Through a Glass, Darkly

I love this picture. It has that lovely blue cast to it. I was on a night bus, alone. The driver and other passengers had gone into a convenience store. Tired, only minutes from my hometown and the family farm, I snapped a picture of my reflection in the window and texted it to my husband, so he’d know I was almost there. You see, he worries. As he often will, he enlarged and cropped the photo and sent it back. The image in the window, with a light pole and tire rims beyond the glass, seems to hang outside the border of this world. It’s a landscape where you wouldn’t be surprised to see an angel, dropping in to help. In that moment, I thought of 1 Corinthians, the verse that says we see “through a glass darkly.” In other words, we don’t see. There’s so much trouble now, with neighbors, friends, even family turning against one another, arguing, among other things, over immigrants and how we should control our national borders. I sigh as I say it—we sure could use an angel or two. Sometimes I wonder if a day will come when humans just stop helping each other.

I wish everyone would park their car or truck and take a long-distance bus ride. There’s something leveling about the bus. Most of the people I see on the bus home are traveling alone. Watching them, it’s clear how small and limited we are, how much we need other people—our little brains, hurrying along, cordoned off from one another by literal muscle and bone, and—harder to see—attitude. Lately, things have happened, connected to my bus travels, that have stopped me mid-step. One involved a lock for my luggage—the other . . . well, I’ve already mentioned angels, haven’t I?

I’ll start with the luggage-lock.

The trip home to see my family is quite long. Midway, there’s a layover. It’s a couple hours, and there are no storage lockers, so I leave my suitcase with the station attendant and walk a couple blocks to a restaurant. Because I leave the suitcase, I never put into it something I would hate to lose. Nonetheless, I lock it with the small lock that came with it. It’s a gesture, of course. It’s the kind of lock that anyone could pop open with a tiny screwdriver. But at least, said miscreant would be forced to face the fact that they were doing an unkind, illegal, immoral thing.

On one of my bus trips home last summer, I took the lock off when I got there and tucked it into the outside zippered pocket of the suitcase. I spent the next days hanging out with my sister, the two of us taking occasional trips into town to see friends or eat at one of the little restaurants. We’re small-town, born and bred—it’s healing to be there, a respite from the things I trouble about. The night before I was going to be catching a 6:00 a.m. bus home, I set about packing. I unzipped the exterior pocket and reached nonchalantly in for the lock. I ran my hand around the pocket—then ran it around again. I spread the flap wide and looked inside. The lock wasn’t there.  

Picture it. A 70-something woman, crawling around the floor. I looked under the bed, under the bedside table, even under the radiators. I remembered that I’d removed the lock in the porch, so I checked there, in case I’d imagined I had put the lock into the zippered pocket, and it might have fallen off along the way into the house. No luck. No one in the house was the type to play a prank. I wondered for a moment, had the cats taken it? Just for a moment.

I should take my reader’s pulse. Will I lose you, if I casually proceed under an assumption that there’s life after life, and some sort of interaction is possible across the veil? I hope you’ll indulge, because I can’t finish this story without going there. While my late father wasn’t perfect, he was a prankster with a cherub’s face and, at heart, a rather angelic nature. It would be like him—with a wink and a smirk and a halo above his head—to reach out from the beyond and hide my lock. A lot of things—a  prized new chainsaw, for instance—have gone missing since Dad passed, and then, after fruitless searching and scratching of heads, have shown up right back in their proper place. When it happens, we laugh and say, “It’s Dad.”

Back to my lock . . .

I had to get on the bus the next morning without it. But no matter. On the trip back, the layover is even longer. The station attendant isn’t around when the morning bus arrives, and I drag the suitcase behind me to the restaurant. During breakfast, my little brain couldn’t give up trying to solve the mystery of the missing lock. I got home and searched the pocket again. Nope. I stowed the suitcase and forgot it.

The next time I went to the farm, I drove, so I didn’t need the lock. Still, it was on my mind. When I got there, I crawled around the floors three times, looking for it. I checked the zippered pocket repeatedly. No lock. Then came the morning of leaving . . . I unzipped the pocket, stuck my hand in, and started squealing when it struck the cool hardness and familiar shape of the lock. I danced around the house, the prodigal luggage-lock in hand. “Look! It was in the pocket!” It’s gotten to the point now, it having happened so often, that we all shrug. Of course, it’s back in the pocket. A mystery, but no mystery to our family.

I’ll leave my father behind and get to the business of angels. I have reasons to wonder if there are literally angels—entities, if you must—around all of us. Perhaps the word “angels” conjures up images of unworldly beings with many eyes, or many wings. That’s not what I’m talking about. The angels I mean aren’t fantastic creatures, nor are they white-garbed, winged messengers. I came to the conclusion that I had met one many years ago, as I was walking down a rainy street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was 1986. I was living there, working as support staff at a college, when my life hit the proverbial rocks. By the time I was walking down that street, I’d separated from my first husband, and everything I’d thought I wanted in life was lying in pieces and shards as I walked.

In Cambridge, people walk. It’s a city. I was making my way down the sidewalk, passing plate glass windows that were close enough to touch—here a bookstore, there a restaurant. Just me and the shards of my life, underfoot. Then—it happened. Because writing is what I do, I wrote the incident down, as a poem spoken to myself. Here’s the story of that rainy day in Cambridge:

Cambridge Angel

You live in a city
of mirrors. Wherever
you turn, you find an image
of yourself. People hurry
by—out for a walk on a rainy
afternoon, with boots to be soled
or wine to be chosen
for dinner. The rain falls
on good and bad. In you, the two
combine: woman who loves
and woman who loathes, one
who moves boldly
through her days, one who can
scarcely wash her face.
Behind the streaked
panes of restaurant windows,
intimacy flouts a thousand
tongues, and you stand
stricken, dumb, until
a stranger, unbathed, unshaven
habitué of doorways,
passes by, and, glancing
from the corner of his
eye, touches you—then, as clear
as the downpour on your
umbrella, speaks your name.
Are you all right?
he says. Are you
all right? He laughs and veers
away, as unmindful
of the rain as he is
of your answer.

My angel was a street person, and he spoke my name clearly. Through a glass, darkly. How could a stranger know my name? He seemed free, in a way I wasn’t—he didn’t need an umbrella, which all of us on that city street were carrying, didn’t need to hear my answer. Was I all right? The question he’d left hanging in the air made me see that, yes, I was all right—bruised emotionally, fatigued, but strangely hopeful. I understood, watching his care-free progress down the street, that I’m not alone as I go through life.

All these years later, I remember the way my world shifted and the border between heaven and earth was blown open by a few seconds shared with a disheveled stranger on a Cambridge street. Was he an angel? Or someone who had chosen the streets? There’s a sad truth here. In this time of dwindling compassion, the poor and the displaced have become the equivalent of the lepers who roam the back alleys of Christian scripture. Something ironic there. Through a glass, darkly.

One more bus trip from last summer . . .

I was waiting in the bus station, this time on my way home from the farm. I’m reserved with people I don’t know, but the few who were there kept drawing me into conversation, the sort of idle chatter between strangers. As the time for my bus to arrive grew closer, two men walked in from the street, older, simply dressed, with indefinable accents. Our border troubles are never far from my mind, and I worried for them, wondered if they were immigrants, if it was safe for them to be there. One chatted with the rest of us—the other kept to himself.

My bus arrived, and I dragged my suitcase out to the platform. The station also serves city buses, and since there were buses arriving and leaving for both, the platform was awash with people going back and forth—riders, drivers, station personnel. It was a hub-bub of noise and activity.

As I waited for the station attendant to load my suitcase into the bin under the bus, the quieter of the two men who’d come late to the station was suddenly at my side. He leaned toward me, not threateningly, and said, “You must be brave, and courageous.” I shook my head, not sure I’d heard right, and said, “I’m sorry—what? It’s so noisy.” Again he said, “You must be brave—and courageous.” The hair on my arms lifted. Who was he, and why was he saying that to me? Just then the station attendant reached for my suitcase, and it was my turn to board. I nodded at the man and moved toward the bus steps, expecting the two men would be boarding behind me. But they didn’t. I watched them wander away down the platform.

Who was he? Why had he said it? Be brave, and courageous. I had the same eerie feeling I’d had on that street in Cambridge, Mass. There was something unworldly about him. He didn’t say, “Be careful, traveling alone.” He said, “Be brave.”

I’m a serious writer, serious about writing. It seems easy, I suppose, to push ideas and words around—no hard labor, no boss at your shoulder. But it’s not. If you’re going to overcome your natural reserve to weave your thoughts into an artifact, then display it to the world, there could be hell to pay. It might take an angel’s direction to make you risk it. Writers throughout history have paid through censorship, from prison cells, or worse. I wear blue a lot—it looks good on me. Concerning social issues, I lean blue. I live in a blue state. Given that combination, “worse” seems very possible. There are a lot of  right-ward leaning people here, too. Most of us  understand we’re community and do a fine job of getting along. We’re all under siege right now, in danger of having a sudden gun in our face.

Through a glass, darkly. I puzzle over the incidents I’ve described. Does my—can my—father return in spirit to the house he lived in nearly half his life? Does an angel walk the streets of Cambridge? Do heavenly beings with accents pass their days delivering needed messages in bus stations? Do they—and here’s another story—ride public transport, offering friendship and encouragement?

One night, on a bus to Boston, I shared a seat with an elderly woman—charming, with her graying hair pulled loosely up, a musical laugh. We talked the entire way, as if we’d known each other forever and were happy to have run into each other. Her profile beside me alternated between sharp and soft as we passed beneath streetlights. I’d told her I was in graduate school, studying writing, and as we pulled into Boston, she said she’d watch for my name. Talking with her was so easy. Was she an angel? At the least, she did an angel’s holy work. Trying to make it as a writer takes one down a path strewn with discouragement. The simple words she spoke to the quiet, at times shy, writer in the seat beside her allowed a novice to believe that someone, somewhere, might someday actually look for her work.

Through a glass, darkly. Were any of the helpers and encouragers I’ve described actually angels? I don’t know. But every time I see a bus, I want to be on it. I want to see my reflection in blue windows at night, see the light poles and tire rims beyond the glass. There are mysteries, in unexpected places, and my mind needs to figure them out.

Subscribe To My Newsletter

Join my mailing list to receive the latest news and updates. It's totally free and you can unsubscribe at any time.

SUBSCRIBE!

You have Successfully Subscribed!