I’ve calculated that I’ve lived in at least 30 different places — 23 of them before I got married. Attending five high schools in four years left me with no time to be shy. I knew I had...

to get started on a particular relationship because I didn’t have time to waste. As a result, I developed a gift for making friends quickly.

My dad was 25 when he met my mom, then 17. It was a seemingly ridiculous match — illegal in some states — but one that endured until my dad passed away only two months before what would have been his 50th Wedding Anniversary. I am the first-born of four children. My second-eldest sister came along when I was four, so I enjoyed a few years of the special freedom that belongs to an only child.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN (AND AGAIN AND AGAIN)

My family moved to Colorado when I was five years old and back to San Jose when I was six. When I was nine, Dad became pastor of a small country church in North Bradley, Michigan — a town with 150 residents, a one-room schoolhouse, a cemetery, a gas station, a post office, and our church. The community was absolutely devoid of amenities that most people would consider essential quality-of-life components but of all the many places I lived in as a child, North Bradley was my favorite. There were no law-and-order issues — the place didn’t even have a saloon. We children could play anywhere, including a commercial sand pit that served as the world’s largest sand box, plus meadows and woodlands through which we could wander. We loved it.

A year later, we moved to Arizona. Dad attempted to start a church in Phoenix, but could never get more than 30 people in his congregation. Almost nobody paid their tithe, so the next year he took a small pastorate in Yuma, Arizona and shortly thereafter moved to San Jose. By that time, I was a freshman in high school and in love with a 19-year-old guy who to my 16-year-old eyes seemed a mature man of the world.

Our Yuma lives and my budding romance came to a crashing conclusion when my father got the idea of converting an old school bus into a cobbled together motorhome and taking to the road as a traveling evangelist. He painted the bus white and red, and decorated it with a silver stripe. We washed both our dishes and ourselves in a little sink, and slept in homemade plywood bunk beds. The front of the bus was a small parlor area with a Goodwill-quality couch and some chairs. Curtains hung in the windows. The obviously ersatz style attracted the admiration of hippies prevalent in those days. They would stop us and ask to tour our bus.

Dad would go to any church that would have us, but most of the churches we visited all belonged to a fundamentalist Christian sect — one of the Church of God groups. Ours was the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) not to be confused with the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) or with any of the 58 other church groups that also use the Church of God label.

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