Girlfriend headed out of town to California for two weeks, about an hour ago. Before she left, she left two Easter baskets on my daughter's desk; one for my daughter and one for me. When I kissed her goodbye, she said, "I smell peanut butter cup on your breath; you been in your Easter basket, already..." I lied and said, "No, I haven't. That is the smell from the pancakes that I had for breakfast this morning." We both laughed.

When I got home from dropping my gal at the crowded airport, I went straight to my Easter basket. Before she left the house, girlfriend had been stuffing money in brightly colored plastic eggs and sticking them in my daughter''s basket and I wanted to see if she had put any money in mine. She hadn't.

I'm not a Christian. I don't buy the myths. I think that they were promulgated to subjagate, dominate and tax in the name of the Lord. But I dig chocolate Easter bunnies, though, and peanut butter cups and the act of handing a basket full of goodies to a kid and watching the kid smile.

That's what God wants: smiling kids, not a bunch of rules and regulations handed down from some old men in weird robes who run back to the church and hide with their money when it is learned that abstaining from sex has created a bunch of child molestors within their ranks.

Happy Easter.