12:26:24

“George Bailey prays in It’s a Wonderful Life, and an angel shows up to answer his prayers.”

-Sasha Stone

On Christmas day I watched Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which I try to do every year. It begins and ends with the ringing of a church bell, in close up. The sacred hertz of bells that I have been writing about on this blog the past couple of months reverberates (“Every time you hear a bell ring, an angel gets its wings”) as the film’s opening and closing credits. I did not see A Wonderful Life until later in life (never once as a child), but it is truly all it’s cracked up to be. Full of love and magic; fate and pathos; kindness and hope. It’s beautiful to look at too, as though it were drawn by hand.

In the parallel universe of George Bailey never having been born, nothing and no one is as they should be. Destinies are unfulfilled, reversed, and swapped. The wrong paths are taken. Everyone is cold, mean, angry, and lonely. Grief stricken, knowing they missed out on something, but what?

That is what happens when people’s dreams don’t come true.

Or: like George Bailey, they keep thinking they have missed out on their dream when they have actually been living it all along.

When people lose or waste their dream, they go crazy. They become hard and brittle.

Everyone has angels. They’re all around us. We can talk to them at any time. Mary is George Bailey’s, even as a little girl (“George Bailey, I’ll love you til the day I die.”). The old un-winged Clarence also. But really everyone in George’s life is his guardian angel. And he is theirs.

Otherwise, Pottersville. Otherwise greed, waste, despair.