It was an unseasonably chilly day on the east coast of Florida a couple of weeks before Christmas. My wife and I were heading back north the next morning and we wanted to have one last beach-side lunch with Florida friends. We had just ordered when suddenly I jumped up and abruptly left the table. “He sees something,” my wife explained to the perplexed couple. “He’ll be back.”
She was half right. I did see something—angels singing—but I heard them, too. They were indeed singing in exultation, just like the carol said they would, singing like the very citizens of heaven they were. That their audience was an empty beach and the waves seething up against the shoreline didn’t matter. They were singing their little angelic hearts out, singing into the blustery wind, singing a Christmas “Hallelujah!” to beat a heavenly band.
Except they weren’t angels; they were umbrellas, rolled and tied because no one in his or her right mind would be using them that cold and windy day. They were riding out the storm, waiting to be restored to purpose: shading beach goers or pool sitters who only wanted a bit of cover while they read or dozed or sipped their drink. That got me to thinking: umbrellas as angels—it’s all just a matter of perception.
Back in Plato’s cave, the shadow world constituted reality only because the poor prisoners chained therein never knew any better. But after one prisoner is freed and his eyes adjust to sunlight, he is able to reason out what is real and what is shadow or, in this case, what is an angel and what is an umbrella. It only gets more complicated. Once he returned to the cave, the eyes of the freed prisoner/philosopher were so unaccustomed to the gloom that those who had remained in darkness concluded that light was harmful, that truth was suspect, and that knowledge was untrustworthy. Better, therefore, to live among the safety of shadows in the dreamtime before knowledge reared its ugly head.
Hmmmm. When I jumped up from the lunch table that day, I knew I was looking at a stand of umbrellas, but what I saw and heard was a choir of angels. Two of my senses—sight and hearing—had trumped my intellect. Had my senses lied to me or had I chosen to see and hear angels, preferring their shadows to the reality of some tethered umbrellas. Maybe it was just a play of light, a momentary glimpse from the cave of the mundane into the sunlight of the fanciful. Only my knowledge of the forms of umbrellas kept me from spinning out of control with those angels singing in the choir that blustery day.
I came back to the lunch table and sat down. My salad had arrived. For a moment no one said anything, then my wife asked, “What was over there?” “Nothing,” I said, just some umbrellas.”
After careers in both international development (Special Olympics) and secondary education (Landon School), Jamie Kirkpatrick bought a home on the Eastern Shore in 2011. Now he’s a happily married freelance writer and photographer who plays golf and the bagpipes with equal facility. Jamie’s writing and photography have appeared in The Baltimore Sun and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently at work on a new book called “Musing Right Along.
Kathryn Day says
A stunning photograph! A perceptive essay.
MARY WOOD says
They certainly looked like angels to me. Perhaps before they were tied down they’d been umbrellas floating skyward