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I grew up with a sister Ann and two younger brothers: Herbert and Don. You can find
out a lot about our parents and how they met in The Legacy of
Roxaboxen. During the years I was growing up, we moved often -- to places ranging
from Hawaii to Germany, from Oregon to Ecuador. Some places I liked more than others,
some schools were better than others -- but on the whole I loved this gypsy childhood.
When my father went off to Europe to take part in the invasion of Normandy in World War
II, the rest of us waited for him in Campbell, California -- renting a house on Alice
Avenue! The four of us missed our father, but our mother somehow made us feel he'd
come home safely from the war -- and he did. Here's a glimpse of us from that era, all
lined up on our cellar door in Campbell.
Almost everyone in the Doan clan uses e-mail, so that even though we live scattered all over the U.S. we stay in close touch. When my cousins and I write notes to each other, we often sign them "YFC", which is short for "Your Favorite Cousin". Who needs to choose? We are all each other's favorites. Our mothers used to sign their letters to each other "YFS", and you can figure out what that meant! I sometimes sign my e-mails to Ann that way.
Like their father, both get a lot of pleasure out of playing the piano and singing. Kenny became so handsome that even
his 2003 passport photo (right) looks good. If you visit
Stephen's website, you'll find a link to photos from Kenny's June 2005
trip to Thailand, as well as several trips and hikes by Stephen and his gorgeous wife Chris.
Here he is on a Ferris wheel near the Louvre; you can see the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Emily is a natural athlete, and currently a formidable soccer player - a real star on her school team.
That's Emily coming up from behind in the shot on the left. That girl in the yellow and
red shirt thinks she has control of the ball - but look who actually gets in there and takes it over!
Here is another photo of my brothers and sister and me, the four of us together in California again. Don, the youngest, now is also the tallest. We live so far apart we can seldom all be in the same place at the same time -- but this was a special occasion.
We were gathering there in January 2004 to celebrate David's wedding to a lovely young woman named Erica.
The two of them expect a son in December 2005. Watch for a photo of this newest grandchild soon! ...
Well, I wrote the previous sentence in early October 2005. Things happened sooner than expected. Noah Samuel was delivered on October 21. He weighed less than 4 pounds and was too little to leave the hospital for a while -- but all systems were working, he gained weight rapidly, and before November ended he was home.
They say babies that tiny can't really smile, but I wonder. Noah's normal expression seems to
be what we call a "Mona Lisa" smile. Sometimes that smile becomes something more definite,
as you can see (above left). I love the shot of him resting with his dad. David and Erica are glad
that Noah is home with them at last, and so are Larry and I.
In another shot taken that same month, we can see that Noah also enjoys his own reflection in the mirror. This baby has a
sense of humor, and big grins and laughs seem to be becoming more common than his Mona Lisa smile!
We wish we could see all these people (and many other family members I don't have space to show)
more often. Fortunately, Larry and I always have each other for company. Here we are dancing
at David and Erica's wedding. Like me, Larry was really happy that day. He usually won't dance -
and here he is actually enjoying it!
We do have one special niece who doesn't live so far away. Most of the time she's in Vermont,
where she and her husband raise angora goats. (She grows her own pumpkins there too.) Since
her job is programming computers, she can "telecommute" from Vermont to her job in New York
City. But sometimes she needs to spend a day or so at the bank she works for, so she has a
time-share apartment in Manhattan as well. That lets her enjoy occasional days of city life,
and sometimes it works that we can visit while she's in New York. We don't actually meet very
often - but she and I talk ALL THE TIME by e-mail.
No description of my family would be complete without mentioning our cat Shuwa. We used to have more cats, but now he's our only one. Like all McLerran cats, he jumps through a hoop. He looks like a miniature puma. When I write about the amber eyes of the dragon featured in DRAGONFLY I imagine them as looking a little like Shuwa's eyes. |
Time went on, and eventually I had a family of my own. I have three kids: Stephen,
David, and Rachel. The shot at left shows us at a Doan family reunion in 1996. (My mother was
Marian Doan, the Marian in ROXABOXEN. The reunion united most of the descendants of the
four sisters who were part of building the special place I tell about in that book.)
Stephen (on the left) helps me produce my brochure for the schools and is a great editor.
I always run my stories past him before I send them out to a publisher. David (between
Rachel and me) put this website up for me; he and Stephen help me maintain it. You might
want to visit 
Stephen has two sons, Matt and Kenny. The summer they were 11 and 13, they
joined Larry and me in Europe. Using Eurail passes, the four of us saw a lot of
Europe together, and these grandsons were wonderful travel companions. Here
they are scarfing down giant sundaes in Heidelberg, Germany.
They continue growing. You can see a somewhat older Kenny atop a mountain on the "Where I live" page,
and here is Matt in the role of Lancelot in his high school production of "Camelot".
Matt graduated from Pomona College (CA) in Jun 2006. He's currently (as of Nov 2006) working in Seattle and applying to law
schools. Kenny is in his junior year at Whitman College (WA) and currently spending a semester at Univ. of St. Andrews
(Scotland) on an exchange program. The two boys were in Europe, May/ Jun 2006, on tours with their college choirs and also
solo trips; there are many photos of their travels 
Rachel's kids are Ryan and Emily Rose. Ryan is growing up fast too, and like his cousins
has a wide range of interests. He won a prize for top science student at the end of the
2004 school year. He likes soccer and track, and recently won the school long-jump competition.
His chess skills are such that he's a threat for any adult in our family, including Larry
(who's no slouch at chess). Larry has been teaching him about investing, and they like to
ski together. In the summer of 2004 we decided it was Ryan's time to visit Europe, and he
spent over two weeks with us in Paris.
Even though he's getting pretty sophisticated, Ryan still loves to do things like
fishing for crawdads with his sister Emily when they are out in Oregon. (We didn't even realize
there were crawdads there until they showed us.)
And yet this tough soccer player can be a perfect lady when the occasion calls for
it. Like the other grandkids she has a range of interests and talents, and it's far
too early to guess what she'll choose to do with her life in the years ahead.
You can clearly see in the photo at right (with the bride and groom, at the reception) how happy
I was on that day!
Time, of course, continued and continues to flow onward. In June 2006, our older grandsons Matt and Kenny joined us for
an all-too-brief visit in Paris, where we were spending part of a gypsy summer that included visits to Russia, Poland,
Spain, and Italy. They are young men now, as you can see!
Meanwhile, by July of the same year, their small cousin Noah was beginning to be introduced into the pleasure our whole
family gets from hiking into high places. Here he is with his parents, enjoying the sunshine and the view -- and
practicing looking as tough as his dad.
All these kids and grandkids are on the west coast, thousands of miles from us. So is
our niece Kristin, the daughter of Larry's brother Dennis. Here is Kristin in her kayak,
by her family's beach house near Seattle.
