Three Blocks
For most of my life, I did not know my father’s name. I did not know my mother’s, either — not really — though I had carried her first name, Nancy, on a sealed birth certificate since the year I turned forty-nine. I grew up on Arthur Avenue in Brookfield, Illinois, an ordinary kid in an ordinary house: a boy who told his kindergarten principal he wanted to play for the Cubs, who taught himself piano off his mother’s penciled notes, who got pulled out of the ice one winter by his older brother. I did not spend my childhood feeling like the center of a mystery. I spent it the way most kids do — not looking very hard at where I came from, because it was simply the ground under my feet.
It turns out I was standing closer to the answer than I ever could have guessed.
When I finally spoke to my birth mother last spring — a phone call I almost didn’t have the nerve to make — she gave me his name. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper at my desk, a name I had never heard in my life. It would be weeks before I understood what I was holding. (I’ll keep his full name for the book; here I’ll just call him Frank.)
Frank, it turned out, had been renting a room when I was conceived — the top floor of a house on Deyo Avenue in Brookfield. My mother mentioned the street almost in passing, the way you’d mention any old address. I asked her to say it again. She said it again.
And I sat there on her sofa and did the math in my head, the way I do math on everything, like a man checking a column of figures. Deyo Avenue. Arthur Avenue. I counted the streets between them.
Three.
Three blocks. My biological father spent the months I was coming into the world sleeping three blocks from the yard where my brother would one day teach me to throw a baseball. Sixty years, two thousand miles, a phone call I almost didn’t make — and the answer to where I came from had been three streets from my own front door the entire time.
If that were the whole coincidence, it would be enough. But it isn’t the whole coincidence.
Frank was an art teacher. He taught at Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, Illinois, from 1963 to 1968. That is the high school I would attend fifteen years later — where I accompanied the choir on piano, won a programming award, rode my first chess trophy home hanging out a car window. His photograph appears in every one of my sister’s yearbooks. He was, quite literally, a face on the shelf in my childhood home — the art teacher smiling out of the pages, and not one of us had any idea we were looking at my father.
And it isn’t only me. My mother, Betty, was Lyons Township class of 1940. My sister, 1968. My brother, 1973. My birth mother, Nancy, 1963. Two of my own children walked those same halls decades later. Nearly every person who made me, and nearly every person who came from me, passed through the doors of one high school in one small Illinois town — a building where, for five years, my biological father taught art, fifteen years before I ever set foot in it.
I have thought a great deal about how to describe the feeling of learning all this at once. The closest I can come is this: it was like discovering that a room I had lived in my whole life had a window I’d never noticed, and that through the window was my own backyard, seen from an angle I had never stood at before. The facts hadn’t changed. I had simply never been shown where to look.
People ask me whether I think it was all coincidence. I understand why they ask, and I don’t begrudge anyone their answer. I’ll only say that I spent thirty-five years as an accountant, and I have a professional instinct about numbers that don’t add up to chance. When I lay these particular numbers out — the three blocks, the one high school, the sealed certificate, the phone call I nearly didn’t make — I cannot quite make them read as random. I don’t insist on what moved them into place. I only know that something did, and that it was patient about it, and that it had been waiting, the whole time, three streets from where I grew up.
I’m telling this story in full in a memoir I’ve written, called Is This Nancy? The Voice on the Other End. This is one thread of it. There are others I still can’t quite believe myself.