As you may know from past essays here, my father's side of the family was Jewish and my mother's was Catholic. Neither parent was particularly proprietary about their religion. To a great extent, it was a matter of being what they were so as to not disrespect their parents' faiths. Judaism was my official heritage/faith but we were never militant about it, The one time it was pursued — when they tried sending me to Hebrew School on Sundays — it was a colossal disaster. In later years, I would tell people I'm Jewish in the same sense that Olive Garden is Italian but one day, I heard a stand-up comic use that same line so I gave it up.
As a kid, I was exposed to both Judaism and Catholicism in sufficient dosage to know a lot about them but, somehow, Easter escaped my learning experience. I was probably ten or eleven before I learned it was about anything more than an imaginary rabbit hiding inedible eggs. Here is my earliest Easter memory and I'm guessing I was five or six at the time.
The eggs involved were, as I said, inedible — actually, literally, inedible. They might have been cast out of Plaster of Paris..certainly never anything it was wise to put in one's mouth. I don't know who made them at the time but in later years, I saw eggs that looked like the ones in this story under the Brach brand name. They were billed as being marshmallow but if they were, it was probably marshmallow left over from the Plasticene Era. They were colorful on the outside, rock-hard on the inside.
So one Sunday morning when I was five or six, I awoke to the following news flash from my mother: The Easter Bunny, she said, had visited our home in the wee small hours of the morning and hidden a dozen eggs for me. Being the considerate sort of Easter Bunny, he had not hidden them in my bedroom or my parents' bedroom, lest he disrupt our sleeping. My father, in fact, was still sound asleep in theirs. Said Bunny had also not hidden them outside. They were all somewhere in our living room, front hall, dining room, back hall, kitchen, hallway or any closets in those locations.
Excitedly, I leaped out of bed in my jammies and began searching for the eggs my mother had hidden. I knew she, not some mythological hare, had done the hiding but it seemed to be part of the game to play along with the myth. Within minutes, I had located all twelve eggs and I even, since I didn't know any better, had attempted to take a small bite of the orange one. You can replicate this experience for yourself by gnawing on a rock. The sound effect of "PTUI!" ricocheted throughout our home and briefly rousted my father from his sleep.
I presented the twelve eggs to my mother to prove I had found them all and I said, "That was fun! I wish the Easter Bunny would come by and hide them all again!" Then I went to my room to get dressed and a few minutes later, my mother popped in to tell me my wish had come true: The Easter Bunny had hidden another dozen eggs in all the same rooms of our home.
Finding the first dozen had taken me about seven minutes. I found the second dozen in less than five…all twelve of them and the orange one even looked like some idiot had tried to take a bite out of it. Later on, the Easter Bunny hid twelve more in the backyard. These took me about six minutes to find and — again — the orange one looked nibbled-upon.
That was the last I saw of any Easter Eggs in our home until the following Easter. That was when, again, my mother the Easter Bunny hid twelve eggs of the exact same colors…and again, the orange one had a big chip exposing its hard-as-stone interior.
And I think she hid them again the following year but after that, they had mold growing on them or barnacles or something and we both agreed I'd outgrown the game. She threw the alleged eggs out and I asked her why she'd bought that kind instead of ones made out of delicious chocolate and/or fit-for-human-consumption marshmallow.
She smiled and said, "What? And waste food like that?" My mother was a smart lady and not a bad Easter Bunny.
