As we munched turkey leftovers spread on toast with gravy the question went around the table, “What do you want for Christmas this year?” Everyone else wanted experiences or edibles: no stuff! I, however, wanted a big thing: that white baby-face Fiat 500 I rented for a day to do a quick trip to Phoenix. I loved the Bose speakers, the moon roof, the handling, the way kids in parking lots pointed at it and tugged their parents’ shirt tails as if they were saying, “Please mommy, can I have a toy like that?”
“But maybe experiences do trump stuff,” I thought. “Adventures don’t collect dust anyway.” For the next week I asked friends what experiences they craved.
“A hot air balloon ride,” I heard on the steps of the post office.
“A float down the Salt,” said the boatwoman in the stacks at Bookmans.
“Massage,” three of us said together over lunch by the fireplace at the Weatherford.
Ah massage. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was an angel on Christmas Eve?” I said.
Years ago after graduating from the Santa Fe School of Massage I spent my first year of practice willing to take my table anywhere. I treated the owner of the Inn at 410 so that the inn might recommend my talented hands to guests. And hark! Midday a man called me desperate for massage.
“Any chance?” he pleaded. “I know it’s Christmas Eve but would now work for you?” Please, please, please …
He’d driven nonstop from Salt Lake City to re-join family soon to shuttle up from Phoenix, and he said he felt too frazzled to successfully meet in-laws. I thought he was very wise to know to get a massage for reclamation. I agreed to come by with my table to his room at the beautiful Inn at 410.
How very peaceful it was, then, for both of us, to carve an hour of sanity out of the hubbub of holiday. I stroked his limbs one by one, pulling the accelerator pedal out of his right leg, lingering on fingers that had gripped the steering wheel, doing long strokes from chin to temple to reclaim the temple that is a head, and opening the face that had been too long staring at horizon and highway.
Afterward a more changed and grateful man I’d never met.
“You’re an angel,” he said. This pleased me to hear. Besides savoring the money I’d use for rent, I liked being an angel delivering a glowing-faced father to his children on Christmas Eve. Driving down Beaver Street afterwards I nodded at the steeple at the Church of the Nativity noting the one wingless angel there.
“Like me,” I smiled, en route to a window at Charly’s to spend a father’s tip on a gin and tonic. “Glory to the newborn king,” I chuckled while last minute shoppers rushed by with their packages of surprise, their exclamations of wonder.
At a Christmas-season lunch 15 years later, my friends mulled over the story of my one gig as an angel.
“Hallelujah to that,” said she who furtively bought our lunches.
“But what do you want this year?” asked the other who likes to pin me down to a bottom line whenever I wax poetic.
Visions flickered: A flight to Fairbanks, Alaska, to see the aurora borealis in a peak year. Christmas in London? And I’ve long wanted to spend a night in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas where Thornton Wilder retreated to write.
“I’d like to be an angel again,” I said finally. “Just that.”
I’ve had a year where meeting an angel disguised as a banker or new friend or old foe has saved the day for me more than once. I can’t imagine what shape I would take to be an angel now, but it’s a lovely thing to want for Christmas. “Like that one at the top of the altar in the Catholic church: the one with the garland of flowers in her hands, arms open wide to shower grace on the top of heads. That one. I want to be her for a minute.”
My friends nodded sagely and so we continued out the doors to Leroux Street into our lives where we give things or don’t, want stuff or prefer experiences, but if we’re lucky, we notice when an angel winks at us, and we smile when we wink back.
