Recently I reunited virtually with a dozen or so college friends, some who I haven't seen since the early 70's. Fun at first, until memories of those who have died and foolish heartbreaks rose up, I still found confronting my past interesting. Angels made a strong if brief return after I spent my Sophomore summer in Europe, where my parents were stationed in Germany again. All those churches, and the success of Jesus Christ Superstar, gave me a reason to put wings on the beautiful faces I'd been creating. I got a lot of flack from friends as well as instructors; they didn't get it. We'd survived three assassinations and were in the middle of a brutal war, and here I was making pretty religious icons.

Then, 7 weeks into my Senior year, my mother committed suicide and I coasted through the rest of that semester. By spring, I was doing a new kind of angel, abstracted into geometric shapes that could have been anything, but I knew what they were. On the strength of that and my intended thesis about Angels as Archetypal images, I got into graduate school. I would go on to drop out, but that's another story.