Happy Easter

I have no memory of a "first Easter" in my childhood, but I do know it was around Easter time when I learned the truth of the childhood myths perpetuated by parents.

My chores at the tender age of five (I know my because of where we lived when this happened, and we moved when I was five), consisted of washing the dishes while standing on a chair, vacuuming (which I recall finding difficult), and dusting everything within reach. My mother dusted the upper shelves.

Apparently I had graduated to dusting everything via climbing upon chairs, because on this day I was dusting upper shelving. I had recently lost a tooth, and my tongue played constantly with the new hole in my mouth. I broke the baby tooth out by falling upon the stoop on my grandmother's carport while I was shaking out a baby blanket for my doll. I stepped on a corner of the blanket and proceeded to pull it out from under myself, falling face forward. My tooth took the brunt of the fall.

(As a consequence of this, I stopped playing with dolls.)

After a trip to the dentist, the tooth fairy visited me at night and left me an entire Kennedy half dollar (which I still have). This was a small fortune for me in 1968 and also an unusual coin for our household, or so I thought.

So it was that near Easter, maybe even Easter weekend, I was dusting a new place I had not dusted before, for whatever reason. As I dusted, I came across a dish filled with a treasure of Kennedy half dollars. I remember standing on the chair and pushing the coins around with my chubby little finger, looking at the great number of them.

I am given to incremental leaps of logic and thought, so much so that I can get from A to Z without a clue how I got there and nevertheless be right (and sometimes quite wrong, too). In one of those leaps, I immediately connected the coin to the tooth fairy.

I remember my mother coming into the room as I stood holding the dish. I asked her if the coin beneath my pillow came from this dish. She hesitated, and I knew the truth. There was no tooth fairy, and I said as much. "You're the tooth fairy," I remember saying. Not accusingly, just knowingly.

Then in another great leap of thought, I made the connection that if there was no tooth fairy, there was no Easter bunny. And also no Santa.

I told this to my mother also, who did not deny that I had discovered the secrets of these mythical benefactors. So from the age of five onward, I did not believe in things I could not see, knowing there were generally explanations to which I was not privy.

I did, however, assist my parents in perpetuating the secret with my younger brother, so much so that I think he was nearly in his teens before he realized there was no Peter Rabbit. I remember his tears as he accused me, somewhat angrily, of lying to him. It seemed my hiding the truth from him bothered him more than the fact that our parents did the same.

This is not a holiday I celebrate anymore with chocolate or mythical bunnies. I celebrate it with thoughtfulness and prayer and dinner with family. I remember the reason for the celebration - those being, for me, Christ is risen and the rebirth of the earth as spring begins the renewal process anew.

Somewhere inside of me, I think, a child longs for that magic, that time of wonder and belief. I hope that this year I can renew that childish spirit, and make her soar.