An Easter week remembrance

Two blogs in one day?  Well, I’m feeling creative.  And I wasn’t sure how much anyone would be reading over the holiday weekend.

Someone actually gave me a, “Happy Good Friday” today.  Happy Good Friday.  Really?  Now, my religious days are well behind me but I just had to reply, “Not so much for Jesus, no?”  The return look I received is actually still burning my eyes.

The thing I remember most as a kid about the Easter season, attending a Catholic elementary school, is that we had off on Good Friday.  However, you were not supposed to speak between the hours of 12 noon and 3 pm, supposedly the time that Jesus was on the cross.  The local stores always had a sale on chalk so we could still communicate (the texting of its time).

I usually made it without speech until 12:30.  Then I’d draw a lewd sketch in the street involving the local shop owner and the husband of the water ice store owner and that was it.  All double hockey sticks would break loose.  It’s funny, parents were allowed to hit you and curse, but we, as kids, weren’t supposed to make any sounds if we were being hit between 12 and 3.  “Mumbling Beatings” there were called.

Funny, I seem to remember businesses being open during those hours.  Parents working.  I assumed they spoke in the course of their activities.  So, basically, it was a story invented for the sole purpose of keeping kids quiet for three hours out of the entire year.

Why not just give away free candy for those three hours instead?

Okay, I realize I sound cynical.  Can you blame me?  As kids we always were more concerned about what was in our Easter basket, as opposed to what supposedly happened that holy morning many, many years earlier.

The season actually started on Ash Wednesday, forty days earlier, kicking off the season of Lent.  The ashes on the forehead always seemed a bit creepy to me, and quite often we skipped the trip to church and just dabbed a few remnants of Mom’s Pall Malls onto our foreheads, and no one ever seemed to know the difference.

We were always asked to give up something for Lent.  We were advised it had to be something of substance.  Not like our efforts to give up eating vegetables or wearing clean underwear.  Something like giving up Lillian’s miniature soft pretzels or Welch’s Cherry cough drops.  I don’t recall ever making it past the first Friday of Lent in giving up anything.  Willpower has never been a defining Duffy trait.

Then came the issue of not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.  For a family of carnivores, this was really asking a lot.  I can recall clearly pleading with Mom, “Bacon is NOT meat.  Sausage is NOT meat”.  Still, Fridays developed into all you can eat flounder night at Howard Johnsons on City Line Avenue and that was that.  But Fridays after school I could always be found sneaking a Gino’s Giant down on 63rd Street.  With a side of large fries and a vanilla shake.

Easter week always started the week before, with Palm Sunday.  As altar boys, some of us had direct access to the palms that would be given out at mass.  They were, for some reason, cherished by the parish  women, who tied them into crosses and the like.  I remember they often made it onto the car’s rear view mirrors, replacing the dad’s dice or Playboy air fresheners.  We would always steal a bundle or two of the palms and sell them for a quarter a piece just a block away in front of the library.  The church always gave out just a precious few.  The older women, for some reason, had no problem paying for black market palms.  “Hey lady, get your palms here.  Just in fresh from Miami”.

Next, we always had off Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  What could be better than that, as a kid?  The only down day was Saturday.  It stood for nothing.  Jesus was already dead, according to the story.  Nothing basically happened that entire day.  I suppose the imaginations back then ran out of ideas for every day of the week.  So we filled it in by Mom dyeing hard boiled eggs for Easter Day consumption.

Then, ah, Easter morning.  The baskets.  The plastic grass.  Jelly beans.  Zitner’s coconut eggs.  The Peeps!  The chocolate bunny in the center.  Assorted chocolate mini-eggs.  Always the Easter egg hunts with plastic eggs, filled with coins and dollar bills.  Almost made it worth having to put on a suit and drag ourselves up to church for Easter day mass.

And then to top it all off, Easter dinner.  Usually ham and ponsoduts (if you have to ask, don’t).  Fried potato thingys that must have had 1,000 calories apiece even back then.

Topped off usually by a birthday cake because both my brother Joe and my Mom’s birthdays came the first week of Easter.  Then spending the next week polishing off the candy.  What a dentist’s delight those holidays were.

For everyone who still has strong faith, good for you.  I don’t envy you but I like the fact that people have something they can still believe in.  It’s important in today’s world.

As for me, I’m off to eat my Zitner’s coconut eggs.  I have still have faith they will always taste good.