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.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2009.