An Easter Egg is not a Potato

I have had enough, how about you?

The New York Times

A little part of me died when I read this article about painted potatoes. Trust me, I wasn’t raised with a lot, nor was there waste, but painting potatoes because eggs are too expensive seems like one sacrifice too far.

As a Catholic kid, we took Lent seriously. We went off chocolate, and even swore off candies named for adult activities we were ill equipped to understand- like Sugar Daddies. Forty days seemed like forty years as a ten year old, but as Lent plodded forward, my childhood home began to show signs of hope. My mom began to mix the dough to make Fuatha (Italian Easter bread) a honey drenched sweet bread, whereby she raised the dough in sunny windows and twisted it into horns in pans, baking it to golden perfection. She created an egg tree, where she hung eggs on strands of lace, giving the bare spring branches personality and pops of color. I thought those hanging eggs looked elegant- maybe a little austere against the gray mountain branches but artful nonetheless. (There’s a photo of her indoor version below.) At our teeny Catholic church with its small congregation we spent Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday in church. We even held a Passover Seder at our church in solidarity with the one Jewish family in our Appalachian town. The covered dish supper held on Holy Thursday in the church hall was a big deal. The women cooked and baked, and it was the most delicious array of dishes served cafeteria style anywhere on earth. As for the rituals that came beforehand in the church, my sisters, brothers and I would try not to laugh when the priest washed the feet of a parishioner. It seemed so old timey- a throw back move to when people went barefoot or wore sandals- an ancient custom that should stay in the past and never be repeated. But, that wasn’t the thinking of our priest- if Jesus did it, we were encouraged to do it too. So out came the soap and water. Besides, the best thing about Holy Thursday was that it meant we were in countdown mode to Easter Sunday- when the suffering would finally be over and the sacrifice would end.

Our mother made the Easter basket an elevated art form: seven woven baskets with handles that she stored away and brought out every Eastertide and arranged on the dining room table like a museum exhibit. She was a librarian and therefore a perfectionist with the laws of Garden Club symmetry on her side. Anything she touched had a special twist to it. Like magic, she made the previous forty days wash away like the inevitable spring floods of the Powell River that split our hometown in three. There were large chocolate eggs nestled on that green cellophane “grass” surrounded by more delicious candy than our deprived stomachs could hold. When we woke up on Easter morning and raced to see the baskets filled with bright, dazzling jelly beans, foil rabbits and wind-up baby chicks, we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted- and before mass. We dressed up in matching outfits (except my brothers who had weird little boy suits that looked like something out of Harry Potter). Our mom made the girls wear hats when they were woefully out of style- we looked like extras in the Minnie Pearl segment on Hee Haw. But we didn’t care. We would’ve worn anything she asked us to wear. We wanted to party because we had earned it.

I would get particularly sick on marshmallow Peeps out of Allentown, Pennsylvania and anything made of “white” chocolate. I was 43 years old when I found out that white chocolate wasn’t chocolate at all. It was just some drummed up marketing scam where cocoa butter and sugar and milk solids are blended to look and perform like chocolate, but it wasn’t actually the real thing. You could’ve melted down one of those white Easter bunnies and moisturized your legs with it.

Lent was full of revelations via spiritual cleansing. The message was loud and clear: deprive yourself and you will be rewarded. “Offer it up” was a common refrain when something bad happened to any of us: a disappointment, a failure or a loss. In offering it up, we were giving our burdens to God- who knew what the hell to do with them because we didn’t. What a system, I thought. Pain is not the worst thing. You can hand it over to the Creator. But what did He do with it? I wondered. Did he just bounce the worst over to another kid, so she had to deal with it? I thought of God as the great ricochet artist- once I had my fill of the worst, that same agita would be recycled on to other unsuspecting children until the end of time. I had guilt about that possibility- and shame that I would say or do anything not to be in dutch with God. The Evangelical kids I grew up with in Big Stone Gap, Virginia had the answers to the big questions. They seemed to know exactly what God was doing and precisely what Jesus meant when he spoke. I’d like to climb into a time machine and head back to those days when those kids knew everything. I sat next to a kid in third grade (Mrs. Grace White’s class) who is a minister on television to this day. He’s the host of the Manna from Heaven show. You could say he’s the only classmate I had from Big Stone Gap who made it big in show business- he’s lasted longer than The Simpsons. I wish I would have asked him back then what he saw in the future. I wonder if he knew that we would grow up, have children of our own and find we couldn’t afford to dye Easter eggs.

And now, courtesy of the observational folks at The New York Times, we must sacrifice anew and more deeply. We must fiddle while Rome burns as the stock market plummets, and all financial logic has been replaced with something called “Let’s see how this goes.” Forty days of Lent is enough pain, I don’t think we need our leaders to make things worse. I took General Business with Mr. Kilgore at Powell Valley High School, and he advised against such folly even back then. He taught us that we had to have a plan. And that plan should never include tariffs. Of course, he remembered Herbert Hoover. He’d ridden that roller coaster. He knew the price of an egg indicated more than the price of eggs.

And here we are, poached, scrambled and fried as a people. We should be planning our Holy Week celebrations, instead we find our traditions up in smoke, our dreams deferred and our hopes in the toilet. The price of eggs means that families like the one I grew up in, can’t dye them. A car payment is less money than jumbo eggs in the double decker crate. Children everywhere will miss the fun of their moms dropping dye tablets into cups of boiling water, and with that little wire slotted spoon thing, dunking the egg until it turned magnificent shades of the rainbow. They will miss mastering the tricky drying process where you had to elevate the dyed egg so you didn’t get white splotches showing through. They will never know the scent of vinegar that was part of the atomic power of those dye tablets. God, it was fun. It meant a countdown to the Easter basket. It mean that Jesus had risen, taking all our troubles with him.

We could afford troubles in the 1970’s because the basics didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Yes, there was gas rationing, but we reasoned we could always stay home. Home. Where there were eggs and bread and people that loved you. Now they want us to give that up too! Paint a potato and you won’t notice it’s not an Easter egg. Look at your 401 K and fuggetaboutit. It’ll come back- you might be dead when it comes back up but so what? You’re in a better place. As for Mamaw who is panicking because she can’t afford her medicine- tell her to calm down. Assure her when her social security check doesn’t arrive- it was all a fantasy. She should pretend she didn’t pay into it for 45 years working in a blouse mill on a machine for 8 hours a day. As the fat cats fly around the world, dropping in to scare people in places like Greenland in matching fur trimmed parkas and fly south on the taxpayer’s dime to golf in places that smell like Aqua Velva, pretend we, the working people, are not paying for it. Pretend that they care about us, and understand that their solution to everything is for us to find the solution. For us to suffer. For us to sacrifice. As my best friend’s father, W.D. Rutledge, a fine accountant out of Florence, Alabama once said, “Boys, I might have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.” I say we rise up. Let’s sign up to roll potatoes on the White House lawn at the national egg roll. They are charging at the event this year- and guess where the dough is going? Not in your pocket. But, at least when it’s all said and done, we know we’re getting hosed and at the end of the day, they’re just painted potatoes.

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