Blogger’s Query: Is there anything on God’s green earth as arrogant as a tom turkey during mating season?
tom foolery
it’s puffery — this fanned tail,
beard, and scarlet head-rush.
inflated egos, swollen pricks
pompous as they dance.
J. Thorp
02 April 01
Blogger’s Note: Grandma Pam has all of my old newspaper columns in a single three-ring binder at the Venjohn house (courtesy of my mom; I was never so organized), and this one was on top. It originally ran in the April 7, 1998, edition of The Pioneer daily newspaper in Big Rapids, Michigan. You’ll see I remembered my correspondence with the Easter Rabbit differently then, but the sentiment was the same.
For me, the anticipation the night before Easter was second only to Christmas Eve.
It wasn’t the candy and presents that did it (well, not only the candy and presents). Halloween was better for candy, and that kind of dressing up was more fun; birthdays were better for presents – I never got a bike or a rifle for Easter.
It was the magic of the evening, I think – a night when a rabbit might hop through your door on his big hind paws, nose twitching, ears forward for the sound of wee ones stirring in the night. Despite father’s joking, no bullet could touch this rabbit – the bark of a nearby dog earns little more than the flick of one long, white ear. He is The Rabbit – no bunny, he – the grandfather of a million magic rabbits; a hare’s hare in his Easter best, with a top-hat all his own, bearing gifts of chocolate rabbits, jelly beans and candy eggs.
Is he white? Certainly, though perhaps not always. Some call him by the surname “Cottontail,” which suggests he once was brown; “Snowshoe,” on the other hand, might suggest a change from brown to white.
He is white – this much must be true, at his age. He is extremely old for a rabbit – it’s been 15 years and more since I asked him his age in a letter Easter’s Eve, and even then he replied, in long quill strokes like my father’s, that he was “as old as his teeth were long.” I have long been a lover of animal lore, and I knew even then his teeth kept growing – his age could be infinite.
Long in tooth, long in ear, long in whisker – the signs of a wise, old rabbit.
I know he’s real – I’ve seen his tracks in the snow, which, unlike the tracks of other hopping night visitors, led right up to our back door, mere inches away from our sleeping boxer, Bonz, who no doubt lay dreaming of Easter eggs (her favorite seasonal treat – she would carry them around in her mouth all morning, with only the tiniest flash of color showing beneath her graying jowls, until finally she dropped and cracked it – then it was eaten, shells and all).
My sister, in more recent years, has said that she created the rabbit tracks outside our door in an effort to further the illusion that there was, in fact, an Easter Rabbit.
She expects me to believe that, with size 10 feet. Who’s deluded here?
On such an enchanted evening as the night before Easter, it was not always easy to sleep, and sometimes hard to remember the morning as a holy day.
Faith was one thing – this, my friends, was the Easter Rabbit.
The Easter tradition is more than just eggs and rabbits, of course – I’ve only recently come to see how much more. There was another, it is said, whom death could not touch, who came to us in the face of danger bearing gifts to all believers.
The wise old Rabbit knows him, perhaps; perhaps the Rabbit is but a small part of the magic of Easter – a servant who gives children a reason to jump out of bed at least one Sunday a year.
If you can believe in one and rise early on Sunday, perhaps you can believe in the other.
When I was little, I liked to write letters to the Easter Bunny. I knew he was real, because we often had snow on Easter morning in those days, and invariably there were tracks – like two exclamation points side-by-side – leading directly to our back door and away again.
So I wrote to him, and he replied – in long, looping letters, like a man’s script crossed with rabbit ears. His answers were like riddles: I asked how old he was, and he replied, “I’m as long in the tooth as I am in the ear.” That sort of thing.
* * * * *
Last night, three-year-old Trevor would periodically stop what he was doing and walk to the door or window. He was looking to see if the Easter Bunny was “peeking with his creepy eyes.” He said this matter-of-factly – he was not afraid; he spoke instead as one who has looked into the hare’s black eyes and seen only wildness.
* * * * *
Jodi took her daycare boys and our two oldest to Living Stations of the Cross the other day. Earlier in the day, she asked them why we celebrate Easter. One of them said, “So we can get Chuck E. Cheese dollars in our baskets from the Easter Bunny.” Others corrected him, sharing the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, and explaining the Easter is even more important than Christmas!
But Trevor may have summed it up the best. “Trevor,” asked Jodi, “do you know why we celebrate Easter?”
“To make God happy!” he said.
* * * * *
At Jodi’s parents’ parish, Our Lady of the Black Hills, there is a young woman who is studying to become a nun. She was singing in the choir during Good Friday services – devout in that quiet and unassuming way Jodi exhibits. Then she stepped forward and sang alone, accompanied only by the pianist, and God’s glory was revealed.
* * * * *
“Roll Away the Stone” had particular resonance today. The darkness of the verses illuminated by the triumphant chorus – you can almost imagine the light of morning breaking into the tomb as the seal is broken …
* * * * *
Wishing you peace and joy this Easter, friends!
It snowed last night – heavy wet flakes, the kind common sense dictates you not attempt to move, because A) they weigh a ton per shovelful, and B) they will melt away soon enough. The pines along the back yard look as if the weight of the world had settled on them alone, and the grey clouds hang overhead like a heavy sigh.
But the steady drip from the eaves is the faint patter of hope – a heart beating faintly in the thick silence. So, a haiku:
The last snow, fallen –
draped in white, the trees bow low
at Winter’s passing
Hm. It may help to know that white is the traditional funeral color of Japan, land of the haiku. But while that detail might add a little something, I think it works alright as-is. At least for today.
Sorry it’s been so long …
village limits
we step into the day with no illusions—
it is gray, cold and april.
a hawk sweeps the haze with banded wing,
birds sing, the street echoes the chatter of starlings,
the bark of dogs, the redwing’s wulperchee!
the stop sign leans how the plowed snow pushed it.
two chickadees man a bare and brushy elm,
feathers ruffed against the breeze, still and silent,
standing sentry at the intersection.
it’s strange to see them stationary—
with the trees around them singing
why should these two remain grounded?
there is a puckered hole where a bullet rang
the stop sign. Beneath its tilted stem
a balding radial is exposed in the melting snow.
the shoulder is scraped bare and sown with twizzlers,
nesquik bottles, crumpled camel packs and butts.
this is the way out—a cracking street with no lane lines
where village idiots pop their pills, their clutches,
whatever they can—a bleached budweiser slowly turns
over and over across the pavement to the muddied grass,
a plastic sack, a bra pressed flat, damp artifacts
of vice and apathy known since birth; a winter’s worth
of bullshits, to-hell-with-its, i-don’t-give-a-damns.
the birds sing; skin crawls to gooseflesh
as a cold wind rattles the weeds.
J. Thorp
04 April 02
—
*Although written in early April, in Michigan …
