1 I’ve often wondered who I would have been if my family hadn’t moved to California when we did. Then came “Good Vibrations,” the Beach Boys’ last major hit and the beginning of the end of their important recordings. Soon after we got to Sacramento, Revolver appeared, and a few weeks later the Beatles stopped touring for good. The Beatles’ earliest American hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” erupted in late December. We moved to Osage just as the Beach Boys released their third album, Surfer Girl-the first to acknowledge Brian Wilson’s role as producer on the back cover. There’s another way to tell the story of those years. It was less a move than a transubstantiation. I was fourteen and about to begin high school. Not quite three years later-summer 1966-my family moved once more, from Iowa to a suburb of Sacramento, California. And because we arrived after the school year had started, I suddenly found myself in a sixth-grade classroom full of strangers studying subjects from an alternate reality. All the girls already had boyfriends named Chuck and Deke. My friends were Bill and Greg and Scott, and I liked a girl named Jolene. In Clarion, I knew everyone and everything. Both towns were roughly the same size-population three thousand or thereabouts-and their residential streets ended abruptly in cornfields. I was eleven, the oldest of four children. In September 1963 my family moved from Clarion, Iowa, to Osage, Iowa, eighty-two miles away.
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