Unorthodox Easter

(Originally Posted, April 8)

Living as I do in the giant yellow spaceship, I am often oblivious to pretty much everything outside my very narrow sphere of work-related activities. After all, it has now been 26 days since I've had a full off day and I am looking at 13 more days in UCA orbit before I can flee the spaceship and make a run for it.

That's why I was oblivious to the fact that today is Easter. At this point most Americans I know would send me a note on Messenger to see if I might be able to leave the yellow spaceship as soon as possible as it appears I could be suffering from the kind of space/time disorientation syndrome that afflicts astronauts, college students, ER doctors, and binge Netflix watchers, all of whom being groups who don't keep regular, reasonable hours.

Before you send me your worried messages, I can explain. Today actually is Easter--in the Orthodox Christian calendar. Protestants and Catholics celebrate Easter one week earlier because they follow the Gregorian calendar, while the Orthodox church uses the ancient Julian calendar, no longer utilized in the West. I became aware of this discrepancy when some of my Kazakh students came to me to request a place to dye Easter eggs a couple days ago.

So, today I decided to celebrate a second Easter as I had observed Protestant Easter last week by walking near the local mosque and wondering if the Easter message could survive another year of this planet and all its nonsense. But today I could celebrate Orthodox Easter because however I celebrated it, I had nothing to compare it to and so I couldn't become disillusioned when my reality did not meet any possible expectation I might have.

I spent most of Orthodox Easter as my Grandmother Krauss would have spent any holiday: in the kitchen. Why is it I am resembling my grandmother more with each passing day? That's a frightening thought. At least I am not following her practice of clipping K-Mart coupons or saving hundreds of empty yogurt cups for some undisclosed purpose.

I started my cooking Easter, by making an intricate omelet with red peppers, green onions, and three different cheeses. My unorthodox, Orthodox Easter continued with me making chili (so that I could use my red, green, and yellow peppers that were starting to age a bit--another grandmotherly thing to do), and I finished by baking a cornbread. I am not absolutely certain, but I would bet a large sum of money that making chili and cornbread does not represent customary Orthodox tradition.

Fortunately, my unorthodox Easter contained a small moment that has been a part of Orthodox Easter for centuries. The two Kazakh students who had requested a place to dye their eggs knocked on my door, just as I was about to cut into my freshly-baked cornbread. They were holding a platter of beautiful painted eggs and asked me if I wanted one. Indeed, I did.

As I sat and ate my unorthodox meal, I looked at the egg sitting on my table. At that moment the yellow spaceship seemed slightly less confining and I was pleased to realize that, through all my disillusionment, a platter of eggs might just contain a tiny, unexpected hint of the Easter message after all.