Dolorosa

Took the kid to the Mision San Francisco de Asis, better known as Mission Dolores. It was the first attempt in weeks, maybe months, to take him on something of a random stroll...not that random, in the sense that it's part of my effort to understand San Francisco history; random only in the sense that it's off the beaten track of grocery-shopping, playgroups, playgrounds and all the myriad baby-related activities that take up nearly all my time these days.

I knew we only had about forty minutes to get there, see what there was to see, and get home, as he was nearing his nap time--and as it turned out, we didn't make it back before he fell asleep in the car. But he'd only been sleeping a few minutes, so I thought it would be pretty easy to transfer him to his crib. Nothing doing. He protested mightily after I gave him a bottle and put him in the crib, and the protests continued for the next twenty minutes. The afternoon sort of went downhill after that, at least for me; my energy level was nil (it still is). And incredibly frustrated, after reflecting on the fact that this simple, feeble effort to step out of the Mommy role for less than an hour caused such a major upheaval in the rest of the day.

But I shouldn't overdramatize; it happened today, but with a little better planning, i.e. if I'd left earlier, I probably could've made the same trip without any nasty repercussions.

And anyway, it intensified and made slightly surreal our whole tour of the Mission, which we had to accomplish at lightning speed. It was small, much smaller than expected. The brochure says it's only 114 feet long and 22 feet wide. And the adjoining cemetery is tiny as well, although according to the guides leading a group of schoolchildren through the grounds, it used to be much bigger. In fact, they said, 11,000 people are still interred under what used to be the Mission grounds; most of them are now resting underneath the houses and schools that surround the Mission.

As my baby and I cruised through the cemetery in our stroller, the guide for the schoolchildren pointed to a large wooden tomb marker with a two side-by-side inscriptions on it, and proudly said to the two tourists strolling along just in front of me, "These are my great-great-great-great grandparents. They're Indians." Then he went back to the explanation of the cemetery that he was giving the schoolchildren.

Most of the tombstones in the cemetery are for people of Irish descent; he said that the majority of the people buried in the cemetery were actually Indian (like his ancestors), but their wooden grave markers were removed, and the stone markers for the Irish and other Europeans were installed in their place. I didn't quite hear if the Irishmen and other Europeans were buried alongside the Indians, or how that worked out. But it was an interesting bit of historical information. I think the wooden grave marker that he pointed out to the tourists was the only one marking an Indian grave. I wanted, of course, to talk to him and ask him how and when this one grave marker was installed; but he was too involved in his talk to the schoolchildren to be interrupted.

The schoolchildren were, in a sense, the highlight of the whole trip. They were all either Latino, Indian, mixed race, or black. Just seeing them as they stood there at the front of the chapel, then in the cemetery, brought San Francisco's history alive...and thrust it into the future at the same time. More to say about that--about San Francisco's interraciality and my hope that my son will make an attempt to understand what race still means in this country (no, it is not at all a color-blind society)...but as stated earlier, my energy level is at zero, so enough for now.