Cookies for an Angel
Christine Mulcauer’s postal service shift ended about three a.m. on Christmas Eve morning and despite the freezing cold, she decided to stop at the all-night grocery store on her way home to buy ingredients for Christmas cookies. “My family calls me ‘The Christmas Kid’,” Christine says. “I am really into the season and love making cookies.” When she came out with her packages, however, she found that a tire was flat. Now what to do? Christine had no cell phone and the pay phone in the lot was out of order. Certainly she did not want to walk the half-mile to the diner at the corner. “I decided to drive the car anyway,” she says. But the car lurched and rattled, and the steering wheel jumped in her hands… Asking the angels for protection, she got out, left the car on a shoulder of the road, and walked the rest of the way to the diner.
“When I got there, I pulled out my wallet which had the phone number of Jessie, my regular mechanic’s towing service,” she says. “A woman answered the phone and took the information down and told me to hold on. A man’s voice came over the phone next and he asked me to repeat my location and that he would be there as soon as possible. In the meantime, a patrol car had pulled up at the diner. The patrolman walked in, wondering about my car. I told him a tow truck was coming, so he left.”
All routine so far. She would be home soon, Christine reassured herself. Soon a bright blue unmarked truck pulled up in front of the diner. Christine immediately went out to meet the driver, and get into his truck. “Normally I’m cautious,” she says, “and I did think it strange that there were no name or markings on the truck, but I instinctively knew he had been sent to me. We drove back to my car on the shoulder, he hitched it up and we towed it to Jessie’s garage.”
Of course everything was locked up tight, but Christine saw the tow truck driver write a note of explanation, and stuck it through the key drop. “All set,” he told Christine. “Would you like a ride home now?”
“I sure would,” Christine said. It had been a long night, but everything had worked out. Even the tow truck driver, although quiet, was a reassuring presence. Christine felt certain she had met him before, but her foggy brain was too tired to think about it. “How much is the tow?” she asked.
“Oh, work it out with Jessie,” he said, pulling up to her driveway.
Christine got out, but before she could muster up some words of thanks, the truck pulled away. “I honestly didn’t see exactly where it went,” Christine says. “It seemed to vanish into thin air, but I knew such a thing couldn’t happen.”
The next day Christine got a ride to Jessie’s garage to tell him what happened and she described the truck. “Did he charge you for the tow?” Jessie asked.
“No,” Christine told him. “He said to work it out with you.”
“That’s crazy,” Jessie responded. “My tow driver, Pat, and I have a standing arrangement. But Pat’s truck is orange, and it says, “Pat’s Towing” on the side.” He called Pat and was surprised to learn that Pat hadn’t had any emergency calls the night before.
“But I dialed your number,” Christine pointed out, showing Jessie the card she used, “and a woman answered and then put a man on the phone, who then came out to get me in a bright blue truck….”
“Impossible,” Pat insisted. “I didn’t pick anyone up last night.”
“Well,” Jessie looked at Christine’s tire, by now ripped to shreds, “SOMEONE had to tow you because you couldn’t have driven the car in that condition.”
“Didn’t the driver leave his name on the note?” Christine asked, extremely mystified.
“What note?” Jessie asked.
“The note he put through your key drop.”
Jessie looked at Christine. “There was no note left for me, there or anywhere.”
“But I saw him drop it…” Christine described the driver, slender with shaggy hair…
“That’s not Pat,” Jessie interrupted. “He’s big and bald.”
The two looked at each other. “I think he was my guardian angel,” Christine said slowly.
“Jessie wished me a Merry Christmas and I wished him the same and left to attend the noon daily mass at my parish, St. Patrick’s,” Christine says. The next day, she told her neighbors about the tow truck episode. “I live in a tiny apartment complex and the lot is very small, so I apologized for the noise they must have heard from the tow truck when I was dropped off at my door. They never heard or saw the truck.”
Christine has never forgotten the incident but as Christmas comes each year, and she bakes her favorite cookies, she gives special thanks to her quiet guardian.
(C) 2004 Joan Wester Anderson www.joanwanderson.com
Related Posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
My mother and I were just discussing this incident today. This is my story and I had a difficult time locating it in your archives because my name was misspelled. There is more to this story….when I attended church at St. Patrick’s and they were setting up the Christmas Creche, my jaw dropped to the floor and I almost fainted when I saw the statue of Balthazar, one of the Wise Men. My pastor, who saw and heard my reaction to the statue, came over to me and asked me if I was ok. I then told him the story, and at the conclusion I told Msgr. (Budwick), there was such an air of familiarity about this tow truck driver even though he didn’t talk much. It wasn’t until I saw the statue of Balthazar that I realized the driver of the truck was my guardian angel! I said to Msgr. “Minus the beard, that’s him! That’s my tow truck driver!” My mechanic and Pat’s Towing never did figure that one out but my pastor smiled enthusiastically and told me he really does believe things like that happen. I KNOW they do! Who knows how many times our guardian angels have rescued us and we have never even realized what was happening???