As I type, the famed Easter Bunny is frolicking through many a front yard hiding eggs in hard to find places. If you ask my baby sister Katie what her favorite part of Easter is, her eyes will widen and she'll shout, "EASTER EGGS AND JELLYBEANS!" As her godfather, the two things that I have made sure she learns is to love God and to love jellybeans. Since I retired from the Easter egg hunt many years ago, I have graduated to the position of filming the hunt with the family video camera. (The documentarian in me wants to shoot the Easter egg hunt as a clash between my brothers who are in it solely for the candy and my sisters who are doing it for the wonder of finding eggs left behind by the Easter Bunny; in short, a classic example of the difference between greed and innocence. This idea gets shot down relatively quickly by the parents, who cite "creative differences" and threaten to shut down filming. Typical.) The Easter egg hunt is always entertaining, but has lost some luster since I stopped participating. I had to find a new favorite thing about Easter, and I wasn't sure what that was until a few days ago.
Few would expect that the best part of Easter would include Mass in the morning, but to me it has a special quality. It starts as we enter the church in a single file line that would make the Von Trapp's jealous. I typically bring up the rear because I have a knack for corralling the little kids when they fall behind. The search for an open pew is always a difficult one, but in a very un-Bruch Family move we always arrive early for Easter Mass and there is usually a wide open pew. A wide open pew is essential because my family is rolling 10-deep (11 if my grandma shows up) and not all pews are designed to fit that many people. Luckily, my parents starve us and we are skinny enough to all squeeze into a pew as one unit.
At this point, the entire congregation is staring at us, marveling at the size of our family and pondering our various ages and how we function together. Normally, such scrutiny might cause embarrassment, but I could not care less. With my position at the end of the pew, I simply glance to the side and see everyone of us kneeling in our best attire, and I smile with pride. Seeing all of us together is a rarity and I savor every minute of it. I can't help but to imagine myself twenty years from now looking down a similar pew, still beaming with pride at my own wife and children. These are the thoughts that count in life.
The mass progresses smoothly until the sign of peace, when chaos breaks loose within our pew. Katie is crafty and knows that as a five year old, she can hop onto the seat and move down the aisle giving everyone a comfortable handshake. For the rest of us, we have to make due with reaching as far as our arms can stretch and sometimes the cheesy two-finger peace sign has to suffice. By the end of it, our family has mostly reshuffled within the pew and I find myself smiling again. I simply cannot help it.
Throughout the rest of the day we engage in other fun activities and I make sure that Katie and I have eaten every possible jellybean before we are sick to our stomachs. Still, nothing really comes close to that feeling of togetherness that I felt during mass, crammed into a small pew. It's exactly what was intended for us and it's moments like these where I love being a part of a big family.
