Growing up in a Mennonite family in Inverness, Idaho back in the forties and fifties, John Reisender takes to wondering. Why had Great-grandma been married in a Muslim mosque way hell and gone out in the wilds of Central Asia? On the road to solving this perplexity, he finds himself excommunicated, temporarily, from the family religion. He discovers how his maternal grandfather escaped Czarist Russia, acts as an undertaker for a cat's funeral, takes a crash course in Nietzsche from the keeper of the city dump, escapes drowning, becomes an unsung, accidental semi-hero in a high school football game, cheats death on a spelunking expedition, and falls in lust with a girl who sports a derriere that reminds him of a WWII pinup. With a Dickensian cast of characters brimming with eccentrics, Crazy Were We in the Head hilariously and often movingly chronicles a singular American boyhood.