Tool Booth Preacher

“No I do not have a park pass”, my reply gives invitation to his purpose. He explains all the lovely parks and perks that such a sticker will give me entrée to. “Sold!” He dips his head into the car, his khaki ranger uniform giving him stature as he queries my Nubian female passenger. (I am expecting, ‘’Can I see your passport?”) Instead he asks her, “Are you single?’’ She beams and blushes a shine like mahogany. The flirt is on and we get chatted up. Really though he is a witness to love. The lake shimmers as a backdrop as he tells us the story of his love life. It is indeed a life of love. He is local boy, from the farm thumb of Michigan. All that water had him seeking; there must be great lake freighter sailor somewhere in his bloodline. He worked as a park ranger in the mountains of North Carolina. Marriage seemed not in the cards. He is handsome and affable, but perhaps he had too good of an eye for beauty. On a visit home to the thumb he met a widow who had raised eight children and fostered dozens. This was his much-anticipated soul mate. His eyes twinkle like the lakes water when he speaks of her. He still surprised somehow of this love and his yes to it. He sparkles still, even when he tells of her death of breast cancer. She beat it by five years. She wrote a list of all her dreams and this itchy-footed man took this woman who had never left the thumb of Michigan on a dream road trip. She witnessed the splendor of the national parks and tracked down foster children who she longed to hug. Though succumbing to cancer it was a good ending. He does not say why he returns to live in the thumb. Perhaps he wanted to smell the air and feel the wind of this pastured, watery haven, to remember in his homecoming the place and scent of his beloved. The thumb had the smell of her, the light of her. All this we learn while he is making change for our twenty.

He places the sticker in the window, preaches a bit about love and it being our purpose, the booth his pulpit. He tells us he is now “seeing”  (this is a better word than dating, a man who sees a woman) Dawn. She was his real estate agent. Upon meeting him she tells him “ I have slept in your room. “  A widowed man he with still much fire he is intrigued by this comment, “I have slept in your room.” When his family sold the farm years before, her family had bought it. Seems two young souls, lay gazing out the window into the night skies all speckled with stars dreaming of love, praying for love. And now years later through it’s circuitous route they have found it again and each other.

And we are held for a few moments in witness to the word, and we are believers in his gospel of love. And as we walk the pier and gaze into the lake we pray with greater faith.

Through Angel Eyes

When starting a blog about angels one anticipates that they will bear witness to all sorts of magical moments. This may be true. But just now I think I got some angel energy or JuJu working on me, trying to alter my interior.

Always in a hurry more by nature than necessity I was aware of the elder man as he meandering toward the library. He was ambling through rows of parked cars as if they were a scenic garden.

He is headed just next to my car and his gait seems timed so that he will obstruct my exit from car. If I am not hasty I will have to wait an extra twenty seconds for him to pass, Hot, hurried I create a sporting event. I will beat him. I will stop him in his path. In my mind I will win the ring from the Bowl Game if I succeed in getting out and blocking him before he gets next to my car..

He wins. He wins like a Nobel peace prizewinner. Noticing me and my intention of exiting, he defers to me. He stands there all gentlemanly like he is my date ready to help me out of the car and waits to shut the door behind me. He smiles.

Derailed, I stop and thank him for his chivalrous ways. He tells me that this is how his mother raised him. Long ago, near eighty years ago this man still recalls his momma’s voice and how it extolled to be him of the virtuous and polite.

He tells me that he likes to read mysteries and is here at the library to replenish his supply. Just an ordinary day yet…

He is my mystery angel of the day, putting me on point. You cannot seek angels if you do not act like one.

Others Pearls of Wisdom

"Look further than where your eyes can 

take you''. Marsha B.

Seeking, Seeing

If you listen for their whispers perhaps you will hear them sing. The idea really is to create a testament to the little moments of magic and miracles that happen each day. Sometimes they seem random, sometimes they seem by design.

Sometimes we are standing in the checkout line at the grocery and we hear a comment, or witness an instant and for a Nano second we are transported to another realm. We have just glimpsed the divine. It is not cinematic like the end of a movie yet  by it is a glimpse the haze is lifted and we see or resee for an instant. Sometimes the magic is ours, other times we are privy to someone else’s. And that is what Angel Daze is, where we are shifted into perception… to….

Well not sure what is but I will be looking for when…

The Awakening

Ah the muse gave me a gift today.

 I have been rudderless for sometime. I had spent three weeks in a crack house of cleaning; I had flunked my attempts at Internet dating, bothered by the intrusion, of men who really just wanted pen pals. Flesh and blood baby.

My show, Annie Speaks had premiered successfully and needed me to bring a skill set that was as life sucking as editing. I had to create web sites and promote the work. Further I was supposed to be writing chapters of my book, And So the Child Shall Lead ( an idea so obscure it will take a sorceress to pull it off). But rather than sit and write I would circle my house and life and assault the toilet bowl once again.

I had a low-grade depression, well not really. But just this funk. No distractions, no daily rituals, no partner, no chaos, which I am so adept at navigating through. Further I had blown my budget and managed to stymie my cash flow, so running away on play dates just to distract myself from the barren tundra of my peaceful life was like a casino retiree without Florida.

 I was a seeker in search of naming my own holy grail. Uncertain about what to do with peace and solitude, my walks, meditations seemed indolent excursions that filled up but did not replenish the landscape.

I just filled days. I wanted to check  the employment box on surveys as “housewife”.  I was morphing into a Donna Reed, Jack Jones lyric of "Hey little girl do your makeup lyric, soon he will open the door”, with no one to play house with. " Life was closing in on me.

 I drove to the city to  join a friend for lunch. I am lost. I am fielding calls from my daughter who just recently returned from a decade in Europe to live in “The City”, New York.

 I am strolling through downtown Detroit, spring sun glares on the street numbers, and I am ambling, careening  really trying to talk, trying to find the restaurant. I tell her I am lost. She laughs, “Use your phone.''  It is good I have a phone and a child who are smarter than I. Yet I say to her, “What fun is it use your phone, then you won’t meet anyone”?

Hanging up, I walk to the man who seems the doorman for a residence, yet colorful woven hat  to imply's other wise.

I bolt into my inquiry. “Do you know where…”

He interrupts and in a Jamaican accent that could only be called music, all slow and intentional, he tells me, "where I come from people say, Good morning, good afternoon as appropriate. ” He is schooling me, in both language and life. I properly say hello. He does not know where the address is. He inquires on my behalf. He wants me unlost, found. He is an earth angel. I may have a smart phone, but fear if I seek in the icons it becomes like idolatry and I will miss God and all the earth angels. This day I have found my rudder. I will seek earth angels, and bear witness to angel days. I am in a daze of purpose.