From the Hutch of Grandfather Easter Bunny April 2025
Love Story
Heaven-sent by an angel
Without giving it a second thought Grandfather Easter Bunny placed mouth-watering Vermont Country Store crème-filled chocolate eggs in his grandchildren’s Easter Sunday basket. Two for them and two for Mother Easter Bunny and Father Easter Bunny. Four in all. A mysterious break with Cottontail family tradition used to pampering cute little bunnies every year while neglecting their parents. What could possibly explain it?
Enter Guinevere. The body-healing sorceress and Tai Chi warrior who transformed into a force of empathy in her afterlife. A Mind-healing miracle-worker, burrowing deep into mind, heart, and soul – hers and a friend’s – to gift him with the answer. An act straight out of the lesson of A Course in Miracles: answering a call for Love.
By ending the drought of Easter basket treats for big deserving bunnies with a timely gesture of loving kindness. Two more chunks of chocolatey drooling goodness. Heaven-sent by an angel.
Salvation’s real army
How could this be? To find out Grandfather Easter Bunny turned, naturally, to his trusted amanuensis, Elwood P. Dowd’s younger brother, Dagwood. A.k.a. Mr. Wonderful. Who had been getting inside dope on all sorts of things from his own Harvey. A big rabbit. Who you would think would have introduced himself to the Cottontails by now but it was not to be.
Their Harvey was Elmer Fudd, who delivered his inside dope from the barrel of a shotgun. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, his idea of Loving Friendship was welcoming cute little bunnies to his carrot patch with General Patton’s Third Army.
Gone with the wind
Dagwood and Guinevere were three years into a relationship. Initially a romance that had run its course but had developed into a Loving Friendship in the meantime. Only Dagwood couldn’t be aware of it while he was distracted by Guinevere’s svelte, luscious body. Seeing in it a Feminine Ideal pant pant that he, well, let’s face it, this guy was hopeless. He was gone.
So when Guinevere, treasuring Dagwood’s friendship but unable any longer to be Mr. Mush’s luscious plaything, tried gently to bring him around to reality, he misunderstood. As we all do when change is needed and we throw a tantrum. The change he thought she wanted was to see him to the door, and so, gentleman that he was, he let himself out.
Still in love, still sympathetic, but unaware that she wished with all her might that he would stay. A beautiful friendship meant to be happy brought to a sad end. Inadvertently and unintentionally, by misunderstanding.
Head over heels in love
They went their separate ways:
- Guinevere closing out career and connections in Louisville to care for her aging mother in Toledo, then to be blessed with true love as her life approached its end in memory care. With Arthur, discerning even though sightless, no doubt captivated as Dagwood was by her angelic voice.
- Dagwood closing out career and connections in the Okefenokee Swamp to begin a second marriage and a new life in the Catacombs under the Harvard Liberal Union. Eventually to be introduced to grandparenting bliss on the Coast and another opportunity to play Mr. Mush. Head over heels in love with two irresistible grandchildren.
Unfinished business
Now comes Parzival, Guinevere’s loving son, with Jungian synchronicity. Inviting Dagwood to participate in a remembrance of his mother by adding his reflections on what Parzival had thought was their romance. Aware that it had ended but unaware that there was unfinished business. An assignment that took Dagwood’s formidable, award-winning intuition back to Guinevere’s family home in Toledo, where coming together in Loving Friendship had been blocked by misunderstanding.
Hers as well as his. When she had thought her ending romance was a test of friendship that he had failed. When in fact he hadn’t. Never for a moment losing his sympathy, admiration, and affection for her. Had he understood her state of mind he would not have let himself out the door. He would have made the adjustment their relationship needed. Then and there too much to ask of Mr. Mush.
When Love takes flight
Because the passion their psyches shared was for the affinity between Femininity and Masculinity at the essence of Creation. Not “here” in physical reality on the surface of things, but Here and Now at the Definition of the way things are. In metaphysical Reality, where bodies have no part in Relationships.
What Dagwood’s Mind’s eye could have seen that moment in Toledo, were it not blocked by his body’s eyes, was Femininity’s wish to relate without female. To trust that when she did, Masculinity would reciprocate by letting go of male. Then both to let the sweet bird of Love out of its cage.
The Dream
Facing forward
A transformation brought to Dagwood’s awareness by his story’s equivalent of Democracy’s Gettysburg Address. The moment in the poetry of Lincoln’s character that committed a nation’s wholeness to memory while it was breaking itself apart. A dream of purpose that then could not have been missed, when Dagwood, relieved of intimacy in a previous relationship, was immersed in the pure water of a mountain stream.
Facing backward downstream at first, toward the residence of the intimate he was leaving. Cleansed by pure water and kept safe from judgment under the benevolent canopy of a great tree at the center of the stream. Then reoriented upstream. Facing forward, to resume his progress against the current back to the Home described for the Child by Jesus in the Course.
The original BFFs
Where Dagwood, like an anadromous fish, began his journey from his spawning ground out into the ocean of involvement in worldly things. Where he was to be taught by experience in the company of soulmates and predators the principles and values, hazards and responsibilities, of maturity. Then to be equipped with the indefatigable strength it would require to swim upstream against the current, over obstacles and through existential threats, to complete his test of character.
Worth the effort for its reward. Return to Self-Awareness. A state of Mind where demons of willfulness have returned to inactivity, with only an implied role in the work and play of Creation. Where answering the call of nature put out by bodies procreating can no longer substitute for the character of spontaneous Relationships integrating. For the infinite power of attraction between Femininity and Masculinity, Love and Logic. The original Best Friends Forever.
With the Spontaneity of Completion
Transmission in the clear
The call of nature here in life on Earth is for reciprocity of pain – retaliation. How to tune it out so that the call for Love can be heard instead has its manuals of instruction. Written in every language known to Sapiens. But while RTFM is always good advice, when it comes to relatability at the remove of functions behind ideas / behind representations / behind words, manuals aren’t enough. It requires Guidance, personalized to the moment. The courage of conviction. Spontaneity in the Here and Now.
Through relationship in the moment with Guinevere Dagwood experienced the rarity of the thing itself making the connection. Without any level of representation. Transmission in the clear without coding. Without his getting in the way since Dagwood, embodiment and name both, is representation.
No match for intimacy
Misrepresentation in a hallucination, and so an obstacle to be overcome to connection. Like all the objects of physical reality, characterized by quantum gravity as “relational” but more accurately described by quantum mechanics as “entanglement.” Implying disharmony rather than the harmony of interrelationships.
The rarity that Dagwood experienced through Guinevere connected itself as if it didn’t need him. Love inseparable from Logic, not knowing of any other way to interconnect or interrelate than to do what they are. As one Self, through Mind’s Energy in the Now: to Love and grow together with shared learning, purpose, and character toward the Ideal of Loving Friendship. Taking it one step at a time in the unreality of time, until Dagwood gets it right.
Where two functions within Mind have no match for intimacy or rhapsody anywhere. Incomplete without one another, completing one another to form one function, one Self, in the Spontaneity of Energy in the Eternal now, the Force of Life that expresses and holds together their act of Completion through all of Creation.
The Immaculate Reception
Once Dagwood put his feelings back together with Guinevere’s in Toledo, the Love between them reasserted itself, only now with insight into what had happened. Helped by Harvey, who now went beyond removing misunderstanding to add to Understanding. By helping Dagwood bring to awareness Loving Friendship that lives still with Guinevere, who lives still.
Then to receive through her now Mind-healing gift the spontaneous thought needed for another change of Mind. Of adding treats for Mother and Father Easter Bunny in his grandchildren’s Easter basket. Hoping that Elmer Fudd and his third army will be off for the holidays.
Evidence that end-of-Life physically is no more a barrier to Loving Friendship than it is to communication between physical unreality and metaphysical Reality.
Building Character
The beginning of a beautiful friendship
Rick’s “hill of beans” farewell to Ilsa at the Casablanca airport may have jerked more tears than Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade (1939). But in those few words their authors, the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch, summarized the fragile accommodation between Love and its would-be jailors in a kingdom ruled by tribal beasts.
I will do what I must for the larger cause, but not as an agent of will to take away my integrity and replace it with itself. You may have my service but you may not own me. (Dagwood’s words, not Rick’s)
Book-ending and thus completing the affirmation of Love between Rick and Ilsa that preceded it in Rick’s Café apartment.
An accommodation that builds character in this life by honoring principle and value –integrity — in the face of pressures to crush it. With a happy ending: the beginning of another beautiful friendship.
In contrast to the story of the biblical Jesus, whose mission wasn’t to accommodate Love’s would-be jailor but to shine its darkness away. To bring to Casablanca’s dramatis personae and its sniffling audience both, awareness that it’s hokum and there’s a better life to be lived in Reality. A mission whose ending on a cross couldn’t be said to be “happy” for Jesus. but since it had no real effect on his being or his mission it can’t be labeled a failure either.
When character mattered
Yearning for a force of nature morally steadfast and upright in time of war in 1942 – for character and integrity — gave us the indelible image of Rick Blaine, squaring around to face Ilsa Lund, the Love of his life and he the Love of hers.
Declaring from the depths of soul rarely fathomed, on screen or off, that the letters of transit meant nothing to him. Or life either, if it had to be lived without Love. That she was all that mattered and the Love between them. No cause worth serving if it couldn’t be served by the Self they were meant to be together. Incomplete without one another.
Rick’s response was also something else. Calling Ilsa’s bluff (in Dagwood’s words):
If you have any honor you’ll put aside manipulation and intimidation. You’ll declare, as I’ve done, the simple, honest truth: that we love one another. That Love is what matters. The letters of transit aren’t what this is about. It’s about character and integrity. About the soul of human striving to rise above predator-animal and affirm the good in us instead of debasing it. It’s about the sanctity of Loving Friendship between two individuals. In Loving Friendship with Guidance from the Mind, Soul, and Relationship we share.
Achieving Completion
A challenge for limited empathy
The plot scripted for Rick and Ilsa contrived for them to satisfy their audience’s yearning for completion in this life. So that a movie’s audience wouldn’t have to wait for a sequel, but in Dagwood’s case with Guinevere they did have to wait. For another three decades before there could be a sign of completion.
She’d “called Dagwood’s bluff” that day in Toledo, though there was no bluff to call. Being open to romance hadn’t closed him to Loving Friendship. But unlike Rick she didn’t declare her intention with body language. By squaring around and facing him with an unequivocal call for Love from them both. It was honest and admirable. Not unsympathetic. Not intentionally hurtful even though it hurt.
But muted. Unlike Rick, who exposed his emotional vulnerability with the same forthrightness that he now set his body in front of Ilsa’s pistol. To do so would be asking too much of a wounded woman, and too much from Dagwood’s limited empathy.
Letters of hot action
But even though Dagwood wasn’t bluffing he didn’t have savvy scriptwriters at his elbow to coach him into a heartfelt response. Unlike Ilsa, who dropped pistol and act both to reveal where her heart was, Dagwood left in confusion. Not grasping the meaning of the moment, leaving it for another time to do the honors.
To let this dear person know that, of course, he loved her and would be honored to be her friend. Romance was no more essential to his happiness than letters of transit were to Rick and Ilsa. A device to rev things up with hot action but otherwise just a distraction.
What Does It Mean?
Help with explanation
Aware of the psychological need that Dagwood had to fill, Jesus would have been aware of Guinevere’s equivalent need. His passion for being helpful finding in the two of them a pairing of needs that also met his. For putting to use a student of the Course that he’d authored for this purpose.
To apply its lesson of Forgiveness to a personal relationship in search of Self-Awareness and Loving Friendship. To be an instrument of learning for Dagwood himself and for Guinevere however and whenever she chose to apply it. Which, until now, seemed to be not at all.
Though her passion was psychic healing in the tradition of Edgar Cayce, Jesus may have heard from Guinevere a call for help for healing of another kind. For release from captivity to male manipulation within, exploiting her psychic talent for his own hallucinatory purposes.
Granting her acceptance into the community of psychics while at the same time obstructing intimacy in Loving Friendship with a man. In which case the Easter eggs which have come of their inconclusive relationship may not only be Guinevere’s gift to Dagwood but also a gift from Jesus that helps to explain it.
You can make this stuff up!
Guinevere’s gift to Dagwood and his to Elmer Fudd’s patrons has a unique passport. Good for travel anywhere.
Like the ridiculous “letters of transit” that got Victor and his indispensable companion Ilsa onto “the last plane to Lisbon,” “signed by General de Gaulle.” As Ugarte told us, a lowlife and therefore trustworthy source of information. So, of course, Ilsa could be excused for knocking off her suave boyfriend in his white dinner jacket If he refused to fish them out of Sam’s piano where they were hidden from Captain Renault’s lascivious appetites.
Except that the movie opened with one of Mon General’s privileged agents getting his butt shot by Vichy French authorities. Who wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same to the General’s butt if it got anywhere near the last plane to Lisbon.
You can’t make this stuff up. And so Dagwood has probably already ruined Guinevere’s Easter gift. Except that, unlike the letters of make-believe, the chocolate Easter eggs have a provenance that’s, well, Real. He didn’t make it up. It happened.
Credit where credit is due
Because unconditional Love and Easter Bunny gifts out of the blue, as Dagwood’s many detractors well know, could not otherwise bear his imprint. If his kind had been written into the script of Casablanca it would have been the guy who knocked off the Germans to steal the letters of transit. Offscreen and gone with one sentence of dialogue. Or one of Major Strasser’s goons hiccupping the Horst Wessel Song before belching himself under the table in a drunken stupor. Dagwood’s name would have appeared in the credits somewhere between ashtray emptying and reading the newspaper.
In the absence of embodiments
The meaning of their enchanted chocolate Easter eggs goes beyond affirmation of anything in human-ape’s animal kingdom. A claim sure to be debunked faster than you can say “Mam’selle Hepzibah.” What makes me think so?
- If Lancelot, Dagwood’s younger son, gone from this “life” for eight years, could become his best friend, the face of Guidance in his imagination and be a constant presence in his thoughts and feelings, his conversational partner of choice for the last five;
- if Guinevere could share with Dagwood her gift of healing at Easter, years after she left this life, when Dagwood is moved by the character of Jesus as he’s never been moved before, to be at his side as he’s been at Dagwood’s side. To practice the lesson of Relatability through forgiveness taught by the metaphysics of the Course. To give himself and others a break;
- if it’s clear that the work of Relationship goes on without hindrance from the presence or absence of embodiments,
then it’s possible that Dagwood isn’t the only one to see and feel something of value in his gift. To be used or not as it was intended: to demonstrate not only that body’s end in this “life” is meaningless but also that the boundary between this “life” and Creation beyond hallucination, is no barrier to Love inseparable from Logic.
To risk hurt
That despite the misperceptions, fears, obsessions, and distrust that obstruct Loving Friendship, the provocations and distractions of illusory demons are no match for Minds open to Guidance from Reality and Truth.
- In Loving Relationship with the Self that completes them instead of competing with them.
- Affirmative with the vulnerability of honesty, not afraid to be disappointed. To risk hurt if what’s at stake is more than letters of transit.
- Ready to take a bullet if Character matters. Because it does. Life worth living with meaning. To be Loved and Loving. The point of it all.
An Irresistible Ideal
The challenge of explanation
The meaning of Grandfather Easter Bunny’s gift made possible through Guinevere could be change. Though in no way to be judged a failure if it doesn’t produce it. Because Dagwood could confirm without reservation that everyone has done their part. The situation now more than it is what it is. It’s what it was meant to be.
And even if the end product is typically a Rube Goldberg mess for being anything human, it’s nevertheless provided ample opportunities for learning and growth. For character development that Dagwood can attest to, though for others to experience in their own contexts.
His pity isn’t reserved for those who encounter or experience the unexplainable in life. That can’t be explained no matter how hard they persist at explanation. It’s for those unaware of questions and their persistence at not being answerable. For what they’re missing. The challenge of Explanation and the joy and satisfaction of Love and Logic interconnecting with all of it through Understanding.
Santa’s sleigh bell
That arrives of its own accord. Like chocolate Easter eggs bearing the names of persons, sweet like themselves, with the Innocence of a Child beloved of its Parents. Bringing its donor to tears of gratitude for possibility long denied by the expectation of impossibility. By lie posing as truth.
Two Easter eggs but another illustration, like Santa’s sleigh bell in Polar Express (2004), of a Child’s believing able to do what “realism” unbelieving can never do: be aware of the presence of Love. That would never be anywhere but where its Child is, whether awake with the joie de vivre of Creation or “awake” to a hallucination of externals. Dead to the Real world hidden from it. Within. Where the action is.
Pierced by the miracle
The gift of Meaning is that the comings and goings of bodies have none. That the boundary between “life” and “death” on Earth, so fussed over with ritual, so overwrought with cymbals of opera and symbols of Church – unaffordable — is an illusion. A joke.
When Guinevere and Dagwood, denied the appearance of Loving Friendship in a hallucination of appearances, managed it in the Reality of Mind anyway. No less Love inseparable from Logic in make-believe than anywhere except for the veil of unawareness hiding it. Pierced by the Miracle when Guinevere, relieved of the false narrative of body, understood what they couldn’t convey to one another in Toledo.
That the call for Loving Friendship came from within both of them. Bringing now to Dagwood’s awareness the gift of thought that counts. Bearing the unmistakable imprint of Jesus, when his Mind, wrapped in thoughts of Guinevere, wrapped itself around Easter. Then without thinking, offered an Ideal in the form of two extra eggs to “others” beloved of the same Parents.
Another chapter to come
The parents of his grandchildren. The Ideal symbolized by the eggs:
- That the one beloved Child of its Parents lives. Whether awake in the Reality of Mind, asleep in a dream of embodiments, recognizable by the Vision of Love and Logic, or hidden by body senses.
- That “life” on Earth is beginning in the eternal Now, not the end of terminal time.
- That the Ideal may be accepted and used or not, as its recipients wish. In this “life” or its afterlife, whatever form it takes. No strings attached.
- That the Ideal is always and forever recoverable. With the sentiment behind the words that closed Casablanca (1942): “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” That among the gifts of every chapter is the promise of another.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!
Dagwood is “Grampa.” A onetime tough guy on the playground, who turns into mush when Carly Simon sings Where or When (1937) or All the Things You Are (1939) while he’s thinking of his grandchildren. Two prototypes for the idealized ‘you’ of every heart-opening lyric, poem, or epiphany, who awaken his soul with the music and poetry of life. Archetypes of Innocence untrammeled by the boundaries of time and space, present in everything everywhere caressed by Love. Two characters and authors within, setting off to write their own stories.
Nothing more important in Grampa’s own life than to be at their sides. Reminder and role-model of grandparenting that grandchildren can trust: reciprocity in Loving Friendship. A bluebird on their shoulders, helping to fill hearts with song and lives with laughter. And an irresistible Ideal: the wonderful day in the here and Now, when everything is satisfactual.