Summer 1985. My parents, brother and I moved from Saginaw to a trailer park in Bay City, MI. I was 9 and had absolutely no clue what the next few years had in store for my family. 

First of all, our new neighborhood was across the street from a sugar beet factory. It always smelled. Some would try to be positive and remark it smelled like peanut butter cookies. No. It didn't. It smelled like rotting sugar beets 10 months out of the year. Sometimes if you were lucky, sugar beets would roll off a truck and you'd have to swerve to the side of the road to avoid them.  Then to cope with the pain of sugar beet harvest, your dad would make up a stupid song about "gettin those sugar beets" that you still sing to yourself every October. 

Speaking of my dad,...

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