Easter Lilies at the National Gallery of Art

Easter is what you make of it.

Over a lifetime you collect memories of Easter, many of them with friends and family. They may or may not included costumes, swords, pirates and/or stringing cables for masquerades.

As a child abroad, there were special moments such as the giant, to a seven-year-old, solid chocolate rabbit that my mother got from a White Russian woman who sold them in Hong Kong. Another year I discovered the truth about the Easter Bunny when its helpers overslept, and the basket was empty.

I remember hunting colored eggs with my friends. One of them later was murdered during hitchhiking in the 1970s. I still have a picture of her at the hunt though, so she lives forever.

As a teenager, my high school friends started the science fiction group, and were also theater people. Instead of going to church, we went to the local SF convention, Balticon, which coincided with Easter.

Listening to Celtic music at Balticon in the 1970s

At those early conventions in the 1970s, things were simple. You could toss a cape over your arm, pretend you were King Arthur, and be generally accepted. You could also learn to sew, figure out how to make a gown, and pretend you were out of a Tolkien book or Roger Zelezny’s “Amber” series or whoever you were reading. Everyone spoke the universal language of SF and/or fantasy literature.

One memory from the 1980s is of seeing the young girls in their frocks and flowers dancing down the hallway of the Hunt Valley Inn while on the other side chain mail clad barbarians carrying axes and looking totally exhausted went by. Both sides were happy.

This was decades before “Game of Thrones” made fur cloaks and swords popular in the mainstream.

Conventions was often the only time I saw so many friends who enriched my life to this day. The convention moved Balticon to Memorial Day and another hotel, and I stopped going.

It took another twenty years and a career in journalism to manage to spark another Easter memory. In 2014, the McClatchy newswire allowed me to do an article and a video on the Easter lilies of the National Gallery of Art. During the winter the NGA has an inside garden. After Easter, the fountain with mercury is barren until fall. Here’s the Changing of the Lilies.