My first memory of, well, anything, was walking up to the San Gabriel mission with my mother and grandmother.  The mission was too old to stand up on its own, and so there was scaffolding all around it.  In my opinion, it was held up by stilts.

My mother said we were going to see a saint.  As we were not raised with religion, this meant little to me, but I was still excited, because whenever we went in this direction, there was usually the promise of heavily larded beans or pistachio ice cream in store.  Even then I was lured by food as my main motivator to explore the world.

The mission was too old to be entered, but there was a section that had been added on to it, which was sunny and open.  We approached a… I guess cul de sac in the wall?  Some kind of section that was recessed.  I didn’t pay the best attention in art school, but I bet there’s a specific architecture word for that part of the church.

There was a long table, wood on the sides.  My mom picked me up.  My grandmother, Honesta, stood silently, mesmerized.  It was oddly quiet, without the sound of her gums chewing gum.  I was maybe three or four years old.  I looked down through the glass top of the wooden box.

There was a dead guy in there!

You could tell he was dead, because he did not move, and he was in a glass top box.  Also, because he looked a bit fake, like his skin was made of paper mache and wax lips.  It wasn’t scary, because he did not move.  Also, because my mom wasn’t scared.  She was laughing.

I think she was laughing because I wasn’t scared.  She tried to tell me something about mummies and Egypt, but this man was from Mexico, also, I did not know what countries were, yet.  My mom and Honesta were from the Philippines, which was a very far away place, like Canada, which made bacon.

Life was very simple back then.  My mother put me back on the ground, and I think maybe they prayed or fell asleep for a while, because they stood at the side of the mummy-saint for a while.

Then we went to a gift shoppe, and I got a rabbit’s foot!  There was a wide variety of awesome stuff in the gift shop: peacock feathers, gum, and lucky rabbit’s feet keychains.  The rabbit’s foot was real and had toenails!  It was dyed an awful purple, and since I had never seen a live rabbit before, I assumed they all came in these colors in nature.

And that’s the first time I saw a dead person.