Anyway Stories: My Guardian Angel
by Greg Moody
Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day,
be at my side
to light and guard,
to rule and guide.
That, was the first prayer I ever learned at my mother’s knee. That, and the Apostle’s Creed, the Hail Mary, Our Father and the Glory Be, all of which I needed to be able to say the rosary every night in ritual familial meditation.
I will admit, I was soon learning a lot of other prayers that carried a lot more weight in the real world, like, “Dear God, get me out of this … math test, fist fight, dire strait … and I’ll be good forever and ever,” or, the ever popular, “Dear God, don’t let me fuck up.”
Actually, that one started as “Dear God, don’t let me screw up,” but you had to know that the harsher version would become the norm as the word became more a part of my regular vocabulary, along about Sophomore year in college.
(It took full hold during my newspaper years and my Naval Reserve service — yes, that’s right, I was protecting your shores from terrorists and alewives. Any of either that came near The Naval Reserve Center on the South Side of Milwaukee and I woulda slung a typewriter at them. At least the ribbon. I was a dead shot with an Olivetti 8800 HD.)
Anyway.
Guardian angels.
Yes.
I’ve had an interesting and ever-changing relationship with my guardian angel. First, there was the standard, perfect cardboard angel standup looking over me as I and my little friends gamboled lovingly in God’s great outdoors and occasionally fell off a neighborhood roof to land in the soft mud (I think it was mud) besides the sewage drainage ditch.

That image stayed with me until age 7, the age of accountability (which, incidentally, no one ever told me about until I was eight), whereupon the image of my guardian angel changed to one of an angel who was constantly downhearted,

dismayed,

upset,

or, really upset.

My mother encouraged this last image in the never realized hope that I would finally return to the straight and narrow when it came to church going.
But I did get some spectacular nightmares out of it all.
By my teens, I was beginning to experiment with new images of my angels, finding inspiration in various fantasy worlds that would never find approval from the Pope. Unless, of course, that Pope was Hugh Hefner.

Then, there were the years of the schlumpy bartender angel in the downstairs bathroom handing out advice along with glasses of Blatz. (Blatz — not only the name of the beer, but the sound you made after four bottles of the stuff.)

Two cans of Blatz and I could sing “My Wild Irish Rose” like Frank Fontaine.
And, yet, all I can think of now is that my guardian angel, never quite having given up, though she certainly considered it, is now all broken down and weary, ready for the Old Angels home.

And still, she stays.
I’ve got this image in my head of her shooting craps with the angel of death at the end of my hospital bed for my eternal soul, torn and tattered as it might be, cutting some deal that will grant me another few years in this little corner of heaven, all the while pulling a fast one on Charon.

Who wins?
Well, she does. At least, she always has til now.
She’s gotten me this far and I’m still in play.
Then again, perhaps she is to become my own, personal, angel of death, always standing by as I walk into walls and fall down stairs and blindly walk between airplane props and gingerly touch a power line to see if it is live and fail to notice the train and step off the curb into seeming nothingness and get bonked on the head with a two by four or face plant onto asphalt from a bike or get hit square in the forehead by a baseball bat or run over by a Flexible Flyer.
She remains ready to gently guide me into the next world.

Not that I’ll go gently, mind you, or quietly, but she’s still there —
Ready to once again scare the piss out of me for old time’s sake.


At which point, I, as I have from the very start, will run off to a safe place and hide until it’s over.
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