Easter Remembrances, Good and Bad

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

This particular Easter I’m doing little more than jotting this down, perhaps listening to the Chart Show, then going to a nearby pub later tonight to watch a friend DJ. I’ve done little more than that for the past 30 or so Easters. I can’t even imagine how long it’s been since I’ve even been witness to an Easter egg hunt, let alone participated in one. I know when I was married last, and had a stepson, Easter was treated like any other Sunday, probably because Mom was if not a full-on atheist, much closer to that than a believer. In 2007, we spent Easter break in the US, but did nothing different that year either.

This year the dates that Easter weekend happen to fall on have individual significance to me, i.e. on April 4, 1999, my second wife announced she didn’t want to be married anymore after nine years. This paved the way, not only for my move to UK, but for another significant day, April 5, 2003, when I met (ex)wife number three. I can bring those dates up now and not embarrass anyone because I am currently very good friends with all three of my exes, which took some maturation and forgiveness on my part, but it’s done and I can remember in all three cases what there was to love about each of them. On a general basis, April 5th is the last day of the tax year in Britain, while April 4, 1968 has historical magnitude as the date of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

But back to Easter, which I researched a few years ago. What I could gather from that research seemed perfunctory at best, and I really couldn’t find any logical connection between the resurrection of Jesus and an imaginary rabbit delivering colored eggs to all the good Christian children to find. Still, it was a holiday I looked forward to as a kid, because it meant a break from school at a time when the weather was equal to most summers in other parts of the world. It was bittersweet too, because in Arizona, we only got the Thursday and Friday off, and I seem to remember having to go back to school on the following Monday.

That was very tedious for me in primary school, because for four years, my mother had insisted I be in the boys’ choir at our church, Catalina Methodist, one of the fastest growing churches in the country at the time. My mother was doing a pretty good job of creating the perfect nerd out of me, as she not only had me being a choirboy, but also in Cub Scouts and playing the cello in the school orchestra. Somehow I survived all that to a degree, and had plenty of friends I considered cool. What my mom didn’t know until much later was the trauma and Christian guilt that the choir brought me.

What that has to do with Easter was that every year, not only was there a very major Sunday service that the choir performed at, but that same evening, there’d be a combined choirs performance at the University of Arizona, featuring close to 150 voices backed by orchestra. This was all co-ordinated by the single vision of a brilliant man directing the whole thing, but before we praise the man too much, let me be the first to say he could also be a complete asshole, which may be how he got such magnificent results. At age 9, somehow my simple presence seemed to rock his boat, and more than once he banned me from Sunday performances. One time in a rehearsal he slapped me across the head for saying, “That’s not how you told us to sing it last week,” and I know I was right, but I had to muster all my strength to keep from crying. I’d constantly be reported to him by Hitler-youth in the making, or lectured by these same mostly older boys who seemed to think they were saving my wayward soul.

My typical Easter Sunday in those times involved rising at 8, with little or no time for any egg hunts or other festivities because I had to be at the church by about 9:30 for an 11:00 service, and also attend Sunday School for about a half hour. The service was always over well after noon, because the minister was a boring old fart whose sermons meant nothing to me, and I amused myself during the sermons by filling out the attendance cards with stupid names and addresses, and passing them around to fellow choir boys for approval, which I got little of. Instead I’d get lectured from older boys basically informing me “God don’t like it when ya act up like that.” Sorry, I was bored and hyper, a bad combination when you’re 9-10 years old and expected to sit still and pretend to be enlightened.

On Easter, the service went even longer because Communion was figured in, so we’d be lucky to be done by 12:30. So then a half-hour drive back home allowed about 3-4 hours of egg hunts and a nice brunch, but I’d have to stay in my Sunday best all day because by about 5:00, we needed to start heading over to the University for the Big Show, and major rehearsals beforehand. The program would actually start around 7:30, and to have all those voices and instruments on one stage was admittedly quite awesome. One year I got disciplined, but not by the director, who had too much else to deal with. At rehearsal, I happened to notice one of the female adult choir members had enormous breasts, and made a comment to the boy next to me how even the robe couldn’t hide them. The kid said nothing, but kicked me in the shin for even daring to think such thoughts, let alone express them vocally, then stormed away. He showed me!

The programs were pretty remarkable, and I had to admit that being a part of them made me sing with more fervor and conviction than about a dozen Sunday mornings combined. But by the time they ended at about 9:30 and I was out of my robe, it was pretty much home and to bed, for the next morning, I’d have to get up for school. By the time I was able to have what would pass for a casual Easter Sunday, the school authorities had voted to change the spring break to be an entire week, thus we had a few days off after Easter. Also, our family had decided to change churches, so no more big Sunday night show, plus I had convinced Mom not to force the choir issue on me in the new church. It wasn’t until the late 90’s that I told my parents about the director slapping me, to which my mom said, “Well, if you’d told me then, I would have taken you out of the choir,” while my dad wanted to find out where the guy was “so he could punch the son of a bitch.”

It’s funny that 50+ years have passed, and yet I look at Easter and those bittersweet memories resurface. I’ve sung in other choirs, even a church choir for the first year after our family moved to California. I’ve also had a very recent stint with an a cappella group of 55 that I totally enjoyed, and will probably do again when it starts up again in a couple weeks. In the meantime, I shall have a pleasant rest of the day in London. I would also like to quote my flat mate, who’s been in Wales since early March, in saying I wish you all a “Happy Celebration of Renewal, Fresh Growth, and Nature’s Re-Awakening.” If that means Happy Easter to you, fine and dandy.

April 5th, 2015



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