only have one child, for example? Why did I not move close to my husband to get more? As we pulled into the small parking lot, he wanted to know, What is this place?
An art supplies store! Well, he was very excited by this news, but I was out the door of the cab and up the stairs and moving fast through the aisles and my list of paints and round the back to where they keep the big pads of paper. Coming back out to the front again, thinking I should have a quick look at the mediums, a man opened up his arms and waved at me. Here I am! he said with his grin.
It was the taxi driver. Looking a bit like actor Robert Wisdom –
But now I could see the long tribal scars patterned on both cheeks, kind of like a cat’s whiskers –
I’ve never been in an art store before!
He was thrilled, delighted, in love with this newfound world.
I was so surprised to see him there, the moment was so disorienting, in my confusion I forgot about looking for mediums and simply lined up to pay for what I had in my arms. My driver was now in deep serious discussion with one of the store clerks.
Standing, waiting for the cashier I wondered, What was it that felt so disorienting, so unusual? That he seemed so open, so free, so un-servile? That in spite of being for hire he didn’t feel obliged to sit waiting in the car if his curiosity was strong?
We went back out to the car together, and driving away his delight with this world of wonder turned to concern – They have all those things out on the shelves where anyone can just grab them and put them in their bag or under their clothes!
This upset him quite a bit, the enormous quantities of goods lying out on open shelves, and he went on about it for a while, driving slowly up the street, now nearing my house, inching along at about 10km/hr, waving his hands, both of them frequently lifting off the steering wheel altogether. But soon this worry, this loose tooth troubling him was put to rest with the summing up, This would never work in the third world – in the third world, you would go up to the counter and ask for what you want, and they go back and get it for you.
This little exchange caught my attention somehow – that he had been so troubled by something I didn’t think twice about, and had had to settle himself down quite deliberately, reminding himself that the context was different. Some lesson about the importance of the need for adaptation felt nestled in the moment.
In front of my house, he practically clucked with dismay at the disarray, the strewn collection of chairs, old bicycles, unraked leaves and crumbling porch. God will help you settle down eventually, was his last fix-it pronouncement on my life.
We said our goodbyes and I trundled into the house, arms full of stuff, head full of the uniqueness of this man.
Somewhere in all of the twists and turns of the encounter I felt the hint of magic, the reminder to remain open to the possible variations on what angelic presences might look like…

Over a week ago I lost my glasses.

Somewhere on my way up to Collingwood they fell out of my bag.

They are the only pair of glasses I’ve ever owned – a recent acquisition (well, maybe 3 years ago) for reading, working on the computer… old lady glasses.

It was annoying – the thought of having to go back to the optometrist for a new prescription, having to fork over the cash to her, then more cash for a new pair of glasses… I was avoiding the problem, stalling.

At night, reading in bed, I stuck to the one library book that happens to be a large print edition – the highly entertaining Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

A week went by. 10 days. I dawdled, squinting at the computer screen.

Then this morning, on the ratty old rocker on the front porch, an apparition –

My glasses.

Returned by the delightful taxi driver from last week who took me to the bus station. They’d fallen out of my bag in her car. And she’d noticed, AND she had remembered me.

What a sweetie-pie!!! I’m in love….

The incident reminded me of the time we were living in Mexico City – we were supposed to be making a film, were often out shooting stuff and interviewing people, lugging cameras and sound gear around in taxis… I had a notebook in which I kept all names, phone numbers, notes and relevant observations, I kept it in a knapsack I took everywhere with me.

The city both fascinated and terrified me – the sprawling monstrous size, the compelling yet horrifying complexity and intensity of a city poised on a gelatinous former lakebed in a circle of mountains – the beauty of some of the architecture, the markets, the flowers and crafts, the rich history, but then the toxicity of the pollution, the extreme violence and prevalence of crime, and yet the hundreds of thousands of bold, beautiful, wonderful human beings living there.

My friend Maria had stories of being held at gunpoint by 5 guys when she was 7 months pregnant – how they’d kicked her in the stomach even though she gave them her cash. But that story not as bad as the time a few years before when she’d been held hostage for 3 days by a man who raped her and emptied her bank accounts.

“Don’t you ever think about leaving?”, I asked her, practically peeing my pants at the thought of staying in this city.

“Solo los cobardes se huyen”, she answered – Only cowards flee.

Count me a coward.

At that point we were staying in a little house in Coyoacan, an old and very pretty section of the city, where many of the houses had walls several feet thick – story was the Spanish conquistadors would hide their gold inside the walls, then murder the slaves who’d built the house and knew where the gold was, and hide their bodies inside the walls as well. There were many tales of ghosts wandering corridors and alleyways around the neighbourhood.

One night we got home to the little house where we lived and I realized I’d lost my knapsack, and in the knapsack, my notebook – probably on the floor of the taxi. All the names and places and ideas and plans and contact numbers…..gone.

There was a yellow pages phone book in the house (it was the 90’s, life before cel phones), and I opened it to the taxis section – hundreds of little companies. Where to begin? There was nothing memorable about the taxi we’d been in – it was one of thousands, if not millions of little VW bugs that served as taxis all over the city. All I remembered was it was one of the green ones, not a yellow one.

Hopeless.

Several nights later the doorbell rang. A very formal, reserved man stood there. He held out my knapsack. He’d found the notebook inside and remembered us and our little house, in this city of some 20 million.

“How could you forget something so important?”, he wanted to know.

I stammered with disbelief, called him my guardian angel, tried to invite him in for a coffee, a beer, something to thank him.

He refused all offers. “Estamos para servirle”, he said – We are here to serve you – and went off into the night.

Tag: angel

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