© 2022 Craig Dahlberg
During just the first two months of 2022, the price of a can of Campbell’s tomato soup at Kroger rose by 25 percent. The rising rate of cars and fuel prices have far surpassed Campbell’s soup, a bellwether of staple food economics. Even the price for mattresses, where one might be inclined to recline, hoping to forget about all this, has skyrocketed.
Have you ever tried to run up a downward-descending escalator? That escalator is the current state of economics. We’re all running hard to keep up, but getting nowhere.
The high cost of living is upon us.
The uneven, up-down, zigzag floors, walls and ceilings of a funhouse are just that—fun—for awhile. It’s a relief to come out the other end, having survived the intractable and dizzying balancing act. But when will this economic funhouse finally settle down? The cost of living is skyrocketing.
I prepared myself for my customary morning walk on Friday, Good Friday, to be exact, the Friday before Easter. I doused myself with deodorant in the off-chance that Joe would want to chat. I often meet him mid-stride on my walks, as I quietly lurch down my familiar back streets. Joe likes to hail me from across the street. It took Joe several months to learn my name. For many weeks, he christened me with the name, “Frank.” I get that a lot. Upon introducing myself, I’m often mistakenly called Frank, perhaps because I mispronounce my own name. “Frank” comes out much more distinctly than “Craig,” which I myself sometimes choke upon, getting stuck somewhere around my tonsils, the place in the gullet reserved for salt water gargling. “Frank” seems a much more straightforward, tongue-forward appellation.
After several dozen more exercise walks, I finally trained Joe to learn my real name. Now I get, “Hi, Greg.” Never mind. His intent is good. My next task is training him to discern the difference between a “G” and a “C.”
Anyway, Joe is a retired school teacher who cares for grandchildren on occasion and walks his dog with religious fervor. There used to be two dogs on his leash, but last year the golden retriever perished quite suddenly in its sleep after being diagnosed with cancer. How do I know this? Joe freely invites me into his world to share the trivia in his life. In some way, I am gratified to be trusted with the rigors of life by this one-time stranger. He lays out a welcome mat into his world.
On this day, this Good Friday, while chatting curbside with Joe, I suddenly realized that I had not paused my Apple Watch exercise timer for today’s discourse interlude. So I attempted to gently drift downstream away from Joe, despite his attempts to close the growing gap between us.
I lurched and forged ahead, leaving Joe to ponder the correct pronunciation of my name, and determined to mark my exercise miles and minutes. The late fitness guru, Jack LaLanne would be proud.
Abruptly, mid-stride in my exercise brain haze, I half-stuttered a step, lurching sideways like a crab skittering from a codfish. A full step would have landed me directly upon the remains of a rabbit, car-flattened. This bit of brown fur was once a beautiful creation. I lingered over it in awe and consternation.
It was laid open, a beautiful handiwork of its Creator, dissected by an automobile tire. It was still a thing of beauty, but a Picasso re-arranged structure it was. The parts were there, but not in the originally-intended design.
Why did this rabbit meet his demise on my exercise street? Why on Good Friday, just two days before Easter? Was it some sort of omen? The implication was obvious—could it indeed be the Easter Bunny? A horrific thought.
My Good Friday Bunny soon disappeared from the roadway. The next day, during my walk, he was but a flattened pelt with most of the fur missing. And the following day he was gone, nowhere to be found. Surely, he had not been raised on Easter Day, this Easter Rabbit. No, indeed, surely not. But the irony was not lost on me, his coincidental death on Good Friday and disappearance two days later—contrasted with the incarnate God-made-flesh, the real Easter Hero who perished on Good Friday and was resurrected on Easter, two days later.
These days, as we all know, it costs a lot just to stay alive. We know something of the high cost of living with each visit to the grocery store or fill-up at the gas station.
When our friend, Mr. Rabbit, tragically met the Goodyear tire while crossing the road that day, he experienced the ultimate high cost of living.
But the alternative Easter narrative is the one we will to choose to remember. It’s the one in which, on that triumphant Easter morning, there was offered a permanent, never-ending solution for the high cost of living.