The Hoop of Life: A New Beginning (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781685131395)

Prepare to laugh, cry, and be discombobulated as Steve Laughlin dramatizes an eight-year-period in his life that is filled with a series of quirky, desperate, and joyful experiences... events that form a strange knot-in-time that is contrary to his usual everyday Midwestern existence.

With the agonizing loss of his wife of thirty-five years, Steve suddenly must navigate single parenting three sons as they become young men.

Share in his renewal as Steve finds love again, late in his life, with a high school classmate that he has not seen, or even thought about in 42 years. Watch a long-distance dating-game unfold between a stay-put family man from Omaha, and Karen, a single professional woman living in Paris, France.

An architectural commission brings the new couple into contact with the values and history of two groups of Native Americans, the Dakota, and Lakota. As we follow the development of Steve's building design and his discovery of new ways to perceive the world, we meet Edward Red Owl, a wise old Dakota man who observes, "A man loses his wife, a woman loses her mother, two people find each other and there is a new beginning... This is The Hoop of Life."