Easter Sunday

This entry will make Grandmother Joyce happy!

It is Easter Sunday. We woke up refreshed after an early night. The babies were down by 7:30 and we were down by 8:30. Luc Au Su was up at 7:30, bathed and fed by 8:00 or so. Maisie Minh Tam slept late. But we were downstairs at breakfast by 9:00 or so. Then we had a short nap upstairs, and at 10:30 we went out for the day.

Marci and her family were at breakfast, and they gave us the mass schedule at the Cathedral: 5 AM, 7, 9, and 11. If we are going to mass, it will be the 11!

Marci had visited the church the night before, in the dark, and caught the mass schedule on a sign. But the square had been full, she said, of people watching a movie projected on the side of the church, on white sheets: The Passion of Christ.

We headed to the Cathedral. At 10:35 it was a massive snarl of motorbike and pedestrian traffic as the earlier mass exited. Then it was gone. At 11 the church wasn't even full, and most of the people there were Westerners, like us. The mass, it turns out, was in French. We sat in the back. Luc took a bottle early, then conked out. Maisie went a little while later. They woke up toward the end of the mass, and they just watched the event with interest.

As we sat and stood, we looked around, too. Late in the mass I noticed the window across the aisle on the opposite wall: St. Ignace de Loyola.

Sorry, we forget that some of you don't know the significance of this. Peggy graduated from Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, and I teach there now.

For dinner tonight, Marci and her family invited us to the Easter dinner. Marci bought several packages of ham steaks, which she had the kitchen here prepare. We had Vietnamese style stir fry vegetables, with mashed potatoes and cucumber and tomato salad. Probably not the meal we would have had at home, but it was an Easter dinner.

Thank you Marci and Betty--and Robbie, Katie, Mylie, and Jamie!