Wendel's Easter World: Random Thoughts and Resurrected Memories

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In honor of Easter Sunday, I've resurrected this column from my newspaper days.  I hope you enjoy it and a Happy Easter to you all.

There is a weird irony about Easter.

Easter Sunday is one of the most devoutly observed high holy days in the history of organized religion. It is a solemn celebration of the glorious return from the dead of Jesus, who has been proclaimed as the one, true King of the Jews.

And how do Christians honor the greatest Jew of all time? We serve ham.

I like ham. I've always liked Easter, too. When I was very small, Easter meant getting up early and searching for my Easter basket that had been filled with chocolate eggs and jelly beans and then skillfully hidden by my parents, under the pretense that the Easter Bunny had stopped by.

When I became old enough to go to church and began hearing the true Easter story, I just figured that the reason Jesus got up and out of the tomb early in the morning was so he could go hunting for his Easter basket.

Easter was always more than just a religious observance, though. It fired the starting gun for the spring/summer fashion season.

When I was growing up, everyone trotted out their best "Sunday go to meeting" finery on Easter. The church service, admit it or not, was nearly as much a festival of big fancy hats and a parade of new bright dresses as it was a worship session.

That was the women. Where men were concerned, Easter meant it was time to put away the dingy charcoal gray suit and sport a new blazer and lighter colored slacks.

Then, when the early 1970s rolled around, leisure suits made their grand entrance, along with spiffy white dress shoes. "White bucks" they called them in the 1950s when Pat Boone made them his trademark all year round.


Mercifully, their rebirth re-died after a few years. And there has been no resurrection since.

But the crown jewel in the Easter basket is the Resurrection story. While the colored eggs, a mythical bunny, marshmallow chicks and white bucks have all figured heavily into the holiday over the years, the biblical account of a man rising from the dead 2,000 years ago remains the bottom line for celebrating Easter Sunday.

I've been pondering the Resurrection of Jesus. If you read the New Testament's four gospels closely, you'll notice they tell an Easter Sunday story each a bit differently, one from the other.

The conflicts are slight:Who saw Jesus first? How many women went to the tomb? What time of morning was it? How many angels appeared at the tomb? What exactly did the women go to the tomb for? Were the women wearing their new spring hats?

Some historians say that the Gospel of Mark originally had no resurrection story, abruptly ending after the crucifixion, and that the final chapters were added by a different writer.

The apostle Thomas got the worst rap. We've all come to know him, traditionally, as Doubting Thomas, because he insisted he would not believe in the risen Lord until he had seen him and touched his wounds.

But no one else appeared to believe, either, until they themselves had seen Jesus. None of them really seemed to think he was coming back. As a matter of fact, in one gospel, Jesus chides all eleven, not just Thomas, for their lack of belief.

Of course, Thomas was disdained for other reasons. He was the only apostle to wear white bucks and a leisure tunic before Passover.

Now what if there had been no Resurrection story in any of the gospels? I'm not suggesting that there was no Resurrection, just wondering how we would react if Jesus had not bothered to appear in risen splendor to anyone?

Would any of his followers have still concluded that he had risen?

Would we today just naturally assume that Jesus had come out of the tomb and ascended to his father in heaven, even though no one could lay claim to having seen him?

Or would we conclude that he saw his shadow and went back in to the tomb for another six weeks of winter.

He said during his life that he would rise again on the third day. For a true believer, shouldn't that have been enough? He said, "Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe."

The Easter story is one of the greatest stories ever told. But how great would the Christian faith be if it had not been told?  If Christians still believed, it would be great indeed.

Just food for thought. Now pass the ham.


Copyright 2004 by Wendel Potter

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Incredible Journeys: Wendel's World on Two Wheels

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When I was a kid there were two kinds of bicycles: boy’s and girl’s.

Oh, there was also the English Racer, that incredibly sleek bike with the thin tires and the ability to shift multiple gears, but that didn't really count.

The Racer was a rare commodity where I grew up. I can only remember one kid who had one and he was snooty.  He never even wore blue jeans.

There wasn't anything too exotic about your standard bicycle back then. Once in awhile, we'd go a little crazy and hang colored plastic streamers from the handle grips, or fasten a playing card to the wheel with a clothespin so the spokes would flick the card with each revolution and make, well, a flicking sound.

I never owned a brand new bicycle. My first bike was a hand-me-down from my brother and it served me well.

It didn't have training wheels. My friend Mike who lived across the back lot, had training wheels on his bike. I envied that sense of security.

But I learned without training wheels. I took a few spills, yet I had enough pride to ignore the scraped knees and elbows and climb back on the bike and try it again.  Each time, I travelled farther. Eventually, all the way through my boyhood.

For me and my pals, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in the heart of America, a bicycle was not just a vehicle of convenience that took us to school on a spring day or made quick work of a trip to the gas station for a bottle of pop. Having a bicycle enabled us to explore new avenues in our world.

Back in Iowa, that first bike of mine took me to a place on "the other side of the tracks." About two blocks from home, we crossed the tracks of the Milwaukee Railroad, then followed a dirt street that stretched for several blocks, where it intersected with the Rock Island tracks.

Once we had crossed over the Rock Island Line, we were pretty much outside of the city limits where we came upon a strange, square block of old houses, shabby and time-worn. Some were inhabited. Some were vacant and missing windows.

We dubbed this odd country neighborhood "Bums’ Camp," because as we explored one of the vacant houses which we imagined to be haunted with ghosts, we found the very real traces -- empty tin food cans and liquor bottles -- of hobos who had put up for the night in that house. We could easily imagine those grizzled old men eating beans for supper to settle the hunger in their stomachs.

We were too young, too innocent to consider how the hobos might take a long pull from a whisky bottle to whitewash their loneliness and dull the memories of the lives and loves they'd left behind them, distanced now by thousands of miles of steel rail, but quickly called to mind at the sound of a freight train chuffing through the night, its long, low whistle sad and mournful like muffled, lonely sobs.

When I was 12, we moved to Fullerton, a quiet rural town in Nebraska.  There our bikes took us to the river to fish. We'd hang a can of worms from our handlebars, then set off on our bikes, steering with one hand and holding a fishing rod with the other.

We had to trespass in order to reach our fishing hole. It was a matter of lifting our bikes over a barbed-wire fence and riding across a pasture among the farmer's cattle. If the farmer ever saw us, he didn't say anything or make his presence known. The cows didn't seem to care one way or the other.

We even rode in high school. Of course, I had graduated to a bigger bike by that time, but most bikes were still built pretty much in that same standard design. You got on them, pedaled and rode away.

When I was in my junior year, there was a group of us, guys and girls alike, who rode together all over town.  I think we called our outfit The Bike Club.  Damn catchy.

Often, when the weather grew warm and the daylight hours increased, we pedaled northwest of Fullerton to a bluff on the northern edge of town that overlooked the Cedar River Valley.

The place was called Lover's Leap, so named for Indian lovers who, according to legend, met their death when a fierce herd of buffalo forced them to leap from the top of the bluff. At least that's the story I once heard.  Nobody seemed to care what happened to the buffalo.

From Lover's Leap, which was marked with a big wooden cross, you could gaze for miles across the tops of pine trees, over rich pasture land and a shimmering river bed. In the evening you could watch the sun set for a long, beautiful time as it lazily slipped behind the green bluffs that rolled west into the next county, and perhaps on forever.

I couldn't begin to tally up the miles I've biked over the years. No matter. It was the destinations that counted.

It was where I went, what I saw, what I imagined, what I dreamed, what I learned. Those old sturdy, single-speed bicycles I rode over the years took me on short, but incredible journeys that forged enough memories of boyhood to fill a scrapbook for a lifetime.


Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter

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