AND SO WE DECIDED

I'm too tired to cook an Easter Dinner, 

later, when guilt consumes me, 

a tiny Danish canned ham will suffice. 

A minor miracle I can pull from the cupboard. 

Just like my grandmother, I will parboil it, 

to remove nitrates and excess salts.

I will score it with a knife to make diamonds, 

I will rub the ham with dark mustard, 

and dress it with dark brown sugar 

and in every diamond I will bury a whole clove, 

spicy nails commemorating Jesus on the cross. 

It will taste delicious and Neil will eat most of it.

What is it with men? Every year,

My aunt Toddy made me Easter baskets, 

after mass, an egg hunt in the raspberry patch, 

squabbling with the chickens, reluctant 

to give up their hard boiled dyed eggs 

never to hatch no matter how long they brooded.

I was a proxy child. Toddy couldn't have kids. 

Everything worked, sperm and egg connected, 

but it stopped there, a stuck fermentation. 

So I was the child-gift on loan. Easters 

and foggy summers, hiking down to the beach,

the Boardwalk, and the inevitable sunburns. 

The sand and sun, sea and sky was my palette.

When John was too drunk to drive, Toddy learned.

If the car wouldn't run, she took it apart. 

It was either that, or walk. That's how 

we got to Easter mass. Shank's mare.

Two miles was a long way on child legs. 

My grandmother was a great walker, 

but she was no spring chicken. So Toddy learned.

We'd scour the thrift stores, and yard sales, 

we picked fruit by the lugful and canned  it. 

I loved climbing the white nectarine tree 

savoring its bitter-skinned fruit, soft fuzz 

of apricots against my lips, like baby's cheeks. 

I remember Toddy explaining carburetor valves. 

Likewise, the miracle of life in words 

I didn't want to know at age 10: penis, egg, sperm. 

The randy ducks nailed cats and hens,

how Toddy struggled to explain that.

The yard and garage gathered the detritus, 

a junkman's wetdream backwashed in,

filled the house. Billard tables, Slipstreams. 

Chickens and rabbits. Books stacked everywhere.

The year we saved an orphan hummingbird, 

I shared a bunk propped up on bookcases

with a hummer the size of a grasshopper 

demanding his snootful of sugar water on the hour.

Toddy was a reader and imparted that love to me. 

One Easter, I read the classics, Treasure Island,

Swiss Family Robinson, and Moby Dick.

Dark tiles turned to sandy beaches tracked in by the dogs. 

The tall grasses out back became my wilderness. 

Invariably, my uncles, aunts, or my mom 

would make their way to Santa Cruz for Easter. 

Winter holidays were my grandmother's domain, 

but Easter was always Toddy's domain. 

John's drinking unraveled a string of lost jobs.

Midnight Mass involved pushing cars out of ditches, 

propping boards under tires sluicing us with mud.

Each year my grandmother told Toddy how to boil ham, 

dress it in cloves and brown sugar. Sign of the cross.

They draped pineapple haloes over it, filled the rings 

with maraschino cherries like sacred hearts.

I loved seeing the ham emerge from the oven,

symbols of mortality and resurrection rolled together.

One Easter, my mom delivered a baby boy to Toddy.

Miracle of loaves into fishes, water into wine,

it was the transformation of brother into cousin.

With the adoption, Toddy's barren period reversed,

John cut back on drinking, she had three more kids. 

Full house: the bases and John were always loaded. 

No room for us, Easter visits ceased. No baskets.

Her last child at 46, flamed the first bout of cancer, 

the same cancer that claimed her brother Myles, 

brown islands of melanoma in a pale freckled sea, 

then the breast cancer that also claimed my mother.

John got elected to the school board and dried out.

But a dry drunk was hard to get to know, John was 

a stranger in our midst, having alienated his kids, 

Sean ran headlong into drugs and the penitentiary.

Easters were infused with the blare of Fox TV,

I grew distant from them, until the heart attack, 

and slowly we all made our amends with him, 

except for Sean, but he too was dead within the year.

A bullet to the mouth. Was it suicide or murder? 

Only the admiral of death knew the score. 

All this painful rambling, to write of family ghosts,

this year, we decided to forgo Easter, except for ham

because now the cancer has settled into my aunt Canice,

and Toddy, a two-times survivor, is our beacon of hope. 

To soothe my stigmata, and roll the stone from the tomb

I measure time by the incremental length of books.

And so now all we can do is wait for the results.

 4/12/2009

22 so we decided

Canice died in May of 20012
Toddy and Jane remain in remission