Easter

 In The Elephant Man, Merrick's nightmares are introduced with two words- night time. Some of mine are evoked by the word 'Easter'....

My wife has the most beautiful and touching memory of Easter. She was a big believer in the Easter Bunny deep into her childhood. She was about 10, and slept under the dining room table, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Easter Bunny. This physical expression of deep childhood belief touches me intensely, a man who doubts everything and believes in virtually nothing, and certainly nothing from my childhood. 

The concept of a resurrected God is very touching for me, but I don't believe it. It is the most obvious grafting of the Dionysus story onto the teachings of a Jewish eschatological prophet. I love the idea of God being renewed in each of us, but the idea of an angel rolling away a stone? No. Grave robbers, possibly Jesus' own followers, absconded with the body. For that matter, the entire crucifixion and resurrection story is considered the least reliable part of the Gospels, almost certainly having been grafted on late in the process of writing them. And despite the biblical order of putting the Gospels first and the Pauline letters second,  Paul wrote first. No, I am not transported by the image of a risen God on Easter. I don't feel especially saved. I feel fake shouting 'Alleluia', or in my background, 'Christos anesti'.

The professional church singer part of me is tired of the celebration of Easter. Always, it involves trumpets, drums, loud music. Palm Sunday usually brings the Widor toccata for the organist, applause from the congregation (always out of place in church for me). Easter day brings one service after another, sunrise singing (not a bass's best time), shouting, long services, and at least a big payday. I could make a month's salary in a day.

For the Orthodox, God does not come down from Heaven. God rises out of the ground. Jesus must be dead in order to live again, and thus imagery of his death figures prominently in Easter. For a small child whose father was critically ill, it felt like a bizarre, ritual rehearsal for his death. And the endless church services, standing in the cold in the middle of the night to recognize Jesus' death, the relighting of the church to symbolize life....And all chanted in Greek, all literally incomprehensible for the child me.

Like a decorated chocolate egg, Easter is for me crusted with bad memories like this. Besides the midnight Easter services there were the Easter egg hunts at the Germantown Cricket Club. I can still remember my sister's Easter dress, and a bunch of children running around on a field, looking for eggs. I felt so out of place that day, so utterly foolish. It was for me just one more of a whole series of humiliations that took place on fields. Soccer fields, football fields, baseball fields, or cricket fields. They were all the same, all places of humiliation and being out of place, chasing balls, getting hit by balls, getting jeered at because I couldn't hit or catch the balls well enough. I couldn't even find Easter eggs well enough. Eager kids were triumphantly and happily finding eggs, and I wandered around, alone, carrying a basket, finding just a couple.

My mother used to hide plastic eggs with candy in them in our home. At least I wasn't in the grass, where I was allergic, and on a playing field I knew intimately. Like most everything else domestic, it was left to the last minute. One year, my mother walked through the house on Easter morning itself, cursing, tossing plastic eggs wherever she could, right in front of us. That was the last time I ever hunted for Easter eggs. It is still the last time. Every time I see a plastic egg I'm filled with sadness and horror.

Because my father was Orthodox, we had two Easters. One was filled with eggs and baskets, and the other with red-dyed eggs that we cracked while saying, idiotically, 'Christos anesti'. Entrail soup....Who eats THAT? Lamb with enough garlic to ward off vampires the rest of the year. Screaming in the kitchen over the meal, sanctified by the curses with which it was cooked. Pulling out the good china. And Easter bread.

Like the One Ring, the only fair work of Sauron, Easter bread remains a favorite food. So sweet and yeasty, flavored with mastica. My parents, like many, bought their Easter bread, from a Greek bakery right next to Jefferson Hospital in Philly, Kipsele's. When my father would remember to buy it, I stood round-eyed with him in a bakery smelling of Easter bread, with several dozen of the mystically delicious items on the shelves. When he did not remember, which was most years, my mother had to go get it. Easter bread is so popular that you have to reserve one. We never did that, so my mother got what was left, usually the gigantic, 5 pound loaves we could never finish.

One year, there were none left. That's what happens when you call for Easter bread on the Saturday morning before Easter. So my mother set out to make one. I don't believe there has ever been a bigger mismatch between cook and recipe. It calls for yeast, and two rises. And mastica. My mother started this journey at the time so many of her personal challenges began, after 8 pm. We had no yeast. She used vinegar and baking soda, converting a dough into a batter. The baking soda was very old, and didn't rise much. She put in too much vinegar....She finished her efforts at about 4 am....And we were up before 6, hoping to see the Easter bunny....

What came to the table was not a brown, fluffy loaf, almost as sweet as cake, but a round, pallid object about 3 inches high, very firm, and redolent of vinegar. As she set it on the table my mother shouted that we better God damn well like it!! We ate without a word. It was an obvious, painful failure. No one could stand to dip it into warm, sweet milk...I have rarely seen so public and humiliating a failure, made all the more pathetic by the tremendous effort my mother made. It was and remains desperately sad to me. Easter breakfast, flavored with vinegar, harsh words, and tears.

So....I never celebrate Easter. I don't get chocolate eggs, or bunnies whose heads can be bitten off in what for me is a sad, cannibalistic ritual. I don't bake, make a special meal, or have friends over. Easter is, without my ever acknowledging it until now, a day of mourning and painful remembrance.

I did not know how much my wife loved Easter until the first Easter when we were dating. She made me an Easter basket, a desperately touching act for me, filled with plastic grass and eggs, and a stuffed bunny. We named him Killer, after the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Killer has been a part of daily life ever since. When we were young we used to hide Killer, a kind of live action version of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. Killer became a symbol, put on the pillow when someone is sick, or sad. Killer has come to represent love, kindness, forgiveness.

Easter is thus a holiday filled with sadness, regret, horror, pity. It is, for me, perhaps closer to Yom Kippur, a day where I remember everything that went wrong, all the bad things, alienation, fear, guilt, sadness. And a stuffed toy, put in one basket, made years ago, symbolizes all that Easter is supposed to be- love, happiness, a yearly resurrection of the soul. And a chance, again, to do better, to not live in the horror and sadness I remember.

Ted