Automotive Angels

---12.27.1999---

It’s 6:30 am and I’ve just come back from the Illinois of my childhood, transported in a dream. I’ll spare you the details, which I imagine you’ll thank me for, save for one.

I saw three cars of a type I’d never seen before. They appeared to be custom, Art Deco low-riders, slammed and chopped in the 1920s or 1930s, their sweeping fenders swinging low over 70-spoke wire wheels. They sat streamlined and white with gleaming, gold brightwork instead of chrome. They appeared divine, like automotive angels. A couple of secular cars were there too, looking humble next to their heavenly counterparts. What does that mean? Can angels take on automotive form?

When I awoke in bed, in Germany, I had come back from a long trip around the globe. Closing my eyes to set everything firm before it evaporated in the bright light of consciousness, I had the sensation of being absolutely vast in outer space, of being very close to far away things, of turning through a radius of millions of miles.

It then occurred to me then that our own distances and proximities are odd and rare, a definitive node between the incomprehensibly protracted stretches of deep space and the great, empty picometers that separate subatomic particles. Within this realm distances congeal into beings and things, forming a locus for spiritual habitation and divine intervention.