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The Write Side of 59

~ This is What Happens When You Begin to Age Out of Middle Age

The Write Side of 59

Category Archives: Men

Small Plane Travel a Throwback to Civil Aviation

17 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men, Travel

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Cockpit Frank

Up front and personal.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Unlike our children, who take air travel for granted, most of us over-50s remember a time when air travel was not the norm. When I was a child, many of my friends still took trains to travel to Florida. Many people still took ships to Europe.

I attended many a bon voyage party my grandparents threw on ships docked on the piers of Manhattan, bound for Italy. It was a great occasion for us kids. We got to go aboard a giant steamliner like the Leonardo DaVinci, and explore the ship from stem to stern while our parents sat around tables in the restaurant enjoying pastries and coffee. In the security-obsessed world of today, no one would dream of allowing non-passengers to roam aboard (or letting their children wander a ship alone, for that matter). And that’s a shame.

It’s also a shame that family and friends cannot go to the gate to see us off at airports anymore. When I took my first flight nearly 50 years ago, we just walked onto the plane with no security of any kind. When we walked aboard, we were greeted warmly by stewardesses who treated us as if air travel was something special (as it was for middle class folks). There were even commemorative pins for kids enjoying their first flight. Stewardesses brought all the food and drink you could want. And there was room to stretch, because the flights were rarely full. In fact, when flights filled up, they often rolled out another plane. No one ever got “bumped.” Flights were canceled only due to mechanical or weather issues.

Contrast that with air travel in 2014. This year I have taken eight flights in six months and have had one flight canceled, and another delayed seven hours.

United Airlines was the culprit last month when my flight from St. Louis to Newark was canceled on a clear, sunny day without any reason ever given. And then to add insult to injury, they rebooked me to fly from St. Louis to Chicago, and then Chicago to Boston (and then Boston to Newark), and acted as if I should be thankful they had provided a plan for getting me home. They wanted to turn a three-hour flight into 13 hours, and have me be happy about it.

My point is that air travel just isn’t what it used to be. Now I know that makes me sound like an old curmudgeon. I remember laughing when Burt Lancaster’s character in the film “Atlantic City,” says to a young friend, “Look at the ocean. The Atlantic isn’t what it used to be. You should have seen the ocean years ago.”

But I don’t think even air travel executives would deny that the experience today is not what it used to be. They would probably blame economic factors like fuel prices and security factors like TSA regulations for the difference. But the truth is that air travel today is about as enjoyable as riding a bus. And far more expensive.

That is why when our pilot friend Brian offered to take us for a ride in his four-seater plane recently, my wife and I accepted immediately. The plane was at the Provincetown, Massachusetts airport where Brian had flown it from his upstate New York home. Pat and I arrived with Brian at the airport, and you could see immediately a return to the early days of commercial aviation. The airport personnel treated everyone as special. There was no TSA security. Brian keyed in a code to open the gate and we walked to where his plane was tied up. Brian opened the door, and we got in.He meticulously checked the plane out, and gave us safety instructions, and then we were off. As we cruised over Cape Cod, I thought that this is the way travel should be. No lines at the airport, no taking off your shoes, no being patted down. We could just enjoy the ride as human beings, not just butts in seats.

More than a half-century of commercial aviation has taken all of the charm, and most of the civility out of air travel. When only rich people traveled regularly by commercial airlines, everyone who traveled received top-notch treatment. Today, when everyone travels by air, it’s just transportation. The airline slogans bear this out. In the 1930s, Delta Airlines’ slogan was “Speed, Comfort and Convenience.” By 1984, the slogan was “Delta Gets You There.” I rest my case.

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The Magic of Babies. And a Baptism

07 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by WS50 in Confessional, Men

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Baptism, confessional, Frank Terranella, Men

Frank Baptism

Family Gathering.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Family can surprise you sometimes. Just when you think that everyone is acting childish with their petty disputes and slights over nothing, they can come together and act like, well, a family!

This was brought home to me recently when my grandson, Bryce, was baptized. Members of the family who had not seen each other for years all showed up, and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. People who don’t talk to one another did. And I have to think that there is some magic in a baby‘s baptism.

Baptism is where a child is initiated into the family faith. The family gathers together for it, and celebrates the new family member. It’s sort of a Christian coming-out party. I think that every religion has an equivalent. The iconic image from “The Lion King,” with the child being held overhead, is of the same cloth.

Bryce seemed to enjoy all the attention and suffered the pouring of water over him with barely a peep. I think his only complaint was that he didn’t get his full bath. The boy loves his bath.Bryce (Frank) Bryce also loves being held, and there was a whole room full of family members eager to accommodate him.

Bryce had another baptism of sorts the day before. He attended his first Yankees game. I think there is a religious aspect of that as well.

So now Bryce is all baptized and seems to be enjoying life at nearly five months. He was all smiles at his baptism. And his grandfather is enjoying the healing effect a baby has on a family. It seems that the innocence of a child can bring out in people what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” It’s a wonderful thing to see.

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The Power Washer Blasts Fun

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by WS50 in Concepts, Men

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Bob Smith, Power Wash

Before and After

Before and After.

BY BOB SMITH

Last weekend our next door neighbors had a guy power washing their house, patio, and outdoor furniture. It didn’t look like a particularly glamorous chore, but it was effective: sheets of brownish water cascaded from the house, and the place virtually sparkled when he was done.

I casually asked how much the service had cost, and they told me it was $650. But then I checked pressure washer prices online at Home Depot, and found I could buy my own power washer for about $400. Because I’m now retired, I saw no reason to pay a $250 premium for a job I could readily do myself. And if I do the job every year, I’ll save that much more.

So on Monday I bought a Ryobi brand power washer with a Honda gasoline motor that pumps out 2.5 gallons of water per minute, under 3,100 hefty pounds of pressure. And I quickly discovered that it also delivers something they don’t specify on the box: tons of fun.

As boys, my brother and I had high-quality magnifying glasses we’d salvaged from a never-used science kit Mom gave us for Christmas. If you held it at just the right angle, the lens focused the sun’s rays into an intense, white-hot beam that you could use to inflict a nasty pinpoint burn on your unsuspecting brother’s arm (precipitating more than one fistfight), or to start fires in piles of dead leaves. Or you could play God.

Magnifying glasses in hand, we would go out on a hot summer day looking for ants. Not solo meandering ants, but thousands of ants in a boiling pile, massed on a melting ice pop or glob of gum stuck to the sidewalk. If you held the glass five inches above the ants and got a good focused beam going, you could sweep it slowly across the pile, instantly crisping every ant in its path. As the beam advanced, the unlucky ants would give off a minuscule wisp of smoke, then twist, wither and fall under the writhing mass of their brethren.

“It’s a death ray!” Jim laughed gleefully. “It’s a laser beam from the sky, like if a flying saucer came by right now and started zapping us!”

While it sobered us momentarily, that image didn’t abate our enthusiasm for the grisly task at hand. Ants are slightly alien anyway, and there are millions of them, so mass murder seemed appropriate. It was exhilarating and empowering – just like my new power washer.

I hooked up the water supply, filled the tank with gas, and fired it up. The motor idled, deceptively tame, until I picked up the long metal wand and pulled the plastic trigger. The engine immediately belched to a high-pitched roar, and water jetted from the end of the hose with such force that the wand recoiled, dancing in my hands.

I tried it on the narrowest setting and the needle of water promptly etched ragged quarter-inch deep lines into the artificial wood of our deck. But when I dialed it down to a wider setting and directed the pulsing spray at the vinyl fencing around our back deck, the result was miraculous. Years of dirt and green mildew that would have taken tedious hours to scrub off by hand was blown away in minutes by the power washer’s brute force.

Then I turned to the picnic table and benches, which are pressure-treated wood that I’ve never bothered to stain or varnish in the decade we’ve owned them. The salesman rightly said you didn’t have to because the wood, even unfinished, doesn’t rot like untreated wood. But it does become “weathered” over time, which means (thanks to the rampant growth of all forms of mold), it turns from its original cinnamon brown to an ugly, blotchy black/greenish gray.

Enter the power washer – wand of watery death for mold spores living on wood.

If I set the spray width just right and held the wand close enough to the surface, I could blast paths of greenish mold off the wood with a single pass. Once again, I held incredible power in my hands.

Only no ants or other potentially sentient creatures were injured or killed this time around (unless you consider mold spores intelligent life). Giddy with power, I sprayed every square inch of every bench; every table; every piece of grimy vinyl in the yard. I even cleaned the concrete sidewalks.

It was great being a boy again.

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Happy Mother’s Day to Mom and Her “…isms”

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men

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Bob Smith, Men, Mother's Day, The Write Side of 50

My brother (top), my mother, and me.

BY BOB SMITH

Why, when we were kids, did our mothers all seem to say the same things to us? Was there a playbook, or were they just passing on the same things their moms had said to them? Are mothers today reading from that same script, or have new momisms crept into the lexicon?

In any event, in honor of Mother’s Day, here are a few of my mom’s classic zingers:

I’d done something stupid like smashed a lamp with a baseball bat or duct-taped my little sister’s hand to the coffee table, and Mom had caught me (and crying little sister) red-handed.

“What’s this, Bobby? What did you do? You wait till your father gets home.”

Just that ominous, amorphous threat. No spanking; no banishment to my bedroom for the rest of the day (which would have been real punishment). This was the 1960s, after all, long before smartphones, computers with Internet, TV’s, and video games had turned kids’ bedrooms into electronic pleasure arcades. My bedroom was furnished with my bed, my brother’s bed, two nightstands with lamps, a dresser, and a shared electric alarm clock. That’s it – not even a radio. If you were sent to your room, you could read all day, or count the cracks in the ceiling, but little else.

For a sensitive, impressionable eight year old like me, delayed sanctions were an incredibly effective tactic. First I felt guilty because although I’d done wrong, Mom hadn’t yet punished me directly. But then the mental punishment set in. I stood in the shadows by the side of our house waiting for the endless afternoon hours to tick by, steeped in guilty thoughts and vague, free-form anxiety about the expected retribution at Dad’s hands. I wanted the time to pass, so it would be over with, but there was no relief.

When Dad finally got home I trudged into the kitchen and stood staring at my sneakers, expecting the worst. And Mom said nothing. The crime was forgotten! I looked at Mom, and she nodded knowingly at me – she hadn’t forgotten at all. This time around, my only punishment had been the agonizing anticipation of punishment, unfulfilled. We both knew that the next time I did wrong, she could make me suffer all day, and then either stay execution again, or drop the dad-hammer on me anyway. And I owed her one for this time, too. Brilliant.

Here’s another favorite: Two or three of us were fooling around, throwing sofa seat cushions at each other, and Mom shut us down.

“What’re you kids doing? Those aren’t toys. Put those cushions back right now.”

Chastened, we started gathering up the pillows, and out of nervousness or just a frivolity hangover, I started giggling uncontrollably. Mom didn’t appreciate my attitude.

“What’re you laughin’ at? You’ll be laughing out the other side of your mouth in a minute!”

What does that even mean? I thought it meant she’d smack me (“I’ll smack you one!”), thereby displacing the grin from half my face. This called to mind the incongruous image of one side of my face laughing while the other side streamed tears, which I tried to emulate by simultaneously frowning on one side and laughing archly on the other, which made me laugh even more.

Which brought on the next momism: “You better wipe that smile off your face, young man.”

Which I emulated by theatrically swiping my hand down the “laughing” side of my face, which made me laugh more still. Which resulted in Mom giving me a sharp smack across my bottom, which made me really cry with my whole face. She hadn’t hit me all that hard. I was crying more out of shame, and surprise, than pain. Which prompted the next momism:

“What’re you cryin for? Come here, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Which finally shut me up. And one of my all time favorites, for whenever one of us couldn’t find something that was right in front of us, as in this classic case of refrigerator blindness:

“Bobby, grab the mayonnaise.”

“I can’t find it,” I mumbled, staring listlessly into the open refrigerator.

“It’s right here,” Mom snapped, brushing past me to grab the jar screaming HELLMANN’S in big blue letters, front and center on the top shelf. “If it had teeth it would’ve bit you.” My brothers and sisters around the dinner table started giggling, and failing to wipe the smiles off their faces, they were soon laughing out the other side of their mouths.

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Hollywood’s Wild West Has Nothing on the Real Thing

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men, Travel

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Photo by Frank Terranella.

Nothing says “Out West” like Monument Valley, in Arizona. Ever since John Ford’s time, directors have flocked to this site located on Navajo land to film westerns. Being here is like being on a backlot. Yet, it’s real, and that authenticity can’t be reproduced in Hollywood.

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Out West, Where the Weather is Vertical

02 Friday May 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men, Travel

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Frank Terranella, Men, The Write Side of 50, Travel

photo 1

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the prime benefits of travel is to experience the unfamiliar. For example, if you want to see what it would be like to drive on the left side of the road, you need to travel to a British Commonwealth country. And if you want to see the Aurora Borealis, you need to travel to the far North.

Living in the New York area, we are accustomed to little variations in altitude. No matter where you start from, you never experience more than about a thousand-foot variation in altitude within 50 miles of New York. Even traveling to the nearby Pocono or Catskill “mountains” does not significantly change things. These are mere foothills compared to what they have in Colorado. In fact, the entire city of Denver is at a higher altitude than any of the peaks in the Catskills or Poconos.

So since New Yorkers have no concept of altitude, we don’t think of weather depending on altitude. This was brought home to me recently while traveling in Northern Arizona. We were driving from the Grand Canyon to Zion National Park in Utah. As we started our drive, it was raining lightly. This was fine for several hours, but then we began to climb up towards Zion, and suddenly, as we crossed over 7,000 feet, we were in a ferocious snowstorm.

photo 2

This lasted only until we descended down to 5,000 feet, and then it was light rain again. We were seeing first-hand that weather is vertical. That’s why out West, the weather forecasts don’t simply say that such-and-such an area will have certain weather. They say that the weather will be X, but above 6,000 feet it will be Y, and above 7,000 feet it will be Z. And this is all in the same town! We just don’t have weather like that in the New York area. Our weather is horizontal, not vertical.

The next day, it was a beautiful sunny day as we began our drive in Zion National Park at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. We were on a short drive to a mountain lake. As the road began to climb, we noticed that the temperature was dropping. At 6,000 feet it was 55 degrees. By the time we got to 8,000 feet it was 34 degrees. But the biggest shock was that, in 30 minutes, the terrain went from a green springtime pasture to a snow-covered winter wonderland.

The road actually became impassable with snow, and we had to turn around and go back, or risk being stuck there. Yes, weather is vertical out West, and that’s a foreign mindset for many of us. But experiencing the foreign is why we travel. And it’s usually a lot of fun!

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Rock Art in Sedona

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by WS50 in Art, Men, Travel

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Arizona, Art, Bird sculpture, Frank Terranella, Men, red rocks, Sedona, The Write Side of 50, Travel

Sedona, Arizona.

Sedona, Arizona.

Our resident blogger, Frank Terranella, is on a road trip out West. Before he left, we asked that he send photos so that we could experience his experience vicariously. This one shows one of the rock formations in Sedona, Arizona.

“What intrigued me is the bird-like figure in the rock,” he wrote. “I have no idea who did this, or if anyone did it.”

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An Epitaph for a Friend

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men

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Tags

Bob Smith, Men, The Write Side of 50

sky 1

BY BOB SMITH

As we move into our 50s and 60s, and beyond, the loss of old friends becomes a regular part of life. Liver cancer recently took Little Richie, a kid I knew who was a year ahead of me in high school. This is my personal epitaph for him.

Richie was short and skinny – barely five foot two and 90 pounds, on tiptoes, soaking wet. But he wore his black hair in a dramatic pompadour that added at least three inches in height, and his personality made up for the rest. Richie not only acted like he didn’t realize he was small, he came on like the biggest, baddest guy in the room.

That’s not to say that no one stood up to him – every few months, Richie would show up sporting a black eye that told us he’d pushed some over-muscled classmate a bit too far, and paid the price. But if you weren’t willing to resort to brute physical force, Richie would mercilessly rule you with his cackling laugh and caustic wit. Even after they’d pounded him, Richie would mock the guys who’d beaten him up for not having had the guts to pick on someone their own size.

Despite his “little guy” scrappiness, we liked Richie. He was generous, and would readily share his cigarettes or beer or whatever with you. And if you needed to borrow 10 bucks, Richie was right there.

And he was the best poker player I’ve ever seen, hands down. During summer vacations in high school, my brother, and a few of our friends, including Little Richie, would walk to the local golf course in the early morning to “catch a loop.” At the end of the day, with 20 or 30 dollars’ worth of caddying money in our pockets, we’d stop off in the woods at the end of our block for some dime-ante poker. With a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Little Richie would crisply shuffle the deck and snap out cards to each of us, accompanied by incisive commentary.

“Five – no help. Three – total pond water. Deuces – not wild, sucker! Big queen – three to the straight. On you, Bobby. You gonna bet that shit, or check to the guys with balls?”

He would loudly analyze everyone’s cards, and if you took his comments to heart, he could goad you into betting or shame you into quiet submission. If you listened to Little Richie, you were playing his game, and you were doomed.

More than once, I’d seen him on a terrible losing streak, down 20 dollars, or more (in a dime-ante game, that was a lot of money), and then suddenly he’d change the course of the game just by the force of will. He’d bluff everyone out, and take big pots of money he didn’t deserve – taunting us at the end by turning over his cards with a flourish.

“A measly pair a threes! I had shit,” he laughed as he raked in the cash. “You pussies!”

The next hand he’d bluster, and bet so extravagantly we were sure it was another bluff, so we’d all stay in, feeding the pot, and he’d pull out a powerhouse hand, and win again. When he was on those runs he played as if possessed. And even though it was costing me money, it was thrilling – like watching a tightrope walker dancing on the wire who gets to the other side, then turns around and does it again and again.

After high school, everyone drifted off to college or full time jobs, and we lost touch with Little Richie. He appeared one summer afternoon in the ’90s, pulling up in a super-expensive, brand new metallic blue Corvette. He clambered out through the open T-top looking gaunt, his black hair windswept and frazzled.

“How ya doin, Bobby?”

“Richie – hey! Great. Nice car. What’re you up to?”

“Real estate. Project development, that kind of shit,” he rattled on about deals and margins and how he had lots of irons in the fire.

He had that coke-addict look, racing along in his own dimension, while the rest of us in the real world were slogging by at half speed. As he flicked open his silver Zippo lighter to fire up a smoke, you could see a hint of a tremor in his hand. He took off after a few minutes, promising to come by again soon. I never saw him again.

Some said it was his dabbling in heroin that messed up his liver. Who knows. I just know that if there’s an afterlife, Little Richie is there madly hustling someone or something, and busting everyone’s chops. And probably getting his ass kicked for it.

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My “Youth-of-Old-Age” Days are Numbered

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by WS50 in Concepts, Men

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bob Smith, Men, The Write Side of 50

frames 290

BY BOB SMITH

At the gym the other day, I overheard a woman complaining that it was her birthday again, and that it seemed as if she had just turned 40 six months ago.  I assume this meant she was turning 50, which was confirmed when her male friend offered this consolation:

“They say 40 is the old age of youth, but 50 is the youth of old age.”

The quote is attributed to the famous French writer Victor Hugo, but I don’t think the guy at the gym had any idea of its source.  He just liked the way it sounded, and thought it would comfort his friend as she turned 50.

The logic of the Hugo quote seems completely accurate, and it even seems to apply to the rest of your life. Let’s ignore the years from 0 to 20 as “childhood.” (You might break it down to “infancy” from 0 – 3, “childhood” from 3 – 11, and “young adulthood” from 12 – 20, but all that’s so far in the past, does it really matter?)

Most of us would agree that in your 20s, you’re enjoying “youth.” Anything is possible. You have limitless energy, and your career and life could go in any direction you choose. The decade flies by and you make whatever choices you make – maybe commit to a partner and/or job, and settle down a bit.  But you’re barely a full-fledged adult – after all, you can still vividly recall your teens.

Then come your 30s – the middle age of youth, when you still feel like you’re 20-something, but you’ve acquired added responsibilities, and a propensity for gaining weight, that belie that. Then you turn 40, still feeling like you’re in your mid-30s, but aches and pains creep in here and there, and that propensity for gaining weight you’d noted in your 30s has turned into a 15-pound bulge that stubbornly clings to your waistline, butt, and/or thighs that won’t budge without a serious commitment to eating less, and exercising more. A lot less. And a lot more. You’re still considered young, but you’re pushing the boundary – you’re in the old age of youth.

Then come the 50s. Whatever was going wrong in your 40s, if you didn’t fix it somehow before turning 50, becomes institutionalized.  If you were fat, you get a little fatter.  If you had aches and pains occasionally, they become chronic.  White hair gets whiter, sparse hair sparser, ear and nose hair coarser. You can still do pretty much everything you used to do, only more slowly and less often. It’s the youth of old age because you’re not really old, and hey, for your age, you look pretty good!

But as I approach 60 this September, the quote is ominous because if my 50s were the youth of my old age, my 60s will be the middle age of old age.  And then at 70, I’ll be just plain old. And suppose I live into my 80s or beyond? What’s that – advanced old age?

So the end of the youth of my old age feels significant because it’s the last time I’ll be able to describe myself as any form of “youth.”

But what’s the big deal?  Part of the beauty of getting older is that, out of necessity, you learn how to roll with the punches. I’ll take it in stride, just as I have every other milestone year until now. 

Like Francis Bacon, “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”

And as Mark Twain said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

As long as I’m reasonably cogent and ambulatory, I really don’t mind at all.

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The Pursuit of the Perfect Easter Egg Hunt

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by WS50 in Men

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bob Smith, Easter Egg Hunt, Men, The Write Side of 50

Easter Bob

All the eggs in one basket.

BY BOB SMITH

When our kids were little – like 7, 5, and 1 – we started a tradition of hiding eggs for them to find on Easter morning. Vincent was too small to participate that year, but Bobby and Abby happily ran around the living room, dining room, and family room ferreting out the colored hard-boiled eggs Maria and I had hidden the night before under sofa cushions, on top of picture frames, and on the windowsills behind the drapes.

But trouble quickly developed. Bobby, older and by nature more competitive, discovered twice as many as Abby, and quickly exhausted the cache of eggs to be found. He proudly displayed the eight eggs that were “his” as Abby mournfully moped over her paltry three. And to top it off, Abby had found the “rotten egg” – the one egg we deliberately made ugly by dipping it repeatedly into each of the red, green, yellow, and blue dye cups until it was a nauseating, mottled gray-brown. Finding that egg was not a good thing.

We quickly moved on from real eggs to fake eggs for the Easter morning hunt, and relegated the “rotten egg” to a place of shame in the center of the communal Easter basket on the dining room table. The “eggs” we now hid were plastic, and came in festive spring colors. Approximately the size of real eggs, they snapped apart into two pieces at the middle so you could fill them with jelly beans, M&M’s, or Hershey’s Kisses. These were immensely popular with the kids, because whoever found the most eggs got the most candy.

And again, the two older kids (now 9 and 7 to Vincent’s 3) dominated the finding-game, with Bobby edging out Abby by a fairly wide margin. Because Vincent was so small we convinced the older two to leave a few eggs behind for him, lest he be left with nothing.

But the system was still flawed.

After only one season using that model, we started labeling the plastic eggs with a dot of masking tape on each with a handwritten “B,” “A,” or “V” so each kid would know whose eggs were whose. If you found someone else’s egg, you left it in place and could taunt your sibling when they had a hard time finding it. Anyone unlucky enough to have eggs still hidden when the other two had found all theirs had to endure the “you’re getting warm … warmer … now cooler, etc.” game to locate their final eggs.

As the kids got a little older, mere candy in the eggs wasn’t sufficient inducement for the hunt, so we started loading the eggs with money. Because of fierce sibling rivalry, we strictly counted out the same number of eggs for each kid and distributed the same amount of money among their eggs. I think we started with a total of $20 per kid when they were smaller, and progressed to a total of $50 in each kid’s eggs every year.

But shortly after we started with the plastic eggs, there was a year when even Maria and I couldn’t remember where we had hidden them all, resulting in a frustrating 15 minutes that Easter morning with the whole family poking around under the furniture.

The next year we kept a detailed list. Late on Easter Eve, Maria and I filled the plastic eggs with cash and candy and then walked around the house together, one of us with a basket of labeled eggs for hiding, and the other following with a legal pad and pen, noting the location of every egg in each room.

It had taken us a number of years, but at last we had a foolproof egg-hiding system. It was fair, because the kids all got the same number of eggs and quantity of cash, and their eggs were labeled so no one could poach. And because of our master list, no one got shorted even if Maria and I were too muddled to remember where the heck we’d squirreled away all those eggs.

Soon the kids were all teenagers, going through the motions of enjoying the Easter morning egg hunt just to please us. They were in it only for the cash. Sometimes one or all of them wouldn’t even roll out of bed until almost noon, leaving no time for the egg hunt before Maria and I had to start preparing Easter dinner. Eventually the tradition died away entirely, and we just gave each of them Easter cards with a little cash gift.

But should grandchildren ever appear at our house on Easter, we’ll be ready. I’m sure those plastic eggs are someplace in the basement, too. I just have to find them.

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