Although she had asked me to arrive early, I was actually running a bit late. Feeling guilty and sensing her annoyance, I didn’t observe much about her person when she met me in the lobby; it wasn’t until she led me into a cluttered attic of an office that I was truly able to absorb the situation. My new therapist appeared to be in her sixties. She wore athletic tights and a baggy button-down shirt, and her hair was coiled into a severe brown permanent that looked almost, but not quite, like nylon. She wore too much makeup. Indicating that I should sit on a doughy couch, she rolled a desk chair around piles of junk and positioned it across from me.

“So what brings you to me today?”

With the distinct sense that I had made a mistake, I nonetheless plunged into the various unpleasant feelings that had recently been defining my life, a litany of anxieties, stresses, frustrations, mental blockages, and insecurities that should have come accompanied by the wail of a strings section.

“Uh huh,” she said brusquely and then asked me if I had had any pains in my body. I described the problems with my feet, shoulder, and jaw for which I was seeing the rolfer. I wondered why she needed to know this, but she began interrogating me about other aspects of my life, and I figured that she was trying to generate some sort of snapshot of my present condition.

The therapist then began describing what she saw as her qualifications. She had a list of credentials that would have told me everything I needed to know if I had paid any attention to this stupefying recitation. Always suspicious of someone with too many degrees and certifications (she listed about fifteen), I thought, No wonder her office is a mess! At that very moment, however, she said, “Now, you should know that this is only my part-time office. I’m not always here, just one evening a week. In case you need me, you should call my direct line and not my message service.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, they use this office for a lot of things. There’s a child psychologist in here a couple of days a week.” Which explained the teetering pile of toys in the corner.

“Oh.”

“I’d like to work more often, but I’ve been recovering from an illness.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“I want to come back, but they’re keeping me from it.”

“They are?”

“They’re forcing me into semi-retirement.”

“Are they.” I felt as if, instead of a therapist, I was speaking to someone clutching too many paper bags, who sat down next to me on a bus.

After a few more pointed references to “they” and “them,” as if "they" were listening in and would register her displeasure with "them," she decided to get the ball rolling. “Now, the first thing I like to do in my appointments,” she said, suddenly businesslike, “is some work with angels.”

The only thing that stopped me from fainting dead away was the idea that I had misheard her. She put that hope to rest by continuing. “Well, I call them angels,” she said defensively, perhaps a little apologetically, as if she had suddenly caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror of my incredulous stare. “You can call them whatever you like. Spiritual guides, Jungian archetypes, they’re just abstract concepts.”

“Just words,” I choked.

“Yes, it’s all just words,” she said. “You don’t have to think of them as angels. First we’re going to play a game called the Angel Game.” She opened a wooden box and showed me a pile of thin strips of badly laminated cardboard that looked as if they had been hand-cut from index cards. On one side of each strip was printed a crude drawing of an angel, and on the other was a word. She shook up the box to mix the cards and instructed me to pick one and not show her the word on it. In a daze, I reached in, and she did the same.

“Now, what’s your angel?”

“Huh?”

“Read your word out loud.”

My appointment was on the evening of a cloudy day, and the room had grown much dimmer in the time we’d been sitting there. I could still easily make out the writing, although I stalled for a moment, squinting, in a futile hint that she might flip on a light. “Uh, gratitude.”

She beamed. “I got adventure! This is going to be fun!”

Then she plucked the angel card out of my fingers, deposited it back in the box, and stuffed the box onto a shelf. For the rest of our appointment—which we saw through to the bitter end—she never once made reference to gratitude, adventure, angels in general, or the Angel Game in particular. This would ordinarily not have bothered me one whit as my aversion to it on principle was so great as to be not measurably affected by its arbitrary nature.

It was only later that I realized I was annoyed because she never told me who won.

To be continued.