Knee-deep in children — trudging through a virtual tsunami of half-pints — is when it occurred to me: Group Easter egg hunts are an awful lot like the running of the bulls.
Sure, there are some obvious differences. Bulls don’t wear Crocs. They sport horns and are all-too-eager to tickle your kidneys with them. They snort, stomp and charge down narrow streets while guys dressed in white scream, “Why didn’t I give up drinking like my wife asked!?!”
Yet, as I stood with my daughter among the hordes of little ones, all waiting to rush the baseball fields at Palencia, I couldn’t help but think of all the similarities.
The kids around me had the steely eyes of angry steers — intense, focused and a bit … well … there’s no nice way to put it … slightly deranged. They scuffed the ground with their shoes. A few snorted smoke out of their nostrils. And they gave adults like me the kind of look that said, “Look here, mister, if you’re fond of your knee caps, you’ll be scootin’ out of the way.”
Parents walked their kids onto the field, positioned them, then quickly ran out of the dugout. “Be brave out there,” some said before crossing themselves and muttering under their breath to a friend, “His nose still hasn’t straightened out from last year.”
A few children cried, but most stood there with eyes locked on the hundreds of candy-colored eggs strewn about the field. Every once in a while a group would jump the gun and rush out, only to be corralled back in. You could feel the tension and excitement. All this self-control from so many anxious kids required an extraordinary amount of energy, and it was literally being sucked from nearby power lines in fantastic bolts of lighting.
The earth seemed to pulse and surge.
So, facing this I did what any sensible parent would do: I kissed my daughter on the head, told her to make the family proud, handed her off to my wife and ran like hell.
“If you need me, I’ll be back here behind the fence huddled up in the fetal position,” I called back as the swarm enveloped them.
Then it began.
The half-pint tsunami poured onto the field. The earth quaked. A thick cloud of dust rose into the sky. It looked like a mushroom cloud. I wondered if the tsunami had produced fission, and if we could harness it.
Trying to glimpse my little one, I worried whether she would be OK. Then, through the blur of madness, I saw a yellow streak zig-zag through the mayhem, bounding from one bulb of color to the next. My daughter! She was alive! And collecting eggs!
“Go little monkey!” I screamed.
How was she doing this? All the adults who had been on the field were strewn about, trying to regain their senses … and their limbs. Yet, all these little munchkins were up and moving. That included my little one in her spring-time yellow dress. She was still collecting eggs.
She was cleaning up!
I know as a parent, especially on Easter, you shouldn’t be rooting for your kid to nab as many eggs as she can. There’s something not quite right about it. Easter is neither a competition, nor a full-contact sport. You don’t celebrate Jesus’ resurrection by screaming, “Don’t forget what I taught you about sleeper holds!”
But on the other hand, no parent ever wants their kid to walk away empty-handed. Think back to your own childhood. Not getting any eggs at a big community Easter egg hunt was right up there with getting picked last for kickball. Or a dance where every boy got paired with a girl, except you and some guy named Sanchy. Sanchy was the kid with the orthodontic device on his face that looked like a bear trap.
So, yeah, I was proud when she came back carting a heavy bag full of eggs. “Look how many I got, dad,” she told me. I nearly teared up. But my pride, I realized, wasn’t in how many eggs she snagged. Rather, it was that she would brave that tsunami at all. That she didn’t end up empty-handed. That I could count her as one of the dozens of smiling faces, all out there running with the bulls. Happiness, it seemed to me, was way more important than eggs. (Although, it sure didn’t hurt if you could wrangle up both.)