Kalo Pascha!

Happy Easter! Here are the red eggs and the Easter bread called tsoureki. My Greek friend Yotta writes from her village near Delphi: I am at my home town with my old parents. We are roasting the lamb on the spit. The whole village is covered with smoke which went up higher and higher and made a cloud this morning.

Happy, Uh, Palm Sunday

We don't always celebrate Easter the same day as everyone else. This year, while many people are having Easter egg hunts and eating chocolate bunnies, we Orthodox are celebrating Palm Sunday. My sons were born in Greece and I have always tried to keep up the Greek traditions for them. You might say that when in Rome, etc., but I have been Orthodox for more than 50 years and anyway am used to being different and not fitting in.

The main reason that Greek (and Russian, Serbian, etc.) Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter is that it must come after the Jewish Passover,which began last Wednesday and lasts for seven or eight days. The rest of the calculations for Easter, involving lunar calendars and something called a golden number, are really beyond me.

Added to this complicated business is the fact that many Orthodox did not accept the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced in 1582 (there is a reason for the word Orthodox) and still use the Julian or "old" calendar, which is 13 days behind. All Orthodox churches, however, celebrate Easter on the same day.

So on Saturday, Eastern Orthodox people will go to church around midnight and wait silently for the priest to bring out the candle which represents the new light and to announce "Christos Anesti" or whatever the word is in the local language. The Russian is something like "Christos Vaskreshi". The flame passes from candle to candle until every taper is lit, and the people try to keep the flame going until they get home, when they will smoke a cross over the doorsill and light the lamp in front of their own icon stands.

Our church stands on a hill in San Francisco. When the Easter service is over, you can wait at the bottom of the hill and watch a candlelit procession as some 700 smiling, sleepy people guard their little flames on the way to their cars. Driving home, usually at about two in the morning, you can sometimes see another small flame dimly illuminating a nearby car.

(Giotto, Palm Sunday)

Bird By Bird

Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird, subtitled Instructions on Writing and Life, is one of those books which should be written with a capital B. To summarize the premise would deny a potential reader the great pleasure of reading Anne's words, but it is a thought about which I need reminding from time to time.

The Greeks have a saying (don't they always?) which goes "Fasouli, fasouli, yemis' to sakkouli". Bean by bean, the bag is filled. A friend once told me that her sister, overwhelmed by an out-of-control yard, decided on the salami method of gardening: One slice at a time. She would take care of the weeds directly in front of her and save the rest for the next time.

In my old Skyline piano class, we had a motto for learning a piece of music: Particular by particular, we approach the general.

Nicodemus has completed 38 of 40 radiation treatments for prostate cancer. We have been told that this has a good chance of eliminating the tumor. Since his diagnosis four months ago, it has been difficult and necessary to remember, as he marches off every day for treatment, that Fasouli Fasouli Gemis' To Sakkouli.

To help, every Friday we have a bottle of champagne to celebrate getting through another week. Since we are not big drinkers and there are only the two of us, it takes several days to get through the bottle, so our tasteless low-fiber no salad meals (which minimize the side effects of radiation treatments) still somehow have a festive touch to them.

Whatever works.

The Cold Room Diet

I have lost 20 pounds this past year. I am healthy as far as I know and have made no changes to my diet, but it has been an unusually cold and windy year on the Coastside. Now it seems that there is a relationship between being cold and losing weight.

The New England Journal of Medicine, quoted in today's New York Times, says the answer is brown fat. Nearly every adult, the paper says, has blobs of brown fat, so called because it is filled with iron-rich mitochondria, our cells' little energy sources. PET-CT scans show that brown fat burns glucose when activated by the cold.

In other words, you can lose weight by sitting in what the paper calls a chilly room, 61 to 66 degrees (the average temperature in my historic but uninsulated redwood house).

We have insulated curtains, vinyl film on the windows, draft-stoppers on the windowsills, sheets of styrofoam glued to the walls, a thick rug on the tile floor. I have caulked everything caulkable, and still we have to wear heavy sweaters indoors. I won't even tell you what we wear to bed, but you might think of eskimos.

I suppose it is some consolation that we can keep on slathering butter on everything and still button our jeans, but it's, well, cold comfort at best.

A Marauder

Although this is a residential community with the usual dogs and cats, we have a great number of other domestic animals and quite a few wild ones as well. There are a few chickens and goats, horses from the stables down the road, and even miniature donkeys which bray once in a while.

We get occasional forages by deer and rabbits and our gardens are eaten by gophers, snails and banana slugs. Ravens swoop about and call raucously; robins feast on whatever berries are growing, whether ivy, cotoneaster or blackberry. Once in a while a gray squirrel will climb the cypresses and run along the telephone wires. A mole made a neat little road of hillocks in the front yard.

At night, there are the owls, the rare possum, skunks and raccoons, lots of them. I am not a friend of the raccoons because they can open the most tightly-sealed garbage can with their dextrous little paws and will scatter the trash far and wide, looking for tidbits. If they get under the house, they will tear out insulation or styrofoam to make nests. They look cute with their little bandito masks, but they will growl and show their teeth if you cross them.

So after a small earthquake and a power outage which lasted longer than usual, we were not sympathetic to the big raccoon who was banging the crawlspace door, trying to get it open. We leaned out the window, shined the flashlight on her, and told her to get a move on. She backed off a bit and waited to see if we would go away. Her eyes were like headlights. Finally she crept away in the dark.

I try to meet the critters halfway. There is a small A-frame down by the fence, under the ivy, where they can get out of the wind, and I keep water for them in a concrete bowl out front. Beyond that, I am not feeling very hospitable when it comes to the raccoons.

"I hope she wasn't pregnant," Nicodemus said.

Growing Up In Heaven

When my daughter disappeared 36 years ago, her kindergarten class was traumatized. They refused to accept their teacher's statement that nobody knew what had happened to Anna.

"But where is she?" they asked. "Is she dead?"

"We don't know," the teacher answered. This teacher, fair-haired, dimpled, brilliant, was one of Anna's favorite people in all the world.

"I don't want to disappear," one student said. "I want to grow up."

"Anna will grow up," the teacher said. "If she doesn't grow up on earth, she will grow up in heaven."

For years, I would look at children the age Anna would have been and wonder what she would look like at that time. Once in a while I would see one of her kindergarten classmates and notice that they had lost their baby teeth, that they were getting taller.

Then about 18 years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children began its program of producing age-progressed pictures of missing children. They would write and ask for family pictures. Using kindergarten pictures along with pictures of family members at various ages, they would come up with their idea of what Anna would look like at age 23, 27, 31.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures, though as forensic software became more sophisticated, the pictures began to look more like a real person. Once I gathered up courage and made pencil changes to one of the portraits to see how she might look with glasses or short hair.

Then Steve Loftin, a retired police officer and forensic artist at the National Center, produced a picture of Anna at the age of 38 and sent it to me, asking what I thought. The face thinner, I said; the forehead higher. When the picture was finished, I knew that if she had grown up in this world, that was what she would look like.

Steve also did an age-regressed picture, one which might have appeared in a high school annual, and I thought "Yes, that's what she might have looked like."

We may never know what happened to Anna, even though her case is still open and is officially considered a "probable non-family abduction". But because of an incredibly vigorous search, my idea of my daughter is no longer stuck in kindergarten. A Google search on her name brings up thousands of hits. She has a Facebook page and at least two MySpace pages which play her favorite song. She is a featured case on Websleuths, a community of 17,000 amateur detectives. The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children runs a video about her. She has a website, www.searchingforanna.com, and a book by the same name which is distributed on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

It's not exactly growing up in heaven, but at least thousands of people have become acquainted with this happy child.

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick

This is the strangest thing in my garden. It's Harry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana contorta), which has just made its male catkins. When the leaves come out, even they are twisted and contorted. It is a variety of hazelnut which occasionally will produce an empty shell. Does it need a mate? I don't know. It came from the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco and had four dates written on its marker, the last one being 7-15-88, perhaps the last time it was transplanted. Harry Lauder was an entertainer in the early 20th century. He often gave shows for soldiers in World War I and in character as a Scotsman leaned on a twisted hazelwood cane from the shrub which later was named for him.