Long Lost

I got an email from my mother yesterday.

"Your father spoke to his half sister yesterday!"

My father spoke to his half sister yesterday. For the first time in forty-three years.

My father was an only child. His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to New York via most of Eastern Europe when he was barely in his teens and later had a home on Flatbush Avenue and a cabinet making business on the lower East side of Manhattan. Apparently, when my father was in his mid-teens, his father took him to help on a woodworking job. The work was being done at the home of his father's first wife. She lived with his father's first two children.

My father had never heard about any of them.

By my understanding, this was the first and last time he ever met his half sister.

I remember some more involved stories about the half brother, maybe having to do with baseball, maybe having to do with some other sport, but the details are foggy in my head.

My father only first mentioned the half siblings to me (my half aunt and uncle?) a couple of years ago. It was in a completely nonchalant setting - driving or shopping at a Home Depot or something like that - and I was shocked.

"You have to tell me these things!" I insisted. "Because, you know, I could end up dating my half cousin and not even knowing it!" And with my luck I would somehow end up in some crazy oedipal machination and never even know. Because, actually, the world IS that small.

My father found out in the phone conversation that his half sister had retired to Florida and has three children ranging in age from thirty-eight to forty-three. Her daughter helped her do the internet research that located my dad.

My father's father was, from the accounts I have heard, a distant father. My dad was closer to his mother, who passed away when he was nineteen. I never met her.

She was my namesake. For years I had a framed photograph of her gravestone in Brooklyn. I thought it was kind of neat because it was the only time I'd seen my exact name in print without it being me, actually. It's an unusual name. I'd venture a guess that I am the only person with my combination of names on this planet right now.

My college roommate hated the picture. "Can we take that down?" she finally asked me one day. "It's kind of... creepy."

It served as my own personal memento mori, which I liked. For the sake of peace however, I took it down.

The idea of having half siblings that you don't even know about is mind-boggling to me. Our own immediate family is such a tight little bundle that I sometimes imagine we speak our own language that no one else quite understands. In a manner of speaking, I guess we do. Maybe all families do. For better or worse.

Because A and I are twins there wasn't even a time when the unit was made up of three instead of four. All of us. Always. Dinners. Vacations. Outings. Morning to school. Choir concerts. Plays. Trips downtown. Visits to the library. All of us.

My father became the father that he never had, and for that I will always be grateful.

I met my father's father once that I remember. Barely remember. I was six or seven. Were there clues, traces of my father in that man? Somewhere? There must have been, right?

Of course now I wonder what my half cousins do. Do they appreciate the arts? Do they value words? Are they democrats or republicans?

It doesn't really change anything. But it shifts. Perspective. Just a tiny bit. Just enough.