Easter Dinner

I had Easter dinner at my sister’s last weekend, celebrating a weird amalgam of ancient pagan fertility ritual and relatively modern Christianity. 

“Happy Easter!” a woman walking a dog chirped cheerily at me as I hiked in the woods before heading off to dinner.

“I’m Jewish,” I said, in an overly loud voice, matching her cheery good will with an excess of my own, while still letting a little barely contained malevolence leak through.

I followed my long walk on a perfect spring day with a killer nap and a huge cup of coffee.  I was in a good mood, rested and primed for any conflict that might come my way, as I entered my sister’s house for the family extravaganza.  My sister is brazenly pursuing the almighty dollar and managed to work in how much her house was worth in the first 15 minutes of my visit, adding a sweet twenty-five percent increase to the amount they paid for it just a year ago.  I should be so lucky with my own property appreciation, especially in an era of declining real estate prices. She also managed to work in the conversation that my brother in law really isn’t into “things.”  I looked around the huge house and the three cars in the driveway and wondered about her definition of “things.” 

This is what we in the business of immature and self-centered behavior call a “trigger,” which translated roughly means “something that really pisses me off for no good reason.”  It didn’t have that effect this time although I carefully noted the egregious transgression for future use.  If I feel like working up a good bitching fit I want to make sure I have a large cache of transgressions to access.  Why someone else’s attitudes about money would have anything whatsoever to do with me is a mystery I’ll have to delve into at some future date. 

Things:  A tangible object, as distinguished from a concept, quality, etc.; as the book is a thing; it's color is a quality.

To be honest with you, instead of lying like I normally do, the whole day was fine.  My sister is a good person and so is my brother-in-law, which is what I needed to concentrate on, instead of her irrelevant money stories.  My nieces are normal and happy.  My sister simply likes money more than I do, which works out pretty well for me since I so enjoy judging other people.  Almost as much as I enjoy feeling superior to them.  I like being self-righteous, too.  And I have many other impressive qualities that I don't have time to go into today.

But I do it better than you – whatever “it” is – unless your values and morals are as high as mine, which is beyond impossible.

It:  An object of indefinite sense in certain idiomatic expressions: as, to lord it over someone.

Let the great world spin, I thought.

My sister entertains a lot.  Fancy entertaining with decorations and trendy hor dourves  and people showing up fashionably late, dressed  carelessly in expensive clothes that they are dying to tell you how much they paid for but hope you ask them first which you don’t do because you’re hoping they ask you about your clothes, which they never do, the bitches.  I think that family functions are more of an obligatory burden for her, a task she feels compelled to undertake but derives very little pleasure from, unless someone asks her how much she paid for something.  I quit hosting them long ago because the No Alcohol In My House regulation quashed the hilarity but good and ushered people out the door so fast it made my head spin.  Plus, I didn’t enjoy the whole atmosphere of artificial camaraderie so my sour mood probably didn’t add to the hilarity, either.

One holiday dinner at my sister’s I emphasized that I’d be happy to help out any way I could since she always hosted the meals.

“You want to help out?” she said, a little too quickly, as if she had thought this through and was debating whether to bring it up or not.  “Write me a check for twenty five bucks.”

I was stunned into silence, which is not easy to do.  I had no snappy comeback.  I sent her the check.  She cashed it without comment.  I thought of this, chuckling at the lack of food at dinner.  My elderly parents split a dinner roll and I had a light meal when I got home that night.  I bet this doesn’t happen when she does her fancy entertaining with her hip and beautiful suburb-mates.

I had a good time on Easter.  Can you imagine if it was a bad time?

Maybe a 2500 mile buffer zone is about right.