At the Yom Kippur service in the Chabad Tent on Route 9 in Wellesley, Rabbi Bleich talked about angels at length giving examples from the Torah, naturally.   He asked that we consider the angels in our own lives, metaphorically.

I was sitting with Max, and as the Rabbi spoke I whispered to him asking he remind me to tell him how my life was saved by an angel in a red Toyota pickup truck one day in 2005 as I walked to the LA Fitness on Coldwater.  It happened, and life has certainly continued, but whenever I am given to the memory it amazes me once again, and again I feel the chill up my spine of that same day.

I was living in a stucco apartment complex you might see in a Tarrantino film where men in wrap-around sun glasses - adorned by women with fake breasts and lips too big for comfort - carry automatic weapons holstered beneath shark-skin suits.  Where vertical plastic blinds covering over-sized windows face a quad where no one walks - or talks.  I had been exiled/freed by the mother of my 3 children and living in the Brazilian Prison Cell a term coined to describe it, I found the time to go every day to the gym.

Funny I can remember the path with my eyes closed, but using Google Earth I’m unable to locate the walk as I did daily; day after day after day until that final day when I finally left at the end of June in ’07, and was born again pulling into a driveway on Cavanaugh Rd.

Once I heard a description of LA suggesting it was inhabited by cars.  No mention of people.  In a world inhabited by cars -  as living organisms, people are of no consequence.  In LA this holds true.  People are of no real consequence; only the tracks they leave, if at all.  
 

Four or five mornings a week at around 6:30 I would walk to a Yoga class at the LA Fitness on Coldwater.  It was a routine that kept me limber to say the least, and ‘regular’ for lack of a better term.  This is a period of my life that had packed into it enough suffering for ten lifetimes, so the daily walk to the gym had a special feel, especially given the previous statement in which LA is described as a place for cars, not for people.  It was a walk in silence, and the only sounds would be the occasional vehicle swooshing by.  The path to the gym was approximately 1 mile.

I had just turned off of Burbank Blvd. onto a brief stretch of road with single story homes fenced off from each other aligned like pegs.  The side street was a short-cut for my daily walk, and had between both sides no more than 10 houses with perfectly manicured yards and regulation white picket fences.  Since Los Angeles is inhabited by cars the people, well… the ‘only’ people one sees are the cleaning ladies and nannies, the gardeners and the occasional starlet jogging or returning home from the liquor store.  At this hour there was a red Toyota pickup truck probably new in the 80s, and crammed into the front seat sat at least 4 illegal alien gardeners eating breakfast - I assumed - before beginning their work-day and as I walked down the street lined with trees 60 ft. high, one of the gardeners in the truck muttered something in my direction.

In itself this is a rare event.  Los Angeles is multicultural - true; but there is little or no integration.  South Americans of many nationalities stick with their countrymen playing soccer in the same park as Armenians who stick together just like Israelis (for similar reasons).  Whites; Christian whites stick together, and Blacks just don’t mix with non-Blacks.  ‘Birds of the same feather’, as the saying goes ‘stick together’.  When a gardener in an old pickup truck aims a comment at a white guy on his way to the gym at 6:30 in the morning it is either an emergency or a provocation.  I approached the truck, somewhat bristled: ‘What was that?’  It was 1969 in Harvard Square where freaks and hippies in long overcoats begged for spare change from under-aged kids from the suburbs.  It was a Tel Aviv sidewalk in the 90’s, being solicited by a Hassidic Jew to stop for a minute and lay tefillin.  It was a knock on my locked door.
‘Jesus loves you’ he said, and surprised by the comment in a nano second my bristle turned to relief, and moved to tears (that he should think such a thing not knowing me), or the pain that enveloped me in those days; that he could be so compelled to cross the socio-economic divide at such a bizarre time of the day without reason, and say those words with such conviction.
‘Jesus loves you’ I heard myself say in return.  I turned away from the guys packed like sardines in their shitty little truck filled with gardening equipment and continued on my way.  The whole affair took less than 10 seconds, but it hung in the air as I walked to the end of the short little street I am unable to find today on Google Maps.  As I reached it’s end and readied to turn left (onto Chandler) out of the corner of my eye I saw it falling, and then came the crash of the massive branch as it fell to the ground.  It was loud enough to make me jump, and then I realized where I stood at that very moment at the end of the street was exactly the ‘less than 10 seconds’ it took me to learn that Jesus loved me.  My life was saved by an angel in a red pickup truck...