One snowy evening, an angel stepped into our store...

It was a December evening about three or four days before Christmas, and I was 6 years old.

I was sitting at the kitchen table that night, watching my mother bake and cook for Christmas, while my father and sister Joan were out of the house for a while.

We had very few customers that day because it had been snowing since morning. At just a few minutes before 8 p.m., the time my parents closed the store, the bell rang, telling us we had a customer.

I followed my mother into the store and saw a man, very dirty, in ragged clothes, carrying a pole over his shoulder with a knapsack cloth attached to it. Men like him were called hobos or bums in those days.

My mother greeted him and asked how she could help him. He said, "Lady, do you have any scraps you could give me?" She answered, "Wait right here. It will take me a few minutes."

She went back into our kitchen, with me following right behind her, and left the man alone in the store. She put coffee on the stove, and proceeded to make hearty sandwiches and other food items, which she carefully wrapped and bagged for the man. She poured the coffee in a thermos (which would have to be replaced).

I just watched her in awe.

Then my mother did something that really surprised me: She started to dip into her Christmas baking and took her homemade fruit cake, which took a very long time to bake and was set aside for our relatives, and cut it in half. She took one of the halves, wrapped it and put it in one of the bags for the stranger.

She sensed my astonishment and turned to look at me and simply said, "The Lord expects us to feed the hungry."

I followed her back into the store, and the man was standing in the same spot by the door where we last saw him.  My mother handed him the bags and thermos, and he seemed quite stunned. With his head lowered, he quietly uttered an embarrassed thank you and then left very quickly.

I immediately went to the window. It had stopped snowing, but I couldn't see the man leaving, and there were no footprints in the accumulation of heavy snow. It was as if he had suddenly vanished.

I can close my eyes even to this day and see the stranger at the door and my mother getting his food ready. This experience has stayed with me over the years, and always reminds me to be good and kind, and to serve others the way God wants us to.

As I grew into adulthood, I would sometimes wonder if that man who came to our store could possibly have been an angel in human disguise -- and that is why I've made this the first story in my angel book, which, in the introductory pages, includes this quote from the Bible: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Hebrews 13: 1-2).

(Sandra Martone, the author of this childhood reminiscence, died in September on her 60th birthday after a 16-year battle with cancer. Coordinator of religious education at St. Catherine of Siena parish in Albany, she also taught at St. Joseph's Academy, Vincentian Institute, Mercy High and Christian Brothers Academy. In a journal she kept, she shared this story from her childhood.)

(12/21/06) [[In-content Ad]]