The Last Easter Basket

Brunch is back on. My friend Ellen and her three kids are coming--maybe one or two other straggling friends. We talked about hitting an Easter buffet but the prices here in Chicago are kooky--anywhere from $50-$100 per person. With three teen/pre-teen kids, that's a no go for Ellen. And Craze and I don't feel like blowing a couple hundred on breakfast either.

So as usual, because I am a total goof, I volunteered to host. Back on is the egg casserole and Bellinis, though I think I'm gonna pass on the drive to Skokie for lox and bagels.

The second day of spring has brought with it more snow. Not a ton, but enough to cover the ground in a blanket of white. I usually love snow, but with almost five feet of the stuff having fallen already this winter, I'm a little over it. Yesterday, I saw my daffodils and tulips beginning to peak through the soil and I was all like "Hello, little flowers! Please, come join us."

I woke up this morning thinking about Easter baskets. I got my last one when I was twenty. April 1985. My mom had encouraged me to try and find a way home for Easter from college. But, unbeknownst to her, I was in the middle of a torrid affair with a boyfriend who was going overseas in the middle of May. Leaving me for months and, I suspected and rightly so, maybe for good. And I couldn't bear to lose a moment of being with him. Not a weekend. Not a day. Not an hour.

So, I decided not to go home. And then a couple of days before Easter, I got a note in my college mailbox saying that I had a package. My lovely mother had made me a giant Easter basket topped with a big pink satiny ribbon and filled with curly green Easter grass and brimming with colorful, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, jelly beans, speckled malted milk balls and a smiling pink chocolate bunny. And not that nasty, cheap candy. Nothing but the good stuff, carefully measured by hand and bought by the quarter and half pound from Kirlin's Card and Candy Shop on the little Main Street of my hometown.

My friends, especially my gluttonous boyfriend, eyed the basket with envy as it sat on the desk in my dorm room in the days before Easter. More than once, I slapped away a sneaky hand trying to steal its tasty contents before Easter morn.

Finally on Easter, I took off the cellophane wrapping and shared the bounty of my Easter basket with Lee and my girlfriends who were going nowhere for Easter and didn't have a mother as thoughtful as mine.

A week later, most of the candy was gone. The bunny long devoured. And my precious days with Lee were also slipping away faster and faster.

A month after that Easter, it was time to say goodbye. To Lee. But also to someone I didn't think could ever leave me.

May 16th, Lee and I said our goodbyes on the blacktop of a sunny campus parking lot. Later that afternoon, my parents came to campus, helped me load my belongings into the mellow yellow family car and drove me home to Illinois. I cried quietly in the backseat for the whole three-hour drive.

In the days that followed, Lee called me often. Telling me how much he missed me. But we never made plans. He always actively avoided talk of a future. At least, a future together.

May 19th, I woke with a start hearing my mother in the hallway, gasping loudly for breath. She collapsed and just three hours later, she was gone forever.

Only a few days later, just a day or two after the funeral, Lee left for an internship in Germany. I got a couple of postcards that summer and finally a letter informing me of a fate I'd suspected all along. He was leaving me for an old girlfriend who lived in Europe. And I was left alone in Illinois to mourn for my mother and my lost love. At the time, it seemed impossible to separate the pain of the two losses. They became one. One giant, gaping hole in my heart. The loss of one who was dead and one still living, still breathing, but gone all the same.

If I had that one Easter to do all over again, I'm not sure that I would do anything different. Given my frame of reference and self-confidence at twenty, I'd probably do exactly what I did. But if I had the luxury of knowing then what I know now, the course of my life might have been very different. Getting that Easter basket in person, might have changed everything. Or perhaps nothing.

There's no way to know really. But given the choice between another day with Lee or an Easter or any ordinary day with my long-gone mother, there's no doubt in my mind who I'd choose today. And I'd be the one making the Easter basket. The grandest, most beautiful Easter basket anyone has ever seen. Perfect for the deserving woman who always gave me so much.

Snow's Not the Only Thing I Shovel

I've always been a good liar.

My mother always used to say that a liar has to have a good memory. Luckily for me, mine is excellent. And while I think myself particularly talented in the telling of untruths, I also value honesty very highly and usually try to stick to the straight and narrow as much as possible. It just feels lighter living with a clean slate. Leaves valuable memory cells free for more important things.

That said, I've certainly shoveled my fair share of shit over the years. But, I've almost never lied about anything really important. Probably my most significant, premeditated lying occurred in my early teens. For example, I made up a couple of stories and got my brother to back me up so that my parents wouldn't find out that we'd been smoking my dad's cigarettes.

I lied about how the yellow candle wax got on the sculptured, green upstairs hall carpet. I can't even remember what lie I told, but it was enough for my parents not to ground us right before my friend Sarah's thirteenth birthday party. Which is exactly what they would've done if they'd have found out that we'd had all the neighbor kids over one afternoon for a seance and knocked the candle over when some spooky shadow (shaped like an ax!) appeared on the wall. To my mind, that lie was pretty justified. After all, if my parents really wanted the house to be a seance-free zone when they were at work, they wouldn't have left me, at 12, solely in charge of my 9-year-old brother. All day. All summer long.

And of course, as I got older, I had new life experiences to weave tall(ish) tales about.

I've lied about how many men I've slept with. Not because I've done a lot of whoring around but because, on occasion in conversation, the number seemed pitifully low and it made me feel unsexy and undesirable to admit it. And besides, I totally feel that it's only right to count one man twice since there was a twelve-year gap between our sexual adventures and we were both different people during the second go around. There you go. Not lying, really.

I sometimes tell the story of the boyfriend I had just before I met Craze because it makes people laugh. The pre-husband boyfriend, Joe, had the smallest penis I'd ever seen except for, maybe, while diapering a toddler. So little in fact, that I only saw it once when it wasn't erect and it was like a little, flesh-colored button really. What's unfortunate about that story is that it doesn't involve even the tiniest bit of a lie.

I do though tell white lies occasionally about things most people lie about. How much I weigh for example (I claim less). How tall I am (I claim just slightly more).

I've told people they look fine when they really don't look their best but telling them so would only make them feel worse. I've told recruiters that I make more money than I actually do. Since working for myself, I've claimed to be on a conference call when I was really just catching up on laundry so I'd seem more in demand.

I've bought expensive items in their original boxes on eBay for a pittance, given them as gifts and let some people think I spent a fortune. Though I guess that last one isn't lying per se. It's just being kind of sneaky and, to my mind, pretty clever actually. Financially astute, even. Come to think of it, I pat myself on the back for that one.

Probably the worst lie I ever told was said to my mother. She had collapsed suddenly early one Sunday morning and couldn't catch her breath. After calling 911 for an ambulance, I sat with her trying to calm her. Sitting on the floor together at the side of my parents' bed, waiting for what seemed an eternity for the paramedics to arrive, I told her the same thing over and over again.

"Shhh," I'd say to her as she tried to speak, brushing her hair back from her forehead the way she always did to me as she sat at my bedside when I was trying to fall asleep. "Just be quiet. The paramedics will be here in a minute and you'll be fine. . . You'll be fine."

But she wasn't fine.

After she finally got to the hospital, she died less than three hours later after a particularly nasty battle with a rogue blood clot. She was only 50. "You'll be fine," was probably the last thing I ever said to her, yet again, as they carried her from our house on the gurney.

That's the only lie I've ever told that's really tortured me. Why, I'm not really sure. "You'll be fine," was really more a statement of a wish on my part than some contrived untruth.

Twenty-two years after her passing and thanks to two years of therapy, I've finally gotten over the guilt of that lie. And the stupidity of it really is that, wherever mom is, I'm sure she's never held it against me. Not even for a second.

But the candle wax, cigarettes and sex with HOW MANY men? That might be a different story altogether. . .