For many years I had kept the heavy brass nameplate engraved “S.A. Schneider” on my own desk, but until I was writing my memoir, Missing, I hadn't understood why it was so important to me. Over a hundred years old, that nameplate once sat on my grandfather Sam Schneider's desk in a bank in Mason City, Iowa. Sam died in 1918, when my mother was seven years old.
This nameplate was a memento of a life so far in the past, yet it held an emotional resonance for me—it was like an
