I have friends and relatives that believe in angels. Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God. And I cannot say that I do not also believe. But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel. Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife. She knew how to make butter in a churn. She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around. She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door. Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.
She also knew how to head a family. She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood. She sent a son off to World War II. She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see. Great great grandchildren were even greater. Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.
Mother Mendiola was an angel too. I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas. She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher. She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life. But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes. She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school. She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well. She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark. She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law. She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it. She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong. When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods. I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!” And it always got better. Because she was an angel. She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation. It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now. She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.
Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels. But I have to say it. I have to believe it. I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God? I convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.
Catch a Falling Star 
The World is Gray Today
It is cloudy outside. The sky is a cool, damp gray. No rain. No snow. Just dreary and gray. The world is gray today.
We have now been in a lockdown and wearing masks for an entire year. I have lost a lot of ground. Color-blindness runs in my family on my mother’s side. Great Grandma Hinckley was completely color-blind by the time she was in her 70’s.
I myself have known I had the color-blindness problem since I was in high school and the school nurse gave me a vision test that proved it.
In the dotted circle, I could see the blue-green number 29, but I could also see the red number 5. I was told that I had a slight color-blindness on the red/green scale. Believe me, I had no idea what that meant. Still don’t. I just know I have never seen colors the way other people with normal vision do.
But now, after twelve months of lockdown, I can definitely detect the fact that I have lost some more of my color vision.
Great Grandma saw the world in black and white and gray since she was 70. That, for me, is now less than six years away.
As a cartoonist I use a lot of pen and ink. I also love black-and-white movies. Being partially colorblind, you might think that I would be okay living in a film-noire world. But I am not. It is simply not enough. I have always craved color. I particularly love to create with bright primaries, red, yellow, and blue.
I will sorely miss color when it is gone.
And I have always loved cardinals. Not only because they are bright red songbirds, like the one singing outside in our yard on this gray and slightly blustery day. But because they never fly away when the winter comes. They stay even in the snow and cold. Trouble doesn’t drive them away. I shall not give up when I lose all the colors.
I remember the world being gray when I was a boy back in the 1960’s too. TV was only black-and-white… and gray at our house. I watched the funeral parade for JFK on the black-and-white… and gray TV. And around that time the three astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, and White had a similar funeral parade… also black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
The Viet Nam conflict on the TV news with Walter Cronkite. The riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968 with the Chicago Seven going on trial. The world was very, very gray.
But then, in the Summer of ’69, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. A giant leap for mankind! And I saw that also in black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
There was a hope of color in my life after that. And we got a color TV in the later 70s after that. And even with my partially color-blind eyes, I saw color everywhere.
And now again is a good time to anticipate color coming back into my life. I am on the waiting list for vaccination. My eldest son has a steady girlfriend living with him now. And we have a better President who actually seems to care if we live or die. Good things are over the next hill.
But still… the world is, for now… gray today.
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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, coloring, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, insight, Paffooney, poetry, self pity