Name Tags for World Peace

I’ve often said, to anyone who will listen, that if I were the Benign Ruler of the Universe the second thing I would do, after establishing an era of World Peace, would be to mandate that everyone wear a name tag.   Not the cheesy kind; the ones on sticky paper that you have to write your own name on with a pen or some sort of Sharpie ™ when you go to a meeting or a fundraising event.  No, I mean a really nice brass or silver engraved one, with the option of a pin or a magnetic catch to hold it to your shirt, blouse, jacket or suit coat. 

Your name tag wouldn’t say anything about what you do; it wouldn’t have your job title or description or anything like that; just your full name and then, beneath that, what you prefer to be called.  Mine, for example, would read thusly:

Michael G. Dell’Orto

“Michael”

From this, you now know my full name and that I like to be called Michael, not Mike or Mickey or, God forbid (and NOBODY ELSE besides my mother – and she’s dead – should ever presume to call me this) Mikey.  Short, simple and to the point.  Part of this comes from my own increasingly frustrating inability to remember names, even of people I’ve known for a long time.  This way, whenever you meet someone, you can instantly greet them in a manner that pleases them; most importantly, you can avoid the embarrassment (and we’ve all been there) that comes from running into someone you vaguely recognize who immediately launches into a cheerful and pleasant conversation with you, all about your wife, your kids, and your coaching record on the local Little League team.  During this colloquy you nod and smile, trying desperately to say something that makes some modicum of sense, vamping madly while that part of your brain that has been, up to now, screaming “who the hell is this person?” at you scrambles to come up with some sort of name to put to the face before you.

All in all, a practical and, may I say, an ingenious and simple solution to a nagging problem we all face at one point or another in our day-to-day living.  There is an ancillary benefit here as well – think of how much more pleasant and polite the world would be if we could all greet anyone we meet by name.  People would smile more, hearing their name and a quick “hello” called out by everyone they pass; if someone hurrying by you on the street or in a crowded corridor bumps into you and knocks what you are carrying onto the floor or the pavement, think  of the potential anger and frustration normally generated by such an encounter that could be wiped away in an instant – “I’m sorry (looks at name tag), Katie; I was hurrying by so fast I didn’t see you there.  Let me help you pick your things back up.”  “Why thank you (looks at name tag) Steve, that’s kind of you.”  “Say, Katie, I was on my way to the Starbucks for a mocha latte, would you care to join me – my treat?  It’s the least I can do.”  “Why, that’s awfully nice of you, Steve; I think I will take you up on your kind invitation.”  Who knows where a chance encounter like that could lead?

And then it hit me.  Maybe, just maybe, I had been thinking about this all backwards.  Perhaps it was the name tags that needed to come first all along; and then, as their use spread from town to town, city to city, state to state, then all over the globe, it would follow, as the night the day, as inevitable as the common cold – world peace! Barriers would fall, civility would reign triumphant. 

Just think, for one moment, how this might work.  For example, say you are at an airport in a foreign country, waiting on line to get through security.  There you are, dragging your luggage behind you, in your stocking feet, your shoes clutched in your hand. The guy ahead of you is bearded, dark-skinned, carrying a backpack.  He seems to be singing, or perhaps he is praying, softly to himself as the line moves slowly forward.  Leaning precariously out of a torn pocket in the backpack is what looks suspiciously like a copy of the Q’uran.  The book falls out of the pocket when the bearded man moves forward; you swiftly catch it before it hits the floor, and the man turns to you:  “Excuse me (you look at his name tag) Abdullah Muhammad, but I think this fell out of your backpack. I caught it as it fell.”  “Salaam Aleikum (he looks at your name tag) Bob, thank you so much for not letting it touch the floor.  I can’t help but noticing by your accent that you are an American.  I was always led to believe that Americans had no respect for the Q’uran, but I can see I was mistaken.”  “That’s great of you to say that, Abdullah Muhammad; heck, I was always led to believe that anyone who was a Muslim just hated everything I’ve ever stood for, but I can see in your face that you’re not like that at all.  Hey, when we get through security let me buy you a drink!” “That’s generous of you, Bob, but devout Muslims don’t drink.”  “Oh, bummer.  Well, Abdullah Muhammad, how about I find us a place to get a couple of milkshakes instead?”  “That’d be just great, Bob!”  And they slowly head off to the airport gate area together, pulling photos of their kids out of their wallets and discussing their mutual love of World Cup soccer.

Name tags  -- world peace – think about it . . . 

Father's Day

I’ve been having much more fun than a man of my age should be having, playing with my train set – vintage Lionel “O” gauge – set up on the floor in one end of my barn. I began building this collection over the past several years, in an attempt to re-create, as best as my aging memory would allow, the set-up my father and I had put together in our basement when I was a very small boy.  Alas, all of the trains I had as a child were stolen out of my mother’s house in Jersey City many years ago; but I’ve bought an engine here and some track there, slowly snapping up 50’s era cars and accessories where I could find them at antique shops or flea markets.  


This collection was recently augmented by a most generous gift from my wife’s best friend, whose own dad had recently left his house to move into assisted living. One of the things she came across while cleaning out the place prior to putting it on the market were several cartons of trains (in their original boxes), track and accessories, all dating from the late 1950’s.  No one in her family wanted it, and she was actually going to throw it all out.   She mentioned this to my wife while they were both attending their 40^th High School reunion some months ago, and the upshot of that conversation was that several boxes and bags of Lionel products were delivered to me (through the good offices of my daughter and her young man, who schlepped the stuff up here from New York) just in time to be a most wondrous 58^th birthday surprise.

This gift has spurred me to begin something I’ve thought about for a long while; namely, building a real train display, complete with multiple track layouts, bridges, tunnels, landscaping – you name it.  It will be a while until I can properly prepare the space for all of this to occupy, and so for the time being I’ve set up some track, a few buildings, and some working accessories temporarily until I can begin the project in earnest.  I’ve done this for two reasons; first, because it allows me to test the functionality of the cars, the accessories and the various switches and relays I’ve bought, and second, because it is just so much fun sitting on the floor and watching the trains go around, hearing the whistle blow, and watching the little flagman come out of his hut, waving his lantern as the train rolls by.

On Father’s Day I found a set of passenger cars; items for which I had been on the hunt for a good long while, at a local antique shop.  I brought them home and took them out to the barn, where I hitched them to an engine to test them out.  I watched them go round and round the track, and as I did I was overwhelmed – it is the only word I can use – by a memory.  I was six years old, certainly no older but perhaps a year or two younger.  It was a winter evening; in fact, it was close to Christmas.  My father and I were in the basement, working on the train layout together.  He was putting the finishing touches on what I think was a raised trestle so that we could run a second set of trains – those very passenger cars, as I recall -- above an already completed layout on the board.   I was doing what I always did, fetching and carrying for him as he busied himself connecting and fastening down track, cutting wood to shim the trestles that held the track above the table, and running wire from the Rotating Beacon through a hole in the table, under the layout, and connecting it to the transformer. At one point he realized that something was missing, though I don’t remember what it was; perhaps we were short of track, or we needed a switch or a relay, or maybe he just wanted to go and buy another car, but he bundled me up and we set out together, walking in the glow of the streetlights through a lightly falling snow. 

He was holding my hand, and what I remember most about it was the feeling of happiness I had just being with him.  In those days (if I am six, then it is 1959), the shopping districts of the city were all decorated with lights, wreaths and garlands strung across the streets; the stores played holiday music and there were brightly lit Christmas displays in every window. It was so exciting, because it was almost Christmas; and it was the most wonderful thing to be out in the cold night air, walking with my Dad to the toy store, leaving a trail of our paired footprints (his so big, and mine so little) through the snow.  We finally made our way there, my father bought what he needed, and we walked home as the snow began to fall harder and faster. When we got to the house we headed straight downstairs to do whatever it was with whatever we had needed that compelled us to set out on our journey in the first place.  Our work done for the night, we came upstairs. My mother had made us both something warm to drink, so Dad and I sat together on the couch in our parlor; and I can still, after all these years, remember the feel of his arm around me and how safe and comforting it was just to be there with him. 

The trains I've been buying, and those that were so kindly given into my care, are, after all, only objects; and objects are worthless without context or memory.  These trains are a link that stretches out over the almost fifty years that he's been gone, to remind me that this man, my father, can yet be truly present to me here in the home I’ve made for myself and my family, where I am now the Dad.  I find that since I’ve set them up I play with the trains almost every day.  I do so, I think, because in that moment, sitting on the floor in my barn, I know he is there with me, as though he had never left.  While those trains circle around and again on their track I can have him, once more, sitting beside me with his arm around me, and I close my eyes and know that I am happy again.

Child of Choice, Part 2

The Search, and What I Found

The details of my adoption that I am sure of, or have documentation for, were gleaned over the course of several years after I learned of it, and are these: I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in what -- in the days before the sexual revolution -- was called a “home for unwed mothers.”  Its name was the Door of Hope, run by the Salvation Army; a name that always struck me as an admirably brave attempt to put the best face they could on what was, certainly in the 1950’s, a delicate situation.   My birth mother, who had wanted to keep and raise me on her own, was convinced by friends and the few family members who were still speaking to her that the best thing to do was to surrender me for adoption; to that end she had finally gone to seek counsel (good Catholic that she was, pre-marital sex and unwed pregnancy notwithstanding) in the bosom of Holy Mother Church.  Catholic Charities (then, as now, one of the largest social services organizations in the world) arranged that I be placed in St. Vincent’s Nursery with the Sisters of Charity, in whose veiled and wimpled care I was to spend the first six months of my life, prior to my adoption. This was not an easy decision for her (that much is clear from the notes and comments from her file that the adoption agency sees fit to share with me), and my desire to find her was bolstered by a letter from those files that was given to me wherein my birth mother writes for permission to come visit me in the orphanage, something she has apparently done on several occasions.  If nothing else, I owe this woman the comfort of knowing that I am alive, and well, and happy.

And that’s as far as I got.  In writing the story down, I mean.  I tried, for a long while, to write this second half of my adoption story; how I came to glean the details of my adoption from the highly redacted information provided to me by Catholic Community Services (part of the larger umbrella group Catholic Charities, and formerly called Catholic Children’s Aid); how I tracked down and subsequently found my birth mother and my half sister, still living in New Jersey, and what I learned from her about the story of my conception and birth, and her life after surrendering me.

I began attempt after attempt at relating this story in some coherent form, but I always found that I was getting bogged down in too much detail, or not enough detail; there was always something that was nagging at me while I was writing that caused me to stop and put the project aside again and again.  I figured that I just needed to get some distance, think on it a bit, and it would all become clear  -- a revelatory insight, a flash of inspiration and clarity of thought, and I would be able to write it all down, finally, once and for all.

The revelation I'd been waiting for came to me, one afternoon, working in the barn.  While I was repairing a hayloft door that had been damaged in a windstorm, I found myself thinking about this out loud, and out of nowhere I heard myself say “I just don’t care.”   What I meant, I think,  is that after I learned I was adopted, the specifics that made up the next part of the story – who gave birth to me, who got her pregnant and why – weren't especially significant to me; the acquisition of that knowledge was never an urgent matter.  I suppose that’s why it took years to begin the search in the first place.  As I’ve said before, the question that kept coming up when I first told friends that I had been adopted was “are you going to look for your real parents?” Their insensitivity (unintended, no doubt, but there nonetheless) annoyed me no end.  I know who my real parents are, thank you.  I am their son, for good and ill; I couldn't see what relevance two strangers whom I'd never met (and in all likelihood would never meet) could have to my life here and now.  


The search for my birth mother was, honestly, more an intellectual than an emotional exercise.  I was curious to find the answers to this puzzle; and I thought it would be good for her to know that she had done the right thing by giving me up.  I was not, however, looking for parents, or a family, or an identity.  I had all of those; and I'm sure this is why it took me almost eight years before I started my search. I realized, when I came to write it all down (the flash of insight I had been hoping for in telling this tale) that my difficulties in relating the story were a reflection of that initial reluctance I'd had, which was playing itself out all over again.  So, this story is really about my ambivalence around what being adopted actually meant to me, as much as anything else; and it is this story, not necessarily the details of my birth, that I believe has some value in the telling. 


When I began my search in earnest, several of the organizations I contacted that help with matters of this sort all told me much the same thing – keep it low key, and search as anonymously as you can for as long as you can, because you just don’t know what sort of person you are eventually going to find, and you cannot allow your desire for answers get the better of your common sense; the person you find may not necessarily be someone you would want to have in your life, or the life of your family.  My own experience, fortunately, encompassed none of the horror stories I had read -- adoptees coming to rue the day they had begun their searches, finding parents who were alcoholics, drug addicted, or only interested in extorting money from their long-lost child.  The reality of what I ultimately found bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one-act play that, I’ll admit,  I had constructed in my mind (despite all the advice warning me not to do so lest I be disappointed) about what she might be like.  Because there was the trap, you see; it was easy, at the point where you decide to begin but as yet have no information, no clues, to get caught up in the excitement of the idea of the search, and give in to the temptation to create, based on no evidence whatsoever except the endless possibilities of the unknown, a back-story for yourself into which you could handily fit all the details of your life as it is now. 

Scenario # 1; or, The Story As I Would Have Written It If Anybody Had Asked Me:  A young actress in New York (living in New Jersey with her widowed mother); she has a brief affair with a fellow cast member in the musical in which they are both appearing; the pregnancy, the realization that she is simply not prepared to give up the career she’s worked so hard to build for motherhood just yet; the decision, difficult but brave, to surrender me, always saying a silent prayer for the child she’ll never know every night just before she steps out on stage.   It would explain my choice of theatre as a profession; I hoped that she’d be glad to know I had followed in her footsteps.  Maybe we’d actually get to work together, someday; in the meanwhile she comes to see me in a show and greets me afterward, tears in her eyes, telling me how very proud she is.  Nice story.  Simple, and sweet.  In fact, I think it might just be the plot of some old 50’s-era B-movie I saw one night on the Late Show.


Scenario # 2; or, The Real Story: In Which I Discover That God Has A Peculiar Sense Of Humor:  A young woman in Northern New Jersey, growing up in a large family in very comfortable circumstances (her father owned a drapery/upholstery/decorating business); nice clothes, big house, parties.  Her mother dies, and her father remarries soon after.  He and his new bride, a woman not overly fond of her new stepchildren, buy a new house and leave her and her youngest sister to manage on their own; she takes work as a waitress. She had previously attracted the attention of an older man in the military, someone who had been advising and vetting small business owners (including her father) who wished to establish apprentice or training programs under the GI Bill.  She is wooed, and flattered, and ultimately seduced into his bed; he disappears once he learns she is pregnant.   She is dissuaded from her original intention, which was to raise me by herself, by the few family members who still deign to speak to her.  She later discovers that her seducer may already have a wife and children in Pennsylvania.  Finally, in a twist worthy of Dickens, he contacts her from (of all places) prison, which was the last she will ever hear from him.  It seems that he and a partner had been running a little graft, a little scam on the side in their dealings with civilian businesses wishing to get GI Bill money for themselves; things had gotten a little hot in New Jersey and he managed to get himself transferred up to Fort Devins.  The petty stuff proved to be not interesting enough, and so it was that he and his partner decided to rob a bank in Worcester MA, where they killed a guard in the attempt and were subsequently caught, prosecuted and jailed.  Some years later, she marries and has a child – my half-sister – but the marriage fails (he is an alcoholic) and she must assume the burden of being a single mother, raising a child on her own under very strained financial circumstances.  Not such a nice story, and not at all so simple.

This scenario, told to me in bits and pieces in phone conversations and, finally, on the occasion of our first face-to-face meeting is far more dramatic than that which I had dreamed up; here was a story that really did appeal to that sense of theatre I spoke of before.   But still, there was this feeling of detachment -- as I've repeated many times, I wasn't doing this to find a mother or a father.  There was one thing, though, that I couldn’t have known until I made the search, the only thing, I think, that I was always ready to accept, even to embrace, as a real part of my life. Something that I hadn’t ever articulated a need or desire for, throughout this whole process; but in the end the one fact more than any other I was happy to discover -- that I had a sister. 

My sister is a terrific woman, brave and strong, living happily in Tennessee, and married now to a man who loves her and cares for her.  She has her own story to tell, and one I would not presume to tell for her; but suffice it to say she has had her share of grief, and pain, and loss.  We speak, not often, but we have grown to love each other.  I’m glad that she is in my life, and I would hope that she could say the same of me; it is good just to know that she is there.  Of all the reasons for entering into this search, finding that I had a sister made the whole process worthwhile. 

I cannot, alas, say the same for my birth mother.  Good drama comes at a price.  At our first meeting, my immediate impression of her (not surprisingly, given her story) is that of an unhappy and disappointed person whose life simply did not follow the arc she had envisioned, as a young woman, that it would. In addition, the emotionality of our reunion was leavened by the unmistakable feeling, which grew in intensity the longer I spent in her presence, that I just didn’t like her.  This sounds harsh, I know; but it was provoked in part by how she spoke to my sister when we first met in person -- a situation where, you would think, we’d all of us be on our best behavior.   She was by turns rude, dismissive, and belittling of her during the 5 or so hours we were together.  Not constantly, mind you, but enough such that I came away from that first meeting with a sense of unease that never really left me.  Instead of joy or exhilaration, or even some sort of peace of mind that I assumed I would feel in discovering this long-buried truth, all I could muster up, as I drove back home, was relief – relief that she had given me up, that I’d been turned over to the care of the nuns, and delivered into the hands of two loving parents.

I tried to be good – I phoned her from time to time, sent cards on Mothers’ Day and her birthday, but I have to confess that my heart really just wasn’t in it.  I had found my answers; I had done what I thought was the right thing by contacting her, but I was done now, and I felt all the worse because I really didn’t want to pursue a relationship of any sort with her, though I knew that I had to, if only because it was the decent thing to do.  She’s gone now; she’s been dead for a good many years.  As I said, I still call my sister from time to time; she has told me on more than one occasion that I will never fully understand just how difficult their lives were together, and how fortunate I was to have been spared their struggle.

So this is where I’m going to leave it.  I was conceived by accident, born a bastard child, given over to the care of the nuns in an orphanage, and then adopted by two people who loved each other and me as well.  I have a sister, and I’m glad that I found her; the rest of it, while it makes a good story to tell, doesn’t really matter to me all that much.  What does matter is that my father Mike was a fine man who was, by all accounts, admired by everyone who came into contact with him; a man who loved his son and died too soon, a man I miss to this very day.  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.  My mother Vickie was a funny, loving, good-hearted woman who had every right to fall apart after his death, but she didn’t – as sad as she was, and as much as she missed him, she got up every day and went to work to keep the roof over our heads and the food on our plates, doing what she had to do despite a grief and loss I cannot even begin to comprehend, because she knew she needed to take care of me.  Neither of them lived long enough; and, lest you be tempted to think otherwise, neither of them were perfect, God knows, but they are my parents -- simply because I am the one they chose to be their son. 

Epilogue: In our first conversation my birth mother asks me if I want to know anything about the man who had put this whole business in motion all those many years ago; was I going to look for him?  Did I want to know his name?  She tells it to me, that first day I meet her, and I remember writing it down somewhere.  I suppose that it speaks volumes about my attitude, or my state of mind, or even my definition of what a “father” is, by the fact that I have long since forgotten it and have no idea where the paper is on which I wrote it. 

Mom & Dad, ca. 1960

Child of Choice

Part 1: The Discovery

I am an adoptee.  In my case, it was later in life -- I was just shy of my 32^nd birthday -- and purely by chance that I learned of it; with the who, when, why and how of it all arriving in dribs and drabs over a period of ten or more years.  When I first made the discovery many friends asked me some variant of the question “so, are you going to try and find out who your real family is?”  That question always bothered me; I would tell anyone who asked that as far as I was concerned, I already knew who my “real” family was; the mother and father who loved and cared for me; the many cousins and aunts and uncles with whom I’d shared Easter and Christmas and birthdays, trips down the shore and up to the lake, and long Sunday dinners at grandma and grandpa’s house that began in the afternoon and lasted until well after dark.  So in every case here when I talk about “my parents,” or “my mother” or “my father” I mean the people who raised me and loved me – Mike and Vickie, the only mom and dad that matter to me.

I have to say at the outset that it was mostly curiosity, coupled with a vague desire to give my birth mother some closure that motivated me to search for my biological parents.  After all, I wasn’t some adolescent, confused about my identity to begin with, fantasizing about how much different (and better) my angst-ridden teenage life would be with my “real” parents, who would certainly let me stay out later or have a TV in my room or not bug me about the length of my hair.  I was a 32-year-old married man with a baby and a house and the beginnings of a career in the theatre. And, at the point where this story properly begins, I was also an orphan.

My mother, who had been widowed ever since 1962, died herself in 1985 after a long illness.  Despite repeated attempts over time to convince her to sell her house and come up to New England to be near me and my wife, she remained what I used to call one of the “diehards;” a dwindling group of neighbors who had clung to home, parish church and each other in spite of the urban decay that was slowly creeping in on them.  Her house had been broken into on a few occasions; she had even chased off a would-be burglar, whom she discovered one day standing in her kitchen.  Neither the increase in crime nor the rapid, sad decline of the condition of many other houses in the neighborhood dissuaded her from staying; she argued that uprooting herself, leaving her home – the house she had lived in for years with her father and brothers even before marrying my father -- and everything and everyone she knew, would be far worse for her than staying where she was.  Which is precisely what she did, up until only a few days before she died, stubborn to the last. 

About two weeks after her funeral I made a trip back to this house that was no longer my home to begin the process of sorting through her life and packing up her possessions to take back with me; I had also arranged to meet a real estate agent who would put the house on the market.  What I saw when I unlocked the door and walked in showed just how much, and how quickly, my childhood world had changed.  The house was ransacked; in the brief interval that had passed from the day I said goodbye to her for the last time, looters had torn out all the metal piping (copper and iron; you can get a lot of money for scrap metal) and all the radiators. They had also stolen some of the smaller articles of furniture, and had flung old clothing and other possessions everywhere. A half-empty bottle of rotgut wine sat perched on the stove in the kitchen; interior doors were torn off their hinges and windows broken.  I called the police, who came right away and were very sympathetic but who could actually do very little to help me, except to promise to keep an eye on the place, while the real estate man offered to make the arrangements to secure the property from further damage until I could sell it.  I spent the rest of that day salvaging what I could and packing it into my truck, and returned home to my wife and infant daughter. 

In the weeks that followed I began the process of paying her last bills and settling her modest estate. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that many of my mother’s important documents, like the only copy of her will, and her insurance papers, were missing; they had been in a small, locked strongbox that she kept in a bedroom closet.  Not surprisingly, given the state of most everything else in the house, this strongbox was nowhere to be found and I presumed it stolen.  About a month or so after the funeral a large manila envelope arrived in the mail; it was addressed to my mother and had been forwarded to me.  The note inside was from a woman I knew to have been one of my mother’s friends who lived just around the block; she had recently found a bunch of papers and documents with my mother’s name on them dumped in a corner of a vacant lot that bordered her house, so she thought to pack them up and mail them to the old address with the expectation that they would (as they did) find their way to me.  It was clear that whoever stole them realized they were of no monetary value, and so just flung them away. 

I was grateful to have them; so much so that I sat down right away and wrote a note to the woman to express my thanks.  When it was done, stamped and mailed, I turned my attention back to the bundle, which included, to my relief, the missing insurance papers and the sole copy of her will, along with a several other documents.  One particular bit of paper caught my eye; it was obviously a legal document, old and worn.  On the front it read: “In the Matter of an Adoption by Michael G. Dell’Orto and Victoria R. Dell’Orto."

Now, I have to pause here to provide a bit of background – two things, actually.  The first is that my parents had often made reference to a “little Italian girl” they had tried to adopt from the old country; this illusory sister was usually brought up on those occasions in my early childhood when I asked why I didn’t have a sibling.  The second was an odd encounter I had when I was about 12 years old.  My mother and I were visiting an aunt who lived in what was then a very rural part of New Jersey.  One afternoon, we were all walking through a picked-over field of cherry tomatoes that bordered her property, along with the neighbor whose field it was.  As I ran ahead in the company of my aunt’s dogs, I caught bits and snatches of the grown-ups’ conversation. At one point, as we were heading back to the house, the neighbor had remarked to my mother “He’s gotten so big – it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?  I remember when you got him.”  It struck me, at the time – young as I was – that this was an awfully odd phrase to use.  Limited though my knowledge of the world most certainly was at that age, I knew that married people “had a child,” or “gave birth to a child,” or something like that.  “Getting” a child sounded a lot like a transaction, as if I had been bought like a bag of plastic Army men in the toy aisle at the 5 & 10.

I stewed about this for the rest of that day; some weeks later I finally got up the courage to ask my mother if I had been adopted.  You would have thought I had asked her if she had murdered my grandparents with an axe; she began to shout at me (as only she could; my mother was possessed of a particularly colorful vocabulary that I’m certain would have embarrassed a Marine drill sergeant), and told me that I was crazy and where did I get such a stupid idea, etc., etc.  Being no fool, I let the matter drop.

Now, some 20 years on after that incident, and confronted with a piece of paper with the word “Adoption” and my parents’ names clearly printed on it, interestingly enough the first thing that went through my head was that I now had confirmation regarding this sister from Italy that never was.  I opened it carefully, so as not to tear the fragile paper.  I began to read, slowly; and one phrase practically leapt off the page and grabbed me by the arm:  “a male child born May 12, 1953; who shall henceforth be named Michael G. Dell’Orto, Jr . . .” I sat for a minute and just laughed.  “Well, that would be me, wouldn’t it,” I thought.   Then I called my wife at her office, and told her that I had something I needed to read to her.  She actually dropped the handset onto the floor before I was done.

The next few days were taken up with phone calls to old neighbors and especially aunts and uncles.  The account that emerged from these conversations was a surprise, but also not surprising.  It became clear that I was the only person involved in this story who hadn’t been aware I was adopted.  Everyone knew.  My aunts, uncles and cousins never brought it up because they assumed that I had been told at some point; the same could be said for some of my mother’s friends and many of my teachers (both grade and high school).  I spoke about it to my mother’s best friend, a woman who lived two doors down from us in Jersey City, and she told me an interesting tale.  All “the girls” were having coffee one day in her house; those few women in the room who knew that I didn’t know about my birth had remarked to my mother that, now that I was getting married and might, at some point sooner or later, have children, wouldn’t it be a wise idea to let me in on the secret?  My mother’s reaction was pretty much the equal to the one she’d had when I’d asked her about my origin all those years before; she swore up and down and told them in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want me to know.  And that, as far as she was concerned, was that.

I’m pretty sure that no one would ever have brought it up to me had I not come across the adoption papers.  As I said, a lot of people in my family just assumed that I already knew, and I would have had very little (if any) reason to remain in contact with my mother’s old friends as I got older and they, inevitably, died off.   Given the circumstances it is certainly possible that the whole business never would have come to light – the papers in that strongbox could just as easily have been tossed in a trash bin and hauled off to the dump, instead of thrown into a vacant lot.  I suppose I should be grateful that the thieves were inconsiderate enough to be litterers as well. 

All of this begs the question as to why my mother was so adamant about the whole business; a number of people, including my mother’s friends, several of my aunts, and one of my best friends from high school (who had also been my mother’s lawyer), have weighed in on the subject, and the consensus is that it was a mix of things; a little pride, a lot of fear.  One aunt told me she had been afraid that, if I knew, I somehow would not think of her as my mother any more, or I would be upset, or embarrassed, or not want to have anything to do with her and go off searching for my “real” mother.  I was also told that some of my father’s family, especially my grandparents, were not thrilled about bringing a “stranger” into the fold, at least not initially (once I showed up, however, their resistance faded, if the photos of infant me with my grandparents are any indicator – I was an adorable baby, if I have to say so myself).  This was complicated by the issue of “fault;” yet another aunt  (my father came from a very large family, eleven in all -- six girls and five boys) told me that my mother allowed her in-laws to think that it was she who could not have children, when all of his siblings knew that it was my father who had been irreparably damaged by the malaria he contracted (and its subsequent treatment) while he was in Burma during WW II.

So now, here I was, married and with a child, already fully possessed of an identity and a family history that was, as far as I was concerned, the only history and identity I needed.  Learning that I was not technically a blood relative to any of these people – mother, father, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents – was (and I know this is going to sound odd) largely irrelevant to me.   They didn’t suddenly cease being my family because of this; these were the people who loved me, cared for me, educated me.   Outside of the fact that I owed a certain measure of gratitude to two strangers for bringing me into being (never forgetting that I was an accident, not a choice), I felt no connection – or, rather, I felt no need for connection with them.

As I said at the beginning, two impulses motivated the search I eventually conducted.  First, the idea that there could be a really interesting story behind all this was intriguing enough in itself; it appealed to my sense of theatre.  Second, the reading I’d done indicated that, in general, birth mothers of this era (since all information about the subsequent adoption of  a child in those days was kept strictly under wraps by the state, private agencies, attorneys and the like) tended to agonize for years over their decision to surrender a child; wondering if the child was healthy, happy, well cared-for.  I thought, if nothing else, to tell whomever this woman was (if I could find her, if she wanted to be found, and if she was even still alive – three very big “ifs”) that I was grateful for what she had done.  So I knew that at some point I would attempt to locate one or both of my birth parents.  But there was never any sense of urgency to it.  In fact, I waited almost eight years before I began.  

The Good Sisters

My wife and I have known each other now for going on 50 years, ever since we met in 1^st grade -- September, 1959, at St. Aedan’s School in Jersey City.  We were in the same class, all eight years, taught by the same nuns; we (and all our classmates) went to church together – Mass at 9:00 AM without fail every Sunday, Mass every morning before school began on First Fridays, and every day of the months of October and May (Mary’s months) -- First Communion and Confirmation together; we were even partners on line at our 8^th grade graduation.

This has gone a long way, I think, in creating and sustaining the bond that holds us together.  I suppose if someone were to ask me what I believed to be the key to a successful marriage (35 years and counting), one component would certainly be the sheer depth of our common background – our collective memory and experiences; we grew up in the same neighborhood, knew all the same people, did many of the same things, and shared many of the same expectations and aspirations about life.  And one of the things that we -- and many other Catholics of our generation shared – is our experience of the nuns.

Nowadays, too many people get their images of nuns either from people like playwright Chris Durang, whose Sr. Mary Ignatius is a twisted and vindictive woman, warped by a "faith" that sees only sin and evil in human nature; or (worse yet, for a whole host of reasons, in my opinion), the "wacky" denizens of Dan Goggins' Nunsense musicals.   Because of the steep decline in vocations over the last 20 years or so, even kids in Catholic schools today will only rarely encounter a nun as a teacher. 

I spent the first six months of my life in a Catholic orphanage, cared for by the Sisters of Charity; and my whole educational life in the Catholic schools, each of the first eight years of which solely (with one exception in 5^th grade) under the tutelage of a Sister of St. Dominic.  I suppose that, having spent what psychologists now know to be the most formative phase of an infant's life under the daily care of nuns, I am perhaps subliminally predisposed to see the whole of religious women in a positive light. Notwithstanding, I have to say that the women who taught me, as well as the many nuns I have come into contact with over the course of my adult life -- with only a very few exceptions -- were (and are) sweet, dear women who I remember fondly as teachers and exemplars, and who loved me wholeheartedly and taught me well.  I even remember most of their names – Sr. Dolorosa, Sr. Patricia Mary, Sr. Ferdinand, Sr. Anthony Marie, Sr. Agnesine, Sr. Leonard Marie, Sr. Maureen James, Sr. Maria. 

My mother continued to be active in the parish church and school long after I’d graduated, gone off to college and grad school, and gotten married.  One upshot of this was that all sorts of random people from my childhood knew my business, and in great detail.  I had a conversation with my mother one day, not long after my wife became pregnant with our first child.  She mentioned that she had been speaking to our 8^th Grade nun, Sr. Maria (who had of course already known, through my mother, that two of her erstwhile pupils had married), and told her of our good news.  I asked her to tell Sister that we both sent our best; and that, I thought, would be that.  


About eight weeks later a large box showed up in the mail in care of us both.  My first assumption was that it came from my mother, but when I  looked at the return address the name on the package was Sr. Maria’s.  I tore open the box, and found inside, folded carefully in tissue paper, a lovely, hand-knitted baby blanket, with a note in Sister’s neat, spidery hand assuring us of her love and prayers for us and the baby to come.  We wrapped our infant daughter in that blanket when we brought her home from the hospital, and we’ve kept it ever since, stored away in a chest, should the baby it swaddled ever have need of it for a child of her own.   There are a lot of reasons why women are not choosing the convent as a vocation; many of those reasons apply as well to men considering the priesthood.  Modern life presents many more options, especially for young women, than were available to them when I was a child; and very few young men and women will have grown up with the kind of day-to-day interaction with religious of all kinds –priests, brothers or sisters – that my wife and I encountered in our youth, and that might serve as an exemplar or role model for them to follow.  I do not know what this bodes for religious life in the Catholic Church, or what changes in attitude or established practice will have to occur to see any kind of renaissance in vocations; but I do know that a world without these wonderful women, working to help children, and the poor, and the sick, living their lives prayerfully and joyfully, is diminished by their absence.

Home Is A Journey

We begin this journey with a photograph. A young couple stands smiling into the camera, their somewhat formal dress (at least by our standards) a contrast to their location, which appears to be a few steps off a hiking trail.  He wears a long-sleeved shirt tucked into his trousers, replete with sleeve garters and a stiff collar, a watch chain dangling from his belt.  She is wearing a long, voluminous skirt and a crisp shirtwaist, with a high choker collar set off by a small cameo.  The young man holds what looks to be a straw hat in one hand, down at his side, while she has a Sunday-best wide-brimmed great mass of fabric perched almost jauntily on her head.  I love her smile in this picture.  It isn’t a formal smile, full of teeth and false gaiety, but a sly, knowing smile, as if she had some wonderful secret.  He’s got more of an open, boyish grin on his face, and even though she’s some four years younger that smile makes her look the older and wiser of the two. 

Here is what I know: It is the late summer or early fall of 1903; his name is Fred, and he is twenty-three, her name is Amelia, and she is nineteen, and they have just gotten engaged.  They will wed on December 17^th, the same day that the Wright Brothers make their first flight from Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  Their marriage will span almost seventy years, during which they will raise four children and live a life that was, by all accounts of those who knew them, remarkably unremarkable – full of both pain and pleasure, joy and disappointment; certainly never perfect but one of care, and hard work, and love. In 1914, Fred will come to work for Mrs. Marjorie Moors as caretaker, gardener and general handyman.  Her grand house, which had belonged to her parents, the Devlins, sits in the old colonial center of the town, hard by the church and the vestiges of the town common.  Just across the road from the field at the back of her house is the other place that Mrs. Moors owns, the house in which Fred and Amelia will settle themselves; the house that will shelter them and their family over the next fifty-eight years.

A house, in many ways, is only a shell that nurtures and protects the home that is created within its walls; but the home that is created therein can, in its own way, sustain – plaster and lath, wood and stone – the house that envelops it. There is a gentle irony here, in that this house, which was their home for almost as long as a human lifetime, never actually belonged to them.  It is a testament to the real significance of what they fashioned here that Mrs. Moors was moved to make provision in her will for them such that, at her death [in 1966], they could continue to live in the house, comfortably and free of worry, for the rest of their lives; which was only right and fitting, since this was their home, even though it was never really their house.

This house in which they lived for so long is my house now; it has been mine for twenty-five years. That fact hardly seems to matter to most of the long-time residents of the town, who still refer to it by the name of this young couple who lived, grew old and died here more than thirty-five years ago.  This too, is as it should be, since you never really “own” an old house, so much as you are simply another name in an ever-lengthening list of caretakers; people whose job it is (if they have the wisdom and good sense to see it; not all do) to safely see the house though another human generation and pass it on to those who will come after.  Fred and Amelia themselves, if they knew the house at all before they came to live in it, probably knew it as “the McCarthy place," from Michael and Mary Margaret McCarthy who bought it when Amelia was about six years old and lived in it for fifteen years; and in all likelihood the McCarthys called it the “old Putnam place;” and the Putnams, well, Amos and Dorcas Putnam, who were third cousins and direct descendants of Jacob Putnam, one of the original settlers of the town, bought the house from the Widow Burton (related to them distantly by marriage), in whose husband’s family the house had been for as much as eighty years, or more, from the time it came to be built by her father-in-law, Deacon Burton, the town's first Town Clerk, who had fought in the French and Indian War.

A commemorative plaque now sits next to the old front door of the house.  It is a beautiful, hand-lettered thing, and it lends the old place a dignified air; here, it says, is something that has endured, something that has remained, something that has seen the sweep of history pass like a ghostly parade through its dooryard.  It gives the approximate date of construction and acknowledges two of the prominent early names associated with its origins, names that are not just confined to old road maps or given to geographic features, but names whose direct descendants can still be found in the local phonebook.  It is, truthfully, a sign, in the archaic sense of that word – an outward symbol or manifestation of an inward grace, a grace that is the gift of the spirit of this house, as it was embodied in all those who took care of it. 

I end this journey, now, where I began; with a photograph. An old couple, their two smiling faces creased and lined by years of work and care, are standing near well-tended flower beds.  Here is what I know:  Fred and Amelia have just passed their 60^th wedding anniversary; their children are having grandchildren of their own.  It is 1963, and it is only for us to know that they have almost reached the end of their long lives.  They will both die, only a few months apart, in 1972; you do not spend the better part of a century with someone to be content to remain behind when they embark on the final journey. Two pictures, bracketing a life, reminding us all of our own fragile, human impermanence. But now, almost forty years on after their deaths, the house remains as it has been for over 240 years. Trees and shrubs they planted and tended now depend on me to prune and water them; the septic system that Charlie dug by hand in 1941 is still nursed along lovingly with periodic applications of Bacteria-In-A-Bottle and Root-B-Gone.  And so it is with the other bits and pieces of this house, added on over time, each of which is a piece of the story of those it sheltered.  I’ve replaced a clapboard or two and some sheathing here and there, a room has been added, and the house, the barn and even the chicken coop all sport solid new roofs.  It is in those moments when I am planting, or painting, or patching something – when I am taking care of the old place, in some large or small way – that I most strongly feel the connection, running like a cord, binding the present to the past. It links me with Fred and Amelia – and the McCarthys, and the Putnams and the Burtons – in a real, immediate way.  It links me to this town, this community; a place where, in a few short years, I will have spent the balance of my entire life.  I have the care of this place, for now.  I have the job of seeing it safely into the hands of my child, and her children.  I am a caretaker – like Charlie was.

There's No Place Like Home

One of the many things that makes living in my little village such a real pleasure and delight is the presence of our own genuine small-town movie theatre, located right on Main Street in Wilton's Town Hall. It is a venerable institution, tracing its lineage all the way back to 1912; the earliest days of film itself. Run by movie maven and all-around swell guy Dennis Markaverich, the Town Hall Theatre is a genuine art-house cinema as well as a showcase for the finest of first-run Hollywood.  Because it offers a much-welcome alternative to the 3D-Multi-rama-cine-odeon-plex-chock-full-of-noisy-teenagers-$29.95-medium-popcorn experience, it attracts a wide audience from all over the southern part of the state, as well as parts of Northern MA.  It is, as you can imagine, a really great place to see a movie --  spacious seats, two separate theatres, fresh-popped popcorn with real butter, and ticket prices that won't force you to take out a second mortgage on the house just to take a family of four to the movies on a Saturday night.  What's more, Dennis runs a special program every weekend of old silent films, many times with live musical accompaniment, as well as a "Classic Cinema" screening every Saturday afternoon as a fund-raiser for local charities -- admission is free, and donations to one or all of the charities represented are gratefully accepted.  

All in all, The Town Hall is one of the best places there is to really enjoy the experience of going to the movies; even more so, when the particular movie in question happens to be the one that I'm in.  A few weeks ago Dennis announced that he was going to run The Fighter (see my last post for the whole sordid tale of Michael-in-the-movies); immediately plans were arranged among many friends and neighbors to descend en masse on the Town Hall to see the film.  As I've said before, it's great to have even a small role in a movie; it's even better when the movie is a genuinely first-rate one.  I've tried, of course, to make it clear to all and sundry how really minuscule my participation in this project is; but I also have to say that their enthusiasm and genuine excitement over the whole business is gratifying to me, heart and soul, in ways that are hard to express.

When I finally appeared on-screen, about 3/4ths of the way into the film, even before my filmic doppleganger could toss out the first of his two lines, my own personal cheering section of about 3 full rows erupted in applause and cries of delight.  A tad embarrassing, I have to admit, and I suppose that this must have been awfully confusing to most of the other patrons in the theatre; the mystery only deepened for them when my little claque cheered yet again as my name scrolled by in the closing credits.  While we were all filing out of the theatre, a woman turned to one of my neighbors and asked what the heck had been going on; she was told that the person walking just ahead of her, contentedly clinging to his wife's hand, was "that guy" in the movie, here in the flesh.  Her surprise and delight were wonderful to see; she asked if I were "really a Hollywood movie star;"  I replied that, as  far as I was concerned,  this was far better -- to experience the authentic, wonderful, dear, sweet, kind expression of joy that I felt in being there with all of them; nothing like this would have happened if I were in LA (or New York, or even Boston, for that matter); I'd be just another minor actor sitting in the dark in a room full of strangers.  But I don't live in a big city, I live in a small town where friendship means something real and neighbors take their responsibilities to each other seriously; a place that embraces and cherishes its special little movie theatre, understanding that it is emblematic of a way of life that is rapidly disappearing under the crush of the soulless multiplex.  My experience in being a tiny part of this really good movie was amplified a hundredfold by the smiles, the hugs, the shouts of "good job!" by these people I love so dearly.  And that, my friends, is what it feels like to be a star.