I Forgot to Bring the Camera to Easter Dinner

I was raised Catholic. Easter week-end was basically one really long Church service after another. From the time I was twelve or so, I was in the choir or playing the organ, so there was also a bunch of rehearsals and getting their extra early for Easter Sunday mass, which was often the day after the spring time change, making it even earlier. Once when I was in university, my parents were visiting and my mother and I were going to Good Friday mass, and a guy in our residence said he'd come with us. As we left the church three hours later, he exclaimed, with several expletives, that he was trying to expiate his Irish Catholic guilt by going to one service for Easter and had figured this would be the short one. My mother almost died laughing.

Photo by Matthew Sabo

When I went to McMaster and belonged to the university choir, the choir director asked me to join his church choir and picked me up for rehearsals and mass for a few months. I remember singing a version of "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord" that gave me the shivers one Good Friday, and made my visiting-again mother cry.

Sometimes I do miss the ceremony and sense of solemnity and order of being a churchgoer. I definitely miss the music. But mostly I'm comfortable with the path I've chosen. Today I felt a tiny sense of melancholy, mostly because my kids are at the point where, if we're not visiting younger cousins for Easter, colouring eggs and searching for chocolate isn't a big priority any more. We went out to Brockville to take Matt's grandmother out for lunch yesterday, and I was planning to drive out and bring her back to my mom and dad's for Easter dinner today, but she woke up today with a stomach bug. And then I forgot to bring my camera to Easter dinner.

But that's okay, because most of the best moments were auditory anyway.

My mother: "Should I say grace?" Eve: "I don't even know what that is!" My mother: "Bless us oh Lord and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from your goodness, through Christ our Lord, Amen." My father: "And Jesus Christ, why don't I have a napkin?"

My mother: "Allison, don't you like stuffing?" Me: "I took some stuffing!" My mother: "Hardly any." Eve: "Look, she doesn't need a buttload, okay?" Me: "I raise 'em classy."

My mother: "This is really good, even if I have to say so myself." Matt: "You're only supposed to say it yourself if no one else said it, and everyone else has already said it." My mother: "I know, and yet I still feel like I have to say it myself."

Eve, eating her chocolate bird's nest: "I don't believe you that you made these last year." Matt: "She didn't make THOSE ones last year, she just made the same ones this year." Eve: "I MEANT that I don't remember them from last year. No one's dumb enough to think these ones are a year old." Matt: "Why am I getting all the abuse?" Angus: "These pitches aren't coming from nowhere, Dad. They're right down the middle. It's too easy."

Matt: "Eve and Victoria weren't at the park anymore when I went to get them, they were back at Victoria's. I looked like a predator sitting there in my truck scanning the park. Tomorrow there'll be a note in Moms From Barrhaven saying...." My father: "Balding man in dark glasses seen lurking near neighbourhood park." Matt: "....." Angus: "...right down the middle." My mother: "It's not funny. Things like that really happen." Matt: "Yes. Men go bald every day and it's tragic."

My father, as we stand up to leave the table: "Oh, here's my napkin. I was sitting on it." Angus: "I guess the phrase 'not up your butt or you'd know it' doesn't apply in this case?" Me: "I raise 'em classy." (But funny).

And our Easter was happy. Hope yours, faith-filled or family-centered or both, was too.

And here's a picture from yesterday: