My Wedding
On June 27, 1981, at 5:00 pm I stood next to the altar in the Mission Carmel Basilica, waiting for my bride to appear from the courtyard about a hundred feet down the center aisle. Below me, entombed in stone crypts, were the bones of three men—Father Juan Crespi, diarist of the Portola expedition and a strong ally of Junípero Serra; Father Fermin Lausen, priest and successor to the presidency of the California Missions; and Father Junípero Serra, the man most influential in inaugurating the Spanish and Catholic colonization of California. Little did I know these three men would one day play a central role in my novel, Five Hundred Moons.…