Egged on: John Henry Fleming and Ruby Fleming in hot pursuit
The
giant Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Pez Candy company of Orange, CT promised
on paper to be an imaginative initiative of corporate outreach as well as a
jocund community event. The candy mavens
had hidden—or at least distributed—as many as 10,000 eggs over several
adjoining fields in such a way as to present graduated levels of challenge for
mixed age groups of youngsters beginning with toddlers. According
to press reports, alas, it all went terribly wrong. Too many of the parents who showed up with
their little kids proved unable to contain their own
hyper-competitiveness. Without waiting for
the official starting whistle, several hundred large persons, who combined the
worst excesses of Little League partisans and bargain-hunters in Filene’s
Basement, rushed into the happy hunting grounds intent on scooping up as many
pigmented eggs as they could carry. The
infants who simply got left behind were the luckier ones. The less lucky were jostled or trod upon in
the stampede. There is one report of a
four-year-old not merely muddied but bloodied.
In the late morning
of Easter Sunday in our own back yard in Princeton we had a rather less
sanguinary event. Five of our six
grandchildren—the sixth being a young professional woman who as it turns out
was on her way to the beach in Southern California at the time—were gathered,
along with their parents, at our house. The five grandchildren, young cousins of three
families, were of two generations: three of them in the toddler to kindergarten
set, and two somewhat older sisters just on either side of the cusp of
teenagerism. The older girls had played
the principal role in the coloring of the eggs, and, without having lost a
certain sense of excitement in the search itself, took on the more detached public
role of preceptor to the infants. The
closeness and camaraderie of the cousins, who are but rarely all together, is a particular source of pleasure for their
grandparents. “How good and pleasant a
thing it is,” says the Psalmist of this familial harmony, which he likens to
the ointment running down from Aaron’s beard onto the hem of his garment—a
particularly apt image for youngsters in a nearly continuous state of drip and
ooze from nostril or lip.
There is a beautiful
old prayer now assigned to the infrequently experienced evening service of
Compline that goes as follows: “Keep
watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give
your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest
to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield
the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.”
One phrase in the
prayer might seem a little puzzling both in meaning and in context: shield the joyous. If you have ever seen a toddler at an Easter
egg hunt, however, you certainly will know the meaning of “joyous”; the account
given above suggests why the joyous might need shielding.
We had dyed about
three dozen real eggs, mostly in unambitious solid colors, though there were a
few daring polychrome experiments. I had
supplemented the offerings of the battery hens with a couple dozen more cheap
and nasty plastic simulacra from the Dollar Store. Experience had taught me that by no means all
of the eggs would be found, that some would remain in the elements for many
weeks, and that on the whole it is better to fertilize the garden in a more
conventional and less odiferous manner than that afforded by the sulfurous
exhalations of decaying ova. Also,
plastic eggs at least have a chance of surviving being found by a
four-year-old. I doubt that any of our
infants noticed the difference. Those
completely captivated by the Spirit have scant time to worry about the Letter.
John Henry and Ruby,
both of whom have entered the Tromping Ages, high-kicked and goose-stepped
around the yard in a state of high excitement, spotting at least one in three
of the bright ovoids so preposterously resting on grass tufts, in flower pots,
or at the base of trees. Frequently
their older cousins offered helpful hints of considerable subtlety, such as “I
wonder if there could be any on the gravel
path?...I wonder…” Their baskets grew
heavy, but so great was the bounty and so great the excited urgency to move on
to the next, that there were still plenty for toddler Hazel as she came like a modern
Ruth, a gleaner following the harvesters.
Innocence, wonder,
joy. How often do we see such things
truly on display? “Verily”, says Jesus,
“Except ye be converted,
and become
as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
heaven.” To my mind this is not a
threat, not even an admonition, simply a statement of the way things are. Wordsworth puts it in a slightly fancier way
that demonstrates the Romantic habit of rationalizing Transcendence:
Heaven
lies about us in our infancy!
Shades
of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But
he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy…
Shield
the joyous.
Photo: Joan Fleming
