Nick and his little family came to Osoyoos to have lunch on Easter Sunday, and the topic of what Easter means came up.  Neither Luke nor Nick had a clue, and wondered.  They said is it when Jesus was born?  I said no, it’s when he died.  Luke said I thought Christmas was when he died, and I said no, that’s when he was born.

It seems almost incomprehensible that two kids, ages 32 and 35, with quite decent IQ’s would never have understood the significance of either Christmas or Easter.  I said to Luke at your gramma Gen’s, we’d have birthday crackers and hats at Christmas to celebrate Jesus’ birth.  Oh well.

Most of the weekend went well except for one small skirmish whereby mom had to verbally attack a waitress at the Diamond Steak and Seafood House.  The waitress was one of those competent, self-confidence types who likes to call all customers ‘hon’, which is fine with me but to mom is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

When the bill arrived mom explained she didn’t wish to be called hon and resented it.  The waitress was excellent, recognizing she had a severely old person here, given we entered at a snail’s pace with the walker which became a major obstacle to all who tried to pass.  So she rolled with the punches and just said she was sorry about that, and Luke and I said nothing because what can you say about a crabby 97-year-old?

Mom and I went out for a nice drive on Sunday afternoon to look at various areas of the town to see how development has affected the poor place.  It’s always amazing to see the amount of land taken out of the Agricultural Land Reserve for subdivisions.  I guess the town’s planners are banking on food coming from California for the rest of our days.

Where the farms haven’t been taken out of the ALR many have converted to grape-growing, which is another puzzle as to how that’s agriculture.  But maybe we’ll end up like the Ruskies, and have our grocery shelves empty of food, and where they have gallons of vodka in times of severe food shortages, we’d be able to forget our troubles with gallons of red and white wines.

I’ve embarked on a new project for mom’s vast collection of books.  Most were bought and read by my dad, so there’s a lot of World War 2 history, and many 60-year-old books in that teensy print that seemed to be okay back then, but now we don’t like that small font, probably due to being very lazy and so we want reading to be easy.

As a result, every two weeks I take a couple of dozen off the shelf, and then replace them with books under 20 years old, within a wide range of categories.  In a year I should have each book replaced and then people will want to grab one off the shelf and read it.  Very few people are interested in the life and times of Hermann Goering.

Certainly the next time I’m in thrift with Elsa I’ll peruse the religious section and try to find books with which to enlighten the children with the meaning of the holidays we’ve celebrated for our entire lives.  I may have to throw in a couple of books about Judaism and Islam and as Jan’s a Buddhist, perhaps one or two of those, too.  In any case, it can’t hurt and perhaps will lessen holiday confusion.