angels

All my life my father believed in angels. There were no angelic frills. No golden visions or beatific quills found on our sidewalk raked up in bushy heaps on autumnal weekends. There were no esoteric dreams transcripted by clairvoyants as being quote Divine. There were no epiphanies. No refulgent frisbee sized halo's tossed in our drive-way. There were no hallucinations. My father drank instant coffee. He taught fourth graders Mon-Fri and Sunday school on the weekend. He kept his Portals of Prayer and his blue-ink underlined Bible at his bedside. He memorized scripture. He never touched my mother before God had made them of one flesh. They went to a Christian conference for their honeymoon. Mother insisted on giving the money Dad had saved for her diamond ring to the church, opting for a less-elegant engagement ring. He was a very practical and modest Christian who loved singing folk-songs to his three young children for nightly devotions. Instead of cursing when he was mad he would say the words "crow" or "H-e-double-hockey sticks."

And he believed in angels.

He also saw them.

I first noticed this when I was five fingers old. Dad and I had walked to the library. It was late-autumn and a premature winter gale had started to flap from the North. It was the early eighties--blue and white graffiti'd phonebooths correlated perfectly with bobing CB antenaes and blaring traffic assaults. Father was dressed in his gray sweater and orange stocking cap. My vision was knee-high and blurred. We were walking down Main street when I noticed that my father had lagged behind. He was talking to a old, haggard shaped woman with silver threads and warts riddled acrossed her face. Dad was reaching into his pocket, pinching open his coin purse. The woman looked like cigarette ash and exhaust but Dad seemed friendly as he carefully picked through the coins and placing them in her cupped palms.

"What were you doing with that old lady over there, Dad?" I asked. My eyes dual-ochre buttons suddenly widened that my dad would talk to someone he didn't know. Someone who looked poor.

"She wanted to know if she could have money for coffee." Dad said, very quickly.

"You gave that old lady money?" I asked again. My father nodded, very quickly, his chin wobbling as if his conscience were involved in a balancing act and he was afraid to fall.

"She needed money for coffee." Was all he said, walking very quickly, insisting that I walk on his left, in case of errant traffic.

*

The next Angel my father perceived would appear in the spring. Our house was up on the bluff, overlooking the South Side. Father had swept the Vice Lords off the roof of his station wagon earlier in the day. Often, I would come home and find the rim of my basketball hoop slooping down south, showing reverence for the gravel below.

Dad had planted an aluminum fence around the house. He was father of three. He was careful who his kids talked to. He yelled at older boys hurtling firecrackers at cats in the alley.

The angel was wearing a tanktop and crooked glasses. He has a red hankerchief wrapped around his denim pantlegs like a tourniquet. He had tattoos on his shoulders that looked like they were inked using actual human arteries.

Dad was watering one of his hostas he had to replant becasue it kept being uprooted by the neighboorhood ruffians. The Angel looked at dad and told him that he was a vet who hadn't eaten in three days. Dad sent me further in the caged lawn. He went into the house to talk with mom. He came back out and handed the man a wad of green bills. Then he invited him to our church on Sunday.

An hour later Dad went to the gas station to put air in the tire's of my bicycle. On the bustop he saw the angel. The angel was smoking cigarettes, talking very fast with his hands. The angel was drinking out of a vase tightly-wrapped in a brown paper bag. The Angel and Dad exchanged looks and then the Angel yelled something and Dad shielded my ears with his calloused palms. He told me that we had to get home.

The next day Dad bent over and replanted the uprooted hosta.

*

I can't say that I'm right there with the old man. I've never seen an Angel. I never even saw my dad cried. My Father's Father, my grandfather, died suddenly of a heart-attack when I was six-months old. Dad always told me that he would have wrestled. That we would have gone fishing. That the two of us would have been buddies.

Apparently Dad cried at his own father's death.

When grandmother died in '98 all of her children, their spouses and children tearfully slumped around her hospital bed. My Aunt Linn is the head of the choir at the Lutheran church where my family has dutifully tithed for decades. I got the call at work that my grandmother was dying.

"Doctor estimates that it should be some time today." Mom says. "We're all over here singing."

I left work, picked up two boxes of donuts and a thermos of coffee from Dunkin' Donuts and headed to the hospital.

"Why are hospitals always so bleach-white?" I thought to myself. "Why does the building where we enter and leave this planet smell like piss and disenfectant? Why does the sum total of ones earthly experiences seem to rotate around the sliding-doors of the hospital and in your proximity to them."

Everyone was huddled around my grandmother's hospital bed. Chemotherapy had deprived her of her golden spume of hair. Grandma was plugged into a ventilator. Her body bellowed and writhed and squinted. Her face had transitioned into a beautiful rosemary hue and there were voices rushed around her. My mom and Aunt brought out old blue copies of the Lutheran Worship. This is how grandmother left this earthly portal, with the voices the harvest she had cultivated crescendoing in her ears. With uncle Larry unable to breach his thick bass monotone above the black rungs of the lower southern cleft. With her wayward academic insurgent grandson (her only grandson carrying the Von Behren name) swigging coffee and sporadically going outside to smoke. She left with her daughter in-laws voice resonating loudly in the room, with her oldest son Arthur sounding very modest in his voice, the only one in the room not crying, not going up to grandmother and kissing her cheek and saying goodbye.


Grandmothers hospital room was co-inhabited. There was an elderly black woman named Grace to my grandmothers right. She was also in the hospital for cancer treatment. My Aunt asked her if she would mind, given the circumstances if we could sing, and she said she would be delighted. When grandma started to pass a nurse tried wheeling Grace out of the room, but Grace adamantly insisted on staying. She said she was fine. She was around family.

A week after Grandma's funeral my Father and my Uncle went to go visit Grace. She lived on the South side of Peoria not far from where Grandma's church was loactaed. Dad had found out from the hospital that Grace had been released two days after Grandmother died, and the hospital had been nice enough to avail her address, so that my Uncle and Father could visit her, bring her a bouquet and express their gratitude.

When they got to Grace's doorstep a young black lady in curllers answered.

"Ain't no one name Grace ever lived here."

"Sure she does," My father says. "She was in St. Francis last week."

"Ain't no woman by that name or description ever lived here." The lady says again, before slamming the door.

"That's weird," My uncle says to my father, turning around from the closed door, a bouquet of chrysanthemums slowly silting near his waist.

"Maybe she was an angel." Dad said, humbly as the two brothers walked down to their respective vehicles.

*

In my late teens and early twenties I was often pissed off at my father b/c I felt that he didn't care about any of my own ambitions while he truckled to my precocious sibblings every whim. I was always working and going to school and trying to read and trying to write and Father's advice would always be, "Do what God wants you to do." and I'm like, check, ok, right on, whose God? Christ was crucified becasue he said that "I and the Father are One." Which means he was crucified becasue he felt a mystic rapport permeating through all things--and he felt that he was part of that divine ribbon.

I was living at home by myself, both my sisters were younger than me but were away at boarding schools or colleges. To assuage my purported literary apprehnsive and my accruing sense of loneliness I drank cheap beer like a broken faucet after work. I can only imagine what my father thought of his son, smelling like stable yeast with cobbled stubble dotted along his chin walking around the house with a copy of "On the Road" tucked under his armpit, sounding like he was perenially prepping for his SAT verbal.

There was an angel Dad would assist every summer. A black man in a white undershirt and fishing cap with bad teeth. Every summer this man would appear on our front lawn like a ceramic garden gnome and dad would assign him very menial work like stuffing mulch around the trees in the back yard and then pay him very sufficiently.

I was up in my room pouring tin soldiers down my throat when I heard the black man outside whistling and saw him hunched over our garden. I had been swamped with grubbing customers all day while my boss had left me in charge to screw the Manager of Famous Dave's in the backroom. I was livid.

"Why do you keep assisting these people?" I told my dad. He was in the living room reading a book by Max Lucado. "They're just milking you for all your worth."

Dad was quiet. He could smell my harden breath. He could see that I was tired from working. That I was just tired from living.

A week before the local paper did an article about my youngest sister Jenn. She was somewhat of a violin phenom and father later said that the one thing he was most proud of in the article was that Jenn "Gave God the Glory" when the journalist asked her about her talent.

"You care about these people more than you care about your own son." I told him, he was still quiet. He could see that tears had incubated inside the pools of my eyes.

"I can't even get you to co-sign on a college loan for me and here you are helping total strangers." I pleaded.

"They're not total strangers," Dad said, very quietly.

"Neither am I," I pelted back slamming the front door as hard as I could, yelling back at my father to go fuck his skewed belief system. To go fuck his god. To go fuck everything he holds as being important.

As I walked outside en route to the Pakistani liquer store I saw the angel, whistling to himself. He was padding the bottom of a hosta. He looked at me smiled and tipped his hat. I made it an overt point in looking the other direction, pretending that he didn't exist. That he didn't exist at all.


*

I spent the last two weeks of my father's life living with Lisa, a classy Bussiness woman I had met at a wine diner a week before. She was fifteen years older than I was, wore sexy Bussiness suits, chatted incessantly into her cell phones to potential clientale. She kissed ass, ripped off people, boasted about her portfoilo, went to the gym after work, sweated, drank like she was supporting her local aqaurium on the weekend. I was teaching during the day and would come home to her red tresses and smooth body. My father had just been diagnosed with cancer but we thought that he would be alright. He was fifty-four, never smoked and drank very modestly if he ever drank at all. He was still teaching fourth graders two weeks before his death. There was fifteen years between myself and Lisa and exactly fifteen years between Lisa and my father.

Lisa first met my father on his death bed. She came to the hospital and immediately started to massage his feet. Dad's whole body was jaundice and sallow--cheap unfizzled beer salvaged from happy hour. The cancer had pushed into every celled fortress of his body. His unblinking eyes were copper and his mouth was spittled open. He was leaving. He was leaving so quickly.

As his family stood over his body rolling tears form their sockets. As we embraced and tried to discern just what the fuck was going on, as Father bellowed his last breath, and at the moment of death, when the body drifts from comatose to commodity, when the body becomes future fertlizer, dormant, worthless, all the vitality licked out---only then I saw it. Father wasn't wearing his glasses. His gray hair was rumpled and unkempt like an aged academics and his skin was so yellow that it almost appeared golden. Squinting through wreathed tears I saw him. He was an angel. I could make out his wings through the carnival of tears. He was an angel and somehow, I knew (although I wouldn't admit it until years later) that he was flapping his wings home.