Easters of Yesteryear

The Boston Herald

Easter is an old-fashioned day. Nothing equals it anymore. The stores are closed and people actually get dressed up for church. Women wear hats. Little girls wear dresses. Boys put on shoes instead of sneakers, men put on sports coats and ties, and all the babies look like expensive new dolls.

After church, families get together. They sit down for a real Sunday dinner meat, potatoes and dessert. Then they talk or play cards or watch television.

Incredible. What a way to spend a day. It's hard to believe we used to do this EVERY Sunday. Sunday Mass. Sunday dinner. A whole afternoon to spend with family and friends. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Was life actually like this?

I didn't have a big family. I had hardly any family at all. Plus my father worked Sundays. So my Sunday afternoons were a little different. My mother and I would watch old movies on TV. I'd go to Gilroy's between commercials and buy a pint of ice cream, three flavors. It came in a square package, not a carton, and my mother and I would divide it, strawberry and vanilla for her, chocolate and vanilla for me.

The mind drifts back to these days, back to 9 Davis Road, back to a way life was for so long I never dreamed it could be any other way.

It's a funny thing about childhood. It occupies less time and space than all the adult years but it looms larger somehow, as if it really did go by more slowly, as if the days WERE longer and sweeter, and it isn't just reverie that makes them seem so. Easter memories of my grandmothers, one red-headed and spirited, who seemed to bloom when we knocked on her door. She'd make tea and beg gossip and hand me a basket wrapped with colored cellophane. She always said I never looked lovelier, no matter how I looked, no matter what my age. 

My other grandmother was a somber woman who smiled only sometimes and only with her eyes. But she always smiled at me when she gave me my Easter basket.

I remember a stuffed, angora bunny that hunched in the window of Rexall drug all during Lent one year. It was small but expensive. I used to hold that bunny and brush it against my cheek. I wanted to take it home and put it next to my raggedy stuffed dog and my Ginny doll, but I never dreamed it could be mine. But it was. It sat on top of my Easter basket that year.  

I remember, too, so vividly, one Easter above all. There's Janet Butler and Michelle Lyons and Ann Marie Tantillo walking down Lewis Drive. It's a bright, warm, beautiful Easter Sunday. They're wearing tailored suits and NYLONS. They're going to church TOGETHER. I have on a full blue skirt, a frilly white blouse and ugly ankle socks. And I'm going to church with MY MOTHER! I have my nose pressed against the window and am feeling left out and forlorn. It's strange that even now, 37 years later, I can still feel that left out, forlorn feeling. I can see the child I was and know that I'd give anything for so simple a problem today. But I can also slip into the skin I used to occupy and be 10 years old again. 

Why, I wonder, does this memory endure? It's there like a photograph the mind took. I see it so clearly that I can almost open the window and call out to Janet and Michelle and Ann Marie, 'Hey you guys, wait for me.’

This year I will cook dinner and buy bunnies and baskets for my cousin Jeannie’s kids. They'll come from their farm in New York as they do every holiday and fill up the house with their talk and their laughter. I love having them here. I wish they would come every Sunday.

But this isn't practical anymore. Life's too busy. There's always something more important to do.

I wonder, though, what could be more important than family and friends getting together, slowing down, spending time with one another? I wonder about all the memories I wouldn't have if Sundays had been workdays when I was a child. I wonder how Jeannie's kids will remember these days, what snapshots their minds are taking even now?