Potatoes and Easter Eggs

Oh yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today. But we got taters, spuds, pommes de terre, or murphies, otherwise collectively known as potatoes. 

 

Okay, so I don’t have potatoes yet, but I’ve got plenty of potato sprouts from the seed potatoes I planted almost a month ago, and I’m pretty excited about that. My garden is starting to look like a garden.

 

Here I am getting worked up over potato sprouts. It’s a sure sign you’re retired and out of the big time when you start getting excited over potatoes sprouting. 

Imaginary scene in a bar

(A loose, attractive woman with a low cut dress is looking for some action. She is talking to two men.)

Loose Woman: Say there, tell me something exciting.

First Man: I’m a lawyer, and I just won a big case in court.

Loose Woman: And you, the big guy in the bib overalls, what got you excited today?

Second Man: My potatoes sprouted.

I bet studies show that women are more attracted to men who win big cases in court than to men who get excited over potatoes. That probably explains two things: (a) why most attractive women leave Fannin County the minute they reach the age of majority, and (b) why I’ve been seeing advertisements for a farmer’s dating service on television.

 

It won’t be long before I’ll be like Don Corleone stumbling around in the garden waiting for the big stroke to take me. And it’s all because I planted two rows of potatoes.

 

Turning to other matters, St. Luke's Episcopal Church of Blue Ridge has held an Easter Egg hunt for the children of Fannin County for the last 19 years, and this year was no exception. Meredith and I volunteered to lend a hand, and that's how I ended up hard boiling a thousand eggs on the Friday before Easter.

 

I thought that all it took to hard boil an egg was to dip one into boiling water for three minutes and presto—one hard boiled egg. So when I volunteered to help, I didn’t think it would take too much time to hard boil a thousand eggs in large batches. I figured I would be at the church two hours at the most.

 

You can bet I was surprised when I showed up at the church, and the ladies told me that the way you hard boil an egg is to put it into cold water, bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat and let the egg sit in the hot water for at least 10 minutes. I believe my actual words were, “You’re shitting me. Really?”

 

Suffice it to say that I was at the church boiling eggs a lot longer than two hours. I was there so long that I got dragged into going to the noon Good Friday service. I’m sorry to say that the service was completely unintelligible to me.

 

To understand why the service was incomprehensible, you need to know two things. First, Episcopals use the King James Bible. The King James Bible was published in 1611 which is the same time that Shakespeare wrote his plays. It is written in the archaic language of Elizabethan England which is often hard to understand. If you’ve ever tried to read a play by Shakespeare, you know what I mean. For example, if I had been speaking Elizabethan English when I discovered how long it takes to hard boil a egg, I would have said, “Thou shitteth me. Verily?”

 

Second, there is a lot of litany during an Episcopal service. Litany is where the minister says something and the congregation responds. When the minister strays from the familiar litanies used in the regular Sunday service and starts digging into the Old Testament for special occasions like Good Friday, the congregation can end up reciting things like "Many oxen are come about me; fat bulls of Bashan close me in on every side” and "Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog." The one that really lost me was “They called upon thee, and were holpen…” Not only do I not know what “holpen” means, I’m not even sure what part of speech it is.

 

Our minister really dug deep into the Old Testament for the Good Friday service. I’m pretty sure the Psalms we recited were on the B side of the record. Since I'm not a biblical scholar or an expert on Elizabethan speech, I had no idea what I was saying during the service. Which leads to another interesting question: Do you have to comprehend a church service to get the benefit of it or is it like a tanning booth where the length of exposure is all that matters?

 

Episcopals are also big on the congregation reciting lengthy passages from the prayer book in unison. I don’t know what it is about the congregation at St. Luke’s, but they have a problem with the “in unison” part. No one recites the passage at the same speed. If the passage is over two sentences long, it ends up sounding like the babble at a large cocktail party. I made a suggestion to the minister that we get a Karaoke machine so everyone can follow the bouncing ball. He wasn’t taken with the idea.

 

Anyway, on Saturday morning church volunteers hid a little over 1,400 boiled and plastic eggs on the church grounds. The eggs weren’t exactly hidden. The church grounds, including a small cemetery in back, are probably half an acre in size, and there are only so many hiding places. When I arrived at the church there were eggs lying out in the open everywhere. It looked like the church had been hit with an Easter Egg cluster bomb.

 

Children and their parents began showing up for the Easter Egg hunt 45 minutes before the start of the hunt. As the start time grew close, there were over 200 kids lined up on the church driveway. The fact that there were hundreds of Easter Eggs lying out in the open only served to work the assembled children into a greedy frenzy. Some of the kids had been to another Easter egg hunt earlier that morning and had consumed so much sugar they were out of their minds. I was tempted to drop kick one obnoxious little brat over to the Methodist church on the other side of town.

 

When the church bell finally rang to signal that the hunt was on, it was like the start of the Oklahoma land rush. The children spread out like a virulent disease as they scurried around grabbing eggs left and right. It was like watching a hoard of starving rats. Kids were knocking each other over to get to the eggs. It was the Episcopal version of the Hunger Games. In 12 minutes every freaking egg had been gathered.

 

It may have been the scariest experience of my adult life. I’ll have to think twice if I’m asked to volunteer to help with the church’s Easter Egg hunt next year. But right now I think I’d rather wrestle with the devil than face 200 crazed kids again.