Before I start, I am not blaspheming or stepping on or over faith and belief, days before Easter Sunday. I grew up following the Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on Christianity and whether out of family loyalty, tradition or maybe fear, I am still a believer.
My first recollection of my first bag of grass was the Spring of 1962. I was sitting at home on Good Friday afternoon, watching a Huckleberry Hound cartoon, happy to have missed school, when in, walked my great-uncle Yates. I saw the bag and got that Grinch grin. I knew the sugar rush was soon coming and that purple eggs, mushy peeps and rainbows of colored confectionaries would soon be mine. Yes, it was time to dye eggs in fancy colors, line an old shoe box (the traditional macho Easter basket for an inner city kid) with my newly acquired synthetic grass and in a few short days, get ready to wear my new pair of shoes and a new suit.
Growing up in the inner city with moderate means, meant that you got a new pair of shoes twice a year and new pair of sneakers once a year. You got, “hard sole shoes” as my great-uncle would refer to them for the first day of school and a pair of dress shoes as my great-granny would say for Easter. Along with that pair of Sunday dress shoes, came a pair of spanking new sneakers. If you were lucky they were PF Flyers. Maa-annnn, for a few weeks you could run faster and jump higher than Superman. My sister Sharrin, got the girly basket with the ribbon, carried it by a fancy straw handle, adorned with a bunny or a teddy bear, but my shoe box filled with jelly beans, marshmallow chicks and a big hollow chocolate bunny was the best.
The night before Easter, we got to sit down with my aunt at the kitchen table and she would supervise the egg dying. The materials for this endeavor consisted of a small box filed with food coloring tablets, the box then folded into a holder for the two dozen eggs and a short wire contraption curved and at the end to hold the eggs for dipping in the dye. You’d mixed the dye with vinegar in your cheapest disposable tea cups from the cupboard, take each cup filled with the separate colored mixtures, dip the eggs and wait for them to dry in the cardboard holders. I still smile when I think of not being able to wait until church was over Sunday morning so you could get home; put on your PF Flyers and walk the neighborhood with a pocketful of jellybeans. God may be an abstract idea to many of you reading this but the warmth I felt on that day told me something more powerful existed. Whether it was just the love of my sister and family or the presence of something more powerful, I am not sure. I do know, love truly does conquer all, along with a good pair of PF Flyers.