"When I told this dream to my shrink during chemotherapy, he said, 'That tells me everything I need to know about your childhood.'"

An incurable optimist. That's the best way to describe her father.

Lonnquist didn't finish high school. When he found out he couldn't be part of the a capella choir, he dropped out. He did some window cleaning, tried to make it in Chicago but that didn't stick. He came back, playing the south Minneapolis bars with his country music band, then hitting the road on tour.

That's where he met her. Fargo, North Dakota. January 25, 1954. It was 25 degrees below. He finished one set and went next door to get a hamburger.

"And there coming to take my order was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen," he said. 

Lois Smith hadn't finished high school either. She grew up hard in east Montana. Her family situation was bad. Her school was a one-room building on a reservation. By 16, she was out on her own, working to support herself. She made money playing music or modeling for a western-wear store. But she always thought of herself as writer.

That night in Fargo, though, she was a waitress. When her shift ended, Lonnquist walked her home. A week later he asked her to marry him. Three months later she did. She was 18; he was 19. A year later they brought their first child home from the hospital. There were five more kids to come.

The way Rodgers remembers it, their family's life was sometimes hard but always loving. "I look back on some of it now," she said, "and I understand how difficult it must have been for my mom at times because they moved a lot." Adventurous as he was, Lonnquist led his family across the country setting up five radio stations across the Midwest and living for a stint in Florida and Washington state. "There was always something else – I could try this, go there," said Rodgers. "He was always a great supporter of the family, the great breadwinner, but he didn't like staying in one place."

Her mother made every place feel like home. When they moved on Halloween one year, she had all six kids out trick-or-treating that same night in hand-sewn costumes. She'd stayed up nights to make them.

Creativity was a way of life. Instruments hung on the walls. The kids were wrangled into a family band – something that Rodgers remembers as sometimes fun but still a job, and no fourth grader wants a job. They had uniforms.

Her earliest childhood memory is going to the library with her mother, after dropping off the bigger kids at school. Years later, she realized her mom had been studying for the GED. With six kids and unpredictable finances, there wasn't much opportunity for her to go back to school. So she worked on it bit by bit, earning her college degree over eight years.

After dinner, each kid had to stand up and give a brief talk. You could read a poem, talk about something that happened at school or give a speech on a news story. But you had to do something. For those couple minutes, the floor was yours.

"We were taught that what we had to say matters," said Rodgers, now a best-selling author living in Houston.

That extended to their art as well. Each holiday, Rodgers' mother would let her paint the windows however she wanted. One Christmas, Rodgers decided to do the front door window like a pane of stained glass, with black paint outlines. In the sun, that black got so warm it cracked the glass. "My mom never said a word about it," Rodgers said. "She did not chide me one bit."

Lois's mind was always busy. When she retired from the local newspaper in Montana, she decided to write her own book about the Fort Peck dam, which her father had worked on all those years ago. The dam had been Life magazine's first cover story. No less than Margaret Bourke-White photographed the piece. But Lois felt that Life got the story wrong. In her autobiography, Bourke-White wrote of Montana, "It was stuffed to the seams with construction men, engineers, welders, quack doctors, barmaids, fancy ladies and, as one of my photographs illustrated, the only idle bedsprings in New Deal were the broken ones." In her book, Fifty Cents an Hour, Lois  instead showed the sometimes unglamorous lives of the folks who made the dam.

For the most part, her husband was the breadwinner. But their marriage was always a partnership. "She was just a great partner for him," said Rodgers, "She's the one who anchored him and kept him real and kept him honest. She understood so much about human nature because she had seen so much -- so much humanity, so much human failing -- that she developed a very forgiving view."

She was a fastidious, private woman. When she got sick, sending her somewhere else for care was out of the question. Instead, her husband doted on her. He added a sidecar to his motorcycle; it made the bike more stable. No one rode in it. But it was for Lois.

Her sickness took its toll on everyone. "I could see how heavily it weighed on him and how difficult it was for him," said Rodgers. "But overwhelmingly, the vibe in the house during those many, many months was peace."

Rodgers had a flexible work schedule, so she was able to spend a lot of time with her mom. The two writers learned how to communicate without language. Emotion seemed to take its place. The only reality her mother understood was the one she felt. Toward the end, she started calling Rodgers "Mom."

Houston, Texas to TBD
January, 2015 -

When he's on the road, Lonnquist doesn't listen to music. "I'm 80 years old," he said. "I need to focus."

Contemporary country music disappoints him anyway. "I don't need Sirius XM," he said. "I've got a million memories I can play back whenever I want."

Some of the places he goes, he's been to before with Lois. Others are places they had talked about seeing but never did. "The United States of America is a wonderful place," he said. The sidecar stays empty, weighed down with a 35-pound bag of sand. One of his daughters jokingly calls it his "babe magnet." But Lonnquist always tells people, "I'm a solo rider. I enjoy the company."

His kids worry about him, especially when there's bad weather. But Rodgers doesn't worry too much. She was once told that she had blood cancer and five years to live; she's had plenty of time to think about what matters in life.

"Just to be blunt, what's the worst thing that could happen?" she asked. "He could fly over a cliff on his motorcycle? That'd be awesome: You go out in a blaze of glory. He deserves happiness. He gave everything he could've possibly given."

From Houston, Lonnquist traveled to Roswell, New Mexico then on to Carlsbad. He has plans to drive the coast of California, trusting that the special fraternity of bikers will get him safely on his way. But it's up in the air.

"The ride is the thing," he likes to say. His wife never cared for the bike. She worried about him on it. And eventually, he will have to stop. But for now, the sidecar provides the stability he needs. "Learning to live alone after 60 years of marriage is a lot easier," he said, "when you have a sidecar."