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predicament as the king, had temporarily lost his mind.
     
     
    BRYAN DID NOT fit into the new family. Now and then, Christopher, Kendall, and Veronica included him in their trio but then they’d turn against him with a snide comment or a collective snub. No matter what approach Bryan tried—as bully, as charmer, as cooperative player—he was never accepted.
    Deb called him fat and inferior and fed her contempt to her children. They gobbled it up and called him fat too.
    In order to cope, Bryan took refuge in music. Led Zeppelin became a favorite band. He wore bubble headphones that made him look like a bug and disappeared into lyric and sound.
     
     
    BY 1973, WE had moved from the big house in L.A. to a house in Fountain Valley and then to a house in Huntington Beach. By the time I was nine years old, I was given a bedroom set from the catalogue pages of Sears. My room became a fairytale of white furniture with gold trim, a canopy bed, and every shade of pink for the curtains and bedspread.
    In this sacred place, I discovered sanctuary and the power of solitude. I listened to soundtracks from West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof —two of my favorite movies. I also listened to my father’s old Cat Stevens’s tapes and learned all the words to “Morning Has
Broken,” “Peace Train,” and “Wild World.” I was crazy for The Beatles and The Jackson 5. Soon I discovered books that had been recorded on albums. The Lorax, The Sneetches, Yertle the Turtle, Horton Hears a Who, and Green Eggs and Ham. Holding a book, I’d follow along with the narrator’s voice and like magic, random letters became words and words shaped sentences. Paragraphs emerged and knitted themselves into chapters. Finally, whole stories revealed themselves and I gained entry into a world that would serve me for the rest of my life. Reading.
     
     
    ON DECEMBER 4, 1973, my father had a heart attack.
    No one saw it coming.
    He was just gone.
    Deb said it was my father’s own fault. She said the word “karma” at a time when very few people were using that term. “He had wished such a death on his business partner,” she said. “It was karma.”
     
     
    KARMA IS DEFINED as a noun and is often interpreted as “fate.” In the eastern sensibility, the word karma is Sanskrit for action as well as for cause and effect. Karma—when you really look at it—is a verb. Cause and effect are active principles—changing constantly and largely impacted by the focal point of “intent.”
    Philosophers, scholars, and great masters will debate, for hours, the issue of karma. Understanding karma is a jumping off point for some of the greatest mystic teachings. I know, I’ve been there listening to these teachings and have taken copious notes. I likely
became a student of the word “karma” in order to scour all evidence of Deb’s perspective from my own thinking like one scrapes the remains of a splattered bug from a windshield.
    And yet Deb remains one of my most vivid teachers. When a lesson really sinks in, it is usually the result of a hard moment in life that has been fully brought to light. Deb blaming my father’s death on karma was one of these moments.
    Let me imagine my father did wish a heart-attack death on his business partner. Let me invent a scene between my father and Deb, in their marital bedroom with rumpled sheets and whispered pillow talk after the five kids were asleep, and he says, “I hate my business partner, I wish he’d just die.”
    If he did say such a thing, did he truly intend for his business partner to die? Did he go on, after he was out of their bed and dressed for his day, to strategize a way to induce a heart attack in his partner?
    I certainly didn’t know my father well, but he was no killer. The man loved the ocean and longed for his own sailboat. He was searching for meaning and security. He listened to the songs of Cat Stevens.
    My father was flawed—all human beings are. But I’m pretty sure his