EASTER, 1964
My birthday is March 28th. In 1964, Good Friday fell on March 27th. Easter was March 29th. Do the math. I turned 8 in between the two. But there is more to the equation than that. My father had been killed in a car accident in August of 1963. My mother would die of esophageal cancer in November of 1964. She was already beginning to show signs of her illness which manifested in her having to run too often to the bathroom to regurgitate any food that could find its way into her unhungry mouth. I was already showing signs myself of no longer being a little boy because of all that even as I tenaciously held on to remaining a little sissy. Such tenacity manifested in my actually holding on there in my lap to the Barbie-like doll that was not a Barbie just as I felt as if I were child-like that Easter of 1964 but not a child.
It was after church and Easter lunch when the Easter egg hunt had begun there at my grandparents house out in the country where my mother had moved us all, my little brother and sister and me, once her illness had taken over our lives. I refused to hunt for eggs and went off by myself to sit under a pine tree, my refusal leaving more dyed eggs I reasoned for my gleeful little brother and sister, greedy in their own hunts, to find. It was all rather foolish to me anyway - Easter and dyed eggs and glee. I wasn’t exactly playing with the doll there in my lap. By that Easter of 1964, I had ceased to play. The Barbie-like doll that was not a Barbie was keeping me company without disturbing my loneliness.
I had known to ask Santa for such a doll - it had hair that grew from inside the top of its head so that I could style it - that first Christmas after my father’s death because I knew Santa was no longer manifested Santa-like in him but instead was manifested now in my sad, lovely mama, a mama who has manifested ever since in the loveliness I have crafted from sadness. On that first Easter after my daddy’s death and the last one before she was to die, she came and sat beside me under that tree where I was styling the doll’s hair. She took the doll from me and propped it up against a pine tree root. She put her bare stockinged feet next to it after she took off her Easter Sunday shoes I’d helped her dye a turquoise color to match the purse she’d purchased after she had me let me pick it out for her. She confided to me that she couldn’t afford both a pair of shoes and a purse so a choice had to be made. “Now it’s your turn,” she said earlier in the week at Thomas Great M, the one clothing store in town. “You choose the one you like and I’ll put an outfit together around it.”
We both watched her massage her feet on the root that jutted up from the ground, her dark blonde swirl of hair the color of the swirl of dirt that could not contain the root. “Why aren’t you hunting for dyed eggs?” she finally asked me. I shrugged and looked away from her and tried to find something there in the cloudless Mississippi sky where I could place the awful longing that was beginning to become such a part of me, a longing that didn’t even know what it was longing for but knew enough about its awful self to know that it was longing. Having been eight years old for only a day, I still knew that what I was feeling couldn’t be solved by Easter eggs or dolls or dead daddies.
(THE REST OF THIS EASTER REMINISCENCE IS FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS)