Absent of Christ, this Easter morning began like many of those secular Easters of earlier years: getting up to fix some scrambled eggs in her bosky bath robe only to find her attempts at providing a substance of animal protein/vitamin B12 rejected for the chocolate effigy of a rabbit in the refrigerator, feeding him more chocolate than he typically got on a given day, and fixing dye in bowls so that he could color his eggs. She fixed some breakfast for herself. It was a self-made Eucharist of thickly burnt whole wheat toast, some beer, and a grapefruit. When he finished dabbing eggs in various dyes and giving to each a distinct design, she poured out some cereal for him. He sat down with his usual fidgetiness at having to sit at all and let his cornflakes get soggy as he picked at them with his spoon. Easters were for him like walking about mesmerized in a choclatey mist. He was preoccupied with catching the ethereal on his tongue; and Gabriele's bottle of beer looked more ethereal than the rabbit. His incessant whining for some of her beer caused her to doctor a bit of his orange juice in the hope that he would be satisfied if not happy in the last vestige of pure childhood. As they consumed the putrid and execrable half-baked scramble of her macabre sense of a meal they heard church bells ringing superfluously at a distance in downtown Ithaca. Church bells were the metallic clanging for the assembly of superstitious tribes. Still, because she always heard more of them each Easter, they seemed melodious the way simple Christmas music fused with the happiness of being with family members while decorating a tree. And yet she knew that once he disregarded eggs, chocolate rabbits, and store-bought sugar cookies for more selfish pleasures, her Easters would entirely vanish. A child grew out of pleasures the way he grew out of his britches; and once this happened such clanging church bells would no longer have anything musical within them. They would only be noise. She sighed, thinking that all benevolent myths washed away like the sandcastle he had made for the sun long ago. It was just a little over a year ago, while pinning damp clothes onto the clothes line, that he wanted to know the truth as to why his friends were repudiating Santa Claus. She explained that they were right in what they said; and that in a world such as this, what one saw was pretty much what one got. It was a testament in favor of empirical evidence. It was a statement that ideas were sometimes the copies instead of physical reality being copies of ideas. She told him, "Reindeer flying from house to house in a population of 6 billion people in 6 habitable continents just doesn't cut the mustard." Now she regretted that she had said it.