Celebrate the angels in our everyday lives

By Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg

(12/21/00 - copyright Alcestis Oberg)

There's an old adage that says there are angels who sometimes take on human form and masquerade as people who walk in and out of our lives.

I've known some.

My earliest memories are of my aunt — my mother's sister — pushing my baby carriage to a nearby zoo to visit the bears and cougars in the pale light of the winter sun. This maiden aunt was always there — rejoicing in my childish triumphs, listening to my little-girl problems. Even after her marriage, her house was a sanctuary in troubled times — a light always on in her kitchen, a fresh-baked cherry pie always on the stove.

I think the angels of childhood are the most important people in the world.

But what do they look like? What do they do?

If we were to stumble upon some "playbook of angels" on a dusty shelf in a forgotten library, the first rule would be simple: to love a child unconditionally.

Even when I knew I was being an obstinate little stinker, even when I knew I was wrong in some domestic dust-up, my aunt understood me — and at the same time, maneuvered me out of that corner I had painted myself into and nudged me toward calm, normalcy, reintegration into family life.

She could correct me and forgive me all at the same time — and somehow never make me feel as if her love was in any way compromised or at issue.

Whenever I drive past day-care centers in the evening and see frazzled parents bundling their exhausted toddlers into car seats, I can't help feeling sad for them. They could all use someone like my aunt. Modern life has gotten so hard for kids and for families. In the 1950s, I not only had parents and grandparents, but also a special pal, a grown-up buddy.

Maybe a special grown-up's interest, and not necessarily unconditional love, is enough for some kids. I heard once about a world-renowned chemist who lived above a drugstore as a child. Every day, the boy would visit the pharmacist downstairs, and every day, the pharmacist taught him the love of chemistry, nourishing this little boy's soul and mind. I had a teacher like that myself. In fact, many of us can point to some adult in our lives — a teacher, a neighbor, a family friend — who looked us right in the eye and said, "I believe in you." And that made all the difference.

Everyone in my town recognized my other angel, Linda. She was an adored teacher and a champion friend. Somehow she made every tribulation, every bump in the road, every conundrum of our young motherhood together a hoot. It seems we always were laughing, even in the midst of our disasters.

When her house wound up in the path of a terrible flood one year, I kept calling her "a poor thing" when we walked through the devastation together.

"I am not a poor thing!" she asserted. She pointed out the old drapes she was glad to get rid of and her daughter's room, which she always wanted to paint a different color anyway.

When she told me she had cancer, I cried all night. We all did. It was a kind of mourning for someone who still is alive — stupefying disbelief, great consternation and a fundamental anger at the blatant unfairness of it all.

But she managed to turn that all around. She was always consoling us, as if we were the ones with cancer, not her. When we saw her at the supermarket, she would drop everything and just talk to us with total candor and humanity about her experiences, listening to our thoughts — as if it were a journey we were all on together. We learned a lot from Linda, the people of Dickinson, Texas, did — about dignity, about courage, about what's important in life and what isn't.

Her funeral was the biggest one I ever saw. People spilled out of the church, overflowed the recreation center, covered the sidewalks, the lawns, the parking lots, every corner of the church property. Loudspeakers had to be set up to let people be part of this last goodbye. There had been an angel in our midst. We were all there to give testimony to that. The minister said Linda had even made a quip — a last hoot, you might say — before she died: that if her funeral was well attended at least she had succeeded, as a church elder, in getting the attendance up.

Christmas is the season of angels. And though we live in a cynical world, there are still many of them who walk around, masquerading as aunts or friends or neighbors or teachers. They are not saints; they make no pretense of being perfect or even very good. But in our lives, they do stand out, in contradiction to the ruthlessness and the darkness that sometimes seem to overwhelm us — evidence of a separate reality, a different kind of world.

They inhabit not the abstract regions of philosophy or religion, but our real everyday lives. Going all but unnoticed on the world stage, they nonetheless exist with a certain vividness by touching us personally, one-on-one, in a way that cannot be denied, waved away or forgotten.

As we mark this holiday with feasting, music and lights, we should, perhaps, also look inward and mark it with a special smile of gratitude for our particular angels, whoever they are, living or dead, for making such a difference in our lives.

And if there is a playbook of angels somewhere, maybe we should try to find it — see what's written, how it's written, who wrote it.