ANGEL

 THE CALL

The phone rang at seven ten in the morning.  The brother’s soothing voice was a comfort to the woman who had called to tell him the bad news.  “I’m so sorry . . . how sad for all of us” he said to the woman, as he felt tears well up in his eyes.  It was a short phone call, just long enough for the grief-stricken woman on the other end to share the news with the one person who would understand her heartache.  “I’m going over to open the Center in a few minutes, but let’s get together later,” he said to her reassuringly, just before saying goodbye.

FREEDOM

Brother Anthony looked up at the vast open space above the yard between the church, with its two grand steeples, and the neighboring school building.  He caught sight of what appeared to be a perfectly white pigeon.  He thought for a moment that it might even be a dove.  It seemed too beautiful to be just an ordinary pigeon.  The bird was gliding through the air and appeared to dance gracefully in circles between the expanse of the old buildings.  It flew very high, almost out of sight, and then swooped down, almost to the ground and then up again.  The bird seemed to be performing a joyful dance as if to convey some type of message.  It disappeared for a moment, out of sight behind the tall brick wall that separated the church yard from Johnson Avenue, the street directly behind the church.  Brother Anthony imagined for a moment that this bird somehow was special, that it embodied the liberated soul of a some previously captivated spirit.  It was as if the bird had a message to convey.  But then, getting hold of his sense of reason, the brother realized he had lapsed into a moment of cute sentimentalism.  The bird appeared again, dancing high in the sky, between the two high steeples of the church and then down, fast to the ground.  It landed, seemed to pause contemplatively, and then walked a short distance in the direction of the brother. In a flutter, it took off, circled high into the sky and swooped down one last time and disappeared over the brick wall for the last time.  Brother Anthony stood for a while gazing upward expecting to see the bird again, but it never returned.  He sensed that the bird could not be content to stay in one place for too long.  As he pondered the moment, he thought the graceful movements of the bird in sky above the yard and its certain departure, had given expression to his feelings about the death of his friend.  The dance of the bird was like that of a liberated soul.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY

“A great weather report” said the newscaster on WCBS radio; “it looks like winter is finally over . . . today we should expect a beautiful sunny sky and temperatures in the low eighties . . . what a change!”  The donut man turned off the radio as he stopped his truck in front of the gate of the lot on Knickerbocker Avenue; he parked the truck there each morning after he finished his run.  “Another day’s work complete” he thought as he pulled the key out of the ignition and the truck’s engine rumbled to a dead stop.  As he checked his milage chart, he thought of home and looked forward to getting there in time to see his children off to school.  The drunk on Johnson Avenue was now the last thing on his mind as he loosened the zipper of his jacket, locked the gate of the lot, and headed for the Morgan Avenue station of the L train.

THE CITY WAS ALIVE

The beautiful white bird soared high in the clear blue sky far above the energetic activity and buzz of the Williamsburg streets below.  Car horns sounded as frustrated drivers impatiently sat in nearly paralyzed traffic on Grand Street; a fire truck roared up Montrose Avenue on the way to what would be the first false alarm of the day; above Broadway, the M train clattered along as it made its way between the Lorimer and Hewes Street stops, carrying hundreds of crammed passengers on the way to their jobs in the city; a number of police cars, with blue lights flashing, sat in and around a gas station at the corner of Leonard and Maujer Streets; traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, crawled past apartment buildings whose windows faced irritable drivers trying to proceed in spite of slow moving trucks ahead; barely audible music sounded from an open window of a twentieth floor co-op of one of the Lindsey buildings, which in the bright morning sun, cast a long shadow on the smaller structures lining Union Avenue to the west; along the East River, the gleaming towers of the Manhattan skyline dwarfed buildings on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bride.  The City was alive.  The bird carelessly and joyfully danced in the air, and then it faded on the horizon as it headed out toward the serene Atlantic Ocean which sparkled as the new day began.