He is risen, He is risen indeed!

One of my earliest Easter memories is of being tucked in my bed on Calle Guaymura, and my mother coming to my bedside, whispering in my ear, He is risen! I guess I was 9 or 10.

I just got off the phone with my Dad, who answered the phone, "He is risen." I responded with, "He is risen, indeed!" which is a tradition in many reformed tradition churches. It's one of the traditions that holds with Easter, and as a one who doesn't have many traditions to hold on to, I cling to this one for more than one reason.

I'll go to the Open Door for the 11 o'clock service, join some friends from church afterward, and then drive to O'Hara Township to spend some time (and Easter Dinner) with some friends from college. I only see these friends about once a year, but they are dear to me. They were not in college, but in their early thirties, but that is when I knew them. They weren't even dating when I first met them. I met Pat first, and Henry later. They were engaged and married before the end of my freshman year, and theirs was one of the first (if not the first) weddings I ever attended without my family. (And at the church where I want to get married, but BEFORE the renovation, so I remember the gray ceiling with chips of paint peeling off.)

Wow, that's not where I meant this post to go, better get back on track. My dad said that the year my mother was in the hospital, the first person that spoke to her on Easter was the woman coming around for payment for the newspaper. Did she say "Happy Easter"? my dad asked. "Are you kidding?" My father has a great way of telling stories, deepening his voice for effect for that last bit. I'll have to ask my mother more about that story. In some ways, that year is a locked box that is just now becoming opened, as the pain of losing Peter lessens, even for me.

(If you're new here, Peter was an angel baby. Born March 23, 33 years ago, so 1978. Wow. I would have had a 33 year old brother. He lived for about 20 days. It was Maundy Thursday, his birthday, that year.)

My dad and I talked about sunrise services, the ones at my grandmother's church in Washington. We'd meet at a tiny graveyard and the pastor, who was the man who baptized me as a baby and maybe the same man who married my parents, would blow his trumpet. And then we'd have Easter dinner at my grandmother's house and have lamb-shaped cake from her friend...whose name I've forgotten. Later years, we'd go to restaurants so that people didn't have to cook. A restaurant that was NEAR the Wayfarer. The Wayfarer, which is now gone. And no one lives in Washington anymore, even though at one time my great Aunt Margaret, my grandparents, and my Aunt P. and Uncle Klaus and their three kids (yes, right, my cousins.)

The other sunrise service I remember, a picture that I can see in my mind's eye, was across the street from the Union Church in Tegucigalpa. It overlooked the city and like Pittsburgh, the city was hilly, so it was a beautiful view.

I always say that Pittsburgh is the city of my childhood. It has the rivers (like Bonn) and the mountains (like Tegucigalpa.) I remember telling that to a new therapist once and she laughed at me. That was when I knew (though I had suspected) that she was not the therapist for me. I mean, you don't laugh at your clients. Laugh with them, maybe. But not at them.

As per usual, this post is going ALL over the map, and I don't just mean Central America, Europe, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh.

It's funny, I woke up this morning thinking it was Monday and crap, what time is it, I have a chiropractic appointment at 8:30, and I REALLY have to get writing, because my self imposed deadline for a draft of my paper is Saturday. I have written 3 pages front and back, but I have miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep. It took me a while to realize, um, no, I think it's Easter, and really, I had to check my phone to see if it was Sunday.

I went to a conference on zines yesterday afternoon. I did NOT fit in, in the sense that either I hadn't ever written (or really read) any zines, I didn't have a tattoo, or blue hair, or I hadn't written a book. (Two of the speakers had written books, and while I did bother her in the hall while she was texting, and I was ignorant of her book, I did think she was kind of rude...I mean, isn't one of the points of being at a conference to meet new people that might want to read your book? Or at least to meet with kindred minds? I do NOT want to read her book based on her personality, although I do, based on the subject matter.

(I mean, if you are Alan Rickman walking through a bookstore and someone walks up to you and says, "are you in movies?" I think you have the right to be rude, because, well, he is, a little bit, and I was a COMPLETE naif in that situation. But...I have to let it go.)

Because I've discovered that magazines are one of my "research interests." How lucky that the first bit of mine that will ever be published in a scholarly journal is ON magazines, how I fell into that opportunity. I am astonished at how Providence has lined up things for me. Even that I happened to read the City Paper on Thursday (which I rarely do) because I had left my book on the kitchen table and needed something to read while I ate dinner. And that the zine convention was listed on the front cover...I couldn't go in the morning b/c I had to supervise at work, but I was there for the afternoon, and it was amazing. These were people who cared about Sassy magazine (before it sold out, I mean in terms of publishing quality) and I'd heard the librarian (with blue hair, jello blue, not granny blue) from Barnard speak before...perhaps when I heard Leonard Marcus speak for the first time in Chicago, at the American Library Association conference, that would have been 2005.

Back to the zine conference...there was one amazing moment, when someone asked about cataloging zines and there we were, looking at one of her MARC records, talking about 650s, and 655s (subject headings, genre headings) and I was in librarian HEAVEN.

Afterwards, I still had time before the Pitt Library School Library closed at five, so I browsed the bound periodicals. Found a bunch of cool articles. Which meant that my brain was not dead at five, and so I chose to go to the Sharp Edge for dinner, and after dinner, I sipped my water and composed a grocery list and then WENT grocery shopping.

(This is pretty amazing, folks. By the time Saturday evening comes, I am so brain dead I generally curl in a ball and watch TV)

Well, time to get ready for church. And, um, eat something. Ta!

OH, OH. But first, if you want, visit this link for a trip down mem'ry lane -- Anita Silvey spotlights The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes in her Almanac.

If we begin with certainties, we will end with doubt. But if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty. (Francis Bacon)

He is Risen!
He is Risen, indeed!

Somehow, it's not Easter until I've heard those words. I remember one Easter, I might have been nine, my mother creeping into my room to wake me up for the sunrise service, and whispering in my ear, "He is Risen!" I remember feeling so loved at that moment, by my mother, and by God.

I'm actually wielding the cell phone now. My father didn't even answer the phone with "Happy Easter." My mother wanted to nail down the plans concerning my dad's 65th birthday trip (in June). I said, "don't you have to go off to choir?"

Oh brother, I'm becoming a grouch, in my age.

I remember Easter morning sunrise services. On the terrace of a park across the street from the Union Church of Tegucigalpa. Oh, the sunrise on the hills. I remember sunrise services at my grandmother's church in Washington, New Jersey, Pastor Farr would greet the morning at a small hilltop graveyard with his trumpet.

I remember eggs--decorating them, blowing them out, making Easter egg trees. My parents have the darlingest set of rabbits, with wheelbarrows and such, getting ready for Easter. I remember when they bought them, when I was a girl in Germany.

I have no memories of Lent until I moved to Pittsburgh, this town of Catholics and Presbyterians. But my second year at Carlow was Lou Mitchell's first Easter at Bellefield and having been raised Catholic, he did Lent with a vengeance. Every Sunday was to prepare us more. "Dying to self" was the big theme. I think Cornerstone one of those years had a sunrise service.

But as an adult, life seems so much more about Lent and so much less about Easter. I don't even have a new dress this year (although I did get my hair cut, and yesterday I got a manicure.) I have not decorated any eggs, and I got my "Easter basket" (a canvas bag filled with Easter grass and some very nice chocolate) on Monday from my mother. I ate some of the chocolate last night. I went to a friend's in the evening, after a long, fruitful, but hard day at work. The manicure was an afterthought--when I called Kelly at five to say I was done, she fretted, saying she still had to paint a second layer. "I'll come over at seven, then?" So I took a back road that I thought would take me to the mall and it did! and got three types of chicken samples at the food court at the mall before I went to get a manicure. The place I go is run by women who hardly speak English and I feel like a manicure is such a personal thing, I wanted to be able to talk to the woman who was massaging my hands, cutting my cuticles. When I paid, I told her I liked her necklace and her face lit up with a huge smile.

So I went home, ate the chocolate that a co-worker had put in my cubby, and with no hammer in sight, stomped on the chocolate egg my mom had given me. I wish I had a "before" picture. All I have now is shards of clear plastic on my kitchen floor and the chocolates. They are very good. I can't remember the brand name--Roche? Anyways, delicious.

Then I drove to Kelly's and my car did autopilot so I was sort of lost. When I got there, she was still painting, so I ate pizza while she painted and then I finished The Solomon Sisters Wise Up, sitting in the other room to let her paint with more speed. Around 9, we put in the DVD and she prayed for us. The Passion is a movie that requires prayer before it, and apparently, I could not tarry even for an hour--at the point at which Simon was helping Jesus with the cross, Kelly was saying, wake up, Sarah Louise, you can't be asleep, I need you to watch this with me! I'm awake, I mumbled. It took a few more minutes for me to sit up fully. What a hard movie to watch. I hardly remembered it, as when I saw it two years ago in the theatre, I spent half the time looking away.

When it was over, all I wanted to do was get back to sleep, in my bed, at home. So I drove into the night and of course by the time I'd brushed my teeth and changed into my nightgown, I was awake enough. So I started a book from the library about a woman who finds out her husband is having an affair when she picks up one of the phone extensions at their house. I read until the words swam.

So it's Easter.

Right now my CD has cycled around to the last song, "What if I fall" by the now broken-up Christian boy band DC Talk. I've listened to that song a lot this week, thinking about Jesus falling at least three times on the way to Golgotha. (Calvary sounds too white, too pure, for the bloody mess we watched last night on Kelly's TV screen.) What if I stumble, what if I fall? Jesus did. He was a man like us, without sin, but he fell. In his last hours, he died a worse death than most of us can imagine, and showed us how to live.

Crap, can you hear the religious sentiment in that last sentence? How do you tell the story of Jesus dying on a cross so that it makes people understand WHY he did it?

I sit here, at my computer, looking at my desk. One of my "Fabulous Broads" quotes from last year's calendar hangs on my desk: "Send me flowers while I'm alive. They won't do me a damn bit of good after I'm dead." (Joan Crawford)

The last time I went to a sunrise service was 1998. I was very depressed, but my parents had insisted I come home for Easter. My grandmother was there, in her wheelchair, and we went to the Lincoln Memorial, by the Reflecting Pool. It was cold. That is all I remember. My parents went this morning and my mom said it was even colder today, below freezing.

Another quote, above my computer screen: "I don't know how to fight. All I know is how to stay alive." (Alice Walker)

I have been fighting this year. Fighting to stay healthy, amid colds and colds and colds. Fighting to get...

...past the doubts? Into the certainty? I don't know if my sneezes are allergies or a cold. Allergies, I hope, since I'll be sharing Easter dinner with the Creasy's and I don't want to infect any of them.

It's cold outside. I have no idea what I'm wearing to church--in the last warm spell, I got rid of three winter dresses that I rarely wear, but that means that the one I have now that's clean is brown, not really an Easter color. Plus, it's short, so I would have to find nylons or tights that are clean.

I'm not feeling the Easter, y'all.

And I want to end with some pithy phrase, like, "and that's not the point." But I can't. Because I'm still living in the doubts. Easter morning is here, but I'm still in...

...hold the phone, I just got a text message from Pete! "Christ the Lord has risen today! Alleluia! Happy Easter! Yours, Pete." And I sent him one back: "Back at ya he is risen indeed sarah louise" (Can you tell which one of us is more adept at text messaging?)

So, wherever you are, whatever state this finds you in, Happy Easter. Because Friday's over, it's Sunday!!