Part of life seems to be waiting – waiting for Covid-19 to subside, waiting to graduate, waiting for the train.  Well, spring has finally arrived, and Easter is tomorrow.  It’ll be a different Easter.  But then every day is different, including the last day.

Christians have been awaiting that day since the year 33, or thereabout.  One thing about the coronavirus, it makes you think along those lines.  New York public schools may not open ‘til September, and our public schools may be no better.  When they do open, it’ll be a different world.

There’ll be new jobs, different ones, and leisure time may not exist anymore.  But we can beat this oppressive disease, you just wait and see.

It was probably once called God Friday, but the way languages evolve (I studied this in college), we now call out time of tribal or cultural sorrow Good. And it is good, because it has a most happy ending. I hope the time of chocolate Easter bunnies is not gone, at least not for good.

We humans have funny ways of adapting, even to something as bad as a coronavirus. But that’s for the future. Let me tell you about the past, which at least I know to some extent. One Easter morning, my youngest brother, a toddler then, found a beautiful box of assorted cookies on the family sideboard. Taking it with him under the table, he proceeded to take one bite out of each cookie, until he had just about finished the box. That’s a toddler’s way of taking care of the future and celebrating Easter.

It flew to a branch and stayed.  It was a bird, judging by its silhouette, a common starling, and when it didn’t move, I asked myself, does it feel ill, coronavirus, or did it come here to die?  I was relaxed, with time to observe.  It didn’t move, but bobbed with the branch in the wind.

Where do birds go when they die?  You seldom see bird corpses, so I watched this bird for ten minutes, conjecturing about the short life of a bird.  A sudden gust of wind tore its silhouette apart, revealing two overlapping dead oak leaves, and my mental sallies came apart.

We construct mental castles from the reality around us, but I think I’ve put coronavirus down correctly.  Sure, it’s infected a tiger in the Bronx Zoo, but I know how to deal with it now.  Not everything the mind constructs is reality.

My wife got an Easter card with the message, “Have a gorgeous Easter from the Maker of all things beautiful.” On the cover were enlarged pictures of cherry blossoms. Yes, all things beautiful. I am not an atheist, so I deeply appreciate beauty at its source — a vermilion sunset, a sky-cracking thunderstorm, a snowdrop blooming in the snow of March, a maple tree in the fall, an enlarged Hubble photo of a nebula, a newborn lamb, a beautiful woman — and the list goes on.

Let’s go back to Easter almost a century ago. My little brother used to enjoy grabbing a lock of my hair at the top and pulling me across the lawn. I never stopped him. As a matter of fact, you might say I encouraged him. To me there was the beauty of youth, of joy in a small prank. You, know, I have a full head of hair in my eighties; the roots grew deep.

And it all started with a Passover, about 2,000 years ago.

It existed for a while in our educational system. A bad idea — putting ninth graders at the top of a school with seventh graders. Ninth graders need to be at the bottom, as in regular high school. Alton was one such ninth grader I had to supervise during lunch in the Sixties. Those were the days of food fights, when supervising teachers had to avoid getting hit with lemon meringue.

Alton didn’t like my insistence on good behavior. One day he came up to me and threw a punch. He was aiming for my central chest, and had to reach up, for at 6’3″ I towered well above him. Then he ran. I let it go.

I knew his braggadocio ways, his Trump-like remarks. A month later a food fight was simmering in the cafeteria again. Suddenly I stood still. Alton was shouting at a bunch of kids with doughnuts in their hands, ready to throw. He sounded threatening, and the kids put their doughnuts away. I watched unbelieving; Alton had rounded a corner in his young life.