The future is in eggs

A play by Eugene Ionesco, if long-term memory serves me. The so-called Theater of the Absurd, it must have been freshman year, and it was a whole new world of literature that rang true in my adolescent mind. I think it was the sequel to "Jack, or the submission," in which Jack takes his place onstage alongside a girl (Jill?) as their families press in from both sides, and others (stagehands?) gradually fill the stage with eggs. Those ideas occasionally resurface, reminding me of the value of a hodge-podge liberal arts education.

The scene at the rec center Thursday night, which sparked the title which led to the blog that lived in the house that Jack built, was a trip and a half. It was my first time at the rec center's home away from home for a year or two while the building on High Street - the real rec center next to the library - undergoes renovation. It will be a wonderful space when it's finished, and for now all the programs will take place in an older building , a former elementary and middle school in the middle of an aging neighborhood between Clintonville and Worthington, built in 1945.

An architectural walk down memory lane, the brick and block structure sits on one end of a small park lined with mature spruce and maple trees. Woodwork is dark, polished, beautiful. Floors are tile inlaid with letters of the alphabet and animal figures. Lots of glass bricks everywhere letting in light. It's definitely old school and a source of nostalgia, even for the neighborhood people who went to St. Michael's up the street. Rumor has it that it's destined for the wrecking ball, since population is shifting and schools are closing, and the city wants the space for parkland.

My classes ran their course in an unheated upper room, succeeding in what the first class of the quarter wants to achieve. To wit: get to know the new students enough to gauge the vocabulary that will register with them, find a pace that will be challenging but not intimidating, find out where they're coming from and what they're looking for. And if the stars align, get a workout, get a clue, learn something new.

I guess the stars aligned, because it was a highly satisfactory two and a half hours in the city that knows how to keep a secret. As the advanced students were winding down from a long, slow short-form, teenagers with flashlights were scurrying around the yard outside our windows searching for eggs among the trees and flowers, making noise and having fun under the watchful eyes of rec center staff and parents huddled in doorways and hallways, waiting patiently for closing time.

Good Friday came and went. I proofed pages and found correlations. Instead of going to a movie, I ended up staying late to respond to an e-mail by making a motel reservation for a small-town homecoming, family reunion, and memorial service beginning midsummer night in LaCrosse. Saturday I cleaned, baked bread, made soup.

Easter Sunday arrives, bittersweet. The bags under my eyes lift a little after I've had coffee and moved around. It's still cold outside, so the trees and flowers that started to open up last weekend are in a state of suspended animation, tulips drooping over looking at their shoes. I forget to bring a cut flower and trust that there will be extras.

The packed sanctuary is a mixed bag of rambunctious kids, parents who don't set boundaries, other kids afraid to look sideways, and parents with nothing but boundaries. I recoil just a bit from the cute story about bunnies seeking bunnies, and the country-rock arrangement of "Amazing Grace" isn't working for me, so I begin to feel like the perpetual first-time visitor judging everything about the service and deciding whether to ever come back to the Church of Existential Doubt.

Then I notice two young families two pews in front of me, parents whom I kind of know, and their beautiful kids whose hair and eyes and stature and manner echo or embody their parents' past, present, and future, like time-traveling while sitting still. Rev. Susan notes in passing that this is the 150th Easter Sunday service in this building. Her reading (Mark 16) tells a familiar story, but what I hear this time is the question, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

I start to plan a quick getaway, but the kids save the day by passing out flowers to each person in the congregation; a young lady in jeans, whose dad I know from committee meetings, hands me a long-stemmed carnation. Instead of bolting, I make my way to the hubbub of the back room for coffee and run into a friend from a drum circle. She wants to talk about a relationship she's dealing with after the fact, and I appreciate her willingness to connect on any level - musical, intellectual, platonic. She goes back for more coffee, and I stop at the social justice table to buy two bars of Fair-Trade Very Dark Chocolate, which will be, like the coffee and the carnation, kind of a sacrament tonight after quiche and sourdough and Chardonney.