Easter at Sea
As I sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, aboard the Research Drill Ship, JOIDES Resolution, my mind drifts to where I want to be. "A job is a job", "a man has to do what a man has to do", and any of a number of other cliches fit my situation. But let's not talk about that right now.
Easter is upon us, and that gives me one more reason to be homesick. I'm thinking about that table full of too much food, that Stacy will insist on making, no matter that it could feed the whole block. And I'm thinking of the feeling that, I have to eat at least a little bit of everything, whether I can fit it in my stomach or not. And, I'm thinking about when the meal is over, how I would lay back in my recliner with the clicker in my right hand, the television on something nobody wants to watch and me asleep. And, I'm homesick.
Not only am I homesick for home, but I'm homesick for back home. You know, "back home", where I come from. I guess that's more of a time than a place. A time when TV remotes clicked, sending a an audio tone to a sensor on the television, which would make a motor turn the channel knob. I remember that if you could whistle just right, you could make the TV change channels. Of course this was to pester whomever was watching what was on at the time.
Holidays at my grandparents were the same, but all the men ate at the dining room table and all the women ate at the kitchen table. That ended the first time Stacy came along to the holiday meal. She sat down beside me at the dining table. She didn't know any better, but after a few brief odd glances from everyone else at the table, including me, tradition had changed.
Then of course there was the Easter egg hunt in the back yard. After, lining the kids up for pictures in their new Easter clothes, holding their baskets in front. The kids would all play tag or hide and seek. No playstation or xbox, not even atari in the early days. Grownups would sit around the kicthen table for hours talking, and many times a game of forty-two.
It doesn't really happen like that anymore, but then again it does. Traditions change. Familys grow and start their on limbs off the family tree. They start their own traditions, shaped by combined pasts. I don't like change much, but I realize that someday these will be the good old days. I look back and see that some of the new traditions have become old traditions. And sometimes the old traditions become new again. Even today my dad still calls the remote a clicker. I find myself calling it that too, especially when I think of "back home".
Happy Easter
