Woodfield Mall fist pumps and the three food groups: Ham, Candy, Miracle Whip

According to Christian Faith: tomorrow,
The Lord
will rise.

I’m not knocking Jesus.
Frankly,
to borrow the gestalt of the (still brilliant)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,
I think Jesus is one “righteous dude.”

As the universe as my witness, I will never not find great joy in this film.

I just have some trauma around being raised in the Catholic church
as a little gay gender nonconforming girl —
and Child Me hasn’t been totally able yet to forgive the Catholic church
for how they contributed to my very ugly, messy Adult psychological problems. (To say NOTHING of the unspeakable shit the Catholic church did to children and families who TRUSTED them. For that, Adult Me will never forgive the Catholic church, and I am cool with Pope Francis, but Adult Gruber doesn’t mess with organizations that protect child molesters.
There isn’t ANYTHING the Catholics could do to win me back,
though I know scores of wonderful Catholics as friends.)

And most of my educators in the Catholic school
failed to recognize, in me, what I would (as an educator)
recognize in a child inside of a week as “red flag” behavior
for depression or anxiety disorder or possibly ADD or trauma . . .
Or if they did notice I was “off,” most didn’t do shit to address this.
I was just “functionally off” enough to scrape by.
Also, it was the 1980s.
As I’ve said before, American education didn’t even pretend
to care about its young (even the white ones)
until circa 1999.

Like up until about 1999,
you could be OPENLY HOSTILE toward children
and fucking get a teaching license.
In this country.
AND a job.
IN TEACHING. Even if
you openly loathed and held young people in contempt:
you, too, could grow up to get a piece of paper
allowing YOU alone to be responsible
for the academic, social, and psychological health and wellbeing
of ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS during
the most formative years of their fucking lives.
That is INSANE!
And it’s still happening
in THIS country!

Gah!

(For any new readers to my crazy Medium blog,
I do, in fact, have a very robust grasp and command of the syntactical
and mechanical conventions of Modern English,
but here I choose not to use them:
because when I’m off the clock, I’m off “the white man’s” rules:
the English language is one of the white man’s rules/tools/inventions.
Surely you know this. Like the language wasn’t built for the communication interests of any but rich, white, men.
The same people who built English Language dictionaries literally — not figuratively — owned people.
So I just don’t have a lot of sympathy as a woman, and a lesbian,
and someone who tries her level best to be anti-racist and feminist
in her everyday life
for adhering to the many tedious “rules” of the English language
though I do make my $$ by sometimes teaching these very rules because
that’s capitalism, baby.

Back to Easter.
Easter was a big deal in my family when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, Easter was — far and away — my favorite holiday
for the following 10 reasons:
1) Spring in Chicagoland is SO thrilling.
The world is thawing after a long, brutal winter. (My depressive,
anxious little self did NOT get to grow up in the wonder of winter weather in the American Southwest)
2) School was almost out. (I despised school 85% of the time I was there.)
3) Easter Mass in the Catholic church was pretty spectacular.
The smell of the lilies, the pageantry, the celebration.
Like Catholics aren’t known for their “collective joy,”
but Easter seemed to bring that out in all of us back then.
(May have been a time/place thing and not
a Catholic thing at all.)

4) After the REALLY LONG mass,
we would go to a Greek diner near “The City”
(I grew up in the northwest ‘burbs of Chicago;
did some time in Kenosha, WI — college, not jail — and moved
to the city of Chicago proper — what’s up Andersonville!
— when I was in my early twenties.)
and I would always get this creamy, lemony soup
with rice and diced pimentos mixed in, and to drink
a Coke with ice and a Maraschino cherry floating in the bubbles
on a green plastic toothpick
Heavenly.
I have since tried to replicate the soup,
with my Grecian spouse,
to no avail.

5) After breakfast we would go to Lincoln Park Conservatory
(too boring and humid to Child Me, but what I wouldn’t give
to go back now; I can still smell the place, feel the way the humidity
of all that flora foisted itself on you like the hot, heavy breath from a mouth the size of Texas).
And then, the best part:

6) We would go to Lincoln Park Zoo.
Yes!
Sarah and I once saw a toddler in Woodfield Mall
(what’s up Cold Phoenix!) do a fist pump
in her stroller upon seeing the Holiday display.
Ever since, when Sarah or I experience something exciting
we say to each other “Woodfield fist pump!”
Like, “Ooh, Trader Joe’s isn’t out of the verde enchiladas
— Wooldfield fist pump!”
Lincoln Park Zoo was total “Woodfield fist pump” territory Child Me.
I loved animals.
I wasn’t even bothered by the smell of their bodies
in the more enclosed areas (I smelled this smell last weekend
when that wild pig rushed past me on my in-law’s property
in the Catalina Foothills)
I liked the gorillas and seals,
specifically and especially. My maternal grandmother
also had an affinity for seals, and we would enjoy them together on Easter Sunday at Lincoln Park Zoo.

The first time I had cancer (circa 2011), my friend Jeremy Hooper — an awesome person — made this for me. I think Pope Ratzinger had just “left” or whatever and I made a joke about wanting to “apply” for the position. If I’ve learned anything in this life, it is this truth: never say never.

7) And lest I fail to mention, Easter Sunday meant Child Gruber’s three favorite food groups were all going to be served up in abundance:
Candy, Ham, and Miracle Whip.
(Gross, I know.
But I was a kid.
Kids like gross shit.)

8) I got to wear my nicest clothes.
I have never, by any means, been a clothing person. I like t-shirts and jeans. That’s just what I like. My friend Mike used to give me playful shit about my infinitely rotating selection of band t-shirts that I’d wear to work (never anything offensive or bloody — like I wouldn’t go to work in a Megadeth shirt — at least I think I never did that. It was Flagstaff. Things are wonderfully weird up there, too.)
and I never felt fully “at home” in the trappings of what girls/women are expected, by default, to like or at least wear, but there were
some fancy shoes I liked (patent leather comes to mind)
and some jewelry that I enjoyed (amethyst earrings, emerald rings . . .) — what kind of monster, I ask you, does not like sparkly things?

9) I got to spend time with some of my favorite people: my grandma and grandpa, my aunt & uncle, my cousins.
Of course it was fun that my parents
and my sister and brother were there,
but holidays like Easter used to BE special
because you’d see people that maybe
you didn’t see every day.

10) Leftovers: the day after Easter
never had that general malaise that seemed to always follow
the day after Christmas or New Year’s.
Maybe that’s because after Easter,
in the midwest,
we know better weather is coming —
the darkest, coldest months are not lying ahead anymore.
Also, my parents always spoiled my siblings and I rotten
with toys and gifts and our Easter baskets were spectacular.
I always had leftover candy.

Here I am sitting on my grandfather’s lap with my brother & grandmother on one Easter Sunday in the 1980s. Chicago, or thereabouts.

Easter brings back special memories,
but it is no longer really special TO me.
Does that make any sense?
If it’s special to you, I think that’s lovely
and wonderful and I’m happy that you are happy.
But Easter, which is tomorrow, will just be another day for me.
Quite possibly a good day, given the newest trend.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday
and will be my 30th day
of active recovery from alcoholism,
provided I do not drink tonight (and I have no plans to).
This morning, I went to my home group meeting.
The same group who were there
day one when I was sobbing and
too ashamed to turn on my camera
for what I’d done to my poor little face
because
well
alcoholism.

And I’m not sitting here thinking “Christ rose on Easter Sunday and I
will have reached a recovering alcoholic milestone on Easter Sunday:
So I am like Jesus” — I don’t aspire to be Jesus.
I can’t be Jesus. Just facts.

If you are reading this and have never seen “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” stop what you are doing and watch it. Yes, it was made in the 1980s, in America, so it’s super problematic, at times, by some modern understanding of human decency, but there’s also healthy laughs to be had and a bit of Actual Truth here and there . . .

The significance for me,
in Easter Sunday coinciding with the day
I admitted I was an alcoholic and began taking the steps
(literal and figurative) necessary to fix or — at the very least —
address the issue is
in that Easter Sunday used to mark
such a happy “new time”
for Child Me: the end of winter, the end of another awful year
in k-12 American schools of the 1980s
(and for many American k-12 students
still awful in 2021)
the start of summer,
and if my Chicagoland self
was lucky enough,
the occasional blue sky.