FATEFUL
In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote that “being in school, from adolescence on, was like doing hard time.” And it was. Because of my anxiety disorder, school was a prison to me. As I’ve said, I would hunker down at the back of my classrooms, in constant fear and dread of...
BRAIN DAMAGE
Toni doesn’t believe me when I tell her how bad my memory is, how mortified I feel when I can’t remember what the movie I saw two nights ago was or what I learned about Lewis and Clark from a documentary last month. She insists I have extraordinary recall—of the...
ADVERSARIES
Beyond telling the story behind the burn scar on his cheek, I realize that up until now I haven’t said much in my blogs about Doug, who’d never wanted to leave Minnesota in the first place. For one thing, he’d never been as intimidated by my father as I was. For...
DOUG
As I’ve said, the move to California was the undoing of us all—both as a family and as individuals. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote a vignette I called “Little Guy”:
One Christmas I took a picture of Doug—crouched in front of…
ODD MAN OUT
The Unitarian Church had a cabin for retreats in Inverness on Tomales Bay. A dozen miles away was secluded McClure’s Beach, which you had to hike to from the parking lot. When I first went to Inverness with my eighth-grade Sunday school class, we roughhoused on the...
IDYLL
The second summer I went back to Minnesota, after tenth grade, my dad rallied briefly—and told Doug and me we could each invite a friend along on a trip to the northern lakes. So I asked Kathy, expecting her to turn me down. To my surprise, she accepted. And for the...