Passage of the Kissing People

A fifty-year-old artist's past leads to a romantic mystery in his present in this lyrical tale of old loves, old hates and a stolen silver brooch called the Kissing People. Set on the grounds of the Sonoma State Home for the Feeble Minded in 1953, sickness, storms and political warfare raging at the Home where his parents work all threaten Michael Kohler's family. To protect them, Michael, 7, steals the Kissing People, the good luck brooch cherished by the family of his childhood love, Gisella Marossi. Then his father lays a devastating charge of suicide about Gisella's brother Joe, an inmate on leave from the Home. What young Michael sees compels him to call his father a liar.Emotional backlash to that charge forces the Kohlers to flee Sonoma. In their flight a pajama-clad Michael tries to return the brooch and loses it. A phrase from that moment - Are you scared to learn the goddamned truth? - echoes between Michael and his father for forty years, the nuclear weapon in their family language. At first a challenge to authority, it becomes a demand for justice, then a plea for love, and finally, an offer of reconciliation. By 1996 Michael is a divorced dad of a teenage daughter; his father is almost eighty, with a failing heart. Michael is challenged by an anonymous email. He must return to Sonoma to face his once-beloved Gisella, and the survivors of the family from whom he stole the silver brooch. To gain forgiveness for his dying father and himself, he must find the long-lost Kissing People.