More Easter Stuff

When my son was about 4 years old, one of his sisters said: "Look at the Easter basket that the Easter Bunny has left you." My son said, "Dad is the Easter Bunny." "Why do you say that?"
"Because I saw him with his bunny ears on."

That Easter Bunny sure gets around. Lately, some of our red leaved plants show signs of being eaten by some creature.. Yesterday the culprit was seen running through our yard.. its large ears and white tail gleaming in the sun. (Since it wasn't one of our elderly neighbors.. it had to be the Easter Bunny.)

I wonder where the custom of colorful eggs began. Perhaps in Russia? The Merriwether Post museum in D.C. has a very large collection of Easter eggs.. some of which fit inside of each other. Most are encrusted with precious jewels. The Czars and Czarinas and their children received them from each other or from their subjects every Easter. I've never seen them outside of that museum except in Art books. That is, until I went to my Aunt Mary's viewing at a funeral home in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. They had a whole case full of these eggs!

I often wonder what would have happened if the Vaughan Funeral Home had survived the Depression. It, too, had a Mattapoisett connection. There was a kind of "Vaughan Compound" in that town. There were plenty of Vaughan's and a few were involved in the Funeral Home. I have done a lot of genealogical research on the family and this is my take on why the business failed. Others in the family have a different theory.

The Vaughan's all had farms and plenty of produce. When the depression hit, people in Mattapoisett kept dying, but their relatives had no money for burial expenses, so they brought in produce, that the Vaughan's didn't need. So the funeral home wasn't able to meet expenses and folded.

This theory has lots of holes in it. Questions that I need to resolve: Why were there Vaughan funeral home ads in the newspapers during the Lizzie Borden trial in New Bedford? Where was the funeral home located then? In what year did the funeral home "go bust?" Did the family live in Mattapoisett when the business was in New Bedford? etc.

In New Bedford, there is a statue dedicated to the men who went out in whaleboats to harpoon whales. It shows a large muscular man in a very small boat preparing to throw a large harpoon at a whale. This represents the days when whales had a sporting chance of escaping capture. (Read Moby Dick) The caption on the statue reads: "A dead whale or a stove boat!"

My grandfather liked to tell everyone that the model for the statue was a giant of a man.. 6 foot 8 inches tall (or so) weighing close to 400 pounds. He said that when the man died, he got to embalm him. That went ok, but they could not find a coffin that he would fit into. They finally had to stick him into a piano case. I wonder how many pall-bearers were required.

Did I tell you about the harpoon that my uncle Allen made for me? I'll check my blogs to see if I mentioned it.

Oh.. I wanted to tell you about Captain Andy. My son, Chris, has always been very artistic and one year when he was 6 or 7 years old, he helped his mother boil eggs for Easter egg painting. They left the eggs in the refrigerator to cool off and after a while Chris went in and drew faces on all of the eggs. They were very well drawn. One was of a whaling captain and Chris named it "Captain Andy".

Captain Andy was so well done that I put it into my lunch bag and took it to work to show everybody what a great artist my son was. One and all, they were impressed. At lunch time, I decided to make a big show of sacrificing Captain Andy for the good of my stomach, and, with several people attending, I said some appropriate words and then cracked Captain Andy right over my work-piled desk. You guessed it... Captain Andy, although looking like a tough whaling Captain, was not as hard-boiled as I thought!

Happy Easter Monday!