Hello? It's me again.

The last couple of days have given me reason to ponder the presence of guardian angels in my life (or angles according to the misprint on the postcard sent to me by my dear friend and guardian angel). These celestial beings don't come clad in silver lamé with fluffy wings and a backup band, uhh, choir. More often than not, they need a haircut and they show up in yesterday's shirt because they know you need them now, not later.

Here's how it works. You tell them you're fine, just fine thanks, ok?, fine, and you don't need them.

And then they show up. Sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone, and these days, sometimes in your email. The effect is much the same.

A few years ago a friend's niece went through an annoying, new-age, guardian angel phase that I heard about in passing. As best I recall, the concept involved an invisible being that hovered somewhere in the neighborhood of your ear and kept you from being set upon by ravening beasts and/or being crushed by falling pianos. It's possible they might also have kept you from embarrassing yourself at parties. I'm not sure. Nice, but not practical.

I'm talking about the honest to gawd, three dimensional kind that shows up when your dog dies and doesn't care about the snot on their jacket. The kind that is there at the hospital when you wake up at 11 pm when they should have gone home hours ago. The kind that shows up on a 97 degree day to move your stuff and never asks where the pizza is. The kind that calls you after dinner because you sounded blue in the afternoon. The kind that finds a new guinea pig on Easter Sunday to replace the one the dog ate. (No, not that dog. A different dog.) Even the kind that tells you to suck it up get a life. That's what I'm talkin' about, Willis.

"Evangelical atheist" is the absolutely enchanting phrase I read on a recent blog commenting on the current "Imagine No Religion" campaign. Now, I'm not particularly political, seeing as how I'm far too lazy to stay current, much less analyze the material I have(n't) read. However, I have to hand it to the gang whose purpose seems to be to alert the general public to the notion of attending to creating heaven here on earth, especially if that includes caring for your fellow time travelers.

Sometimes, lying in bed at night, I make a mental list of the people I could, without hesitation, call at 2 a.m. on Christmas eve in the middle of a hurricane. It's an embarrassment of riches. Thanks.