Angel at the Market

By John P. Walker

How beautiful a day can be

When kindness touches it!

~George Elliston

"I'm going over to Highway Market. Want to come?" I welcomed this invitation, as there were few recreational choices within walking distance of our college campus. Being students, we were all broke, but bargains were to be had a couple of hundred yards up the road. On one occasion, I had returned to the dorm with a ten-pound bag of bananas. They were only pennies a pound! It hadn't occurred to me that I couldn't eat so many bananas before they turned black and I ended up giving most of them away. Still, with this kind of treasure in mind, my friend Michael and I set off for the store, a few dollars burning holes in our pockets.

The small lobby was particularly crowded as we entered the front door. It was full of people ascending to the store on the next level. We opted for the ramp between the two sets of stairs. It was a cross between an escalator and the people movers you see in airports — in the early 1980s, it was way ahead of its time. It had polished stainless steel walls with a hard rubber railing and a rubber-coated tread that moved you up the slope.

As we began to move forward, I noticed that there were two or three children playing on the ramp. They would ride it to the top and then race down the stairs to ride it up again. More than once, they ran the wrong way down the ramp, pushing past customers to get to the bottom.

Just as we neared the top, one of the children directly in front of us slipped and fell. He was wearing loose socks and, as he slid off the tread onto the metal grate, one of his socks was pulled into the gap where the tread disappeared into the floor. Immediately, the teeth of a hidden gear grabbed the sock and the boy began to scream.

Someone quickly hit the large red "kill" switch at the top of the slope and shut the machine down. This, however, did nothing to relieve the pressure on the boy's ankle. As we crouched to try to help, a panicked shopper began to wrench at the child's leg, making the whole situation worse and the screams louder. The boy's leg was swelling badly, ugly red and puffy.

A young man in a store apron quickly blocked off the bottom of the ramp with a plastic barrier to keep people from crowding in for a closer look. This left Michael and me the only ones on the ramp between the barrier and the child.

Urgently, someone shouted, "Help, we need a knife to cut him free." I always carried a pocketknife and began to rummage through my pockets for it. Seldom did I go anywhere without it but on this occasion, when we needed it most, I had left it on my nightstand in my dorm room.

What happened next is still clear in my mind even after more than thirty years. Michael and I were standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder. The end where the boy lay was blocked. Yet a woman appeared in front of us on the ramp. She hadn't come past us and she hadn't climbed over the sidewalls or the boy to get to where she stood. Neither did we see her appear. She was suddenly just there in front of us. She was wearing a parka, which struck me as odd because it wasn't very cold outside.

The woman immediately turned, looked Michael in the eye and said, "Michael, give me your knife." Until that moment, Mike hadn't realized that he had a knife with him. He dipped his hand into his pocket and came out with an old folding pocketknife. He opened it and handed it over.

Quickly, the woman crouched down and sawed through the sock, releasing the boy. By that time his mother had arrived and she hugged him as she and the boy both cried. We were relieved to see the skin on the boy's leg had not been broken and the leg was returning to normal size and color.

It took only a few seconds for Michael and me to realize that the woman who had so dramatically intervened in the situation was gone. Again, she hadn't passed by us and there was no space for her to have pushed past the kneeling mother and her child, still blocking our exit. We were stunned. Where had she come from? How had she known Michael's name, let alone that he had a knife in his pocket that he hadn't realized he was carrying?

Over the next few years at school, we discussed the incident many times, yet we never came up with a rational explanation. Neither of us could even describe what she looked like other than the coat. While all the other details of the event were clear in my mind, the woman's face was fuzzy, a blur.

From time to time, the subject of meeting angels comes up in Bible discussions or in the popular media. It always makes me think of that day at the market when it seems we had direct intervention from God in a time of need. I believe that on that day Michael and I met an angel.

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