A stranger stopped in the cold rain at about half past two in the morning and asked whether we were okay. I had been driving drunk, and it could not have been hidden.
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The few minutes after a close call are what I want to talk about.
I told him I was okay. Then I told him I did not want to be arrested, which gave me away. He stayed a few minutes. Then he was gone. I never saw him again, and I never learned his name.
It is smaller than the crash, and it is the part I kept.
The crash is easier to describe. We had been bar-hopping; my ex-wife and I were on our way home. White Zombie was on, "More Human Than Human," and I felt like nothing could touch me. I took a turn much too fast, lost it, and hit a telephone pole. The airbags went off. My face was bleeding. Nobody was seriously hurt, and someone could have been. I’m grateful no one was.
So, let me be plain. I was driving a car I had no business driving, with somebody else in the passenger seat, on roads that belonged to everybody. The car was finished, and it still moved, so I drove it the roughly 0.15 miles home. I have called myself somebody not deserving of help, and I am not going to soften that here.
I am going to call what that man did love.
The smaller words are available, and some of them fit. I am reaching past them on purpose. And I am talking about myself when I say it, not about him. The word is about what reached me. It is not about what he meant by it, and he never told me. He may have thought of it as ordinary concern. He may not have thought of it as anything.
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Here is what I believe, and you can leave it where it lies. I believe he was an angel. I believe God, which I understand as my own Higher Self, was looking after me through another man. I felt a kind of recognition come off him that I have never been able to explain.
I believe we have all met people in our lives that are angels, purely in a non-mystical sense. These people come when we least expect them, and I believe they serve a mystical purpose, whether they know it or not. Michael Perks is one of those people. He checks on me when nothing has happened at all.
We have never stood in the same room. Neither of us knows where the other lives. He turns up in my comments with a green heart, which is a small thing, and I notice it every time. He has written, "You know I'm always going to show up when I can. That's just who I am." Another time it was, "You know you've got people in your corner." I have said this in public before, and I will say it again. Michael Perks shows up. That is the whole thing, and it is not a small thing. I never have to wonder if I have support.
He has been low too, and he has said so, and I have been the one on the other end of it. It goes both ways.
Most of what passes between the men I know does not announce itself. It gets done rather than said. Somebody covers a shift. Somebody stays on the phone longer than they needed to. I have said before that sometimes carrying the couch is the sentence, and I still think that is right. It is not a lesser way of saying it. It is a whole language, and I know men who are fluent in it.
Help can just be help, though. Not every decent act is love in work clothes, and if I rename it all, I have not discovered anything; I have only stretched a word until it stops carrying weight. Saying it out loud is not automatically deeper. Doing it without saying it is not automatically deeper either. And silence does not come with something inside it by default. Sometimes silence is just silence.
The kitchen stays open either way. If something here was worth something to you, there is a jar.
So here are the two I keep coming back to. A stranger, once, for a few minutes of a night I caused, gone before I understood what had happened, and I never saw him again. And Michael, who is still there, in a friendship that is not organized around a wreck, and I could message him right now.
The man who stopped at the wreck to check on me and Michael are not the same, and I am not putting them in the same box. What they have in common is narrower than what separates them, and it is the only reason I am setting them next to each other. Nothing that came from either man arrived with something attached to it. So, I am going to use the same word for what reached me from both.
The word is mine. I picked it years after that night, and I am picking it again now, and I do not know what either man would call it. I call it the purest form of love. It’s the type of love that gives money to a homeless person without deciding whether they deserve it or judging how they might spend it. That kind of love is stoic, unmovable, and unjudging.
The parts I remember, I can still see. Memory keeps things that have a shape, and a wreck has a shape, and a stranger stopping in the rain has a shape. A message on an ordinary afternoon does not have much of one. Neither does somebody staying on the phone. If something went past without leaving a shape behind, it would not be among the ones I can see, and I would have no way of knowing.
Michael, this is not a plaque. What I know about you is what you have chosen to tell me, and that is not the whole of you, nor has it ever needed to be. I am glad you are out there.
Did any moments in your own life pass under a smaller name?
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