Behold Lambie, symbol of renewed life

We did a comprehensive job of celebrating Easter this year.

Easter Observance 1, in Lancaster, addressed the first Easter celebration, the one that The Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) decreed on the Sunday following the paschal full moon, which is the full moon that falls on or after the vernal (spring) equinox, and is also when the Easter bunny comes to lay his eggs.

My assigned duties were to sit up straight through the Easter mass at Natalie’s church and attend Easter dinner afterward. That went fine, except that I’d had little sleep the previous night and so a substantial portion of M. Kinsler, his stomach in particular, was still essentially dormant when I suddenly found myself at a restaurant facing what was effectively a breakfast of salad, dinner roll, Easter ham, mashed potatoes and the inevitable chocolate eggs.

Easter Observance 2 was interesting. Greek and Russian communities observe Easter on a different date, for the Eastern Orthodox Church has clung with admirable fortitude to Julius Caesar’s original and correct calendar, accepting no substitutes. Thus the Orthodox ecclesiastical calendar differs from that of the Roman church by several days and places their Easter a week later.

My friend Scott is married to Voula, a lively Greek-American lady banker who brought her equally-lively daughter Aphrodite into the blended family. They live in the suburbs of Chicago, a city with the third-largest Greek populace on earth, and this year they invited us to their Greek Easter celebration.

Their Easter service is held outside while the congregation stands (you can’t fall asleep in a Greek church). The associated feasting lasts deep into the night, rapidly burning through eight months’ worth of our allotted Weight Watchers points. Voula’s cooking skills rival Natalie’s, and we became honorary Greeks for the food, the company, the two huge, happy dogs, more food, more company, and Lambie.

Yes, Lambie, weight 38 pounds. Also named Arnie by daughter Aphrodite, arni being Greek for lamb. We met him in the back yard where, divested of his skin and lamb-like liveliness, he rotated slowly on an electrically-powered spit over a bed of charcoal, with head, tail, and not-very-delighted face included. Lambie’s tongue lolled out to one side, his eyes were not alert, and a lamb’s teeth look disturbingly like a person’s.

Scott obediently cooked Lambie while Voula, as American (and tolerant) as she is Greek, prepared alternate dishes for those of us, Scott included, who weren’t quite prepared to sample the meat of someone we knew so personally. I did my part by learning to imitate Lambie’s gradually-blackening face for Natalie’s benefit. My beloved did not share in the general acclaim when Lambie’s head fell off.

Everyone talked and ate and laughed to exhaustion, which is the stated goal of any form of Greek entertainment. Natalie politely put aside her own qualms and, ignoring my ill-advised discourse concerning sweet lambs gamboling in the meadow while unaware of their fate, accepted a bit of Lambie.

He was quite good.

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives with Natalie and the cats in an old house in Lancaster, where we are all in imminent peril of becoming compulsory vegans. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com.