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was just starting kindergarten, at the elementary school across the street. We’d already moved more than half a dozen times in my short life, including one trip across the country.
    My parents met in Berkeley, when my dad pulled his van over for the pretty girl with waist-length hair standing on the side of the road with her thumb sticking out. It was 1967 and my mother, Helen, was with two friends from UMass Amherst, from which she’d just graduated; the three girls were visiting Berkeley before their real lives started. My dad, Rick, was with two friends as well. He’d been living in Berkeley for about six months, painting houses, taking classes at the community college in Oakland, and driving a van on which he and his friends had used blue house paint to scrawl SAY IT WITH FLOWERS across the side.
    One of Rick’s friends slid the door open and the girls got in, smiling. Even Helen was feeling brave that day. After they settled into the back, she leaned forward and made a joke about the originality of “Say It with Flowers”—it was the slogan of a popular flower shop and Helen liked that Rick and his friends had appropriated it for their hippie purposes.
    Rick laughed and decided he liked that one, the littlest one of the group, with her almond-shaped hazel eyes, wide smile, and perfect teeth.
    â€œSo where’s everyone going?” he asked.
    â€œJimi Hendrix at the Fillmore,” one of the girls said, and Rick’s friend Tom laughed. That’s where they’d been headed, too.
    By the time they arrived, Rick and Helen had decided they’d rather stay in the van and continue talking, so everyone else went in to the concert without them.
    It’s hard for me to imagine this, because my mother and father are both so shy. But over the next few weeks, they walked along Haight Street and through Golden Gate Park, they went to concerts and a few antiwar demonstrations, they talked and laughed.
    Helen was signed up to take a teacher training course in New Haven, Connecticut, so she could begin teaching elementary school in the fall. They kept in touch with occasional letters. One evening, about nine months after Rick and Helen had met, Rick and his friend Tom decided, while drunk, that they wanted to go to Europe. So they packed their bags and left that very night for the East Coast—figuring that would be a better departure point than California. They stopped in Providence, Rhode Island, Tom’s hometown. There, they decided they needed to save some money for their trip and found jobs casting jewelry in a workshop. And given Providence’s proximity to New Haven, Rick called Helen.
    Helen was happy to hear from him, though a bit wary. She liked Rick but didn’t want to get too attached: Her biggest fear was (and still is) being abandoned and she couldn’t imagine things ending any other way. Still, he was just a few towns away. She invited Rick over to the house she shared with Yale students and workers; when he arrived they went into her tiny room and closed the door. They smoked cigarettes and a little pot. Helen was funny and witty, in the ways she still can be, and she was shy and awkward, too, which eased Rick’s own nerves.
    Not that first night, but soon after, Helen tells Rick about her earliest memory: She’s a baby, definitely under a year old, and she and her parents are living in Connecticut temporarily, while her father is in the merchant marines. They live in a house that’s built partly on a small hill. The back of the house is raised, as if on stilts, though the front is level with the ground. Helenis crying. Her mother, Esther, has no idea what to do with her. She wraps Helen in a blanket, carries her out to the back deck, and sets her down close to the edge, where the railing should have been. The deck is ten feet above the ground. Esther goes inside the house, closing the door behind her. Helen is out there alone. She cries,