A curator for the Oakland Museum called me yesterday and asked me to e-mail him the photograph of my kinfolk having a picnic in the Oakland Hills. I had just returned from Dot Dotsons in Eugene where Jo framed a enlargement of this historic event in a antique frame I purchased. She did a splendid job!

Thanks to the Trust my uncle Vincent Rice left me, I have more funds to investigate and record my lost family history. Being poor I have had to endure hardship in order to visit my newfound daughter and newborn grandson in California. Tyler’s father was not there for his son, so when I went to see him for the first time I made a point to ground him in the history of my father’s people whom I and my cousin had just discovered were in a tomb at Cypress Lawn in Colma.

We three were the first kin to enter this tomb in many years. Tyler took an early lunch when Heather breast-fed her son on a marble bench facing the Tiffany window. Afterwards we went atop a hill and had a picnic next to these beautiful angels. Heather told me Tyler remembers being there. I was amazed when I saw his eyes follow a plane in the sky, and then smile.

My friend, Joy, had given me a special AA coin with the image of an angel on it for my late sister, Christine Rosamond, that I slipped into a crack made by an earthquake.

When we drove through San Francisco on our way home, I told Heather this was her and Tyler’s town now, for the Stuttmeisters are listed as a pioneer family, and made the Blue Book. In some respects, this was a Baptism.