Easter 2026 and a different kind of re-birth

Saturday, April 4th, 10:00 am. I was sitting on the porch smelling the fragrant hyacinths on the bistro table and feeling the cool and gentle breeze blowing through the still bare branches of my trees. Rarely do I feel nostalgia for my childhood. My father was despotic. He was devoted and jolly but also a bully and a tyrant. I know that this is not a rare occurrence and I have read many memoirs of others, including many men who had this experience with their fathers, for example, Allen Cumming. I forgive my father because he did provide for us, but his temper and his violence were a blight upon my childhood. Truly I can remember thinking to myself with despair that it was going to be years before I would grow up and be able to get away. I loved my father and I feared him. He was unpredictable and dangerous.

Nonetheless one of the spirits abroad in the years after I was born in 1945 was a post war EXHUBERANCE! It was over! The war was over, the husbands, father's, brothers, sons and uncles and all the women serving in the forces were returned home again and there was Prosperity. The economy was bursting to build and supply the new things the unionized and well paid survivors who were working now had money to buy. The austerity of the war years was over - it was abundance that infused the culture now

My mother was pregnant the day she marched in the neighborhood parade celebrating VE Day! She carried a tall flag pole. The death and destruction was ended and now RE-BIRTH! All over the world, people were picking up the pieces and starting anew.

Perhaps few books symbolize this period better than the SEARS Catalog - the wish fulfullment book! It was so fat - fatter than the telephone book! And it had EVERYTHING - furniture, clothes, appliances, every form of fabric item from curtains to sheets to cothing, shoes, hats, and TOYS! More toys than we ever knew existed! Houses were being built in new developments all over the countryside and cars were being built to carry the families out of the cramped and damp and teeming cities to those new houses in the green and shady suburbs. We bought a house in the city, then we bought a house across the river in New Jersey! New Jersey was just across the river but it was a world away from the brick canyons of South Philadelphia under the tall smoke stacks of Publicker's whiskey manufacturer and the oil refineries - all concrete and asphalt, dark smoky sky and lifeless vistas. New Jersey was the Garden State! And when we got there, we gardened! The Victory garden of the war years became the vegetable garden behind our brand new three bedroom suburban house. And we had a pantry into which all the bountiful produce could be stored after it was poached, and sealed into sterilized Ball jars for use in the winter. We had trees and birds and flowers, fields and even a Creek! Pennsauken Creek.

My parents got stout in the new stout world. My mother got appliances - a washer and dryer. And we got a new tv and then a stereo in a beautiful wooden cabinet. I had my own bedroom.

My father was intelligent and his experiences had taught him to refine his native abilities so that he rose through the company where he worked and we had plenty - plenty of everything. He worked overtime all the time and "brought home the bacon" and my mother treated him like a king and she was thrilled and satisfied to be a home-maker in her beautiful new home nicer than she had ever imagined she would have with all her new stuff. Her creativity was used in upholstering and curtain making. She literally was a home-maker! She made our home beautiful guided by the many magazines to which she subscribed: Better Homes and Gardens, Woman's Day, and all the old ones we'd had in the City, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic.

With her new friends who lived along the 'cul de sac' of Roland Avenue in Maple Shade, she went to the Cherry Hill Mall - a new and amazing museum to opulent purchasing. Every morning the ladies, all of them stay-at-home mothers - (I never knew a mother who worked outside the home during my childhood) gathered in my mother's dining room with the percolator and Steve the Breadman's boxes of donuts and their menthol cigarettes to drink coffee and chat, about babies, husbands, houses. They seemed happy. At least they seemed happy to me, a child, staying home from school to spy on them. I barely remember what they talked about, but I don't think it was dissatisfaction. At least not then.

As a family, in our stationwagon, we would go to SEARS in Camden and shop. SEARS was the farm field in which all the glistening products of fertility and re-birth were blooming and harvested and ready for us to buy. We bought our Easter outfits there, everything from my white straw boater, patent leather Maryjane shoes, petticoat and dress, little duster if it was a cold spring and my gloves and purse. My brother got his little suit and his shoes, and my mother and father their new outfits for the Easter church attendance where everyone would be dressed in their NEW outfits to welcome the new year, the new decade, the new era! We had left the Depression and the War and we were entering the BABY BOOM - the 1950's, which for all its faults was a wonderful decade, a decade devoted to the family. Family day vacation spots rose all over in New Jersey - lakes with picnic areas and row boats and dance pavilions with juke boxes, motels with swimming pools on the way to the seashore! Everything brand spanking new!

A new kind of re-birth. And that is what I miss now that I am 80 and my life is coming to its close, my own winter. I miss that exuberance and the beginning of things, the prosperity and the joy and relief. I miss being young and excited by shiny new things. I miss the opening of the world that was to be my life. Happy Easter everyone - Happy Spring! wrightj45@yahoo.com