For three years, my Sonoma Sun column consisted of chapters of my family memoir. I took a break from it a year ago as grim events were coming up: The deterioration of my mother; the kidnapping and rape of my 13-year-old sister; my oldest sister’s high school pregnancy and marriage. It wasn’t going to work to have these stories in the paper. So, we’ll skip the details and jump back in here:
August 1953 • California to Minnesota and back
Wanting to get away from it all, Dad packed Betty (age 13), Claudia (age 11), and me (nearly 5) in the back seat of a new four-door 1953 Chevy Bel Air, and took us on a month-long trip to the Midwest to visit his family. My brother Larry (age 19) came home from college to help drive. We were in the car for so long that Claudia developed a jerky leg, bad enough that Dad considered taking her to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where they had a whole building for patients with “restless-leg syndrome.”…