We tend to remember fondest that which is most distant. The early days, when my father played short center field for his softball team at a city park. The times we woke at dawn on Easter Sunday, nearly stepping into the wicker baskets on the floor next to our beds, with the foil-wrapped chocolate bunnies and marshmallow eggs nestled in green plastic hay.
The baskets disappeared the year my father was out of work, though we were invited to believe that our dog, Cleopatra, plundered them in the night: We could not be certain since she was the fattest beagle anyone had ever seen, thanks to an embarrassing trick she'd perform again and again -- call it a hug -- for a handful of Liva Snaps.
But we already had begun to scatter -- all 10 of us kids -- and though it has been decades, spring's annual mix of magnolias and northwest breezes still smells like promise to me. Years later, my father gone, April nights held excitement still. But there was also danger in the wind, a salty smell of rain and lightning and, somehow, of risk.
We built a family against that risk, my wife and I, with a string-bean boy and two chubby girls wearing straw bonnets with ribbons dangling down the backs of their necks, carrying miniature white vinyl purses to Mass. I'd wait on the concrete steps for them to come home, skipping along the sidewalk ahead of their mother, their dress-ups flecked with coconut from Hostess Snowballs, rewards for good behavior in church.
It's all right there in the photo from 1980, our boy in a blue bow tie, the girls with bonnets askew on their blond heads, all three posed, sitting together on an overturned johnboat in the yard, grinning at the camera. It's a picture of innocence, hope and unsinkability that, for me, came closer to Easter's promise of eternity than any hymn or Scripture.
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And if I could just have hung on to that. But I was as sure as I was young that things could get even better. The usual "things" like prestige, money, erudition, property, important friends, which taken together, would increase our servings of happiness proportionate to our conception of self-worth. So I waited for something else, betting that the rustle in the trees must portend something hidden, something big yet to come -- but which now better hurry.
Now, the air is sweet but warmer. Our babies all grown, thrusting this way and that in rays of success and wonder at the augury of their own futures. No desire now to calibrate my years on a graph or on a 1040, as my only real worth is a wife younger at heart than anyone else I've known.
The night before Easter, I slip outside and stare at the sky. I take a deep breath, hoping, not fooling myself, that something more could yet happen before dawn, another mammoth stone pushed away from a tomb. Even after all these years and scores of Easter eves, my faith diluted, I long for just one more.
As the stars melt together in an astigmatic blur, it occurs to me that the hope was never really for a thing that was new but for the same newness to be sustained in every miraculous day.
That in spite of the obscenity of war, the disgrace of human greed, the cycle of same old sins, every life born deserves the promise to exhilarate in something he loves, gather it in his arms and prop it all up on an overturned rowboat on Easter morning.
I go back inside to hunt for the photo. I'll nestle it on a bed of hay at the bottom of a basket and set it on the floor on my wife's side of the bed.
David McGrath of Hayward is emeritus English professor for the College of DuPage in Illinois and is the author of "The Territory." Contact him at profmcgrath2004@ yahoo.com.
