Easter
So what did I do to welcome spring, other than pretend that a large rabbit brings Sweetart eggs and small items of clothing from Target into our home? I ate my weight in malted milk eggs, and all of us took a walk in the woods where there was such a profusion of robins hopping about on the forest floor that in fact it creeped me out more than a little. We had lunch at the Panera, which had a profusion of food and gave away all its baked goods to the last people in the store when they closed. (This means my co-workers get bagels in the morning!) Then we watched “The Great Escape,” always a fantastic movie, in order to get the taste of “Snow Dogs” out of our mouths. The kids liked it, but I didn’t, and was sorely beset by the waste of James Coburn, so we went sideways and watched “The Great Escape” to make up for it.
The other movie of the weekend, and in keeping with a spring theme if in title only, was “Pieces of April,” which the box billed as a comedy. The box was wrong, but it was a sweet little movie about a very very troubled family going to experience the first Thanksgiving hosted by their eldest daughter. Katie Holmes, as if I need to say more. Lovely little movie, one that I probably won’t remember in general, but from which little snippets will stick with us for years (such as sticking an entire onion into the turkey carcass, along with some bread mix and unchopped celery spears.) The poor girl doesn’t have a clue — but who did on their first Thanksgiving? I remember ours — it was hosted for friends, not family, in our walkup apartment in Syracuse. I still have the roasting pan we used, which had to be surgically altered with pliers in order to fit into the tiny oven. God only knows what else we made — there was consumption of mass quantities, I know that, and the night ended with an ill-advised stroll through a cemetery which was not even near our apartment. Since then we’ve gotten serious about the cranberry sauce, the birds are organic, and our strolls through cemeteries are strictly well-advised.