Angel’s front door

I used to have a friend who lived in Paris.

Paris is expensive. Angel bought the largest apartment she could afford, and it was tiny. But, because it was in Paris, she had a lot of visitors. Friends and family came to see her, and in order to get to her place and back, they would take the subway.

In the subway are photo booths; they have been there for many years. Angel loved the photo booths, and she would drag every person who visited into one to have their photo taken with her. Then she would tape the photos onto the inside of her front door. Soon, the inside of her door was covered with smiling people who had visited her and, in most cases, slept on the couch in her cramped apartment.

Angel died a little more than five years ago.

I was with her shortly before she died. I stayed with her in her apartment when she was very ill and confined to her bed. Then I came one last time when she was in hospice. During this last visit, I stopped by her apartment and saw her door was still covered with photos from all her visitors. There were two recent ones of us. In both photos, we were wearing oversized sunglasses and oversized smiles for the camera. In one, Angel was wearing a white hat with a jazzy hatband, and in the second, she was wearing a bright blue wig because, in both cases, she was on chemo and didn’t have any hair.

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