Lovely Lady Spring has arrived early. I saw a robin last week; our pussy willow has fat catkins; and our daffodils, crocuses and magnolia tree are blooming. I know, of course, that it won’t last. Thirty-degree weather is predicted soon, and we just hope that the magnolia’s blooms won’t be blasted.
Eek! Here we are at Easter already! It seems as if Christmas were only a few weeks ago. That’s the way it happens with time as one grows older. Time folds upon itself, and the intervals between the major holidays that delineate our years grow shorter.
My years speed by with increasing rapidity. When I was a kid the clock went tick . . . . . . . tock . . . . . . . tick . . . . . . . tock. Now it goes tickticktickticktick. Faster, faster! Time is an invisible, unbankable dimension whose passage we cannot slow down or stop. However, my past coalesces with my present when I rummage through the dusty trunks stored in my mental attic at the core of my being where nothing is ever lost.
It’s all still there: At the deepest layer, here I am, little Rose Mary, dragging around a big chocolate rabbit during the Depression. My sweet-starved siblings yearned for a taste, but it became too dirty to eat. The family often repeated that story while gathered at the round table, stuffing themselves with Mother’s Easter banquet of ham, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, Mama’s corn pudding, green beans simmered with bacon and onion, lime Jello with melted cream cheese and pineapple, homemade rolls and two or three of her pies with tender crust made with lard. When I was in high school I attended Easter Sunrise services with my girlfriends.
Fast forward: Life continued in the same comfortable pattern. Here Bill, Vicki and I are coloring eggs with the Peter Paas dyes that Mother and I used and that are still available today. In a photo from our album, Bill and I are in bed. Billy and the identical twins, Chris and Tony, are standing next to us, blowing the whirly-gigs that were with their baskets. Vicki sometimes hosts the Easter feast but the menu remains unchanged. Since the family wasn’t here last year, Bill and I were ever so daring and went to a restaurant after church for Mexican food instead of a ham dinner and toasted each other with margaritas.
Vadel gave me a charming grouping of statuettes of three dark-skinned women wearing turbans, golden earrings and long robes. They are singing. One clutches a cross to her chest; another is holding a candle; and one is holding an open book. This most tolerant of men said, “I wanted to give you something Christian.”
One dictionary definition of the word “epiphany” describes it as when a person undergoes a spiritual change. Suddenly one sees or understands something that one hadn’t been aware of or understood before.
I believe that Vadel witnessed a man’s “epiphany.” When we headed for Knightstown, even though it’s only thirty miles away, Vadel said, “I must buy some drinks.” (Perhaps this was a throwback to his life in the Sahara.) He stopped at the station where he worked.
The first time that I met him, he was working at the cash register a few days after 9/11. All of us waiting in line were shocked when a man yelled at him, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” and stomped out of the station.
When Vadel got back in the car he had a bemused expression on his face. “What’s up?” I asked. “When I went to pay for my drinks the clerk said, ‘That guy ahead of you paid for your stuff.’ It was the man who was so hateful to me. I called out ‘Thank you’ as he was leaving.” He called back, ‘That’s O.K.’” wclarke@comcast.net
