Category: Memoir

The summer of 1969 is the family’s first back in the Chicago suburbs. To his dismay, the young man’s family has left lively and liberal Ann Arbor to return to the stodgy conservatism of Chicago’s western suburbs. He is 16 years old and entering his junior year of high school. He walks home from school

When our family moves to Illinois in the early 1960s, we leave behind our California dreams for a new life in the Midwest. I am eight years old and the trip east feels like a journey out of time, to a place too far away for my young mind to quite comprehend. I do not

Last night I dreamed that I was a child Out where the pines grow wild and tall I was trying to make it home through the forest Before the darkness falls                                                

Here is a short account of a family story that only became known to me in recent years. In the early 1950s after my mother Marion moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of Seattle, she met my father Reed and three months later they were engaged. She was 19 and he was 22. Her

This is an excerpt from a work in progress, tentatively titled, “These Are Sunny Days for Our Family: Stories From My Youth.”  Early 1970s. In my college years, I work three summers as an over-the-road truck driver for my father Reed’s new packaging business. It’s a good-paying summer job, delivering plastic bottles from his suburban Chicago manufacturing