For more than 100 years, a beech tree stood on the first dune in from the Lake Michigan shore. The tree was known by tourists and townspeople alike as the place to carve your initials to memorialize your undying devotion. It came to be known as The Beech Tree. In 1998, the tree was destroyed in a freak storm of straight-line winds. The tree held the secrets of hundreds of people who carved their initials into her smooth, grey bark. The Beech Tree chronicles the (fictional) lives of a select few of those who visited the tree and shared their lives, their loves, their hopes and dreams, beneath the tree's dark green canopy ... and their curious, inexplicable connection to one another. When the book's characters encounter another who has visited the tree, they experience a "deja vu, don't-I-know-you-from-somewhere?" moment. Only the readers are privy to this interaction as they experience the characters from a birds'-eye view. The readers are introduced to Johnny & Margo, the first characters to visit the tree, just before Johnny ships off to fight in The Great War in 1918. We follow Johnny's & Margo's life together through the births of their daughters, to Johnny's devastating loss when Margo dies, and his subsequent three-year bender. He finds comfort in a sailor-tongued barkeeper named Marie, before being rescued from the Kalamazoo Insane Asylum by his friend, Charles "Bullet Joe" Rogan, a pitcher in the Negro Leagues. Johnny and Bullet share a lifelong, albeit socially taboo, friendship, through decades of racial divide. Bullet is brutally beaten during the Freedom Rides and Johnny comes to the aid of his battered friend. Johnny introduces his granddaughter, Debby, to the tree in 1957, an era of bobby socks, roller-skating carhops and Elvis music. Ten years later, she meets Mason - Mick - during the Summer of Love, and their romance blossoms until Mason gets a letter from the Draft Board: "Greeting." Despite their pledge to meet back at the tree in two years when his tour is complete, neither of them shows up. Mason is lodged in the Hanoi Hilton, a savage Vietnamese POW camp. He endures unimaginable torture before being rescued five years later. Meanwhile, Debby is struggling as a single mom in New York, raising a young man who was born nine months after she and Mason met; a young man with unmistakable resemblance to Mason. She names her son Mason but calls him Mickey. Mason once dreamed of using his love of mathematics to be a computer pioneer, but today, lives out his life as a brain-damaged beach bum who prefers the end of the beach "where the queers hang out." The queers, as he endearingly refers to gays, love him in return and call him "Captain," even though he was never more than grunt Army. The doctors cannot determine if his brain damage is the result of his exposure to Agent Orange, snake venom, heredity, or all of the above. Thirty years after they spent a summer together, Debby returns to the Michigan shoreline community to finish out here last years of work before retirement. After the derecho -- the freak storm - she happens into Hostetter's News Stand for a Sunday paper. She strikes up a brief conversation with a fellow customer. A half an hour passes before she realizes she'd seen his eyes before. They are her son's eyes. "Mason!!!" Debby screams, "Was that you, Mason " Debby summons her son, Mickey, to come to West Michigan to find the love of her life - Mickey's father."
