I hailed a cab in front of my office on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. “Hello,” the driver said cheerfully. “And where are we going?”
His voice was loud and friendly, with a light Spanish accent that reminded me of my dad’s. But I didn’t want to invite conversation, so I gave him my home address without even a hello back. I pulled the taxi door shut. I didn’t have the energy to make small talk with a stranger. I just wanted to avoid people in general. Couldn’t God at least give me that? One peaceful cab ride is all I’m asking for right now.
The cab pulled away from the curb. Like most New Yorkers, I usually took the subway or an express bus after work. But today had been rough. I’d missed a deadline and had just come out of a difficult meeting with my supervisor. She felt I hadn’t been focused lately, and she was right.
Five months ago, I’d lost my friend Analia to cancer. Two weeks earlier my beloved aunt had passed away. Analia was in Canada; my aunt was in the Dominican Republic. I couldn’t be with them when they died and had barely had time to process the loss with one coming on the heels of the other. My work suffered; my zest for life evaporated. I wanted to be alone with my grief instead of having to drag myself through each day.
At a red light, the cab driver turned to me, one hand on the wheel, the other poised at the radio dial. “Mind if I put on some music?” he asked. I nodded an okay. Maybe music would help keep us in our own worlds.
An old merengue filled the back seat. The light turned green, and I thought of Aunt Nena. She didn’t need a green light to get up and dance. She was always the first to hit the floor at family parties. I could see her now, dancing with abandon and singing off-key. “Always give yourself a reason to dance and sing,” she used to say. “And to wear red lipstick.” Her signature color. Once she applied some to my lips and insisted it was my color too.
My throat constricted, and I was afraid I might cry. I fought it off by humming quietly to the music. The cab driver must have seen my reaction in the rear-view mirror, because when the song ended, he turned the dial. Did he think any kind of music could bring a smile to my face?
“Everyone loves a good romance,” the deejay on the new station was saying when we tuned in, “but friendships can be just as beautiful, can’t they?”
They sure can. Analia had shown me that.
“This song is for all the good friends out there,” the deejay said. The first few notes were familiar. Like something Analia and I would have sung on one of our road trips. We’d traveled together to China, Germany and Costa Rica, but our drives closer to home were the best. We spent a weekend in a sky lodge in Pennsylvania and made day trips to the Hudson Valley outside New York City. Analia managed the GPS, while I turned the radio dial from behind the wheel. We sang to our hearts’ content, making up our own words when we didn’t know the lyrics.
On our last trip together, we went to Rhode Island for a concert. Analia was in the passenger seat, her head wrapped in a flower-patterned scarf to cover her hair loss from chemotherapy. Singing, always singing, no matter what. If she were here instead of me, she’d be singing even now. Was that what Analia and Aunt Nena would want for me?
A new song started, and I watched the city go by out of the taxi window. I felt my sadness shift. Maybe grief was the price we paid for love, love I wouldn’t have traded for anything. There was joy to be found in that. The merengue, the pop songs—my aunt and my friend brought music to my life. Music that came not only from the radio or a concert. They’d lived with exuberance and would want me to embrace each day the way they’d taught me. To appreciate my job and my time off, my friends and my family, the subway and bus rides, talkative cab drivers, life.
“Mind if I sing to this one?” the cabbie asked, rolling down his window. “The music feels better when others can hear you sing.”
“It sure does,” I said. “Can you turn it up a little?” I opened my window to let the breeze in. To let life in. And to sing with a cabbie for all of New York and Aunt Nena and Analia and the angels to hear.
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