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Lucky Little

Adopted. Along with the card I mentioned earlier, the Littles told me that my birth parents probably couldn’t take care of me and wanted me to have a better life. I guess it’s about as good a story as you can give a kid.

Over my life I have met people on every side of the issue. Those that were adopted. Those that gave their baby or even young child up for adoption. Those who have adopted children. Those desperate enough to fly to Russia and come up with tens of thousands of dollars to hopefully leave with a somewhat healthy child. Even to this day, even this day, Mary Ann told my wife and I that she thinks the reason she could not have children was so that she would be available when the time came to adopt me, and my brother as well. She told us tonight that she never worried about not having children. “What good would worrying about it do”, she said. Here we are 50 years later and she thinks things turned out very well. Even today it’s about as good a story as you can tell a kid. At the same time, my little mind was going in a thousand directions. I had taken a consensus of some of the kids at my school. Some said my parents died in a horrible accident. Some said they were famous and couldn’t be slowed down with taking care of a kid. Some said they were robbers like Bonnie and Clyde and were running from the law. Sure there was the side of ‘poor me’ my parents left me, gave me away. I chose to live in a world where they were coming back one day and we would all be one big family. Maybe they were famous. I sure didn’t believe they died in some bad accident. Being adopted meant a loss of identity in knowing my heritage, my nationality. I was just a white kid, in a school of mostly black kids, with a red headed brother, and a last name that was an adjective. On the flip side, being adopted meant I could be anybody. My horizons started to open wide. I settle up on the couch one night with my dad to watch Bonanza. It’s 1972. I’m thinking the older son, Adam, that could be my dad. There was a show called Emergency and one of the actors was dark haired. Sure, that could be my dad. Teachers, nurses, other kids parents, I started to look at everybody different. Thinking to myself, my mom might look like that. My dad might be like that. It wasn’t that I was unhappy. I was just extremely interested. It was very much a ‘loose end’ that needed to be tied up. That’s all. I’m 6. Find my dad, and my mom that carried me for nine months, find out why they gave me up, get past it and be one big family and be happy. All tied up, back to being a kid. I remember my skill of being able to remove a box from a top closet shelf, remove the contents for examination, place the contents back in the box, and place it back on the shelf just as it was. Then going to the next box or drawer or desk or cabinet, until I had searched the entire house, inch by inch, for any record of my adoption. Nothing. Well, nothing about my adoption. I did find some things that I would have to go to the dictionary for more clarification, lady items and such. What I did stumble upon in said reading was to realize is that we all had different blood. Dad, Mom, Boyd, me, we all had different blood. We came from four totally different bloodlines. “Who am I?” I pondered. “They’ll be back. We’ll get it all straight soon.” I knew what my next move would be.