Easter

As I sit here annoying my family with my Easter tradition of watching "Jesus Christ Superstar," I'm reminded of the difference in the Easter experience that my children have and the ones that I had as a child.

For starters, most of my childhood Easter's involved at least some church service...at a Catholic church decked out in purple. We became non-practicing Catholics sometime early in Marty's life, so the religious part of the holiday is mostly represented in my viewing of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera.

Otherwise, my kids have it pretty good. They get their Easter baskets filled with candy. They usually get a book or toy in their basket and they get an Easter egg hunt. Then they get to go to their grandparents house and get more candy.

I will say that as a kid, I do remember getting the candy in abundance, if for no other reason the older members of my family would buy it so that they could eat it.

However, there's one Easter that stands out above all others. While my parents were never divorced, they did frequently separate during the seven years of my life before my dad died. There was no real pattern to when I would be with my father if he wasn't living with my mother...since he didn't work, I just seemed to have been with him whenever.

One year, they were separated heading up to Easter and I was out on weekend with my father, who took me someplace to see the Easter Bunny. After that, we stopped at the pet store in the shopping center so that I could look at the puppies and kitties. Like a lot of pet store's, they also had a bunch of baby chicks for sale for Easter. Considering that we were in an East Coast suburb, you wouldn't think that there would be a lot of call for chicks.

Well, as any 6-year-old kid would, I wanted to take a chick home. So, my father let me. In fact, he let me get three of them so that they wouldn't be lonely.

When he took me back to the apartment that he and my mother sometimes shared, he walked me as far as the door. Then he rang the doorbell.

And, then he ran.

You can imagine how pleased my mother -- who at this point was mostly laid up in bed after a bad car accident had led to several malpractice inducing botched back surgeries -- when she found her first grader had acquired three baby chicks.

As I had done with the three goldfish that I had previously gotten thanks to my dad, I happily named the chicks after my three favorite people -- Moe, Larry and Curly.

It was assumed that the chicks would perish, of course. We lived in an apartment after all and didn't really have anything to feed them. My mom finally settled on giving them oatmeal loaded down with sugar. Why? Who the heck knows, but turns out that chickens like that.

Instead of dying, the chicks actually did quite well. They spent the entire summer growing in a cardboard box.

By the time Christmas rolled around, Moe, Larry and Curly were still alive...and could now fly a little bit. Kept flying right into the Christmas tree. They weren't three French hens...but it was still as close as I've ever come to experiencing a live action "Twelve Days of Christmas."

Around the time that they were knocking the ornaments all over the place, it was decided that they were probably too big to keep in the apartment. You'd have thought that would've been obvious a few months prior to that, but don't look at me...I had just turned seven.

One of my uncles had a brother that owned a farm in Western Maryland, and Moe, Larry and Curly were shipped off to him. For obvious reasons, their fate past that wasn't really relayed to me. My understanding after I got a little older is that at least two of them had turned out to be egg layers, and had stuck around for a while...before eventually becoming someone's dinner. Considering that I doubt that most pet store chicks even make it much past May of the year they're sold, I like to think that my little Stooges actually did pretty well.

Despite the fact that we live in a house with a yard, and in a town that is surrounded by working farms, I've already been told that I'm not allowed to try to recreate that childhood experience for Marty and Casey.

Of course, I wasn't told that I can't get a pair of turtledoves or a partridge, so there's hope yet.