Today would have been my dad’s 103rd birthday, so I’m going to reminisce for a bit.

My parents went to San Antonio on their honeymoon. They’d both grown up in tiny towns so this trip was as much a Big Endeavor as getting married. The only thing I remember about their honeymoon stories was how they kept getting lost in the maze of streets. (Española, New Mexico, and Mexico City are the only other two places that won against my dad’s superior navigational abilities.)

At Easter Break (this was so long ago that Spring Break hadn’t been invented yet) the year I was in the third grade, we took a trip to San Antonio. This was notable because we weren’t a family that traveled to cities or to see relatives. Our trips were almost always camping trips to the mountains in Colorado. Anyway, on this Easter trip, I suppose we saw the Alamo. And the Riverwalk. Maybe the zoo. There are two things I remember about this trip: my sister and I got daily pearl necklaces at a downtown department store. And we went to see some of the Spanish missions.

The grounds of the missions were cool and green, with ancient, twisted live oaks and other trees providing nicely dappled shade. (I still have a fascination with dappled light.) And there were peacocks roaming the grounds; it was my first encounter with those birds and their cat-like calls. I was an extremely timid little kid so I suspect that the peacocks scared the crap out of me.

When I went to San Antonio earlier this month, I stayed over for a day and took myself (with help from Uber) to see some things that seemed significant. And that’s how I wound up early on a Friday morning alone inside the Mission Concepción.

The grounds had some nice shade, but I didn’t see or hear any peacocks.

Mission Concepción
San Antonio, Texas
photographed 10.6.2026