My world was turned upside-down by events beginning on a February day
in 2001 when I was walking a canoe through a shallow Cockroach Bay with
friend and fellow photo-journalist Jim Phillips.  We were dragging the
canoe because we carelessly did not check the tides, thus arriving at
low-low tide, yet this didn't bother us, as we liked slogging through
the muck like two little boys, despite both being half a century old
each.

We are both writers and photographers. On the photographic scale, Jim
is by large measures more advanced. We have much in common, including
elderly mothers with failing health, deceased fathers, and the
uncertainty which comes of beating a living out of the keyboard of a
MacIntosh and through the lens of a Nikon. It is  curious we have become
good friends, because as writers, we both tend to flee at the arrival of
anyone else who is a writer, yet we have forged bonds.

While we were wading through scant inches of water, the cellular phone
in my pocket rang. Trying to extract the ringing nuisance from my jeans,
I missed the call and went to my voice mail. A woman, whose voice and
name I did not recognize, said my mother was in a serious car accident
and taken by helicopter to the county trauma center.
"We have to go back," I told Jim. Then I explained calmly, or at least
it seemed calmly.

We hurried through the shallow waters, dragging the canoe behind. We
loaded gear into Jim's car and tied the canoe to the roof. The trip to
my house blurred by, while Jim put more metal to the peddle than was
wise for a Toyota with 200,000+ miles, a car whose soul has since
transmigrated to the great Japanese car resting place in the sky.
With vague information about your mother in an automobile accident,
horrible images run through your mind. If you're imaginative, a quality
which is a mixed blessing for writers, the images get pretty ghastly. I
knew it was a single car accident. My mother was thrown or fell-out the
car door, while the Oldsmobile continued going round in circles, until
at last it crashed into a tree. I imagined a tire running over my
mother's head, killing her. I worried she would be forever in a wheel
chair, amputated stumps all remaining of the legs which danced with my
father.

My mother was then approaching eighty-six, and I did not want her to
drive. Several times I asked her to give up the car, but she persisted.
I mentioned driving evaluations by a professional instructor. No need to
waste the money on such nonsense, she said. She had unsuccessful eye
surgery to repair macular deterioration. Although everything seen from
one eye appeared twisted, when I asked the surgeon about driving, to my
chagrin he said she was legal with the right to drive, and said so in
such a manner it sounded like I was trying to take her right away
unjustly. And there was hesitation on my part. Her recently lapsed
license was renewed by Florida, and who was I to argue with the state
while taking away my mother's independence?

Two hours later, I found myself picking bark and wood from the bloody
scalp and gray hairs on my mother's head. Inside the trauma center were
moaning folks. A motorcyclist who had an accident without a valid
driver's license was being talked to frankly by a no-nonsense highway
patrolman. Elderly couples from a car accident called to each other from
various corners in the emergency room, and one man begged to be allowed
to smoke. Every five minutes or so, the man pleaded to smoke, then asked
if his wife was dead. His wife called out to him that she was alive,
then five minutes later he would ask again to smoke and if his wife was
killed. The man's questions repeated and repeated, like an old vinyl
record whose platter was scratched. My mother shook, her lips trembled,
I kissed and held her, and told her it would be OK.

     Mother

It's too bad you meet my mother in print when she is already
eighty-six. In her thirties, she was as pretty as a movie star and had
long auburn hair. In her bathing suit on the beach, heads turned, and as
a child she called me Sunshine and read to me. She loved to dance, and
with my tall and handsome father, cut quite a figure on the floor. She
sat all night in the hospital when my tonsils were extracted, and cried
when I brought my body home alive from Vietnam, while in-between she
suffered with a teenager whose heart was too reckless, hormones too
powerful, and brain too large. Sometimes now when I look at my mother, I
wonder where that woman I used to know has gone, but from time-to-time I
see the eyes of that young woman looking back at me from a body that has
moved-on by half a decade. I know men and women who hate their mothers,
but I love mine and consider myself fortunate.

When you pass eighty, even a stubbed toe is a major event, and my
mother had multiple bruises and contusions from her accident. She was as
close to black and blue all over as anyone can come. She looked like
Hulk Hogan had thrown her around the mat a few times. Still she was
miraculously lucky. No internal organs were damaged, and the cuts on her
head turned out to be minor, fixed by a few stitches and aspirin. She
would need some time to rehabilitate in a nursing home - everyone
thought a few days, but they were wrong. Like many simple things in
life, it would not be so easy.

At her house, I saw the aftermath in her garage where the police had
somehow managed to cram the remains. The car was twisted so badly it
looked more like a heap of painted metal than a four-door. I decided her
days of mobile independence had ended and prepared for a fight. I kept
thinking how guilty I would have felt if she died in the accident or if
someone else was hurt. I could have been without the mother who had been
there for me all my life. When I visited my mother in the nursing home,
she asked what make of car I thought we should buy her next, and I told
her with what I hoped was both humor and sensitivity that it was yellow
with the word "taxi" on it.

What should have been a week in the nursing home turned into a month.
My mother did not do well in the nursing home, although she would say it
was them, not her. My mother worried about having to go into assisted
living and was depressed over her injuries. I told her I saw no reason
why she shouldn't return to her own home and continue to live
independently - with the aid of taxis and me.

My mother looked so dispirited when my wife first saw her, huddled and
still in her sheets, that Pam began to cry, thinking my mother was dead
or dying.

I visited my mother almost daily, and looking for things to cheer her,
took her candy, newspapers, magazines, and cokes. "It's like a tour of
duty in the army," I said. "You do what they tell you and when your
time's up, they send you home." I also took her a copy of my
newly-published third book, Florida's Fabulous Trail Guide, which I
dedicated to my parents.

Home. A very powerful word. A place of familiarity and safety. There
are times in life when without a home you are in danger of  falling
apart. On the first available Saturday, when my wife could help, we took
Zella Ohr home from the nursing home for a short visit. I wanted mother
to see return home was possible and to know good things were still in
the world.

When home at last, she announced she had something to tell us. I had
heard this before, and did not pay much attention. Previously what was
important was for me to promise to stay married this time, or that she
loved me, something I had known all the life I could remember.
Then my mother told me I had been adopted.

It was as if someone put a bell jar of white sound over my head. Her
lips were moving, clocks were ticking, car tires were rushing over
asphalt on the street outside, and I heard nothing but the inside of my
brain pushing against my skull.

She could not have children, a result of illness and a large ovarian
tumor. My father told her to keep my adoption a secret from me, why she
did not know. She directed me to the back bedroom where, under a
mattress like in a Dickens' novel, were hidden my 1946 adoption papers.
Orphanages and foster homes full of the abandoned and discarded were my
first family.

Pamela was in tears, but I tried to remain calm for my mother's sake.
"No, it did not matter," I said, and "Yes, sometimes I had suspected,"
because I was so different, not only in appearance, but in acquired
tastes, like reading and music. My Eagle Scout father wanted an Eagle
Scout son, I am sure, but what he got was a sort of teenage mutant who
absorbed books whole, memorized classical music, while slapping on
aftershave to attract girls.

"Keep these for me," I told Pam, tossing her the adoption papers, with
what I hoped was displayed nonchalance for the benefit of my mother. My
real mood was probably reflected better in how the adoption papers
soared into the air and landed at Pam's feet in disarray.

     Reeling

Despite many questions from my wife while I drove home  after the
revelation, concerning how did I feel and what did I think about
learning my name had been Albert, not Timothy, I was in a sort of state
where everything moved slowly around me while my brain raced on like a
runaway locomotive. The brain is an amazing thing, able to spin out
poetry and nightmares, often at the same time.

Formed from egg and sperm, attached to uterine walls, growing and
expanding, a life. For a while, brain cells migrate and are identical,
so that the same cell could be the one that moves your feet, or controls
speech, gives rise to cognitive thought, or be your optic nerve. They
call this plasticity. In time, the cells stop where they will function,
specialize, and we have ignition. How and why no one has really
figured-out. In the folds of gray matter, in the sparking and arcing of
neurons across synapses, a human personality is born in everyone of us,
no matter what we look like, almost all the same inside, influenced by
myriad biology. Then life starts to work on us. Some inner mirrors are
shattered early, so people never recognize themselves correctly, as with
friends I dearly love - some of these people go astray.

The inner pieces of my brain were at work absorbing this new shock of
adoption when we arrived home, and Pam knew what best to do. She went to
bed exhausted, while I sat on the porch with various dogs and cats I had
rescued from somewhere. I sat there for hours. Cats fell asleep. A dog
wandered back to Pam.

After leaving the army a few years following service in Vietnam, I fell
apart. I have never been able to decide how much delayed stress had to
do with it, from crawling in tunnels where hidden people wanted to kill
me or flying in helicopters where pilots crashed us into trees, as
opposed to how much it had to do with a half-dozen failures at love. It
is a fact that I tied my brain into knots, fueling the knot tying with
an incendiary dose of illegal marijuana, smoked with a blond Latina
(more secrets and passion) who then drove her car up the off-ramp on
I-275 and Hillsborough Avenue. What was in the grass? we both asked each
other - and never knew. My short and non-illustrious period as a pothead
was ended by blinding panic. Six months later, I was a better man for
having fallen apart. The knots were untied, and I thought I understood
myself from alpha to omega. I was in total possession of the facts and
meanings of my life. I realized with the knowledge of my adoption that I
had been wrong, and the onion had at least another layer to be peeled.
There were wheels within wheels, gears within gears, and mazes to be
run.

Some things now made sense which never made sense before. For the first
six formative months of my life, I had not had the normal nurturing a
child receives. No motherly bonding, just one of many rejects and
unwanteds. People said I was unemotional, a flat liner, deadpan. Now I
knew why.

Around me were the saved cats and dogs, just like I had been saved. I
did better with animals than people. They were easier to understand and
to earn affection from. Feed them, stroke them, and toss them a ball
until your arm falls off, and they love you. In saving them I was
following a pattern in which my parents selected me and saved me from a
foster home. No wonder why, as an environmentalist, I wanted to save the
whole wide world and its wild things. I was rescued, what more natural
than to rescue in return? What better to rescue than everything?
Joy on my baby face when my parents took me home was evident on old
black-and-white photographs yellowing with age. The grin was really wide
for a baby. My hands were outstretched in other pics as if there was joy
in just feeling the air. What a happy little tot I must have been to
have a home or someone willing to pay attention to me at last. Thank
you, Frank and Zella.

For hours on the porch, I thought and thought of my family, and my life
as part of it and away from it. For 50 years they kept a secret, and a
constant smoke screen hid the fact of my adoption. I recalled needing my
birth certificate to get a passport to go to Mexico. Despite repeated
pleas that I would take care of it, my father said, "Don't worry about,
I'll take care of it," and did. There was a cousin I once tried to
defend from a perceived bully, who in youthful pride screamed angrily at
me that he could defend himself, adding I was not part of his family.
The people who knew I was adopted and didn't tell me included two uncles
and aunts, two sets of grandparents, six cousins, various more removed
relatives, not to mention friends of the family, various husbands and
wives of cousins, maybe children of cousins, and my very own (adoptive)
parents. No only did no one tell me. They kept the secret half a
century. No wonder I always felt skeptical as if a trick was being
played on me. It was.

Each event in my family life, no matter how major or minor,  had to be
re-examined now for potential meaning it did not possess only a few
hours before. New questions arose for which I felt I would never have an
answer. I was stunned, and I knew it would take months, if not years, to
sort all this out. It has.

I was not me, but I was me. I had been born someone else, to another
woman, not the woman from whom I picked bark from her hair. My father
and mother were my father and mother, but they were not my father and
mother. New modifiers, birth and adoptive, now were added to the two
single most formative words in a person's life, mother and father. Most
disturbingly, I was not who I thought I was, nor were the reasons for
events in my life true.

     Wife

In John Fowles' Daniel Martin, Dan's daughter Caroline asks her writer
father why writers are bad at relationships. He tells Caro  because they
can always imagine better relationships with little effort which are
more pleasing than real ones.

To use one more literary illusion, my life has been like the Ogden Nash
poem about being no good at love. Or perhaps too good at it for my own
well-being. Nearly the first 28 years of my life were lived for hometown
women and the ideal of an all-American family - you know, two kids and a
house in the suburbs, an ideal never achieved.  Such failure made me
feel a defective part in the great American dream machine. After falling
apart around age 28, I intentionally spent a number of years involved
with women who would never marry for differing reasons, including
professional careers and bi-sexuality.

When I finally did marry the first time, quickly I was headed toward a
painful divorce. It always seemed I could never get enough affection or
love, and now I knew why that was so also. Possibly my entire life I was
trying to make-up for the affection deficiencies of those first six
months. I have only felt "normal" in my marriage with Pamela, a
relationship exceeding a decade, but all credit goes to her, and none to
me, for my reckless heart and overly large brain continue into
adulthood.

My wife Pamela, however, needed no time to sort out my predicament.
Like my father Franklin, she is quick on the draw, able to make
instantaneous decisions of great import, while sticking by them
unflinchingly. I, on the other hand, must turn a stone over a thousand
times in my hand before skipping it across the water.

"Are you going to find her?" she asked, startling me out of my trance
on the porch.

"Find who?"

"Your birth mother."

I didn't know. I hadn't even given it a thought.

"She's probably still alive," Pam said. "Time is running out."

Recently I watched television sleaze, a show in which un-wed mothers
confronted the man they said was the father of their child. Paternity
tests done were not announced until after the ensuing harsh spat.
Nothing like a good fight, humiliating and demeaning to one or both
human beings, for the benefit of our viewing audience. Promiscuous women
lied and were found out before televised witnesses, while irresponsible
fathers often admitted paternity on the airwaves, or at least to
sleeping with someone they shouldn't have. Meanwhile, flashing portraits
of innocent children smiling or looking angelic lit the screen to touch
our hearts, while women spoke of passion and secrets, and men attacked
the virtues of the women whose children they may have fathered, and into
whom at the very least they had plunged the most intimate part of their
body in an act which implies love.

Once I was such an innocent as the kids shown in those
nationally-televised pictures. One of those young women could have been
my birth-mother back at sixteen or seventeen. It was hard to believe,
yet it was certainly true.

"Aren't you going to find her?" my wife asked me again.
Pamela is my biggest fan, and when she defends me or decides to do
something good on my behalf, there is no length she will not go. It
might be tracking down a first edition of Vonnegut's Palm Sunday, when I
would settle for a umpteenth edition paperback, or buying for me not one
but three expensive Kahlo art books after I took her to see Frida. Once
someone took my parking spot, and I had to hold her back by her belt to
keep her from going-out the window as my stand-in at road rage. This is
a false image of her, as she is usually a sea of tranquillity,
none-the-less it speaks the lengths she has gone for me and is willing
to go, God knows why, because I am not worth it.

Pam called from work on the Monday after my mother gave me the adoption
papers to tell me she had the address of people related to my
birth-mother.

"We can find your birth-mother."

"I don't know what I want to do," I said, "and it is my decision to
make, not yours."

Still she persisted, unable to understand why someone wouldn't want
a second mother, or a new family of half-brothers and sisters. I told
her my life wasn't a soap opera, although it now felt like it, and this
was not Oprah, all endings were not happy, all reunions not joyous. Part
of Pam's frame of reference was a woman to whom she was a Big Sister who
found out late in life she was adopted and found her overjoyed
birth-mother.

Pam is goodness, like being a Big Sister. She is Walt Disney's biggest
fan. If they make Legally Blond 4 or 5, Pam will be lined-up smiling.
She is Homeward Bound, Christmas presents, and Halloween candy. It is a
form of innocence and goodness I wish I had. My life has been too
convoluted, and I am no longer an innocent. I am what you would call
complicated. I was not ready or willing to address the issue of a second
mother.

The stone needed turning over and over in my mind. I wasn't ready to
toss it.

     Facts

Not that I wasn't curious. I sent a overnight package to the
appropriate agency on the eastern seaboard, and when they responded,
sent a check so they would provide me with the circumstances of my
life's beginning.

Sometimes knowledge compounds mysteries.

The man whose sperm made me was apparently a criminal, maybe a
gangster. When I was born, he was in jail for armed robbery. I, a human
manatee, was descended from a tough guy. My sperm donor was apparently
never told about me, or at least the woman who bore me reported she
tried to keep me a secret from him. He was not looked favorably upon by
her family of Protestants. He was a carouser, a drinker, a bad influence
on their little daughter, and it must have appeared to my alarmed
adoptive parents that in his footsteps at times (and except for crime) I
was walking.

She, my birth-mother, how strange the distinction, was a high school
girl who was very intelligent, wanted to go on to college, and was in
trouble. She was good in school, very bright, yes that made sense, for I
always felt like a talented alien in my home, and I am for better or
worse very bright. The report from the state said she had genuine
affection for the man, as the man did for her. She felt unprepared for
motherhood, and single motherhood was not the trend in those days as it
is now.

My birth-mother's family was a church-going one, but in that there was
a rather large surprise. My father Frank was a Methodist too. He and my
birth-mother attended the very same church. In fact, she was attending
the very same high school Frank graduated from several years before.
When Frank lived in the same city, he carried mail and perhaps delivered
it to his fellow Methodists. His brothers and friends carried mail, too.
Chances seem good he and/or they may have known my birth-mother, her
family, and likely her circumstances. They inhabited the same haunts. I
will never know for sure unless I seek her out, but it is possible Frank
was acquainted with the family and the circumstances, and perhaps the
church itself had a hand in the arrangements.

It is even conceivable that I was baptized in front of a congregation
containing both my birth and adoptive-mother in the new second name of
my life, maybe with both women unaware of such irony.

     The Maze

Recently I tried to buy a house near mine for my mother Zella. At
eighty-eight, although she would deny it, she is beginning to need more
and more help, and the idea of bringing her closer seems a good one. I'd
always like to have her around.

In discussions about the house, while explaining I had just found out
about my adoption, the owners told me that they were both adopted. For
the first time I was actually jealous, for they had a special day, like
a second birthday, to celebrate the date of their adoption. I had been
gypped. I could have had two birthdays, but instead all I got was my
head stirred-up 50 years later.

We talked about contacting birth-parents. "It goes both ways," the wife
said, and I thought how the state reported my birth-mother never
contacted them about me. "It would be a slap in the face to my
adoptive-mother," she added, "if I tried to contact my birth-mother."
Yes, my adoptive-mother might take it hard if I tried to look up my
biological one. Or maybe not. Maybe she's curious. But I certainly
wouldn't do anything to hurt Zella who has raised Sunshine.
"Maybe you mother shouldn't have told you," a friend said. I don't
believe that since sanity comes from dealing with truth, not illusion.
She did the right thing, only 30 years late. Not her fault either. She
followed my father's wishes, a man whose labor supported us and whose
decisions, right or wrong, made our lives and defined us.

Looking the birth-mother up might ruin the magic. There is something a
little magical about not knowing your ethnic heritage. I could believe
that I was black, Native American, Eskimo, or anything I wanted, except
a WASP kid. For a white kid, I always felt black anyway. It started with
bullies on the school bus who thought they were insulting me by hurling
racial epitaphs at me. My heroes have included Doug Williams for guts
and miracles of football flight, Martin Luther King for inspiration, and
Malcom X who made the journey of a lifetime from hate to love. I could
be anything I wanted, I told myself. Like Steve Martin in "The Jerk," I
could be black, although I am not sure how many black folks would claim
whitebread Ohr.

It is also a good thing not to have a nasty medical background. Looking
up biological parents might lead to knowing they needed a kidney - mine
- or died at an early age of all the bad habits I currently possess,
meaning I might have to change them. In fact, not knowing my heritage, I
could believe my biological parents were Superman or Supergirl, and I
would live forever thanks to Kryptonite.

While making these excuses, there was a little voice in the back of my
head saying, "Coward," I could not shut-off.

What I might do came to me slowly over two years and was capped-off by
a conversation I had with Mr. Luther Thrift of  Waycross, Georgia,
descendant of Swampers, rugged Crackers who lived in or around the
Okefenokee.

Luther is an amateur genealogist and local folksy historian who has
traced swamp families, including his, back to their roots around the
1800s.

I haven't met Luther yet. The day I was supposed to meet him, the trip
was called-off because of a tragic death in the family of my friend,
Chip Campbell, with whom I am working on a book on the Okefenokee Swamp,
the reason for talking to Luther.

The world seems often interwoven with connections you never expect.
With Luther I got help on my indecision while I was looking for swamp
tales for a book. I have talked to Luther twice on the phone, and the
other morning the subject of my adoption came up in our conversation. I
mentioned that it was astounding to me that someone could have a
heritage going back six or seven generations. Even within the Ohr
family, my knowledge made it only as far back as grandparents, and I had
no knowledge of my birth-family.

There was something warm, direct, and honest about Luther.  "We all
have to know our heritage," Luther said.

Yes, that's true. Even if our heritage is tawdry and sad, not pink and
happy, it is something we need to know.

"Well, you're going to find her, aren't you?" Luther said.

"Well, Luther, I'm going to try," I conceded. And I thought, I am not a
coward, just afraid.

Having rolled the flat stone in my hands a thousand times, I now sent
it skipping over the water.

However, maybe that's not what happened. Maybe it was more like this.
"We all need to  know our heritage," Luther said.

Yes, Luther, but I know all I need to know about mine. Just because
someone bears you doesn't make them your mother. That comes from years
and years of raising, tolerating, feuding with, and loving a child no
matter what they do and hoping in the end they turn-out decent. The
woman on the eastern seaboard just gave me blood and cells and DNA,
nothing else which I need to concern myself about.

"Well, you're going to find her, aren't you?" Luther said.

  "No, Luther, I'm not," since I'm happy with the six letters in my two
names and who I am, although reaching a point where I was happy with me
has not always been an easy pilgrimage. My terrible-wonderful life is
full of belly laughs and tragedies, beauty and horror, happiness and
depression, love and lost love, but I do not wish to trade it or change
it. I am still the son of Zella Ohr, and she is still my mother. I will
love her not one whit less or more for not being of her womb.
I let the stone drop from my hand and heard it land on the ground by my
feet.

Or perhaps not.

I have asked myself why I had to write this piece. It is because I am
writer, it is what I do, just like each of you does what you do. It is
too interesting a story not to tell. Being a writer is nothing special,
and is a lesser profession in my mind than being someone who can build
things by hand or someone who can save or help suffering living things.
Each article is a journey of inner exploration, none more so than one
about your own life, and not to take the journeys would be dishonest.
Questions I had to clarify before I published the story were mostly
about if my mother Zella would be hurt by publishing it. I don't think
she will. I did not write this for the money, although I do not turn
money down, or for attention, because an uncomfortable crowd to me is
any congregation more than two people. In part I wrote it for the 20
million adopted Americans who may experience the same thing. But it is
misleading to impute altruistic motives. I wrote it because the only
other choice was not to write it, something a writer would not do.
People who hate two endings to a story should consider that there is no
right or wrong answer about finding birth parents for those who discover
they have been adopted.