You know you're at a formal event with (my) children when...

One sings along with the hymns during the service, one has to be removed for reasons of loudness. (I made the mistake of telling him if he couldn't be quiet, I was taking him out... which, on reflection, could have been phrased more nicely.) At the reception, one insists that he must, must, must sit at a table that has cake as a centerpiece, and not flowers. He will not admit to the social nicety of sitting at one's assigned table. Finally, I made Mike ask the table next to us if we could swap their centerpiece (Norwegian wedding cake) for ours (flowers.) They just graciously offered it up, and although we thought it was only decorative, we'd managed at our table to eat half before learning that we were supposed to share the cake with another table. We handed it back and all was well.



Finally, during one of our dozen trips to the bathroom, another guest, unknown to us, said when she saw my charming son (by now covered in boysenberry sorbet) "Oh, it's Peter. I've heard his name!" leaving me to hope that it was for cuteness that she'd heard it, and not, say, extreme awfullness of behavior.



Yesterday we went to a theological bookstore that's housed in a former church, but which is still one of my sacred places. We browsed a bit, bought a couple of things including a little monograph on Sankta Lucia in Italian, and took some pictures (the stained glass one is a bit dark, but the other one of Grace gives a nice sense of the looks of the inside.) While we were checking out I told Grace that one book was about Sankta Lucia, but the Italian part of the story, and the clerk looked quizzically at me and said, "But I thought she was a Swedish saint?" I told him that the original Lucia was martyred under Diocletian in 309, and was venerated in France and Belgium in the tenth century, and then in Scandanavia by the 1300's, and that there was a record of some liturgial images of her from 1310 in Turku, Finland.... and he said, "Special interest of yours?" Um, yeah, whoops, got a little carried away there.