Be a baggage-convertible-optical-fire angel

This is a world of angels.

I was so moved on Saturday night when my host in Bend, Oregon, invited two dozen people to sit in a gorgeous fire circle after my reading in that fair city. We talked about paths up a mountain, those paths we had taken and not, whether we even wanted to get to the top of the mountain or not. And we talked about friendship, about showing up, and more. It was an intentional and intergenerational conversation as we passed the talking stick and added more wood to the fire, deep into the night.

The amazing Beth Patterson first asked me to come to Bend last year when Life is a Verb appeared. I would innocently post on 37days that I was going to New York City or Sarasota and she would write to tell me that each of those cities was close to Bend. I finally made it, almost a year later. It was so much worth the wait.

The day had started inauspiciously. I had (METAPHOR ALERT) run full speed into a glass wall the night before, bending my eyeglasses into a terrible mess and leaving me with a bruised eyebone. (What is an eyebone, you ask?) I had a tremendous headache and could barely see out of the glasses the next morning when my friend, Mary Meares, and I appeared at the Budget Rental car desk in the Portland airport, having been led there by Angel Number One, a baggage porter whose energy buoyed us.

"You've rented an economy car," the woman noted as she looked at my reservation and peered, puzzled, at the glasses that sat at full alert crooked across my face. Little did I know she would become Angel Number Two.

"Yes," I said, "but wouldn't a red convertible masquerading as an economy car be so much nicer? It would make my broken glasses feel so much better," I said, and Mary and I laughed. "I'm turning 50," I explained, "and feel compelled to indulge my mid-life crisis." Yada, yada, yada.

We laughed about my glasses and the metaphors of running full speed into a glass wall. Mary and I talked about our week in Portland, just ended.

"Do you have a lot of luggage?" she asked as she finished our rental paperwork.

"If you get me a tiny convertible, I will hereby GIVE you my luggage and everything in it," I answered, laughing.

One laugh led to the next (Please note: If you ever EVER need to laugh or get other people to laugh, bring Mary Meares along for the ride) and pretty soon Mary and I found our middle aged selves in an airport parking lot peering down at the tiniest convertible object I had ever seen. It looked like a Hot Wheels Car.

It took us 15 minutes to find out how to open the so-called trunk. And when it did open, flying open in a direction I had never personally seen a trunk fly open, we laughed so hard we had to search for a bathroom. Rental agents flocked to us to see what we were laughing so hard about.

We both now understood the question about how much luggage we had, since the pretend trunk MIGHT hold the contents of a quart-sized Ziploc bag IF and only if you took every single item out of the bag and placed it in a single row around the edge of the trunk.

Sure, we could have given up and marched back for a car with trunk space, but we decided to make this work. Which meant that all my underwear was crammed into the available space around the wheel well in the trunk, and we ditched the rest of the luggage. "TRAVEL LIGHT!" was our mantra, and off we went into the mountains, wind blowing our hair to unimaginable proportions, sun crisping us like tempeh jerky, and my broken eyeglasses resting at carnival angles.

In Sandy, Oregon, we spotted an espresso stand. Nothing–and I mean nothing–was quite as amusing as seeing us try to get back out of that car once we were lying down in it. I maneuvered my way out of the blessed horizontal to get grande Americanos and ask about an optical shop. "I was wondering about those glasses," the man said as he pointed me to a shop a few blocks away run by a woman named Cheri, otherwise known as Angel Number Three.

"Oh, my," Cheri said as we entered and she saw my frames. "Oh, my."

She was mightily impressed by how much I had torqued those frames without breaking my nose. Knock wood for that one. As she bent the frame back into shape, we talked and laughed, admiring the art in her back office. "Is that wooden frieze Thai?" Mary asked. "Not really," Cheri responded. "Sort of Egyptian, but if you look closely you can see that my sister and I painted eyeglasses on all the Egyptians." Sure enough, there they were.

It was a magical optical shop. She not only fixed my bent frames, but gave me a pair of clip-on sunglasses to fit the frames. I asked her what she thought the glass-ramming episode was a metaphor for. "Do you feel out of balance?" she asked. At that, I had to lie down on the sofa in her shop.

Lunch at the river in Bend, a standing- room only reading at Camalli Book Company (thank you, Tina!), the fire circle, and a stay with Maria and Dick in one of the most beautiful homes I have ever seen complete with breakfast in a wildflower garden in a yellow chair.

And then, in darkness at the fire circle, a young man came toward me with a flaming cake, embellished with a "5" and a "0" and singing began. Happy birthday in four-part harmony was never sweeter.

Let the celebration of angels continue in your life. Who can you be an angel for today?

(Birthday cake photo by Mary Meares)