By Grace Acosta

I spent Easter Sunday having brunch with my family, mulling over childhood Easter memories. Some of the images that popped into my mind qualify me for, I believe, some sort of “Weirdest Childhood Ever” prize. My family is Buddhist (though not of the consistent temple-going variety), and I grew up surrounded by Chicano and Latino Catholics. I also attended a Catholic school in downtown Los Angeles run by the Maryknoll missionary order.

You didn’t have to be Catholic to attend the school; however, you had to be a least half-Japanese, a policy which even back then was criticized as being racist. I spent my K-8 grade years being one of four unbaptized students in my class.

I remember once dressing up in Easter finery, placing a neatly folded veil and bobby pin in my purse, plus a coin for the collection basket, to take to Mass. Before leaving, my mother snapped a photo of my sister and me in the yard, surrounded by the Easter baskets that we had received from relatives and friends. She then promptly whisked the baskets away to distribute them to our neighbors because she was a Nazi about sugar and didn’t want us eating a single chick, egg or bunny. After the holiday photo-op, I proceeded to church with a friend.

I remember the season of Lent in my school. My classmates and I gave up the normal things: candy, sodas, TV or some other fiendish delight. When our pockets became heavy with unspent junk food change, we donated those nickels and dimes to the “Pagan Babies” fund.

“Pagan Babies,” I kid you not, was the actual name of a nationally sponsored, Catholic relief program designed to collect money to sponsor missionary work in foreign lands. The “Pagan Babies” collection box was made of cardboard and had a kind of decorative headboard that displayed the Virgin Mary with downcast eyes and arms outstretched toward the heads of children floating around the box itself: smiling heads, black, brown and yellow heads, in short, pagan heads.

It never occurred to me that at least technically speaking, I was actually one of those pagan babies. While I was imagining the dimes that I dropped through the slot heading down a magic chute toward Kenya, India or China, I was possibly subsidizing an education that those kids never asked for, and maybe didn’t even need - kids like me who weren’t born Christian but were taught to believe that it was indispensable to one’s salvation to become one.

I don’t regret my Catholic education, though admittedly, it might have been nice if I could have somehow managed to avoid a near-obsessive fear of roasting in perdition for eternity if I happened to die before I got baptized. That idea was introduced to me at age five, and stuck with me until I was about 16. But barring that distraction, no harm, no foul.

Today, I remain a pagan baby, if you will, all grown up, still contemplating spirituality and the human condition, but going beyond the range of my Christian schooling. And, I might add, buying See’s chocolate Easter eggs for my kids, just for the hell of it.

Acosta is a Los Altos resident. You can contact her at noshoesplease@sbcglobal.net.