Dandelions in Paradise

by Kit Duncan

"So what's the deal with the angels?" I asked the next morning while Silas and I were walking the bluebonnets.

  "What do you mean, the deal?"

  "What's their story?"

  "You mean the two at the game last night?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, they just showed up at the store yesterday afternoon, said they were going to spend the night in town, and McMillan asked them if they wanted to come to the game. My goodness, that one could hit, couldn't he! The little guy with the cutoffs, though, he wasn't much. Couldn't bat. Couldn't throw. Couldn't catch. But seemed like a decent enough fellow anyway. They were leaving this morning, McMillan said. Headed for Zairella. That's the nearest express port."

  "What's an express port?"

  "Oh, it's just someone's fancy way of saying a waterless pond. There's no water. Just a hole in the ground. Angels use them to move between the three spheres and life."

  "Where do angels live?" I asked.

  "I just told you, Newbie! Between the three spheres and life."

  "Don't they have homes, though?"

  Silas sighed deeply and closed his eyes, and his lips were moving, though no words were coming out. I watched his mouth closely to see if I could make out what he wasn't saying.

  Five, six, seven, eight….

  He was counting to ten.

  He looked back at me with a plastic smile, his voice shackled in a slow motion monotone as he spoke.

  "Angels move. Angels don't reside nowhere. They move around. They are travelers. They are not nesters."

  "Oh," I said.

  "Oh," he repeated, mockingly. He stopped and bent over, caressed a bluebonnet, and when he stood back up he was smiling again.

  "The thing about adoring something," he said, "is that it helps you adore other things. Even when other things are annoying the holy crap out of you."

  I kept my mouth shut for a few minutes, but then curiosity won over again.

  "So, the angels travel," I said.

  Silas nodded.

  "What do they do while they're traveling?"

  "Well, mostly they just sort of keep an eye on things."

  "You mean, they don't intervene?"

  "Well, if you mean, poke their noses into other people's business, no, they do not intervene."

  "But how do they help?"

  "Who said anything about helping? Heavens, you are…"

  "But I always thought it was an angel's job to be helpful."

  "Misconception. Angels attend. They're really quite passive, you know. Oh, they'll ask questions from time to time, knowing that folks are often healed by their own answers."

  "So they just go around asking questions?"

  "Newbie, there are many ways of asking questions. All an angel does is to encourage folks to clarify for themselves. That's all. Well, and a lot of times they just hang around. I've found that having someone close by is all a person needs sometimes."

  "Like the blue van?" I asked.

  "What blue van?"

  "Oh," I shook my head and walked ahead of Silas. "It's nothing. You'll just laugh at me."

  He caught up with me quickly, matched my pace, and said, "Listen, I'm probably going to laugh at you twenty-five times before the day's over. May as well laugh at you for the blue van as anything else."

  "It was years ago, when I was living in Massachusetts," I said, slowing down a little. "Just before Christmas. I was leaving Hartford from work and driving home to Springfield. Traffic was horrible, it had started snowing around one, and the east bound lanes were nearly choked by the time I got to I-91."

  Silas listened quietly. I continued. "Well, not two minutes from the office I hit a patch of ice, swerved all over the road. Horns were blaring, cars were donutting, it was a mess."

  "Anyone get hurt?"

  "That's what was so strange," I said. "All those cars, all that ice, and somehow we just all got back on the highway and rolled forward. Not even a fender bender."

  "You must have been terrified," Silas said, and he nearly seemed empathetic.

  "Petrified!" I exclaimed. "I was stiff as a board with fear. And then, just before I got to the exit to get on I-91 North, a blue van pulled up behind me. Now, I was going pretty slowly by now, trying not to go too slow, but, well, I was pretty much crawling. And this van sort of eased in behind me and on my tail."

  "How long did it follow you?" Silas asked.

  "All the way to my exit in Springfield." I said. "It felt like that van was sort of keeping a lookout for me, but I always thought maybe I just imagined it. I mean, thousands of cars drive that corridor every day. Maybe the van just wanted to drive slow, too, I don't know."

  "But you felt better knowing it was there."

  "Oh, yes!" I said with great animation. "I couldn't see the driver's face through the snow. It was like a blizzard out there, and most of the cars around me were still buzzing past me. I remember it was just before the holidays, and a lot of the cars had skis on their hoods, headed for Vermont. And I was from Kentucky, remember. I had never driven in that kind of weather until I moved to Massachusetts."

  "So, even though you never saw the face in the van you knew he was there. Well, or she. One of the two."

  "Yes. Someone was close by, and I'll tell you, Silas, it made that trip home manageable. The van went on north toward Vermont when I got off my exit to go home. The salt trucks and plows had already been on the side roads, and I got to my house without a hitch. But I always wondered about that blue van."

  Silas and I walked silently a little while, and then I asked, "You think the driver of that blue van might have been an angel, Silas?"

  "Maybe," Silas said, tugging on his beard. Then he looked up at me and winked. "Or it might have just been someone going skiing in Vermont."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN