Daily Loaf

To think of you brings tears less caustic
than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps
we meet our heaven at the start and not
the end of life.
—John Updike, from “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth” (2009)

At Easter our family turned toward jellybeans. We also had baskets with colored eggs, chocolate rabbits and, sometimes, flowers. But it was the jellybean hunt that caught the imagination and energy of our four children as they hopped through the rooms, looking on the windowsills, along the bookshelves, under the phone. Through the years they got faster and faster at finding them — heaven help any youngster who joined them in the chase! The visiting child would stand in the middle of the floor, spinning like a weathervane on a gusty day as our kids raced back and forth filling their little baskets, triumphant when they found “difficult” ones, like a licorice jellybean on a black piano key.

Even to us, this happy shrieking sometimes sounded barbaric, as we contemplated the dark catastrophe of the crucifixion and resurrection in the midst of this pagan revelry. The jellybean, being a symbol of a symbol, is pretty far from the original story. The egg symbolizes rebirth, the jellybean symbolizes the egg; we’re getting close to stem cells here. To complicate matters, we always ate the eggs we colored, which, while economically sound, is religiously delicate. Even, or perhaps especially, in the two years we lived abroad, exotic eggs were prominent. In 1972, in Neuchatel, Switzerland, the stars of the show were the dark chocolate eggs from the nearby Suchard factory. But in 1979, in communist Warsaw, the wooden Polish Easter eggs seemed closer to the original spirit: surprising, gorgeous, complicated and creative.

I sometimes tell our friends that we’re bi-religious:  I’m agnostic & Jeanne’s vegetarian (she claims that means I don’t know what I’m eating).  Actually, we’re still nominal Christians, and were steady churchgoers in our youth (Methodist and Lutheran, respectively) — our children attended the Unitarian Church in St. Petersburg — but we feel tugged toward a steadily enlarging limbo: a recent survey said that 16 percent of Americans, over 20 million (more than Mormons, Jews or Muslims) claim to be agnostics or atheists, the fastest growth occurring not in swinging California, but in the highly educated northeast. One odd note: in addition to this being a fast-growing number, a recent survey said this group has one of the country’s lowest divorce rates (the Bible Belt has the highest).   We’ve been married 51 years, so we say, somewhat pusillanimously, Thank God for that. I like the Arab saying, Trust in Allah, but tie your camel to a tree.

A scientist friend of ours, an atheist, claimed that agnostics were just cowardly atheists. But I think agnostics are more realistic, and less puffed up:  who really knows these things, except Rush Limbaugh? It’s true that the various religions today carry a lot of unbelievable baggage (though they make lovely or scary stories), and a great many religious leaders support the war, “intelligent” design, patriarchy, censorship and other dubious causes; still, the origin of the world, with its wildly different creation myths, does seem like a miracle. Maybe if you grant one miracle, you can accept others, though 72 virgins is pushing it.

John Updike was more of a hoper than a believer, but he was a churchgoer; he loved the Bible stories and, like the poets Edgar Allan Poe and Phillip Larkin before him, deeply feared the thought of death everlasting, so he played with various interpretations. One of the most charming is his idea (above) that maybe heaven comes first for us, instead of last. Before I read that, I’d never thought of Brooklyn as heaven (except maybe in 1955 when the Dodgers finally won the World Series), but as I look back on my urban childhood, it does seem mythically sweet. At any rate, any real heaven would have fewer wingéd adults playing harps, and more happy children hunting for jellybeans.

—Peter Meinke (www.petermeinke.com) is still fond of licorice jellybeans; his latest collection of stories is Unheard Music, published by Jefferson Press. The following is a poem from his 1991 collection Liquid Paper.

Easter in Neuchâtel
The rosy-fingered dawn
is at it again I said   You said
pouring our coffee  Let’s believe
in home and Homer   Just then
the clouds were lifting  and the Alps
in morning splendor raised their heads
or hoods  like God’s own cowlèd monks

Hosanna!   Hosanna!
Our mountains nudge us to believe
in something  the romantic
wishbone aching like Grandma’s wrist
before a rain   Beyond our sight
on clumps of rocks and chunks
of mountainside  rosettes

of saxifrage and campanula
cling in their pure design
celebrating spring   It’s Easter!
and the whitewashed Alps  baptized
by the vernal equinox
chart in jagged graph our dizzying swing
between the movable peaks of faith and feast

- from Liquid Paper, © 1991 by Peter Meinke
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