COMMENTARY: Childhood A Hare-Raising Adventure

Thursday, April 4, 2013

The Easter Bunny destroyed my childhood.

OK, that’s a little dramatic, and seems a lot for an imaginary animal to have to shoulder.

Particularly since it doesn’t appear that even imaginary rabbits actually have shoulders. No, the bunny was the Gateway Invisible Stuff Bringer for me. He was the key to my discovery that, periodically, adults will tell you things that might not be true.

OK, Spoiler Alert. If you’re letting anyone under the age of about 10 read this, well, what a precocious child you have! And perhaps we need to have a conversation about appropriate parenting choices. I mean, really, they should probably be reading “Hints from Heloise,” or the guy who writes about bridge.

But just in case they are reading this and you don’t want to put an early end to their wonder years or at least disrupt an entire holiday-themed industry, let me suggest you distract them by saying something like, “Look, there’s a large varmint bearing candy to our neighbors. Quick, run upstairs to bed before he skips our house!” Of course, if your child is reading this before school, there might be some truancy issues involved. Again, those parenting choices …

Anyway, I remember when those tiny little holes in the whole Peter Cottontail thing became gaping chasms of Hasenpfeffer credibility. I was probably about 6, and, frankly already beginning to have my doubts about a lot of this whole “good things happen while you sleep” deal, anyway. I didn’t live in a particularly tough neighborhood, but I was pretty sure if someone breaks into your house, he’s not there to leave anything except an empty spot where your stereo used to be.

I was sitting at breakfast when suddenly the improbability of the whole thing struck me and I asked my father, “is the Easter Bunny real?” My dad looked over the top of his paper and, fighting back the pangs of realization that his youngest was about to lose some of his childhood innocence, uttered this poignant remark: “Nope.” Then he went back to the Sports section.

All right, so maybe the poignancy was as imaginary as the bunny. And from there it was a slippery slope. If the bunny wasn’t real, well, you can see the dominos start to fall. By the time my cereal was done, I was older, wiser and a little less concerned about how someone could get down a chimney we didn’t happen to have.

And since the presents and the chocolate still seemed to be arriving, I figured, perhaps the delivery details weren’t really that critical.

The whole Imaginary Gift Bearers deal probably started unraveling for my kids about the time they starting losing teeth and the Tooth Fairy seemed to miss them, mostly because he fell asleep watching a ball game on TV. That led to us simulating a frantic search of bedclothes before “finding” the money we’d actually palmed and insisting to some crying 4-year-old that “see there, the fairy did come after all.”

Now that would seem traumatizing enough, but guilt generally drove up the price of a bicuspid from around 25 cents to the $5 range. So what my kids may have lacked in childhood magic they made up for in maximized profitability. And it doesn’t take even a pre-schooler long to realize capitalism is a beautiful thing.

It’s different with teenagers. Christmas Day festivities used to start about 4:30 a.m. with the reciting of that old, traditional holiday saying, “if the only people up at this time are either delivering newspapers or getting arrested, it’s not morning. Go back to bed.”

Now the lovely Mrs.

Smith and I can have our coffee, read the paper, eat a little breakfast, do some laundry, wax the car and finish the New York Times crossword puzzle before anyone staggers downstairs.

And then they usually fall asleep on the sofa right after “thanks, whatever this is is exactly what I wanted.

When’s lunch?”

But the next wave is coming. Last Sunday marked my granddaughter’s first Easter, and while at this point she’s content to continue teething on the ear of the giant bunny that was part of her basket, the day is going to come when we’re back in the chocolate rabbit-eating, egg-hiding game.

Maybe this time around, we’ll be smart enough to remember how many we hid. That’s important later. Say, in a week.

Another poignant childhood memory I can do without.

GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 04/04/2013