The ritual maintained
29 November 2011 06:00 AM Categories: The kid | Writing prompts
In one home movie I will never see again, my toddler cousin and I frolic in the thin spring morning light in our Easter dresses and Easter coats (I am about four). Somehow the belt of my coat falls off. In the old days, in the darkened room with the projector, the best thing to do was to watch this movie in reverse, to see my belt snake up around my waist again to find its proper place.
These were the rituals that my grandmother maintained: the Easter dress, the little girl underclothing (always an undershirt beneath the cotton shirt or dress), the special shoes for special occasions. The year I lived with her and my grandfather, she made sure I always wore skirts to school and that my unruly hair was pulled back from my face. There were standards and she was there to keep them going and, after all, it was only twenty years before that that my own mother was a third grader, too, in the rigid fifties, and how much had really changed?
My family doesn’t really have rituals, at least not rituals that I can identify clearly. Easter in particular is a strange one for me – it’s about the resurrection, right, something I really can’t get behind, and the whole chocolate and jellybean thing, the food delivery from a humanoid rabbit, is just too bizarre to focus much on.
The boy loves Christmas, though, the evergreen spice in the air, the way the colored lights twinkle, so there’s that, the ritual of getting a tree and decorating it. He even likes the holiday narrative, despite our lack of concrete faith, having told me recently that he likes Christmas better than Halloween because it is a religious holiday, because there is a story behind it.
Maybe in spite of myself, in spite of my occasional cynicism, my atheistic mind, I’m doing something right here, passing on the importance of the story, the meaning, the details that go beyond brand new dresses outfits and the smell of pine.
From the prompt "Brand new."
Image of me at my grandparent's house (for Easter?) probably taken in 1978 when I was living with them. I found this photograph recently in a search for kid pictures in which I resemble the boy. Not sure if this counts as one of those pictures, though. It does make me wonder if all the speculation about my mother's genes -- German? Swiss? Polish -- are correct. Her mother's maiden name was Kreider and the Kreiders who settled in Pennsylvania and Delaware were of Swiss extraction.
I took down yesterday's post because it needs more work and I will not have the time to do that today ... perhaps it will show up again soon.
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