As most of you who have been hanging in there with me for a while probably know, Mither and Pop are my lifelong loves.   My mommy and daddy from the get-go.

I think I alluded to the fact that Pop adopted me when I was five years old in a previous post… actually I can’t remember and don’t really feel like going and looking for it.   But, trust me, he did! 🙂

As soon as he and Mither got married, they took me up to the courthouse and the nice judge, (a friend of Pop’s), swore me in and explained everything to me, (one more time).  He said some words and reminded me which hand was my right one and showed me how to hold it up while we took our oaths.   I took Pop to be my father and he took me to be his daughter.  It was all pretty cool and I felt like a big shot.  I looked for any reason I could find for ages, to call him “Daddy” , and when I’d forget and call him Bill, I’d slap my hand over my mouth and squirm until I could think of something else to tell him so that I could use the word “Daddy”.   He’s been my daddy ever since.  The only father I’ve ever known.

Mom, (you know her as Mither), and my natural father divorced when I was a baby, shortly after my older brother was killed in a drunk driving accident with my father behind the wheel.  He was an alcoholic and my brother, Kurt had been standing in the front seat beside him.  Kurt was 22 months old.  I was three months old.  Mither and I weren’t in the car.

I had nothing to do with my natural father my entire life, with the exception of one meeting with him when I was in college.  He came to the town my college was in and met me at the little  Mexican restaurant.  He paid the bill after supper and with the exception of giving my dad permission to adopt me, that’s all he ever did for me after he and Mither divorced.

I learned around that time of two half sisters I have and even had a conversation on the phone with them.  They were much younger than I was, but it was very interesting to talk to them, and they seemed really nice.

I never really gave it much of a thought again, or at least not enough to really look hard for them.

Fast forward to a few days ago when Mither called me and said that she was cleaning some things out and found some old letters from my father and some photographs of my half sisters and she would mail them all to me.

The little girl’s pictures are decades old, and  and yellowed.  They appear to be from the early 80’s.

The letters are full of drama and a good deal of angst.  They are really very much like my mither described my father.

There were some phone numbers in one of the letters and I picked the one that looked like it was  possibly where he was working at the time and called it.  It was his AA group, but the guy that answered the phone knew him and said he was dead.  He had died 10 or 12 years ago.  This took the wind out of my sails just a bit.  How was I going to find my half sisters now?  The man was really very nice and friendly and said he knew some people who knew my father better than he did and he’d get my number to them.

In just a few minutes the phone rang and another nice man told me over and over how sorry he was that I was just finding out he was dead, and I finally made him understand that really, I only met the guy the one time.

He told me that he’d give my number to my father’s ex-brother-in-law and he felt sure that he or my father’s ex-wife would call me back.

Sure enough, again in a few minutes, the phone rang and it was a nice lady that used to be married to him.  She said that he had died of lung cancer in 1993, but said that my grandmother was still alive and, as far as she knew, living in Garland Texas.  So I googled her, found her phone number, called and she answered the phone.  She’s 93, living in the same house she was in when I was born and one of my half-sisters lives there with her for the time being.  She said that she had had a drug problem some years ago and after she did the rehab thing she went back to school and was staying there with her while completing it. She wasn’t home at the moment.

So that’s about it.  I found my natural father, only he’s dead.  BUT, I now know where to call my grandmother and she can hook me up with my halfsisters… if that’s a good idea or not is anybody’s guess.