Sonrise Magazine

For God orders his angels to protect you wherever you go – Psalm 91:11

by Dennis Morrison

On January 19th, 1949, I was born a miracle: a super tiny three pound, two-ounce baby boy because of a kitchen fire. You see, the night before, my pregnant mother rushed my older sister and brother out of the tub yelling, “Get out! Get out!”

Well, I always did what Mom said, and so I got out. I was born way ahead of schedule the next morning at 4:21 AM. Looking back, I’m now sure my guardian angel helped me survive my premature birth and long stay in the hospital.

As my brother and I grew older, our boyish curiosity turned into one calamity after another, keeping our angels on their toes – assuming angels do have toes.

Remember the old Double-Dog-Dare challenge? I was six years old when my brother and I made up a concoction from the bathroom medicine cabinet mixing a drop of iodine, a splash of rubbing alcohol, and aspirin.

Well, you get the idea. Having dared, then double dared, and finally double DOG dared each other to take a sip, our short career as pharmacists, not to mention our lives, almost ended in having our stomachs pumped.

Every American boy loves sports anywhere, anytime, including a game of living room football. At the age of 7, during the big game on the living room gridiron, my brother Pat flipped me over his head, resulting in a fractured collarbone. Ouch! But wearing a brace for a month was a small price to pay for having fun, especially when compared to the time one afternoon. That day, as Pat ran home, he slipped on our back steps, resulting in a nasty forehead scar that lasted for years.  

Maybe “hard-headed” should have been Pat’s nickname. Adding insult to injury, an angry neighbor boy later smashed him there with his daisy rifle. Similar predicaments caused his head to collide: with a swinging golf club and a thrown beer can.

But Pat’s continued misfortune turned into our fame: You see, we got our pictures published in the local newspaper when Pat almost drowned in a swimming pool! Pat’s guardian angel used an eagle scout to spot a shadowy figure (Pat) at the bottom of the pool, and from there, my dad revived him by artificial respiration (see picture).

One would think night is a time of peace and quiet. That idea was disabused, however, by my dad being awakened by a loud noise downstairs. Upon investigation, he found me at the bottom of our 20-stair landing…still fast asleep and unharmed. It’s a good thing that guardian angels protect sleep walkers.

Boys in my day were transfixed by the old TV westerns. Naturally, we wanted to be cowboy and Indian heroes. So, there we were, out on the open range, Lone Ranger and Tonto, sitting around the old campfire. However, our campfire was in a vacant lot near the neighbor’s garage, on a very hot and dry eastern Washington summer day. The fire, however, didn’t cooperate. It suddenly grew past the limits we set for it. But just before it got completely out of control, Miss Kitty, my fireman mom, doused it out with a garden hose!

 Warm summer evenings were a boy’s delight: playing kick the can, hide and seek, and ringing neighbor’s doorbells.  With so much to do, we neglected to think of the toxic dangers of playing army in the fog behind the DDT truck that killed bugs during the hot summer months (this is pre-EPA and publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962).

But our greatest, death-defying thrill was when the Barnum and Bailey’s Circus came to our small town. We were enthralled by the tightrope high flying acrobats. Naturally, I duplicated this daring feat back home by tying twine from our back porch to our neighbor’s fence. I boldly stepped out to go where no Eastern Washington boy dared to go: into mid-air. My bravery, however, did not take into account the strength of the tight wire. With the no longer sturdy twines snapping, I crashed to the sidewalk below. I took it on the chin, catching it on the edge of the cement porch.

But nine stitches is a pretty minor price to pay for a famous circus performer. Later, in another Death Defying Circus Act, I set about climbing a telephone pole guy wire. I made it up alright. But upon my descent, I failed to notice a very sharp, broken glass jug, directly below me, that pierced through my tennis shoe and foot. Undeterred, I journeyed across the street and headed home.

As I made my way home, I started feeling weak and dizzy, due to the loss of blood. Reaching our backyard, I fell in a heap and yelled for help. Mom, no longer a Western fireman but now a nurse straight out of General Hospital, came to the rescue. Is it possible to have too many angelic rescues and stitches? We couldn’t tell for sure but seemed determined to find out.

On Saturdays, Mom frequently treated us to the movies at the Roxy Theater in downtown Pasco. I guess she and our guardian angels needed a break from our adventures, but every boy knew that a matinee was the place to go to inspire more great adventures in a young lad. It was time for another adventure and, in time, we moved: out of the wild west, to the wilder western Washington. We landed in the small town of Edmonds, just 15 miles north of Seattle.

Of course, we couldn’t wait to explore our new neighborhood. One day, while Pat was chasing me in an unfinished house, I failed to see the pane of a closed sliding glass door. I crashed right through it, but stoically refused to bleed to death.

We rode our bicycles all over creation. A favorite destination was Puget Sound next to the railroad tracks. We enjoyed throwing rocks and rolling boulders into the water and thought it was cool to place pennies on the tracks as the train roared by–within 10 feet of us.

We also enjoyed defiantly riding our bicycles down the middle of the tracks. What fun.

Later near home, we tried a new way to enjoy skateboarding. What could go wrong? Tying a rope to my friend’s bicycle seat, I jumped on my skateboard while he pedaled as fast as he could down a hill approaching a busy intersection. Working up to a speed of roughly 15 miles an hour, I jumped!…rolling into one monstrous bloody scab.

Years later, I was sharing these fond memories with my mom, whose only comment was, “You sure remember the weirdest things.”

Thank God for guardian angels.