It's All Relative by Wade Rouse Page B

family of moles. How can you expect them to find buried eggs? You have an evil streak.”
    But my father was a competitive sort. We had to work hard to earn our reward. And my dad always liked to win—at any game, at any price—and he seemed to revel in the fact that logic always won over emotion.
    I cry. I give up. I lose.
    I keep looking. And digging. I win.
    So when my brother and I finally got old enough and smart enough to map out our yard, tote our own spades, and work as a team on our Easter-egg hunts, my dad, like any good engineer, improved his methodology and began scaling our solid oaks and skinny sycamores, hiding our candy-filled eggs in tree limbs and birds’ nests, places no normal child, unless they were the offspring of Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, could venture, places that no parent, unless they were drunk, would allow their children to go.
    â€œMy Lord, Ted,” my mother said to my dad. “We’re not a family of squirrels. How can you expect them to climb that high? You have an evil streak.”
    Still, I know deep down that my father never did this to be mean. I believe he did it to test himself, his engineering acuity, to see if he still had game. Perhaps, when you reach a certain age, you also do such things to show your children that you are still superior.
    As an adult I asked my dad about those Easter-egg hunts, and he told me, “Weren’t they a blast! You know, I just wanted to make them fun. We didn’t have a lot growing up, and I wanted to create great memories, make it a
real
hunt.”
    â€œOh, it was,” I told him.
    And then I made him watch
Blood Diamond
.
    Looking back, I don’t know why my brother and I wanted to find those eggs so desperately anyway, since there was nothing hidden inside worth eating. My Depression-era grandma often filled the eggs for us, meaning we didn’t even get
real
candy, like mini chocolate bars or little marshmallow bunnies. My grandma was too frugal. Instead our eggs were filled with breath mints and nickels. It was like Easter at Guantánamo.
    Sometimes my grandma would insert globs of those nasty orange slices, the ones she kept in her cut-glass candy dish that always ended up melding into something resembling a spleen. Occasionally shewould stuff our eggs with leftover liqueur-filled chocolates—ones she hadn’t finished from Christmas—which I would mainline before becoming belligerent and then very, very sleepy.
    And, to top our Easter off, my grandma didn’t even use “real” Easter eggs, the petite plastic ones that clicked snugly together and came in bright spring colors. Rather, our eggs were actually leftover L’eggs containers, which at one point housed her taupe stockings.
    As a result of all this, my family wisely stopped hunting eggs while I was still fairly young and instead focused our competitive spirit on playing board games and gorging on ham.
    Which is why—at the age of thirty-two—when I spent my first Easter at Gary’s parents’ home, it came as quite a shock to discover his mom still hid eggs.
    For adults and grandchildren.
    In spots even Helen Keller could locate.
    In fact, Gary’s family had never hidden their Easter eggs outside.
    One Easter, when Gary was little, he said he remembers pulling back the dark-brown curtains in the living room of his house and watching other families in the neighborhood hunting for their eggs outside.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” Gary asked his mother. “What kind of people hunt for eggs outdoors?
    â€œPeople who’ve obviously never had allergies,” she told him.
    For Gary’s mom, a woman who loves the holidays as much as her homemade dickeys, potpourri, and Buick LeSabres, the thought of anything new, any external forces that could ruin a holiday, scared her. To wit:
    It might rain.
    It might be too cold.
    A rabid squirrel might attack a grandchild.
    A baby bird might choke on a