I’m glad Sister Rosanna is dead. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not really glad, because Sister Rosanna was my very favorite nun. In fact, if she were alive today, I would bring her to Maine so she could see how well I’ve turned out. Well, maybe that’s not such a good idea.
But I’m just glad she’s not visiting me here in Maine and shopping with me tonight.
Because I couldn’t handle seeing her expression when we walked down aisle 10 in my favorite supermarket together, passing all that Easter candy. There it was, right there with all the Cadbury eggs, row after row of assorted candy eggs, jelly bean eggs, chocolate bunnies the size of a small child. A chocolate cross.
WAIT! WHAT? CHOCOLATE CROSS? Not just one, but six boxes of them, all in yellow boxes with cellophane windows like iPhones or plastic razors.
Now I’m a long way from being the little Catholic boy who wanted to be a priest when he grew up. (That ship sailed the summer day at the public pool when I laid eyes on Rosemary De Branco, she of the one piece royal purple swimsuit and white fudge hair.) But I have enough of the dogma still in me to be taken aback at such a sight. I could have tried to avert Sister’s gaze, but that would have been impossible. She had the legendary eyes in the back of her head. But this. OMG. A chocolate cross.
It could have been worse. Thank God it was just a cross, the plain kind Protestants have in their churches, empty, without the body of Jesus nailed to it.
I was born and raised directly across the street from the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Those Sisters were almost like real blood sisters to the Devines. We always rushed across to the gardens where they strolled, to show off our loot on Christmas day or birthdays, and especially on Easter.
My sisters were eager, after Mass, to rush over and show their favorite Sisters their new Easter dresses, shoes and bonnets. Of course they proudly took their Easter baskets full of colored eggs and big chocolate bunnies with them. Naturally, the Sisters, smiling and polite, complimented all the girls of the neighborhood, but there was always one, and usually that was Sister John Bosco, the mother superior, she with eyes like Crazy Joey Gallo, a powerful woman who never had to use a ruler or raise her voice. Just the sound of her waist beads clicking as she came down the hall was enough to freeze your saliva. At the gate on Easter, she would ask the inevitable question.
“Can anyone here tell us the true meaning of Easter?” There was usually a moment of silence as everyone looked at one another until Sister pointed to someone like Nina Karenbrock, the oldest girl in the bunch, who already had a bad tic and stutter.
“Nina?”
“It’s about the dead Jesus getting up and walking out of the hole,” Nina replied. Well, it was something like that, a broken, stuttering, terrified reply. Sister John Bosco simply took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a long moment. Now that I think of it, she always did that, exactly like that. I never gave much thought to it until I married She who used to do the same exact thing when I tried to explain why I put some silverware away with food still on it.
Chocolate coating religious symbols isn’t new. While in San Francisco in the ’50s, my bunkmate Arthur Silverman, told me how horrified he was to spot a chocolate menorah in the window of a kosher delicatessen. A dreidel maybe, but a menorah?
I think it might be fun this Easter, to surprise my very Catholic, chocolate addicted wife on Easter Sunday morning by putting one of those chocolate crosses on her breakfast table. I kind of miss that deep breath and closed eye thing.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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