Resurrection

Come on. Admit it. You’ve stolen something, probably after a few beers or on a dare. Or both. You justified it as a souvenir. It sits in the back of a closet or at the bottom of a drawer wrapped in newspaper or an old bandana.  

And whenever you come across it—usually when you’re looking for something else—you cringe. You can’t figure out, one: why you took it to begin with; and two: why you still have it. But you can’t throw it away. That would be sacrilegious.

Maybe it was a mug from your favorite pub in college. A towel from the resort where you stayed on your honeymoon—the first one. Or a statue from a cemetery.

That’s what it was for Dolores—a manger ornament bearing a sash that read Gloria in exelsis Deo that she naturally named Gloria.

As is often the case, she and her friends had imbibed a little too much—okay, more than a little too much.

Dolores blamed Danny, her boyfriend at the time. Danny says it was Linda’s idea. And of course, Linda, doesn’t remember anything anymore. But these days, neither does Dolores.

The way she always told the story, they had gone to a Samhein celebration at a deserted cemetery one Halloween when they were 15- or 16-years old. A high priestess, cloaked in billowing white veils, brandished a wand and sounded some kind of animal horn. She said that All Hallow’s Eve ushered in the Celtic New Year, the night when the dead returned to make merry with the living, the undead, and the yet unborn. The moment when the veil between the worlds was so thin, she said, dramatically lifting the veil from her face and casting it over her shoulders, that they could easily pass over.

Then she chanted something in a strange language that Dolores swears she heard as Save Gloria. After the ritual ended, and the faithful departed along with the faithfully departed, the kids removed the statue. Naturally, they named their secret quarry Gloria.

Dolores insisted that they hide it in plain sight in the abandoned garden of her parents’ home behind the sycamore tree, where neither they nor anyone else could see it. But the gang of teenaged thieves assembled there on weekend nights to smoke, drink, and offer sacrifices. On Halloween it was pumpkins and apples. And on Christmas, chocolates, candy canes, and peppermint schnapps.  

Dolores is my aunt. We grew up calling her eccentric. But that’s an understatement. A self-proclaimed wiccan priestess, she traveled the world, played the ukulele, and grew exotic herbs in her garden. She never married, choosing instead a series of boyfriends who, believe it or not, were even weirder than she was.

In fact, it took a while for us to realize that her eccentricity had crossed into dementia. Now her nieces and nephews had to place her in a memory unit at the local assisted-living facility and sell the property to pay for it.

The house belongings were easy enough. But Gloria stymied us. She had to go before we could show the property, but she weighed a few hundred pounds. How did a bunch of drunk teenagers get her into the garden? Well, because they were drunk teenagers, we concluded. We were middle-aged and practical.

Dolores also said that Gloria changed her life. Well, she changed ours, too.

Mary, a devout Catholic, suggested we bury her.

“Isn’t that what you do with relics?”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Gene, who had studied for the priesthood. The Catholic one, not the wiccan one.

“Let’s return her to the cemetery, I suggested.

Gene backed his pickup truck into the garden. Using a ramp and pulley system that he devised with scrap lumber and an old clothesline, we rolled Gloria into the flatbed.

First, her wings broke off. Figuring we’d deal with them later, we threw them in separately. Then it was the halo, the skirt, and finally the banner proclaiming in exelsis Deo. All that remained was a torso holding the word Gloria.

We wrapped it in a tarp and headed to the old graveyard. We hadn’t thought through our plan, because when we arrived at our destination, a sign informed us that the remains in the cemetery had been removed and reinterred at the manicured memorial garden across town to make way for a new condominium.

“Let’s figure this out,” I suggested, noting that the non-denominational memorial garden was a statuary-free zone. I gestured across the street to a coffee shop. While we sat over cups of coffee, we noticed first a police officer, then a few more encircling Gene’s truck. A few minutes later, Gene’s cell phone rang.

It seems a passerby reported a dead body in the back of his pickup.

Rather than explain that this was a stolen angel that fell from grace, Gene shrugged and said we were on our way to the dump. After a good laugh, we headed there. It seems, though, it’s a haven for dumpster divers, for as we pulled away, I noticed a few kids sifting through the debris.

I heard one exclaim, “Look, it’s named Gloria. Let’s take her home.”