Easter Sunday Humbug

Cáisc Shona Dhaoibh! Beannachtaí na Cásca oraibh.
Happy Easter to you. Easter blessings to you.

Rachaidh triúr leis an aistriúchán atá cruinn.
Three rungs on the ladder of accuracy.

Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste.
Broken Irish is better than clever English.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
People live in one another’s shadows.

Dean do smaoineamh féin
Do your own thinking.

That's just it, I can't think...I'm resorting to posting triad fragments in Irish.

Today's writing prompt is: So we decided... 

And for some reason my mind just went south, the idea of we deciding anything was beyond me. I'm worn down by the week, too tired to care that it's Easter. No call from my cousin...no usual gathering in Nicasio. They must all be in Santa Cruz.

I'm too tired to call Santa Cruz, let alone, drive there, or sneak out to Longs, grab some fake grass and chocolates to make a basket for Neil. For twelve years I've made him an Easter basket, and the favor has never been returned. 

Every year, Toddy made sure I got an Easter basket, and there was always the Easter egg hunt to look forward to. Not this year.

This year, I'm too tired to even cook an Easter Dinner, I'm having a nice lie in, as they say, but later, when guilt consumes me, an emergency tiny Danish canned ham in the cupboard will suffice. I can pull that miracle out of my hat later. 

I will parboil it, like my grandmother did, to remove the nitrates and excess salts, then I will score it with a sharp knife to make diamonds, I will rub it with dark mustard, and dress it with 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, who professes not to like pork, will eat most of the tiny pressed ham.

Santa Cruz. Every Easter, when my grandmother was alive, we made the annual trek to Santa Cruz. In the 1950s and 60s, it was a quiet retirement community. My aunt Toddy and her husband John Ritter, were among the youngest families. No children. 

 They moved to Santa Cruz following a job and when John lost that job at EBSCO, and every other job thereafter, the marriage to the bottle, too great... There was no place else to go to, so they stuck it out.

I was the proxy child. Toddy couldn't have kids. Everything worked, sperm and egg connected, but it always stopped there, a stuck fermentation. So I was the child-gift on loan every Easter and long foggy summers. 

Easter is irrevocably linked with Easter egg hunts in the raspberry patch, squabbling with the chickens, reluctant to give up their  hard boiled eggs, visiting Mrs. Brookshire, riding the neighbor's pony...hiking down to the Boardwalk, the inevitable sunburns. The sand the sun.

John would drink just about anything. Aunt Jane's precious Pernod she brought back from France for the Oysters Rockafeller we never made. One time Toddy made mulberry wine from the tree in the front yard and John got ahold of the carboy before it was done fermenting, and he was sick as a dog for a week. 

Most women would have never stuck that kind of marriage out, but Toddy did, and when John was too drunk to drive, she learned how to, 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.

Toddy was far from the center of town, on the border between Soquel and Capitola. We walked everywhere. The marine air would tire me out and two miles there and back was a long way on child legs. My grandmother was a great walker, and thought nothing of it, but even then, she was no spring chicken. So Toddy learned to drive. Sort of.

Toddy had no marketable job skills, so she made do. We'd scour the thrift stores, and yard sales, we picked fruit by the lugful and canned or froze it. Frozen raspberries or boysenberries and sugar were a personal favorite. I loved climbing the white nectarine tree and savoring the bitter-skinned fruit in summer, the soft fuzz of apricot skins against my lips, like baby's cheeks. 

I remember her explaining the carburetor needle valve to me when I was going on eight. Likewise, she also explained to me, how sex worked, words I didn't want to know: penis, egg, sperm. The randy ducks who would nail anything and Toddy struggled to come up for an explanation for that.

 The yard and garage gathered detritus over the years, was a junkman's wetdream. Junk backwashed in, filled the house. Billard tables, and Slipstreams. Chickens and rabbits. Books stacked everywhere.

The year we fed the orphan hummingbird with sugar water every two hours from an eyedropper, I slept on a bunk over a bookcase piled high with books. She was an avid reader and imparted that love onto me. She still gives me armloads of books every time I see her. 

One Easter, I slept on the living room couch and read all the classics, that corner of the room, tied to Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island and Moby Dick, the dark tile gave way to sandy intrusions, impromptu beaches tracked in by the inevitable dogs. The tall grass in the yard became my Treasure Island, my wilderness where I hid from the adults. 

Grandma and Toddy spent hours talking about all manner of things...circling back to the Celts, and past historical wrongs. Invariably, my uncle John, Toddy's brother, my aunt Jane, aunt Canice, or my mom would make their way to Santa Cruz for Easter dinner. Thanksgiving and Christmas was my grandmother's domain, in Forest Knolls, but Easter was Toddy's. 

Every year my grandmother would tell Toddy how to boil the ham, how to dress, it with the cloves and brown sugar. They went a step farther and draped pineapple rings over it, embedding the rings with maraschino cherries. It was a sight to behold, though in those days, I didn't like ham, but I loved seeing it emerge from the oven in all its finery. Sometimes we had leg of lamb but that was rare. Ham was more economical. The ham bone made cabbage soup. In hindsight, I suspect my grandmother was buying the Easter hams since John couldn't hold down a job for very long.

When John got a job at UC Santa Cruz, as a custodian, we were elated. By that time the drinking had escalated, he'd alienated most of us several times over. Every Christmas, he drove the car into the ditch so Midnight Mass was coupled with pushing the car out of the ditch, propping boards under the tires and the inevitable mud and rain. 

One Easter my mom delivered a baby boy to Toddy, my baby brother Sean was now my new cousin. But that's another story. Yet another half-brother. Suffice to say,with the adoption of Sean, Toddy's twelve-year barren period reversed itself about the time John cut back on drinking and she went on to have three kids of her own. It was a full house: the bases and John were always loaded. Her last child at 46, spurred on the first bout of cancer, the same cancer that claimed her brother Myles, the melanoma, followed by breast cancer that also claimed my mother.

Somehow, John got elected to the school board and did good work, so when he was fired for being drunk on the job, he had the school board to cling to. He did good work there. At Sean's funeral, one of the stories was how John took a cyclone gate and attached it to the back of the Chevy with chains and cement pylons for weights and dragged the track when no one else would pony up for maintenance.

But a dry drunk was hard to get to know, John was a stranger in our midst, having alienated all his kids over the years, Sean running wild and headlong into drugs and the penitentiary... Easters became, the constant blare of Fox TV, john reading his tree to five newspapers daily, the rabid racist and bigoted remarks...and I grew distant from them, until the heart attack, he wasn't expected to survive, but he lived on for years, and slowly we all made our amends with him, except Sean and he too was dead within the year.

All this rambling with no central viewpoint, painful as it is, to write of family ghosts...and so we decided to...forgo Easter this year, except for the ham.

And I found out why there was no dinner in Nicasio, they were all down in Santa Cruz, because the cancer had settled in Canice's intestines. Toddy, a two-times cancer survivor, a beacon of hope. And now we await the results. And so we decided to wait...