Remembering Paul Crume's
"Big D" Column!
(1912-1975)

A man wrote me not long ago and asked me what I thought
of the theory of angels.
I immediately told him that I am highly
in favor of angels.
As a matter of fact, I am scared to death of them.

Any adult human being with half sense, and some with
more, knows that there are angels.
If he has ever spent any period in loneliness,
when the senses are forced in upon themselves,
he has felt the wind from their beating wings
and been overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the
endless and gigantic dark that exists outside the little
candle flame of human knowledge.

He has prayed, not in the
sense that he asked for something,
but that he yielded himself.

Angels live daily at our very elbows, and so do demons,
and most men
at one time or another in their lives have yielded themselves to
both and have lived to rejoice and rue their impulses.

But the man who has once felt the beat of an angel's wing
finds it easy to rejoice at the universe
and at his fellow man.

It does not happen to any man often,
and too many of us dismiss it when it happens.
I remember a time in my final days in college
when the chinaberry trees were abloom and
the air was sweet with spring blossoms
and I stood still on the street,
suddenly struck with the feeling of something that was an enormous promise
and yet was no tangible promise at all.

And there was another night in a small boat when the moon
was full and the distant headlands were dark but beautiful
and we were lonely. The pull of a nameless emotion was so
strong that it filled the atmosphere.
The small boy within me cried.
Psychiatrists will say that the angel in all
this was really within me, not outside,
but it makes no difference.

There are angels inside us and angels outside,
and the one inside is usually the quickest choked.

Francis Thompson said it better. He was a late 19th-century
English poet who would put the current crop of hippies to
shame. He was on pot all his life. His pad was always
mean and was sometimes a park bench. He was a mental case
and tubercular besides.
He carried a fishing creel into which he dropped the poetry
that was later to become immortal.

"The angels keep their ancient places,"
wrote Francis Thompson in protest.
"Turn but a stone, and start a wing."

He was lonely enough to be the constant associate of angels.

There is an angel close to you this day.

Merry Christmas, and I wish you well.