Repairing an Angel

I love The Onion. A couple of weeks ago they reported on a sad event at the Vatican:

Angel flies into window at the Vatican

The story reminded me of another damaged angel who I wrote about not long ago . . .

As I sat at home last Tuesday, doing the things I would normally have been doing in my office on a Tuesday (thanks Winter Storm Juno for coming on a day I don’t have classes), I managed to avoid checking Facebook until early afternoon. When I did, I saw that my daughter-in-law Alisha had posted a link to a “What Color is Your Aura?” personality test. I hadn’t taken one in a while (they used to be a mindless and fun obsession) so I bit.

What Color Is Your Aura?

I had done this one before a while ago (I think I got yellow) and was pleasantly surprised by the following: A white aura means you are intensely spiritual, possibly surrounded by angels. You are good, honest, quiet and a bit shy, but full of light. Congratulations! You are an amazing person. The usual on-line personality attempt to “pump you up”—but I like it. Of most interest was that I am “possibly surrounded by angels.” I’ve always found the very idea of angels, especially guardian angels, strangely attractive yet entirely outside the reach of reason and logic. Strangely this reminded me of a place that I not only don’t like much but is about as different from Juno-invaded Providence as possible: Memphis, Tennessee.

One of the few things I remember fondly about the city of Memphis, where we lived for three years in the middle nineties, is “Memphis in May.” This is an annual event in Memphis during which the city celebrates the culture, food and history of a country selected in advance. It was (and I presume still is) a big deal, providing us with a welcome window into the world beyond the Mid-South parochialism and Southern “hospitality” that we found so challenging. We arrived in Memphis in August 1991, just in time for the beginning of the 91-92 academic year at Christian Brothers University, the place the inscrutable gods of academics chose for me to begin my career as a philosophy professor. We were not amused. But a couple of months into 1992, we started hearing about “Memphis in May”—and the country of choice met with our strong approval.

Italy. I knew nothing about Italians or things Italian until Jeanne and I met; once we were together permanently by the end of 1987 (we had met a month earlier), it was a quick education. A girl from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—Italian father, Irish mother. Youngest of five, with three older, large Italian brothers and one older sister. Jeanne often describes herself by saying “I look Irish but I act Italian;” the latter part of that description is true of all of her siblings as well. The nature of an Italian father together with the nurture of being raised in a Sicilian neighborhood pretty much clinched the deal. By the time we made it to Memphis, our stepfamily was still relatively new; none of us liked Memphis at all (with the inexplicable exception of my older son), and we gladly anticipated seeing what Southerners might do to celebrate Italy.

The celebration must not have been that great, because I remember absolutely none of it—except the poster. The central figure is a Raphael-esque angel in gold and earth tones, contemplatively smiling and holding a garland as she walks down stairs containing the notes of “Spring,” the opening movement from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” There is also a lute on the second stair and a random, oddly shaped chair at the top of the steps with a palm, fruit tree, and cedar trees in the background. It thought it was pretty, particularly because I thought the angel with its curly, reddish hair looked something like Jeanne. I spent more disposable money than we really had available to get it framed for Jeanne’s birthday—it has hung somewhere in our home for the last twenty-four years.

Our Italy-poster angel is not the only wall-hanging angel in our house. A few years ago (even elephant-memory Jeanne can’t remember when), we purchased a ceramic angel who has hung on our dining room wall ever since. Let’s call her Hannah. Hannah hung happily for a long time attached by one of those wonderful Velcro contraptions that both hold things securely and can be removed from the wall without leaving a mark when necessary. One evening as I watched television in the close-by living room, I heard a crash. Usually such a noise is the effect of something one of the dogs has done, but not this time. Hannah had decided that she had hung in her particular spot long enough and fell five or six feet to the floor (she hadn’t flown for a while so was out of practice), shattering into five or six pieces. Fortunately she did not shatter into dust—fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle I thought “this is fixable.” “I’ll fix Hannah with Super Glue,” I told Jeanne when she returned home. This was a bold prediction.

I have a checkered history with Super Glue. Given Jeanne’s obsession with all things bovine, a decade or so ago I frequently purchased ceramic miniatures of the various “Cow Parade” cows that popped up in city after city. Soon we had more than a dozen of them; we even had a three-tiered display stand in the corner of the living room upon which these ceramic cows lived and grazed. That is until the day that Stormy, my son’s cat who was living with us while Caleb and Alisha were residing in the basement for a few months after they moved to Providence from Colorado, did a typical feline thing and knocked the display stand over just for the hell of it. Tiny horns and legs snapped off each Cow Parade treasure (they weren’t cheap). I gathered the parts and said “I’ll fix them with Super Glue.” As it turns out, Super Glue is great when you can clamp the things being glued together for thirty seconds (impossible when one of the items is a couple of molecules in length.) It is also great when the gluee’s fingers are not larger than the tube of glue and the things being glued. After many mishaps in which the only things being glued effectively were the tips of my fingers, I despaired as a repair failure. Jeanne took pity on me and put all the broken bovines into a box and put them into the attic where they still reside. Two of the less damaged ones are still in the living room, one missing a horn and one missing a hoof.

So my plan to repair the fallen angel with Super Glue was contrary to my past. But Hannah is larger than a Cow Parade figure, and her five or six pieces fit together nicely. Amazingly enough, the glue held, Hannah was deposited back on the wall (with more Velcro devices), and there she hung for a year. Until we decided to repaint the dining room over Christmas Break a month ago. I detached Hannah carefully in one piece from the wall and laid her, along with a number of other items (including the Italy angel poster) in the book room while we painted the dining room. It turned out beautifully; the day came to put everything back on the wall. That morning as I arose from reading in a book room chair next to where Hannah was lying, my clumsy foot touched her just directly enough to snap her trumpet and both of her hands off, each severed hand holding half of her broken trumpet. “No biggie,” I thought—“I’ll fix Hannah with Super Glue,” as I had the last time. But the detached pieces were eerily reminiscent in size of the tiny bovine items I had failed to repair in the past, and all of a sudden I was reliving the frustration of trying to repair midget cows. After several failed efforts, I said (loudly) “I’M ABOUT READY TO SHOVE THIS TRUMPET UP YOUR ANGELIC ASS!” and started thinking about what an angel with no hands and no trumpet might look like on the wall. Maybe nobody would notice.

Then I remembered that between my cow failures and now I have learned something about peace, avoiding frustration, and things angelic (sort of). Repeating the phrase that regularly calms and centers me when needed—“Truly I have set my soul in silence and in peace”—I returned to the handless and trumpetless Hannah. Suddenly it didn’t seem so impossible to hold two tiny ceramic pieces together solidly without wiggling for a full minute. Suddenly it occurred to me to slide a book of just the right thickness under her newly attached trumpet and hands so they could meld with full Super Glue strength to the rest of Hannah without being threatened by gravity. I calmly left the room and did not check on her until the next day. Sure enough, Hannah was once again whole, a cooperative effort between Super Glue and peacefully centered me. Hannah now presides over the archway between the dining room and the kitchen. I don’t know if real angels ever need repair. But if they do, I recommend Super Glue and lots of Psalm 131.