I believe in angels.
Like the one who helped my dad save me from drowning in the pool that day. Or the one who made me stop while skiing in the woods, alert for something, when I felt and heard the bullet whiz by from a distant shot, inches from my head. Some days angels were right in front of me, like the pretty ninth-grade girl who ordered the bullies to stop laughing at me, a shy seventh-grader, when I sat in gum on the bleachers. She died in a car accident before her high school graduation. I put a picture of her in a scrapbook and never forgot that day. Or the day I fell through the river ice with my dog, and after long minutes somehow found the strength to push him out and claw my way to shore before freezing to death. Those angels and others took forms of friends, parents, neighbors, people I knew, others I had never met.
On the rarest of occasions, we are lifted up from the inside. It starts with that....thing we feel, for someone, for somewhere. Then one day, maybe the next, maybe after many, and just at the right time, an angel touches our hearts, and we soar. Have you ever felt like that? Time goes by, so quickly, and we try to do right by the world, and work at being good kids and parents and friends and maybe find one extraordinary thing that makes a difference, and becomes that memory we look back on and we are grateful we held on because now we can’t imagine being without it. Grab that moment and hold on. Hold on tight. Don't let it get away. Soar.