Nobunny’s Angel Now

     I’m looking at a photograph of my Grandfather’s family taken on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. Inscribed along the lower right in big, bygone, fountain-pen cursive is the caption, “The Walter E. Edge Clan, Easter 1940”. The family is ranged across the photo, arm-in-arm in their Easter best, the very picture of high hopes and prosperity. My mother, between my Uncle Walter and my Grandfather, is fourteen in this shot. My grandfather, born in 1873, is sixty-seven. Although Europe is already in turmoil, there’s nothing here to suggest the dark future that would soon engulf the nation. Easter on the Boardwalk is sun drenched; we’re all smiles, looking sharp, and tomorrow will be even better! And that’s pretty much what Easter has always meant to me. 

   Having dipped our toes into Presbyterianism as youngsters at our parents’ insistence, my brother and I gained a working knowledge of mainstream Christianity at Sunday school. We knew who the major players were and what they were up to, but the why of it all was as illusive then as it is to me today. I have some theories that are none too charitable and best left for another screed. Mom and Dad ran my older brother through the Confirmation process when he was about thirteen in order to see whether the results would be worth all the trauma involved in getting there. Evidently deciding to the contrary, we soon dispensed with church altogether. 

   The lead-up to Easter, coinciding with the promise of Spring, was replete with fabulous props: palm fronds, ashes smudged on foreheads, hot-cross buns with those funky candied chunks in them, Shrove Tuesday when my mother would serve dinner wrapped in crepes, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday - all blended together in a pastel froth of warm sunshine, foil eggs and bunnies, profoundly flammable excelsior straw and chocolate! Spared by our sect of the gore, guilt and solemnity of even the higher Episcopalians, the Easter service was performed with dispatch and the congregation dismissed at once lest the Yorkshire pudding fall.

   This, in my opinion, was church as it should be; sun streaming in through the stained glass, huge vases of lilies and tulips, everyone dressed to the nines, birdsong from the green and fulgent churchyard filling the lulls in the minister’s sermon. Just enough religiosity to stick with a fellow should he need to trot some out later in life. A few rousing hymns and we’re off, before I get the giggles or wet the pew.

   Church may have been the only place where chocolate was not available that day. As soon as we awoke we’d be into the Easter baskets at the foot of our beds. I didn’t have much use for the jelly beans or licorice but devoured the bunnies, hollow or solid, and gorged to near satiation on the diminutive, foil-wrapped eggs. Indeed, these little symbols of Christ‘s yearning for sweets at Lent proved my undoing in a shoplifting incident a few years later and are still irresistible to me today. To end the festive, formal lunch, my mother would serve “Dusty Millers”: coffee ice cream coated in a proprietary hot-fudge sauce that immediately hardened into a leather-like substance one couldn’t chew but gnawed like jerky, all dusted with powdered malt. 

   Although I still love the idea of church on a warm, sunny spring morning, I don’t visit other than for weddings and funerals.  I do catch myself beseeching Him on occasion, with little more expectation of pleas fulfilled than I would have for the more pagan rituals of crossing my fingers or tugging on a wishbone. If there is a Heaven, I am confident that my mother is there, arranging the tulips and serving up the Dusty Millers.