One thing I did do was to cruise over to the harbor and take a look at the Maritime Museum's growing collection of ships. I saw the San Salvador all finished and sitting in the water, and she was beautiful!
I didn't have time to go onboard or really look at anything. I had a great chat with the young man behind the counter at the gift shop -- he said he was a history major at one of the local universities and is getting interested in maritime history.
Conditions at Dad's place have improved. I talked to one of the neighbors before I went over, and she said that the yard had been cleaned up and looked great, and it did! When I got inside, the kitchen was clean (or, clean-er) and there was actually space to move around in the living room. Even the stink was lessened! Since I returned home to Smack in the Middle, we've found out that the ceiling tiles are not asbestos, so we can take them down ourselves without calling a certified abatement person. At any rate, I went out and fetched Dad's favorite pizza, and we found enough sitting places that Dad, my cousin, and I could hang out together and watch an old western on television. So the most fraught part of the trip went really well.
At the conference, I did not attend my usual high number of sessions -- only one, that I wasn't involved in myself. I helped out at a table in the book exhibit, and I had a nice chat with my editor as well as with a bunch of my old friends that stopped to say hello. Normally, I'm pretty much on my own at these things -- I've come to understand that I'm a bit of an introvert, as are lots of other academics, and activities like this are hard on us. I've learned to forgive myself for being a little stand-offish in social situations.
Our session went well, in spite of the fact that I was sorely mistaken about the time and came in about three minutes late, something that horrified me then as it still does now. But the presenters carried on beautifully and kept to their time without me -- they started without me because there were four papers instead of the usual three and we would be pressed for time. The senior scholar that we asked to do the commentary, a man usually known for his ascerbic wit and snark, did a wonderful job. I was allowed to conduct the question and answer session at the end, and the audience was great. We had more than twenty attendees, a miracle in view of the fact that right across the hall, the famous women's historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was in a competing session. Once I saw that in the program, I expected we'd have a skeleton audience, but ours was kind of packed, even by normal conference standards!
After our session, I ran straight in to the other room to seek out Dr. Ulrich. Her work has been a great influence on me, and I wanted to tell her that. I thought I'd have to wait in line, or be on the outer edges of a triple ring of admirers, but she was alone and putting her things together to leave. I walked up, shook her hand, and introduced myself, and told her I was going to gush, and gush I did! She took it with a twinkle and great humor, and I'm glad I didn't hang back. Later, I found that nobody else had the guts to talk to her. I guess that's the other Pulitzer prize they don't tell you about.
After scanning the hall for a few particular friends and not finding them, I sat in on a session that I hadn't originally planned to listen to, but I was very glad I did. The topic was finding Indian voices in studying the 1775 Mission Revolt by Kumeyaay Indians. They coordinated an attack on Mission San Diego on November 5, killed the priests and a bunch of other mission workers, and burned the building down. The scholars presented some great and creative work using data. One found that there had been a huge spike in baptisms at the mission right before the revolt, possibly indicating Indian reconnaissance of the mission's strength. Another used genealogy to show that the villages which participated were related by clan and located along waterways. One of the presenters was the head of a dig project that I worked for in 1989, doing archaeology at the mission ahead of a planned building project. It was great to say hello and reconnect with a former boss, and reminisce about a project that so deeply affected all of us that worked on it.
While still in San Diego, I shopped for a purse and found nothing. I went to a bead shop that I visited with Sis last time we were in town, and came out with a single strand of red carnelian beads. I had lunch at a fish taco place I used to love, and then went out and got Dad's pizza.
To be honest, I had been dreading my trip to San Diego. I had a good time in spite of all of the responsibilities that I had to fulfill, I saw old friends and made one or two new ones. I went over old ground and revisited some memories and looked at a beautiful blue sky. When I say I'm "back from the wars," I mean to say that the wars were within me.
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