A Story of Easter Past

In 2010, just like every Easter that had come before it, I spent Easter weekend with Spanky and the family.  It was difficult to peel myself from the clutches of Philadelphia, but by Thursday of Easter week, the city had me by the throat.  I packed up the kids and we left for Newport that morning.

The drive to Newport was a trek we made all too often and not often enough.  Visiting home renewed me, refilled my tank, grounded me, and left me feeling like I was missing out on the final years of my parents’ lives, the formal years of my nieces and nephews, and all of the rest of my adult years that I had projected as taking place in my hometown.  It didn’t matter how many holidays, weekends, County Fairs, Turkey Trots, hockey games, festivals, and Friday Night Lights for which I was present. I had gone from being a renegade member of the Newport High School Class of ’89 to something that had faded into a bare threaded tapestry of people who used to live in Newport.  Like my Papaw always said, “Used To is dead,” or at least my father says that is what he used to say.  

I was five when Papaw died.  My only encounter with him was a visit to see him in the Pennsylvania State Hospital. He was wearing a diaper and had no teeth. He mashed words around between his bare gums, and thrashed his free flowing limbs in detest of something.  I was enamored by the man, and later grateful that my Mema had thought enough to take me to see him within the framework of his dying dies. And even later, when my father told me about Used To among other things that constructed my grandfather into a functional human being for me, I grew even more grateful to have come from a man who took zero shit from life.  Before losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. my Papaw had gobbled up almost a collective thousands acres across eight farms, having established himself as owner and operator of the largest turkey farm in the State of Pennsylvania.  I am that descendant.  Unfortunately, I keep Used To’s fire burning, much to my Papaw’s detest.  Maybe that’s why he mashed and thrashed in those dying days.  He knew that I was about to encroach on a life of Used To.   

Shortly after arriving to Newport that Maundy Thursday in 2010, I was back in the car and heading into town with my sister Spanky where we attended my nephew Max’s basketball tournament.  The game was held at my old high school, which is now a newly constructed high school. Spanky and I chain smoked in the car on the way into town, which resulted in us reeking in the stands of the unrecognizable gymnasium, which resulted in me wanting crawl back into bed for the rest of my life.  We smelled like wet ashtrays sitting at a youth athletic event with an audience of ghosts from my past. 

 “I can’t do this,” I whispered to Spank.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Be here,” I said.  “I can’t be here right now.  Let’s go.”

“That’s my son on the floor,” Spank said, pointing at Max guarding an opponent.  “We are not leaving.”

“We smell bad,” I said.

“Life smells bad,” Spank replied.  “Are you going to leave life?”

After Max’s game, we chain smoked on the way home, and then for a while on my mother’s back porch, which is also Spank’s back porch because that is the circumstance of their lives.  Then I went out back, to where the jungle gym stood in the yard, still erect in 2010, and I laid down on the bottom of the board where the slide levels out parallel to the ground.  Spank followed me into the yard.  She stood over me for a minute, blocking the sun, then sidled over to a swing upon which she took a seat. 

“I’ve been reading Mitch Albom,”  I said, my eyes closed with sun-induced psychedelic features exploding behind closed lids.  It was a lie. I had finished the book days prior. I dog-eared a dozen pages and memorized the lines that struck me as life-altering.  “You are not your past,” I boasted to Spank.  She left the quote hanging in silence with the smell of wild garlic and overgrown yard grass.  I let out a sigh because Spanky has never let me be profound outside of the one time she took my advise on putting her infant twins on a bedtime schedule. 

“I’m stuck,” I finally said, not sure that she was still there, sitting stationary on the swing.

“You’re afraid,” she replied from the swing.

I didn’t respond.

“I need you to know,” Spanky continued, “that I’ve been sitting in this house for ten years making the same devastating decisions over and over again, expecting my life to change on its own.”

I considered the quantity of ten years.

“I loved that white house you lived in on Jamestown Avenue,” Spanky said.

“It wasn’t my house,” I replied.

“Exactly,” she agreed.  “You made a decision to leave based on ownership.”

“It was a good house,” I said, side-stepping her psychoanalysis of how I left a perfectly good rental dwelling for one that I could hold in my hands in the form of a deed.

“That white house was your home,” Spanky continued, side-stepping my side-step.  “But take a look at why you left.  Look at why you’ve done everything you done over the past ten years.  You keep making decisions based on a single notion of what you think you’re supposed to be doing with your life, and look at where you are.”

“On a sliding board,” I attested.

“At the bottom,” she corrected.  “Lying down to boot.”

“I’m reading Mitch Albom,” I said trying to salvage my dignity from the prone position.  “You should read it.”

“I don’t need Mitch Albom to tell me that I need to change,” Spank said.

“I think the book changed me,” I said.

“No it didn’t,” she said through the veil of a sigh.  “You’re incapacitated with fear.”

“Fear of what?” I asked.

“You’re afraid of not getting the life you’re expecting,” she explained.  “Just like all those houses you’ve lived in, all of the cars you’ve driven, all of the schools you’ve put your kids in.  All of it represents what you think you should be doing.  You keep hopping from stone to stone thinking that the next one is going to be the one.  The next one will take you there, to that great place of expectation.  What about the stone you’re standing on now?  What about the great expectation of this minute right here?”

“I don’t know what I’m expecting anymore,” I admitted.

“Exactly,” Spanky repeated.  “Because you have spent ten years dwindling on something that has long since past.  You keep reaching behind your back, expecting it to be there, within an arm’s length away.  But it’s gone, Sissy.  That old life you keep trying to resurrect is over.  That ship has sailed and the sooner you stop trying to recreate a life that is written down in the history books, the sooner you’ll get off the bottom of that slide.”

Oh those dreaded things of my past. The the tragedy of a fallen suburbanite stay-at-home queen and the demise of her king.  How the kids would be damaged for life.  How I could never show my face again in public.  How I would never again be able to go home.  And yet, there I was, sunning myself at the bottom of a children’s sliding board in the backyard of my childhood.  Defeated.  Deflated.  Still trying to find that unnamed destination.  Still trying to revive the long-dead past.  Digging deep to revive royalty and redeem the house, the Jag, the jewelry, the stature, the dance school, the Montessori school, the luncheons, the salons, the spas, and all of the other piles of bullshit that were lost in what seemed like a single day over a collapsed business structure that crumbled from beneath and caved in over the rim.  Ten years later, we lived a fine life.  One that afforded me to chase the next best thing.  But I still couldn’t let go of chasing what I had considered to be the life I had meant to live.  I wanted the life I Used To live.

“I’m not reaching for anything,” I lied.

“Then how much longer are you going to keep catching your chin in the zipper?” Spanky asked me.  “Because you must know that every time you pull on the zipper, your chin is going to get in the way.”

I laughed.  My chin was zipper shredded.  Gnarled by the act of reaching backward for the house I Used To have, the car I Used To drive.  I was stuck on going from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, insisting that I had the authority to dig up the bones of Used To, as my Papaw would have seen it. 

“I don’t why it happened,” Spanky continued.  “It just did. I woke up one day and declared that I absolutely could not live this life anymore.  I needed to lose weight, I needed to be a better parent, I needed a better job.”

And I needed to let go of the past.  I was afraid of living outside of the life plan that had failed.  I was afraid of moving on.  I held the past so close to me, so tight, that my knuckles turned white in the clutch.  

“It will happen to you too,” Spanky said.  “Maybe you’ll stumble onto an photograph, or hear a song on the radio, or see something in the eyes of your children reflecting who you’ve become in contrast to who you meant to be.  I took back the night. I made a conscious decision that my life was not be surrendered to a decade of poor decisions. I took the reins. And I decided that I would not give up. Not after one day.  Not after two weeks. Not after another ten years.”

Spanky got up from her perch.

“It’s times like these when I like crawl under the covers and hide from the world,” she said standing over me.

“I usually curl up in laundry baskets,” I confessed.

“Well,” she said.  “You’re not getting into mine.  Let’s go eat the kids’ Easter candy.”

And so we did.

Over the course of the ten years that have followed the conversation from the bottom of the slide, a lot of scary stuff has come my way.  My kids got hurt, my husband lost jobs, loved ones fell sick, bikes were stolen, our kitchen window was shot out, kids rioted on our street, my oldest daughters went to college, I taught in the School District of Philadelphia.  But my greatest fear, the fear of moving on, the one of which Spanky spoke of ten years ago, that is a fear with which I continue to grapple. 

There’s a stump in my forest from which grows a sapling.  I walk past it almost every day.  And every day, I stop at that place along my path, I say my prayers, and then I whisper to the stump, “From death, comes life.  For every end, there is a beginning.”

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it.  And to all, I wish you Happy Beginnings.