This all started in 1975 when I was 13 years old sitting with my father at a Phillies game. No, really. I was very close to my parents, but knew there were at least some differences from our family to others. My mother had no "birth" stories. There were no complaints about my size (she's "four feet, ten and three quarters inches tall"...anyone who feels a compulsion to include that 3/4 inch is reaching, quite literally); no time-of-birth recollection; no reminisces about where President Kennedy was when I shot out. And all of those comments about how much I looked like my father seemed as obligatory as the "are you losing weight?" platitude my mother's friends passed around like a big fatty. He has a chiseled face that is Mount Rushmore-worthy and I looked like Little Ricky Ricardo with the mumps.
So I figured it out -- Dave Cash was leading off, Jon Matlack was about to get him to ground out, the Philadelphia horde was poised to boo the best infielder they'd had since Granny Hamner and I was having a revelation:
I was adopted.
So what? I felt quite "normal", even though I was geekier than most of my friends (reading the World Book encyclopedia for recreation, then using the volumes to build an Egyptian tomb will earn you this label). My parents loved me. I had a lot of first cousins (36 at the time), many of whom I felt very close to. So what did it matter that I arrived in this family differently than others arrived in theirs?
For one thing, no one ever talked about it. My first theory would have to wait -- Bowa walked and now Michael Jack Schmidt was up with a man on base...double play. As soon as the leather-lung next to me stopped threatening the future hall-of-famer, I'd surmised that they were protecting my birth mother (my family, not the Phillies). Maybe she was ashamed. After all, look what she gave up! I read encyclopedias, dammit! Now I was getting angry. Would I have read encyclopediae if she'd kept me...how would I have come to know Eero Saarinen, whose architectural accomplishments meant nothing to me, but whose first name would come to be invaluable in completing the New York Times Crossword puzzle...or, worse, what would've happened had I wound up in an orphanage? I didn't really understand the possibilities at all, but clearly something bad could've been in the works for me. I had new respect for my adoptive parents (a phrase I wouldn't come to know for another two decades -- throughout the '70s and '80s, they were my real parents). I was chosen and given a good life, unlike some of my friends who fell into theirs by genetic sfortunato. I would respect their decision to keep the facts silent, no matter how odd it seemed to me.
This lead to an inevitable wave of guilt (I was raised Catholic, after all...the group that taught you to do an act of contrition if you found a nickel on the sidewalk -- there are children starving in Biafra, after all). I was on the plus-side of the ledger. Actually, that's an anachronism -- I wouldn't be exposed to the mind-numbing cruelty of accounting until 1977. I probably thought of myself as batting .400. I would make it my life's goal to use all of those hits to drive in some runs for someone else. I didn't know how yet -- adoption into my own family seemed a bit distant since I hadn't yet hit my stride with women (editor's note: the author is hoping for that occurrence before the Democrats win their next national election...Vegas odds are favoring the Dems) and the combination of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court and some non-threatening sitcom characters made adoption by single (read: gay) parents fashionable were 30 years off -- but I would do something beneficial for orphans.
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