My dad left one day when my parents got divorced and I was nine years old. Then later, in the fall years of his life, he left another lady he married named Lois. She had 3 children, all blond with yellow-tinted skin, not like my dad’s dark handsomeness. He disappeared one day with no hint of why or where he was going. For many months we didn’t know where he was. One day Lois came to visit a commune where I lived. A big wooden mansion in Oakland. She came in one morning and sat down at the piano and played loud hymns on the untuned keys. Then she cried. And cried. I didn’t know what to do with her, so I gave her a bowl of miso soup and some green tea – food items that were hard to come by back in 1969. Later, after Steve and I got married and had our own little house in Marin County, my dad came back. But I never saw – or heard – Lois again.