I know from experience that sometimes I get up (not always by choice) and whatever dream I've had at that minute is still lingering in my head vividly. Sometimes, it's distant.

I don't know if it's residual or what, but as I did some work this morning, something hit me and I started singing an old Christmas song. Then it was goose bumps all over. Chicken skin. It doesn't happen much, and when it does, it's almost only in church. I haven't gone to church hardly in the past few years, so that makes the whole thing extremely rare.

But here I was, sitting on the couch and working on the laptop, and the song is in my head and I couldn't help but sing it a little, and the tears came. Fall on your knees ... and hear the angels' voices ... oh night divine ... oh the night when Christ was born.

Now you may (or probably) think this is so tacky. Or religious. But for me, it's not. I knew right away that all these years that my mom said "God is watching over me," that wasn't just talk. She wasn't a bullshitter. Never. She was wrong sometimes, but not out of a lack of conviction. I realized this morning that she knew in her heart that God was there for her because an angel has always been at her side.

With her disposition, that's the only way she survived being away from home from the time she was 8, gone from her father and mother from September to June every school year. That longing and suffering never left her. She missed her dad, especially, to the day she died.

So I can't explain to you in physical terms or with science the existence of God or angels. But I know now that's how my mother survived through extreme loneliness, through being deaf and being reprimanded severely for trying to use sign language at the Territorial School for the Deaf and Blind.

My mom had no business knowing about God, let alone the existence of an angel. Her mother was pretty typical of Japanese women who moved to Hawaii in the early part of the 20th century. I remember grandma kneeling at her altar, reciting stuff in Japanese. My mom had no grasp or connection to that.

Whether that kept my mom and her mother at a distance from each other, I don't know. I know they cared about each other. But that's it. My grandma had nine kids to raise in a tiny house in Kula, and when her husband died young, she was on her own, and looking back, I know that's probably part of the reason why it was best to send my mom (and her older brother) to the deaf school on Oahu.

It takes me a long time to connect the dots. Always has been that way. But when they connect, it's real. I wonder if mom gets to talk with her angel now.

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