Maybe you’ve seen Wings of Desire, the 1987 film by German director Wim Wenders. Actually, I like the original title much better, Himmel über Berlin, which translates as Sky (or Heaven) Above Berlin. The city, still divided by the infamous wall, plays a central role in the movie, and the ambiguous meaning of the word Himmel fits beautifully. Other leading characters are angels. They walk around in long black coats, unseen by humans, observing and watching. They take a benevolent interest in us, in our bungling, confused ways of living from one day to the next. They record strange and wonderful things we do, such as:
At the Zoo U-Bahn station, the guard, instead of the station's name… suddenly shouted, "Tierra del Fuego!"
In the hills, an old man was reading The Odyssey to a child… and the young listener stopped blinking his eyes.
A passer-by, in the rain, folded her umbrella… and was drenched.1
They can’t really change a person’s destiny, but their selfless love and compassion can gently lift one’s spirits or move a heavy burden so that it becomes bearable. Less painful.
I’m not religious, but I don’t see why there couldn’t be all sorts of beings without a physical body. What name we give them doesn’t really matter. That the ones we call angels appear to have wings – that’s how they were depicted in many different cultures – may simply be an imaginative way to indicate that they’re not bound by space and time.
And I’m going further out on a limb: I posit that we all have a Guardian Angel, sort of like a Higher Self. The part of us that knows we’re ultimately “nothing but” pure consciousness. The part that’s truly selfless, not divided into “I like this but not that” or “I am this but not that”. When, for whatever reason, something painful or bad or horrible is going to happen in my life, the Guardian Angel can’t stop it but can soften the blow so that it happens in the least harmful way (which can still be pretty awful). Here’s an example; I’ve experienced this many times in my life and will write about other events in the future.
This one happened not very long after my daughter and I had moved to the United States from Japan. We first stayed with friends in San Francisco, and a bit later I found a small apartment for us in Berkeley. Some German friends who I knew from Munich had bought a car so they could travel all across the States for about six weeks, and when they were ready to return to Germany, they sold me their car. A VW station wagon! I was ecstatic – it was bright orange, came with a stick shift, and had lots of space.
I had the car for maybe two weeks when we were driving home to Berkeley. We visited my friends in San Francisco who always let me do a load of laundry. It was around 11:30 pm, a hamper with freshly washed clothes was in the very back and my daughter was asleep on the back seats. We were driving across the Bay Bridge which spans the San Francisco Bay and is more than eight miles long. At that time, the bridge had two decks, one for each direction; traffic going to San Francisco drove on the upper deck, and the cars going to Oakland and the East Bay used the lower deck. And there were no emergency lanes. Traffic in each of the six lanes on both decks went at least at speed limit, which was 55 miles per hour I believe.
If one had to stop for any reason, one was in trouble…
When I came close to the Oakland end of the bridge, I suddenly noticed that the car stalled, the motor wasn’t running, and I was slowing down. I was in one of the middle lanes, and traffic was rushing past me on both sides. I still had some momentum and managed to get into the right lane without being hit. Luckily, the last stretch of the bridge curved a bit downhill. I was able to roll off the bridge and come to a halt just barely away from the constant stream of cars. I opened the driver’s side door and got out, meaning to check the motor which was in the back.
And that’s when I saw the flames. I don’t remember if they were big or small, all I saw was FLAMES. The car will explode any moment! My daughter is asleep in the back seat! That’s what flashed through my mind and had me close to utter panic. I meant to open the passenger door behind, when I heard somebody shout: ”NO! NO! Don’t open the door on the traffic side! Too dangerous!” A man was running towards me. I quickly went to the other side, the door was locked and I barely managed to get the key into the lock because I was shaking, expecting the car to blow up any second. And that’s when I experienced the possibly worst moment in my life: the door wouldn’t open.
Besides several other faults, this VW had the most senseless keys imaginable: it fit the lock both ways, but only ONE way would unlock it. I had put it in the wrong way. A second of utter abjection, despondency that lasted a lifetime. Then I saw that the man who had come to help had opened the door on the other side, the side with all the traffic, and pulled my daughter out of the vehicle. I ran to meet them, held my daughter in my arms, and the world was good again. I was calm, everything was okay.
The man’s car was parked a bit ahead of us. He had us sit on the passenger’s seat and then we drove back to the west-bound lanes where the toll booths were located, so that he could call the fire department; remember, this was WAY before any cell phones. While we waited for him to come back, I thought about what would happen next. I didn’t have a Green Card yet but was an illegal alien, and I pictured me and my daughter being deported to Germany. Normally this would have been the worst nightmare (I’ll share the reasons in a future post), but after the existential scare I had just experienced – fearing that my daughter would die in the exploding car – nothing could worry me. Let the police come.
And they DID come, of course. They had me roll down the window of our rescuer’s car, and asked what had happened, why were we driving across the Bay Bridge, where were we heading to. They did NOT ask for an ID, Driver’s License, car registration, insurance – nothing. They apologized: because the car caught fire just beyond the bridge, not on it, my insurance wouldn’t pay for the damage. Well, I could live with that! The helpful man, who happened to be black, drove us home.
Do you see what I mean? This could have turned out SO. MUCH. WORSE. I credit my Guardian Angel for the relatively mild results – the car was a loss, and the freshly washed clothes in the back were all singed and black. Oh well.
One more thing: The car above has only two doors while mine had four. No matter how long I tried to find a VW Squareback model with four doors from the right time period, I was unsuccessful. I remember doing some research in the early 90s, when I had a computer and an internet connection (remember dial-up?), I found several mentions of similar events, with an explanation: the fuel line broke. While I was driving, the gas leaked until the tank was empty and the car stalled. The hot fumes ignited and caused the fire. Apparently, this had happened to a number of VW station wagons of a certain year, maybe there even was a recall, and the internet has been scrubbed clean!
Tonight I will be watching that movie! 🍿 I've been circling it in my stream machine. Thanks again Darlin., 💖
yes / i've met some / they looked like humans but they acted like angels