184. The Angel

Maybe it’s because my real name, Angela, means “female angel” in Italian, but I am seriously into angels.

No, not the woo-woo kind of angels that some people feel send us messages and predict the future. Or the guardians that sit on our shoulders and save us from danger.

The angels I’m talking about are the chubby-cheeked, chubby-butted cherubs that you see all over Italian religious art. It turns out that I like them so much that they pop up all over my house.

My Christmas tree is festooned with them, brought straight from Napoli.

My Aunt Gloria’s self-portrait (whether she realized it or not; it’s the spitting image of her) has pride of place in my living room, over a trio of angel heads she created during her time at Chicago’s Art Institute.

But there is one very special angel. Way back in 1951, my mother made her first trip to Italy, quitting her job as a nurse to spend the summer there with her sisters Gloria and Rose, both artists. It happened to be the trip when she met my father, but that’s not important here. What is important is that she admired a wooden angel plaque at a flea market on the streets of Rome, and her big sister Rose, generous to a fault, immediately bought it for her. Thereafter, it held a place of honor on the wall of my house in Somerset, Massachusetts, and fifty years later, on the wall of my mother’s senior living apartment near us in Pennsylvania.

My mother was one of the younger ones in a family of eleven children, and she was especially close to her niece Joan, who was only fourteen years her junior.

At the very end of my mother’s life, she had only one instruction: please send the angel plaque to Joan, which I was happy to oblige. After all, Joan was like an angel to us, flying up from Florida to stay with my mother on several occasions so I could take a much-needed break.

Sadly, Joan passed away this New Year’s Eve, like my mother, at the age of 95. Also like my mother, she had a vibrant, active life, nearly to the end. She lived near her daughter Jane, and the job fell to Jane of handling her mother’s affairs, including emptying out her apartment. She mentioned to me that much of her mother’s stuff would be donated, as one would expect.

Oh, no! Not the angel! So even though I felt grabby, I couldn’t bear the thought of it going to Goodwill, so I got up my nerve and asked her to send it to me, if neither she nor her siblings wanted it. She generously and graciously agreed, and yesterday, it arrived, even more beautiful than I remembered it.

Welcome home, old friend.