Angels Once In A While

In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry
babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone.
The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister
was two. Their Dad had never been much more than a presence
they feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel
driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds. He did
manage to leave 15 dollars a week to buy groceries. Now that he
had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no
food either. If there was a welfare system in effect in
southern Indiana at that time, I certainly knew nothing
about it.

I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand new
and then put on my best homemade dress. I loaded them into the
rusty old 51 Chevy and drove off to find a job. The seven
of us went to every factory, store and restaurant in our
small town. No luck.  The kids stayed, crammed into the car
and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whomever
would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything.
I had to have a job.  Still no luck.  The last place we went
to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer
Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop.
It was called the Big Wheel. An old lady named Granny owned
the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time
at all those kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift,
eleven at night until seven in the morning.  She paid 65 cents an
hour and I could start that night. I raced home and called the
teenager down the street that baby-sat for people. I bargained
with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night.
She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would
already be asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her,
so we made a deal.

That night when and the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers
we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job. And so I started at the
Big Wheel. When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up
and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money-fully half of what
I averaged every night. As the weeks went by, heating bills added
another strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the
consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them
with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go
home.

One bleak fall morning, I dragged myself to the car to go home and
found four tires in the back seat. New tires! There was no note,
no nothing, just those beautiful brand new tires. Had angels
taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered. I made a deal with
the owner of the local service station. In exchange for his
mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember
it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him
to do the tires. I was now working six nights instead of five
and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming and I knew
there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can
of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys.
Then I hid them in the basement so there would be something for
Santa to deliver on Christmas morning.

Clothes were a worry too. I was sewing patches on top of patches
on the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair.
On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the
Big Wheel. These were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state
trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at
the Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine. The regulars
all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and 
then left to get home before the sun came up. When it was time for me to
go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning I hurried to the car.
I was hoping the kids wouldn't wake up before I managed to get home
and get the presents from the basement and place them under the
tree. (We had cut down a small cedar tree by the side of the road
down by the dump.) It was still dark and I couldn't see much, but
there appeared to be some dark shadows in the car or was that just
a trick of the night? Something certainly looked different, but it
was hard to tell what. When I reached the car I peered warily into
one of the side windows. Then my jaw dropped in amazement!

My old battered Chevy was full-full to the top with boxes of allshapes
and sizes. I quickly opened the driver's side door, scrambled inside
and kneeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I
pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was a whole case of
little blue jeans, sizes 2-10! I looked inside another box: It was
full of shirts to go with the jeans. Then I peeked inside some of
the other boxes: There were candy and nuts and bananas and bags of
groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables
and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and
flour. There was a whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items.
And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll.

As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly rose on the most
amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude. And I
will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious
morning. Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December. And
they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop.