Saturday, February 25, 2012

The Truth About Angels

Don’t bother trying to tell me there’s no such thing as angels, ‘cause I know the truth. I don’t know her name but I can describe her: She was about 65, blond hair from Detroit but has lived in an Atlanta suburb for the past 30 years and very rarely ever meets anyone from Atlanta. Her neighbors are all from places like New York and Wisconsin.


She was sitting next to me on a two-hour flight last night out of Chicago on the way back to Atlanta. We’d both been in overcast places this last week (Seattle and Toronto) and it was snowing outside, there was one of those crane-looking machines de-icing the wings in the dark. I got to know a lot about her: she has two sisters, two daughters, and one son—ages 40, 38, and 30. Two grandchildren, a boy, 15, and a bossy little girl, 12 going on 25. We talked about children and family. Hopes and realizations. She described to me what putting your own projections on your children looks like in hindsight. We talked husbands—ours, our sisters, the ones belonging to our mothers and our friends.


We talked about values and about what it means when you let others know they’re appreciated. About praise for children, too little, too much. About planning families and surprise families. About remembering our foremothers, and their china cabinets. Our love for those things and how grateful we both were for having meaningful work.


We talked about marriage. She had a sister with three husbands, the third apparently turned out to be the right one. She described to me a friend’s mother who had been married for 50 years, celebrated that anniversary in a big way, and then shortly after, the woman’s husband told her he wanted a divorce—he’d met someone in Sunday School who was 20 years younger. The kicker in the story is that this woman spoke multiple languages and was educated and could have done anything but her husband was old-fashioned and he wanted his wife in the home, taking care of him and raising a family. My fellow passenger told me, you never know what’s going to happen so you should always make sure that you take care of your own happiness. Life is finite.


We talked about our mothers and ourselves as mothers and tried to figure where we had all fallen short.


The last thing she did for me when we landed at midnight was to loan me her phone so I could call my son and tell him I had arrived. Mine had gone dead. We walked off the plane to baggage claim—carousel 1. We wished each other luck and went home.