Three weeks ago, when I told Jackson his only remaining grandpa had suddenly died, the first thing he said was, "But he left me some chocolate eggs, right?"
I guess it's normal to worry about stale candy when you're almost six and your mom has just broken some news and you're cautiously waiting to see if she's going to fall apart like she did last year when the dog got put to sleep.
The thing is, Grandpa knew how to push a kid's buttons. Back in April, he'd promised Jackson that the Easter Bunny had left some extra chocolate eggs around his house for Jackson to find, and that they'd still be here when we arrived, June 1.
Instead, June 1 ended up being the day of my father's funeral.
But when I'd arrived, by myself, at what is now just my mom's house, two weeks before the funeral, to help my brothers figure out which way was up, the first thing I did was look for Jackson's chocolate eggs. I found piles and piles of old newspapers and Mac Mall catalogs and unopened bank statements and my father's hoard of free Dairy Queen napkins and straws -- my brother, Tim, brought in a shredder just to cope with the stack of carefully saved but unopened credit card offers -- but no eggs.
I was fucked. Not just because Walgreen's would be long sold out of compromise half-price Peeps, but because my father, the Germanophile, had his secret connection who several times a year would smuggle in (I guess) these special chocolate treats from Germany called Kinder Eggs. They're a hollow shell of milk chocolate surrounding a two-inch-long plastic capsule that contains the pieces of a small toy that a child over three can put together. They're cute! They're not available in the United States! Thank you, FDA, for protecting those of us who walk around in a blissful cloud of obscurity believing it'd be a good idea to stuff a chocolate egg the size of a kneecap into our mouths and immediately choke on the delightful foreign toy contained therein.
So there I was with two weeks to score a bunch of German eggs and make a little boy believe that even though his grandpa was dead he did not forget to leave behind a little something special just for him.
It's too bad no one cares enough about Canadians to inflict a Kinder Egg ban on them. Sorry, Canada! Hope you don't die! I ran to e-mail jenB in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) to see if (1) she was managing to stave off death by imported chocolate, and (2) she could score me some contraband eggs.
JenB is an Internet friend. We met through our blogs, I don't know how many years ago now: four? Five? We exchanged comments, then e-mails, and then we met in real life at the first BlogHer conference and were smitten. If there was ever an argument for the potential and actual goodness flowing through the tubes of the World Wide Web, Jen is it.
The day before Jackson arrived at my parents' house I joyfully opened up a heavy cardboard box containing two Cadbury Flake bars (delicious), something that looked like giant marshmallow bombs (my brother, Chris, was all over that), two pretty packages of cocktail napkins (just in case we had guests), a giant sack of Wine Gums (the mysterious attraction of wine gums continues to haunt me), and six GERMAN EGGS OF DEATH!!
I hid them all. For I am The Bunny's MINION.
The next day, after Jackson had not just found but escaped unharmed from the completely unsupervised consumption of six delicious, toy-filled Eggs:
Me: "Honey, are you still sad about Grandpa dying?"
Jackson: "I'm over it. Now I'm focusing on my birthday."
