A recent AP shock poll revealed that 69 percent of Americans believe in angels. Maybe that’s because they’ve been helped by one, as I was fifty summers ago. 

Due to an economic downturn, my fifty-year-old father was unemployable in NYC. Fortunately, he’d somehow managed to land a straight-commission sales job in Houston. So, when I was thirteen, like tens of thousands of desperate 1970s New Yorkers, we left friends, family, and the familiar behind to light out for Texas.

It was all very strange. 

When my mother pushed open the airport door and first stepped into Houston’s midsummer heat, she hurried back inside, gasping, “They must be having a heatwave.” My ten-year-old brother and I followed her back out into the dripping humidity and scorching sunlight, and our clothes immediately shrink-wrapped themselves to us like ground beef packaging at the supermarket. 

My father had been in town a couple of weeks. As we walked toward his car, my brother stopped and with real wonder in his voice whispered, “Look.” Mom and I looked up and beheld Texas’ majestic big sky. Walking in small circles in the griddle-like parking lot, we gazed at it until my father shouted, “Hurry up!”

Driving to our apartment, we gaped at all the pickup trucks with racked rifles in their rear windows driven by men wearing cowboy hats. 

“Is it like the Wild West here?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” dad replied utterly without conviction. 

After a pregnant pause, he caught himself, mustered some enthusiasm, and asked, “Hey, how’d you kids like to try some Mexican food?”

Outside of the occasional Frito, we’d never seen Mexican food. So, as we moved down the cafeteria line, I bit into a jalapeno, and my mouth burst into flames. Teary eyed and runny nosed, I managed to choke out, “What kind of pickle is that?”

“It’s a jalapeno pepper,” dad explained handing me a napkin.

“Why would anyone eat something that hurts?” 

Walking into our crummy, one-bedroom, furnished apartment, unspoken comparisons with our nice house on Long Island weighed on us. Dad announced that I’d be sleeping on the living room couch and my brother would have to sleep on the floor. My parents began quarrelling and disappeared into the bedroom. 

The strain caused by the enormity and suddenness of our move built over the next two weeks. Disconnected from everyone and everything we knew, we began to snipe at each other. So, to relieve the tension and despite the insane hours he was working, my father drove us eighty miles for a daytrip to Lake Livingston. 

At the lake, we rented a tiny boat. My brother and I sat on either side of the motor as dad yanked harder and harder on the hard-to-pull starter rope. Steely-eyed, he straddled the motor, grabbed the rope with both hands, and gave it a mighty heave. My brother and I watched dad pinwheel overhead as our boat shot out from under him; he’d started the motor in gear.

The three of us pulled him back aboard, and, mad as a wet captain, he solemnly declared we were leaving.

Soon after we’d arrived, dad had sent me to retrieve something, so I was the last to have his keys. When we got back to our car, I couldn’t find them. All their fear, failure, loss, and loneliness – all of it – came spewing out as my parents yelled at me. 

Suddenly, a stranger approached. I assumed he was just moving closer to the fun, as New Yorkers would.

“Can I loan y’all my truck to go fetch another key?” he asked.

In stunned disbelief, we looked up at a tall, elderly man wearing jeans, a western shirt, and a straw cowboy hat, his worn face framed by its glowing brim.

“But we live all the way in Houston,” dad protested. “Why would you do this?”

“Because I’m a Christian,” he answered handing dad his keys.

Driving home in his pickup, all the tension was gone. Instead, we were filled with Christmas-like feelings of peace and hope. No one spoke for a long time, and then dad said quietly, “These are good people.”