loneliness

Easter Memories

I lived with my dad and stepmom, and stayed with my mom at her apartment on the weekends.  She is a Lutheran now but when I was growing up she was an ex-catholic, and I’d been an atheist since sixth grade, when I signed off forever with one final, angry goodbye prayer; nonetheless, we always made a big deal of Easter.  I think that a lot of non-Christians, including myself, celebrate Christmas despite the fact that it’s a Christian holiday, and who can blame us? - in December, the city looks the way I'd have it year-round if I were God, with little lights like glowing, stationary fairies outlining rooflines and tangled in branches.  But Easter's theme of martyrdom is palpable and a drag, and the decorations are all in muted pastel.

 

By the time I was eleven or so, Easter and the Fourth of July were two of my least favorite days, because I’d been on a kids-free vacation from school by the time each of those holidays rolled around, and therefore was incredibly lonely by then, and it seemed sad to enjoy all the bells and whistles of either of those days with just me and my drunk mom and nobody else around us.  

For Easter she put on solitary easter egg hunts for me in the front yard and for the Fourth of July we walked down to the freeway overpass where we could see the fireworks show coming from the Rose Bowl.  Our Easter celebration feels particularly bizarre because we did it until I was at least fifteen, and I think I may have actually been eighteen and about to leave for college in a few months on our last Easter Egg Hunt.  It seems so weird to me that we still went through it all when I was a sullen teenager, still dyed Easter eggs and then mom still hid them, along with a lot of candy and little toys, while I waited inside, and then she sat on the front porch and took pictures of me looking for the eggs.  It seems like a huge example of neither of us knowing what normal behavior is.  This morning I was just remembering a particularly depressing Easter.  Her apartment was down the street from a really cool record store, the record store where I bought most of the Riot Grrrl and Sonic Youth records I listened to so much in High School, when I wasn’t acting out the rituals of an over-sized only child on holidays.  One Easter when I was in my late teens and still doing the Easter Egg Hunt, these two indie teenagers were walking past the front yard on the way to the record store and one of them asked me, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”   That's one of those things you'd expect to see on a sitcom, like something you'd watch just once because it was only sort of funny and there was something depressing about the premise, only slightly but enough to make you wish you'd changed the channel.