THE LAST ANGEL

Leaving O'Hare airport last December, I was seated beside a smiling woman in er early 60's. She was bound for Denver , and I, San Francisco . Smartly dressed, she was holding the most beautiful angel doll I have ever seen. It was the perfect conversation opener, and by the time we reached her destination, I had enjoyed the most unusual story. Let me share it with you.

Each Christmas, she told me, a department store in Chicago puts up an angel tree, a Christmas tree decorated with nothing but hundreds of white paper angels. On each of the angel the store has printed the first name and age of an unprivileged youngster innee of a remembrance at Christmas.

Customers choose an angel, purchase an appropriate gift anywhere they wish, and return it to the store for free gift-wrapping and delivery on Christmas Eve. This woman had noticed the tree a dozen times when shopping there, an each time she made a mental note to select a child's name; but as so often happens, she just never got round to it.

Then, on Christmas Eve one year, she had returned to the store to find a last minute gift. And there stood the tree, now bare. Well, not quite for above her line of vision, toward the back of the tree, was the last angel. She stood on tiptoe, removed it, and read: “Cyndi 3,” Unless she moved swiftly, this child would not have a Christmas present this year.

Hurrying to a nearby toy store, she bought an angel doll, the last in the store and returned, only to learn that, although the clerk would gladly gift-wrap the toy. It was to late to have it delivered. But the clerk gave her the child's address, and she was soon on her way across town to deliver the present.

As she approached the neighborhood she sought, the woman noticed the house were increasingly dilapidated. The address proved to be a one-room shack in the rear of the last house on a dead-end street. Walking up the sidewalk, she noticed that no one has made tracks in the preservious night's snowfall. She knocked on the broken door and waited, but there was not a sound from within.

Knocking again, she heard a child again begin to cry. The force of her knock had pushed the door ajar, and she saw a child – soiled and dirty – standing beside an unmade bed. A single light bulb, hanging from the ceiling, dimly lit the cold bare room.

The pathetic site compelled her to enter, and there on the floor behind the table, lay a woman. She bent down and realized in an instant that the woman was dead. She panicked.

Her first thought was to close the door and run… but someone might have seen her enter the shack. And the clerk at the department store knew she was delivering the gift. So the woman unwrapped the doll, and she gave it to the child, who cuddled it and stopped crying. Then she ran down the block to a grocery and called the police.

They arrived shortly; the officers estimated that the child's mother had been dead for more than eight hours. While the woman comforted the child, the two officers discussed what agencies should be contacted and whether a place could be found for the little girl to stay this late on Christmas Eve.

Suddenly the woman had an idea. Why not take the child home? In arguing her case, she was so persuasive the officers agreed to cut the red tape and arranged for her to have temporary custody for the holiday weekend.

It proved to be the most wonderful Christmas she and her husband ever had. They had no children, and their families lived out of state; they are planning to spend Christmas alone.

Late Monday afternoon a social worker arrived and reported that the authorities had been unable to discover who the child was. There was nothing in the shack or on the woman's person to identify her. None of the neighbors had ever talked to the child or her mother in the two months the had lived there.

My new friend's prayer were answered when the social workers agreed to let her keep the child while the search for identification and relatives continued. A year later the woman and her husbandadopted Cyndi whoi by then had become the focus of their lives.

As we sat together and talked, the woman told me that today Cyndi was grown and happily married with a three-year old daughter if her own, who was also named Cyndi. The woman, now a widow, was flying to spend Christmas with them in Denver . She was bringing the angel doll for her granddaughter; it had been the last one in the store.