I love field trips. ... I made a field trip to a candy store, just to get the names of all the chocolates. My friend distracted the proprietor by buying something while I went about stooped over and mumbling as discreetly as I could into my small tape recorder.

If the journey is more important than the destination, then I am already succeeding as a fiction writer. I really like all the preparatory work that goes into a story. I like writing out the basic idea, creating charts with my characters' names, dates, and biographical particulars, and doing the research to get certain details right. In the last story I wrote I had to find a place where a couple could get married with just a few hours between securing the license and repeating the vows. (Vermont worked well for this. In California you can get a "confidential license" that you don't even have to be present to secure. It costs more than the standard license. Just in case you need ever to know this.)

I've started another story. This one concerns an older man (my second male protagonist) who feels a compelling need to visit with an old friend. He is disappointed when the friend refuses to see him. She is in swift physical decline after several strokes and no longer sees anyone outside the family. The man then follows an inner call to attend a weekday Mass in the church where he was married. The neighborhood around the church has changed in the forty years since he's been there, and he finds that the daily Mass is given in Spanish.

The need to visit an old friend was actually experienced by my father a few days before he died. My mother told me about it later, seeing it as a sign that he somehow knew that he should be making his good byes. As it happened, he died on their anniversary. She also told me how much she regretted that they had not attended Mass together in the church where they were married. She'd had the idea, but hadn't mentioned it. It was I who contributed the news that the congregation had become predominantly Spanish.

Put these elements together and you have several scenes. I wrote the scene where the man calls the old friend and talks to the housekeeper/companion. Next I wanted to write the Mass scene.

So on Sunday I drove past the church where my parents were married on June 22, 1946, and where I was baptized on March 17, 1947. I learned that Mass was given en espanol on lunes, miercoles, y viernes.

On Monday morning at 9:00 I arrived at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in the 1400 block of Market Street, which means it's half way up Allison Hill, about ten blocks from the downtown area. The neighborhood has always been solidly middle class, with row homes and double houses, storefronts, banks, and churches, not unlike the neighborhood Archie Bunker lived in in All in the Family. Although it has undergone many changes and has declined somewhat, it is by no means a slum.

I had not been in this church since 1967, when I attended a classmate's wedding there. I did not remember how small the sanctuary was, much smaller than the big stone church of the city parish I grew up in. About fifteen people were gathered for Mass. You must understand that my Spanish is less than rudimentary. (I can, however, say with confidence, "Albondigas! Hoy es miercoles!", which means "Meatballs! Today is Wednesday," an instructional conversation from ninth grade about the school lunch menu.) I came prepared to say "No hablo espanol, solamente ingles," in case anyone started talking to me.

I needn't have worried. I must look like someone who doesn't speak Spanish. At the passing of the peace the man behind me said "Paz, Paz." to everyone, but "Peace be with you" to me. At Communion the deacon offered everyone else la sangre de Cristo, but to me he offered "the blood of Christ."

The rite of the Mass is familiar to me, and the paperback Mass book available in the pews is bilingual, so I had little trouble following the order of the service. The scripture readings were given in Spanish, as was the deacon's short homily, and that, of course, was incomprehensible to me. Well, almost incomprehensible. This is Holy Week, so I can anticipate the themes to be treated. I heard the deacon say something about the death of Jesus being less important than the resurrection, and his talk was full of the words amor and corazon. His words came in a slow, mellifluous flow, and he used his expressive hands to emphasize his message and I, sitting there unable to understand any but a few isolated phrases, nevertheless felt a peace that I had not anticipated.

Since I was, after all, on a research trip, I made some notes. I sketched the altar, and studied the stained glass windows. The two windows in the front on the west side of the sanctuary (the right if you are facing the altar, the "Epistle side" if you are a pre-Vatican II Catholic) show scenes of the Virgin Mary being crowned Queen of Heaven and of her Assumption, with words from the Song of Songs: "You are beautiful, there is no flaw in you. Arise my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come away."

That is the window my  mother stood in front of during her wedding.

I had come as a sightseer, a stranger in a strange land with an agenda that had to do with my work and not with myself. And I found that I had walked into a piece of my history, and a feeling about it that I had not anticipated. For if you've read the piece My Face Before I Was Born, in my family history section, you'll know that, in a sense, I was there that day too.

I took a Mass booklet with me to copy some of the Spanish text, so I attended Mass again this morning in order to return it. I signed the guest book, noting my biographical connection to the parish. I know I'll go back. For one thing, there are no pictures of my parents' actual wedding (they didn't hire a professional photographer and they didn't have a flash camera), but I'm hoping the parish has some archival pictures of exactly how the sanctuary looked then. Holy Week isn't exactly the best time to go asking for stuff like that.

But even if I didn't want that kind of information, I would still go back. Something happened inside me these past three days, something I hadn't expected, and I need to sit with it for a while.