Tell me about some of your favorite Easter memories. What made them so special?

Easter is the celebration of Jesus rising from the dead and a cherished holiday, its only rival being Christmas.  The entire family would dress up in their best clothes, attend Mass at Our Lady of Mercy and go out for brunch.  Our family did not eat out very often so that in and of itself was special.  It’s also a kind of unofficial start to spring, so by Easter, the days were getting longer, temperatures warmer and we were a couple of months away from our summer break from school.  

A day or two before Easter my siblings and I would get to color a few eggs for the Sunday afternoon hunt and deciding what color, or better yet, colors to use caused much deliberation.  A hard-boiled egg would be suspended on a copper wire which was bent to hold the egg on its bottom half.  If one color was desired, the egg would be carefully rolled off the wire at the bottom of the glass of dye where it would lay submerged, soaking up the dye.  The dye started out as a tablet, the proper amount of vinegar was added, and we would stare at the tablet as it slowly dissolved.  Deciding how long to leave the egg covered was crucial.  Too little and the egg would be pale and have to be dunked again.  Left too long, the egg would soak up too much dye and be darker than desired.  A bi-colored egg would require a strong and steady hand, holding it half-submerged for several minutes, allowing it to dry, and repeating the process on the remaining white side with another color.  I think making the Easter eggs was more fun than trying to find them after our parents hid them.  Inhaling vinegar to this day always takes me back.

My children grew up with the same thrill of coloring Easter eggs.  When they were very young it was easy to hide those eggs in places that they would initially overlook but obvious when they slowed down a bit.  But there are only so many places to hide eggs outdoors and they quickly learned where Dad liked to place them.  I had to get creative and discovered that kids, like all humans, don’t naturally look up and any hiding place above eye level was the same as being invisible.  The first year using my new method resulted in a very long hunt and a couple of frustrated kids.  They eventually caught on, of course, and like many things that make childhood special, they outgrow it and move on, but the memories last forever.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favo...
Read more

Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds. Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over th...
Read more

What things are you proudest of in your life?

I’ve written about some of the things I’ve built during my career while answering some previous questions but after forty-four years of dabbling in Information Technology, I accumulated more than a few.   One of my favorite sayings is “I’m glad I never learned I couldn’t do something” and the stories below begin with a pair of projects I undertook at Wright State University that few others would have even contemplated trying, followed by two situations where technical ability had nothing to do with achieving significant changes and finishing up with how I helped resolve a dispute without knowing anything about the subject being discussed. GOTHIC was a mainframe assembler program that read a single input card and printed out, sideways, each character using multiple lines of asterisks, creating large letters in a Gothic-looking font. Since the mainframe printers used continuous forms, GOTHIC was perfect for creating large fancy banners, many feet long, announcing birthdays or ot...
Read more