While Mark makes the gravy...

8:14am on Easter Sunday

Happy Easter to the three or four of you.

"Are you going to blog?" That's what my wife just asked me. She's holding a head of celery over the sink. It's Easter Sunday, which is a lot like Thanksgiving Thursday around here. She wakes up early to cut celery stalks and stuff a turkey. I wake up with her to do my best at trying to look busy.

So when she asks - "Are you going to blog?" - that's not out of curiosity or encouragement. There's an insinuation that I could be doing something infinitely more productive than writing a Happy Easter message to the three of four of you. 

I could retort that it's only out of duty to the three or four of you. I could say - "You've already had your fill of me. Now it's time I let my three or four blog readers get theirs." But that would have entail a snicker about the first sentence, at least to those of you who still carry the curse of eighth grade humor in your soul.

It'll be a typical Easter scene around here. We'll have Germans, Pollacks, Mexicans, Dutch, Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Greek Orthodoxes all hovering around the island in the kitchen waiting for my brother-in-law Mark Foreit to make the gravy. There's been a lot of good interaction over the years while Mark made the gravy. It takes him a long time to make the gravy. I don't know why, but it's like waiting for the chocolate chip cookies to finish baking after you've already poured your milk. You wait and wait and wait and everyone circles around the island looking for something to munch on and wife Alexis tells everyone to shoo and nobody does. 

After a while I can't take it anymore so I grab either nephew Allan or Jack or both and I beat on them in the living room. And the dogs start jumping on us and Jack starts yelling and Allan works his way to hang on my back and invariably someone kicks over one of the glass eggs on the end table. Who puts glass eggs on an end table anyways?  By this time Alexis and I could easily get in a minor fight - "He's like a child, my husband is" - but right on cue, right at the last possible moment, like a conductor holding back until the audience can't take it anymore, Mark announces.

"The gravy is ready. Let's eat."

.... There will be radio, of course. First of all, I'm headed down to the station right now to check on things. I gotta check that all the dials on the board are in the right place and that the log on the computer is right and that our STL is strong at 100%.  If I go right now to the station, I'll run into either Choo Cho or Javier. They alternate doing the Spanish-lanugauge music show on Sunday mornings. Javier, as the three or four of you know, has been working at the steel mill since 1958 in the same job... and he's been doing radio at WJOB for nearly that long. He has a handshake like someone just dropped an endtable on your hand. Once I asked him at the old station to help me move a refrigerator and he wound up telling me to move out of the way as he lifted the whole thing himself. He's a freak of nature at the age of 76 and he's bowled several 300 games. A couple Sundays ago when I went down there to do my diligence, Javier stopped me to give me a bowling lesson. There we were right in the window on Indianapolis Boulevard, him doing the steps - one, two, three, four - and me following him step for step, as if I were Fred Flintstone learning how to dance. Twinkletoes Dedelow. Happy Easter.