The Angel of Losses

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/12/2015 (3657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bob had disappeared again.

It was Christmastime, when our family’s tiny clothing store filled with people looking for practical gifts and shoplifters after the very best free merchandise. Bob’s job was to see the shoplifters in the crowds. He succeeded because, at nearly seven feet, he was the tallest person most of us had ever seen. He towered over everyone, his head, neck, and shoulders like some Himalayan peak thrusting upwards from a shroud of clouds.

In the store, it was easy to spot Bob. My parents, however, had a different relationship with him. They were the ones to search for Bob whenever he failed to show up for work. At day’s end, they’d ride the bus to his neighborhood, and walk from bar to bar looking for him behind hedges, atop trash heaps, underneath a porch. Sometimes they found him in a tangle on stairs leading to basement doors, or under bundles of collapsed cardboard boxes, or sandwiched like a slice of cheese between a discarded mattress and box spring.

Dad had learned a lot from fallen comrades during the war years. He assessed Bob’s condition carefully. Had he been beaten, or just fallen asleep after getting drunk? Did he need a hospital? Sometimes Dad carried Bob for blocks to his boarding house to sober up. Bob knew better than to argue with Dad; he’d seen Dad win a bet by shouldering bundles of rebar and carrying them unaided for a full city block.

My brother and I recognized the hospital stays because Bob returned to work after a protracted absence and sported stitches or an arm in a sling.

When he wasn’t watching customers, Bob restacked dozens of pairs of pants by size and folded shirts to their packaging. Those lulls were important to him. He filled them with “The Story of Bob”. That was what my brother and I began to call it when we were little.

Bob always began it in the mid-1940s with his short-lived career in the Pacific Coast Hockey League. We were sceptical that gangly Bob could skate. I asked my brother: “Don’t hockey players need muscles? He looks like what’s-his-name, the guy who gets chased by the Headless Horseman in Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

My brother had a smart answer: “Maybe a Disney artist saw Bob playing against the Hollywood Wolves and turned him into Ichabod Crane!” To us, Bob was like one of the rolling clothing racks in the store, a shaky thing of hollow tubes connected by loose screws, unable to stop itself whenever someone pushed it.

Our laughter ended when Bob explained how his hockey career ended: “I was skating to gain position on the puck and crashed hard into the boards, and everyone else slammed into me. They sliced me up. Doctors said I’d never walk but I showed them. Only nothing went back to normal. There were lots of able-bodied folks looking who moved faster and carried a whole lot more than me. I couldn’t find work.”

The search tore him up and he began losing pieces of himself. He took comfort in liquor. His wife Anne left him. She told him she was praying a lot for him, and even tried to help him through his neediest moments, but stopped when she realized he wasn’t doing anything to care for himself. She couldn’t bear to watch his descent.

Then she died in a car accident.

We heard the story thirty times or more while Bob worked for Mom and Dad. We got older and Bob shared new chapters of his life. He needed others to listen, and in exchange offered his chief possession, the memory of his lost life.

Most adults masked their disinterest with polite gestures, or developed escape strategies. We stayed and listened in imitation of our parents; they accorded him their attention while they performed the daily chores.

In time, Bob’s sadness became uncomfortable for us, and then threatened to overwhelm us. We began bringing books to the store and filled the slower hours with reading. Bob never interrupted us, but after a while, we felt ashamed. What did it mean that we used books to avoid giving him an audience?

Around that time, Bob surprised us. He began reflecting on his own life in ways we’d never heard. I wrote some of his comments in a journal I’d kept since my eighth birthday.

Bob said: “People tell me bad things happen all the time. You set course for one shore, then get blown and near-drowned by storms and currents you never asked for. They take you to a place you never expected and don’t want to be. What can you do then? There’s nothing you can do to change it.”

Through our high school years, Bob fleshed out tales of his eastward migration. He cleaned bus station restrooms in the Rockies, cooked and bussed tables in restaurants and hospitals, ran harvesters and loaded trucks. There was more about drinking and about times when his eccentricities clashed with others. It was too much to digest then, and even now too difficult to remember — except I wished I’d written down all his fresh starts and subtle, shifting longings.

When Bob told us about how he came to town, it was much the same story at every place he’d been to the west. Somebody robbed him of his savings and winter gear, and left him with a concussion in a snowstorm. “That was how I met your Dad. He found me and called for the police. The doctors said I was lucky I hadn’t lost anything to frostbite. Your folks gave me clothes and found me a place. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them.”

Mom said, “Your father saw many bad things over the war years. He is upset when Bob gets hurt or drinks too much. Bob reminds us of how hard it is to survive. Too many people gave up because they had no one to tell them ‘Keep fighting!’ Every time we were with Bob, we said it to him. In many different ways, every time — for ten years now.”

Another time, she told us: “Bob always tells the same stories. Bob thinks he cannot find kindness, patience, or forgiveness anywhere, but the problem has become that he cannot see it. Your father cannot listen for very long. We had plenty of our own bad times, but it does no one any good to compare sufferings.”

In my final year at university, I returned for the holidays. I’d been away over three years, immersed in my studies and too busy to visit the store during my short visits to see family. I wanted to work there and hear the rest of Bob’s story — only Bob was gone.

Four summers earlier, Bob had done something remarkable: He volunteered to coach an amateur hockey club at a community centre. On foot, Bob still plodded along. After he laced up a pair of skates and got onto the ice for the first time in decades, he was slow there, too. Yet something seized him and he’d flawlessly demonstrate some complex manoeuvre or clever technique. When his momentary grace vanished, it didn’t matter very much. It lasted long enough to dazzle the kids and impart some hockey wisdom. Bob’s coaching skills even captivated one of the parents, who hired him to manage his hardware store stockroom.

Over two astonishing seasons, Bob’s kids skated toward a junior league championship, but Bob died before they won the trophy.

“Liver complications,” Mom said. “But, you know, when he decided to coach, he told us. We were thrilled. He even wrote to thank us — on a typewriter!”

The letter was seven pages gently summarizing Bob’s life. It ended with a bedtime story Mom had told him just after Dad first found him:

“Mrs. —, do you remember the story you told me when I came here? I’ve thought about it all these years. You told me there was a special angel watching over people, no matter how dark their world seems. Yode’a. The name’s stuck in my head because to me it sounds like the word ‘rodeo’. You called it ‘the Angel of Losses’ because it records each detail of life before it disappears from memory.

“You said the angel picks helpers and gives them special shovels and they spend their lives digging for the stuff that disappeared. They know where to find the missing pieces from broken souls because even every bit of buried soul is a beacon. They shine, and the helpers put those lost parts together and bring them to the folks who lost them. Then they’re not broken anymore, and they live again.

“Ma’am, I think that’s what you and your husband did for me. I can’t thank you enough. I am forever grateful. God bless you both.”

When I finished reading, Mom softly said: “I wanted to tell him that he did the same for us, but I never got the chance.”

Larry Pinsker fondly recalls the many people with whom he worked, learned, celebrated, and shared sorrows during his Winnipeg tenure from 2004-2013. Two other stories he wrote were honoured in previous Writers’ Collective/Winnipeg Free Press contests.