This blog has always meant to be a humor blog, then over time when things began to changes in my life and it adapted it whatever floated my boat. I started it in when I still lived and and worked in Houston. That was 2007. A million years ago. I continued on with it after retiring and moving to Central Texas, though I didn’t blog as often and shut it down after the election in in 2016. I have a cognitive related MS and my doctors suggested that restarting my blog would help exercise ye olde gray matter.
Houston.
My life there was interesting. It was great, horrible, boring, exciting…it was everything. The ubiquitous “they” that by the next census, officials knowledgeable in such matters say Houston will be the third largest city’s in the country, surpassing Chicago which I completely understand. With any big city, comes big city problems and well, frankly weirdness. Place eight or nine million people in close vertical quarters towering 79 floors in the sky and you’re gonna get some weirdness.
With few exceptions, I’ve stayed away from religion. In fact, I don’t even like that word. It’s just an umbrella term for a slew of “religious entities” that couldn’t be more different. Like putting feral tomcats in a bag. Cruel concept, but you get the analogy. And in Houston, I tried making several different attempts at returning to Catholicism, but it always quickly faded. It just never took. Often, I just felt safer staying home. Lots of crazy in Houston. But I couldn’t stat in my yurt 24/7. I had to work and occasionally I enjoyed going out. But this South Texas woman child learned Big City survival tactics very quickly.
From the time I moved to Houston in April of 1999 to when Ieft in August 2012, I suppose I’d seen at least 12 random penises. Strangers’ penises. I’d walk along ing the trails atop the city’s many bayous, hear a loud cough, then I’d. look down towards the water and there would some reprobate with his pants pulled down just enough enough to prove how agile his middle aged elbow still is. I looked briefly then and kept on walking. I’d walk through packed parking lots and invariably, there would be two men maybe three, sitting in their cars airing out their tiny flesh colored pogo sticks. There were more incidents, but the stories are too involved, but all grossly perverted.
But. the subject leads me to the actual reason behind this blog,
You work unusual hours in the news and entertainment. You’ll find more extreme shifts that start at one AM and you’ll finish eight hours later, providing you can sneak out before an explosion or mass shooting In some some ways, it’s cool because you get out of work so early you beat the the madding (or in Houston’s case maddening) crowds. But for me I had to get everything done that I had to do because once I got home, there was no going back out again. I’d be down for the count.
For those of us who worked the overnight shifts, we’d often take turns collecting money to buy breakfast for the staff that was clamoring and cussing and sweating to get the first five or six am newscast looking well……decent. I worked for some shifty stations in my career,
Anyway, on this one particular morning, it was my turn to buy breakfast and this being Texas and all, breakfast tacos were always a fave among slaves. I stopped at one particular fast food joint that made a good taco we could all agree on. As I turned the corner into the drive through. I saw a very small, dark skinned, Mexican man peering from behind a wall, I thought to myself, “Oh no, not another penis production”.
It wasn’t.
He squinted at me through my headlights snd made the universal sign for being hungry with fingers pointing toward an open mouth and patting his stomach. I had a few extra dollars on me so I ordered two more tacos to my order of 24.. I Drove forward and looked in my rear view mirror and still saw him peeking from behind the corner. Due to the amount of tacos I needed, I preordered them the night before and two more bacon and egg tacos wouldn’t take that long to make. By then, I noticed the man was gone. Then, as I paid for my order and drove forward, I saw him hiding behind a corner in front of my car. I have no idea how he made It from the back of the building to the front that fast.
I stopped and handed him two tacos snd some napkins and he told me “Gracias” and I just smiled and drove about ten feet, stopped, and looked in my rear view mirror fully expecting to see the hungry little guy devouring his tacos. But he was no where in sight.
Now keep in mind, I was in an empty, but large, well lit parking lot with a well manicured vacant lot on one side and the entrance to the freeway access road on the other. Where had he gone? I even put the car in park, got out and looked around. He was no where in sight. There hadn’t been enough time for him to have gone anywhere out of my my line of sight, and only the drive through line was open at the restaurant, the dining room doors were locked. And the ten foot treck I made in with my car only took two to three seconds, if that long.
He was gone. He’d disappeared. .
Had Iimagined him? A ghost….. and acid flashback? Could he have been an angel?
I don’t know what I thought about the squatty, little Mexican man with a penchant for tacos that gave him Usain Bolt speed. I’m inclined to think that something supernatural…..more Jim Bakker than Ghost hunters……happened that night. If so, was this a test of some kind? Does God do this? Test people? Is this the Universe’s way of rewarding or withholding depending on how you respond? Did I escape a carjacking with my largess? Or was it an everyday act of kindness that happens everyday, just not enough times everyday.?
I dislike being this jaded , but big city, big problems, right? But I think I’m going to willfully choose the to view this as an angel-to-errant human encounter.
Again, permit me to reiterate: I’m not very ecclesiastically hip. I’m a lapsed Catholic with a spiritual side, but it encompasses a lot of different….well, spirits, but I but I think a Bible verse might be applicable here:
“And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you do it to one of the least of these my brothers, that you do unto me,”
So, what exactly did I experience in the darkness of that early morning? He had no wings, nothing ephemeral or typically angelic emanating from him, just gratitude, maybe Angels unawares, as they say. I don’t really know, who or what he was if nothing more than a hungry, penniless man, hoping some stranger in a drive through line at 1:05 am would help quell his hunger. But I did that night what I always try to do: Helping a stranger, a friend or colleague in need, in whatever capacity I can has been the right thing for me to do. Not tooting my horn here. I can be the biggest bitch this side of the Equator, but helping where and when I can has always been part of my personal belief system and I don’t do it for any reason other than it makes me feel good. And trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of the same kind of help, so yeah, I know both sides of the matter.
”You only get what what you give”
—To quote The Young Radicals and hundreds of others
So, if this little, squatty Latino man was an angel with a thing for What A Burger breakfast tacos, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. His earthly charge is a squatty little white girl who digs those breakfast tacos, too,
