Last year, I reached the stage of my life where I have spent more time without my mother on this Earth than with her. She was middle-aged when she died but, in many ways, it felt like she was taken from us in the prime of her youth. Up to her sudden end, she was vivacious, whimsical, sunny – the kind of person that was a joy to be around. Her memory book from the funeral is filled with expressions of gratitude from people who were uniformly uplifted by her presence.

So, you can understand why it’s been so hard for me for these past 28 years to see her as noncorporeal. As lifeless. As gone. For much of this time, I have chosen not to dwell on her passing, focusing instead on the tasks before me. Building a career. Supporting my family. Being a positive influence on the people around me.

But I also think I avoided thinking about Mom because the grief would consume me. I am reminded of what CS Lewis once said: “Grief still feels like fear.” Because I refused to be fearful, I concluded that being brave required me to move on. Never mind all the cascading effects of that deflection – anger, frustration, coldness to those around me who deserved warmth.

Adam Levy, who I have known and worked with since the late 1990s and who has been editing this series, recently sent me an article by Amanda Petrusich that was published this year in The New Yorker. It centers on the loss of her husband to a neurological disorder when he was only 43 and their daughter was barely a year old. Normally a music critic, Petrusich does an amazing job covering the science of grief and the impact it had on her personal relationships.

“I was having a hard time connecting with anyone who hadn’t locked eyes with a particular sort of darkness… who were able to reckon in some way with the lunacy of human life,” she writes. But she also comes to terms with the fact that people lose loved ones all the time. Reading that, I wondered whether I avoided dwelling on Mom’s death because I wanted to avoid the realization that my story wasn’t particularly unique or special, like I had always thought. After all, I had a full 27 years with Mom in my life – others weren’t so lucky.

In the second chapter of this series, I shared how I pushed back hard when my uncle Mal said that I had lived a “pretty sheltered life.” Six years later, I think he was absolutely right to say that. And it is because of the special woman who raised and sheltered me.

I have spent so much of this series focused on the men who Mom brought into our lives to fill the father void. I did so because each served an important role in my upbringing and formation, and because Mom was the chief recruiter in bringing them into our lives.

I also chose to tell the narrative in this fashion because that’s how I saw things for much of my life, focusing on who wasn’t there versus who was. As a kid, I often looked out the window at the quickly passing terrain, imagining a kind of Evel Knievel character riding a motorcycle alongside us, deftly weaving between trees, jumping over rivers, scaling tall buildings, and generally making sure he kept pace so he would always be there for me. This was all a coping fantasy. I never really stopped to appreciate the parent who was already in the car with me, dutifully driving me to my destination and making sure nothing prevented me from getting there.

And, so, I’m going to fix that right now in this closing chapter, to the best of my abilities. My mother’s positive traits far outweighed her faults, and they have had a massive influence on me and my ability to keep my shit together all these years she’s been gone.

First and foremost, Mom was a determined and steadfast provider. Like her father before her, she did whatever it took to make a living and put a roof over our heads. She proved resilient right from the start. One of the first jobs she had was working in the morgue at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. I remember her describing the first time she wheeled a recently deceased veteran into the elevator for processing and how startled she was when it groaned underneath the sheets on the way down, the last of the air draining from its lungs.

Despite the fright, she didn’t quit – she just aimed higher. Later, she became a flight attendant. After my sister and I were born and our young family moved to Frederick, Maryland, she was hired as the town’s Operations Town Action director. It was a perfect post for a burgeoning extrovert, one that had her organizing cultural events and recruiting new businesses to downtown. For many years, she served as an executive assistant in various capacities, earning enough experience to become Pamela Churchill Harriman’s personal assistant. Before she died, her ambition drove her to open a successful deli in Sarasota, Florida, with her husband.

Some of these jobs were emergency postings after one of her relationships unraveled. Mom always seemed to land on her feet, and it never came as a surprise to us. Employment for her wasn’t attained by luck, but rather the result of her unyielding persistence.

That trait revealed itself in many other dimensions of her life outside of her profession. Mom was an avid golfer and worked tirelessly to improve her game. One of her life’s goals was to score below 80 during a round and she finally did it one hot and sticky DC summer day at Rock Creek Golf Course in July of 1991. She was so proud of her achievement that she framed the scorecard, which I still have. On it, she wrote “I kept the faith!” next to her score of 78.

Her tenacity rubbed off on me. I was a disciplined student and a hard worker at school, never satisfied with any grade but an A. When I switched to football my first year of high school, I showed up every day despite the relentless heat and pounding by guys twice my size, finally earning the job of starting cornerback the last game of the season. After picking up the bass at age 13, I practiced until I knew every song in my record collection, started a band, and went on tour in the 1990s, playing vaunted venues like CBGB’s, TT the Bear’s and the 9:30 Club. When forced to pick a language at the start of my college career, I chose Mandarin despite the immense difficulty – I ended up passing Georgetown’s fluency exam, needed for graduation, four years later.

I owe all those achievements to my mother and her relentless support and high expectations. Encouragement was another of her strong suits. As I wrote in the first chapter, she could make you feel like a million bucks, even on your worst days. She always had high hopes for me and made sure I knew that the world was my oyster, full of infinite possibilities. Among her go-to expressions each day, I heard, “I’m so proud of you,” “you’re so handsome,” and “I know you can do it” at regular intervals. When I took up soccer, she rarely missed a game and was often the loudest parent on the sidelines. I was a timid defender at first, spurring her to shout “Be aggressive, Wiliam!” until I started shouldering and tackling my opponents like it was my job.

Mom was also tirelessly selfless and taught us to look after others who were less fortunate than we were. Every holiday season, we would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hand them out to the homeless in downtown Washington. She routinely volunteered at a battered women’s shelter, often taking us with her so it would have an impact on us. When friends contracted cancer, she made sure to have them over for dinner routinely. For all my childhood, even during the most financially fragile of times, she sponsored children in Africa and had us write pen-pal letters to them.

Mom understood the power of words. It was her that encouraged me to become a writer. In me, she saw a version of a man she dated in high school and almost married, were it not for his being accepted to Oxford University after graduation. His name was Kurt Schork, and he became a longtime war correspondent for Reuters, reporting from hot spots such as Bosnia, Iraq, Chechnya, and East Timor. I got to meet him one year when we were touring colleges in the Northeast, and I thought he was one of the coolest guys I’d ever met. I had fantasies of hanging out with him if I got into my dream school, Amherst, but I didn’t. He tragically died in 2000, killed in an ambush while on assignment in Sri Lanka. By then, I had become a reporter at Bloomberg News.

Mom was an aspiring writer herself and took classes at the local community college to strengthen her skill at it. I have some of her assignments in my collection. In one, she describes the medical advances that kept my sister alive after she was badly burned as a child. In another, she undertakes a deep analytical dive of the legend of Narcissus as part of a critique of self-centered modern American society. In my favorite piece, she romantically recounts her family’s summers at the Ark Haven community on the Chesapeake.

I couldn’t stop to unpack the car – I would fly to the shoreline, past the ten or so other houses lining the drive, waving and calling to anyone who was in their yard or on their front porch. It would be close to sunset by the time we arrived and I wanted to recapture the memory of the blazing orange ball dipping down into the rocking waterbed for the night. See you in the morning, I used to think.

Mom fantasized about writing for a living but never did. Still, she was skilled enough at it to earn a sizable return from it one year. I was a freshman at the University of Vermont and had just been informed by my standout Chinese teacher that she was leaving the school and that I should consider it, too. She told me she knew I cared about learning the language and had ability at it, and that the remaining professor in the program would slow my progress. She agreed to write me a recommendation for transfer, and I wrote one for her. She transferred to Fordham and I was accepted to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. There was only one problem: the financial aid package they sent me wasn’t nearly enough to accept their offer.

When Mom found about it, she wrote a three-page letter to the administration, detailing all the hard work she had put in over the years to make sure I got a college education. She knew exactly how much to empty her heart into it without pleading or being overbearing. A week later, a new financial package arrived that granted me an additional $10,000 each year. I think the day I graduated was one of her proudest moments – of both our accomplishments.

I will forever be grateful to my mother for pushing me when I felt uncomfortable. I have tried to embrace that motivation in writing this series. It has often been difficult wrestling with my feelings, not the least of which is anxiety over how my words will be interpreted by my old family members.

But I also wanted my new family members to better understand me, and why it wasn’t such a tragedy that I never met my biological father. Earlier this year, Charlie and Tammie and I were simulcast watching the Harry Potter movie “The Deathly Hallows – Part 1” from our separate homes, and we got to the powerful part where Hermione casts an obliviate spell to make her parents forget her. I sat there wondering how the scene made Tammie feel, knowing how much she would have benefited from having Lester in her life. I remember feeling weirdly unaffected by something that should have made me sad. Despite all the volatility and uncertainty, I was a kid of privilege – not from money or stability, but from being in the center of a bright spotlight of love.

If I haven’t delivered this message yet, let me clear the air about something: There is no one on the face of the Earth who could have done a better job raising me than Mom did. In fact, in raising my own children, I’m not sure I’ve measured up to the high bar she set. I give myself good marks for being a provider like my mother and her father, and for granting my daughter and son the independence I cherished as a child. But I have at times emulated her not-so-great habits. I have said things to my kids I wish I could take back. I have gotten better in that respect, but I also recognize I could do more. Putting all this down on paper has made me want to step up my game in encouraging and nurturing them.

I do often wonder how our lives would be different if Mom was still around. I can’t help but think they would have benefited immensely from her wisdom, compassion and positivity. Fortunately, I married a wonderful woman who is very strong in these areas. More than anything, though, I would love to see my mother again and tell her all about them. How our daughter, Indy, is as much a fighter as she was. How our son, Ozzie, is as persistent and focused on self-improvement. And how both of them are, also like her, kind and considerate people who care deeply about their friends, particularly those going through some things.

The last time I talked to Mom was the day after she died. I was asleep but it was more like a visitation than a dream. She pulled up in a convertible Cadillac with the top down. A gray-haired man I’d never seen was driving. She was there to say goodbye. She wrapped me in her arms and told me she loved me, then hopped back into the car with a big smile on her face. She waved as they pulled away, and I remember waking up feeling extremely grateful, and happy for her.

That’s the way I will always remember her, fulfilled and moving onto her next big adventure.

This is the 15tth installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. While this is the final chapter in the serial, this Substack will live on. After a break, I plan to return with more stories from my past, including my favorite pastime of traveling. And I will continue to update this space with adventures with my family members, both old and new. Stay tuned!

First and foremost, Frank brought levity at a time when we were going through some pretty heavy stuff. We had just left our previous home under tumultuous circumstances and were trying to build a new life from scratch – literally. We found an affordable home to rent in Kensington, MD, that was a project, to say the least. It was a small 2BR/1BA house with an unfinished basement that could double the size of our living area. So that’s what we set out to do, and Frank was an enormous help putting up and sanding drywall, painting, and otherwise making the new space feel homely.

Frank was always quick with a joke. Some might call him a smartass, but he was a lovable one. Every time one of us would burp, he would reflexively say, “Oh man, that sounds great. Did you just get that fixed?” He would pull our leg at regular intervals, so much so that you never knew whether he was kidding or not. One time we were driving by the Mormon Temple, he asked us if we knew the name of the saint depicted in the gold-leaf statue on the spire. When we airballed, he filled in the blank: “It’s St. Moroni.” That sounded like complete baloney to us (Frank was an Italian American after all) and we told him so. This was before the Internet, of course, which would have revealed he was 100% correct.

For his own edification, Frank often dialed 411 (note to the kiddos: this was the phone number you punched in when you needed someone else’s number). He used it habitually for answers to trivia questions like: “Who was the actress who played the lead in that movie last year starring Robert Redford?” When the operator would push back on such calls, we could hear him ask, incredulously: “Isn’t this information?” He was such a charmer that he would often ply an answer from them, including one famous time he got the operator to tell him how long he should cook a 10-pound turkey.

Spam callers often got more than they bargained for when they called our landline and Frank picked up. These were moments worth spectating. He would almost always ask for their name and inquire how their day was going before asking them to tell him something about themselves. Most would hang up less than a minute into his interviews, but some embraced the surprise conversations.

Frank was also extremely handy but never did anything without teaching Dorsey and I how to do the task along the way. When I was 16, I bought a used Honda Accord that had a number of issues. One was warped brake rotors. I didn’t have the money to replace them, so Frank taught me how to replace the pads, which would wear down every six months or so and start whistling. I found an auto parts shop in Bethesda that would sell them to me for 20 bucks, and Frank and I set out to swap them out with a pair of needle-nose pliers, a C clamp, and the car jack. After he showed me how to do it the first time, I could make the repair in about 30 minutes on my own.

Frank stepped up once again when I needed a summer job after my junior year. He was a potter by trade and had two jobs that relied on his skill, one as a professor at the local community college and another as a salesman at a ceramic supplier in Greenbelt. The latter employer was looking for someone to help manage their warehouse and handle shipping and receiving. Frank put me up for the job and I landed it after an interview.

The warehouse was hot – anyone who has suffered through a humid DC summer can sympathize – but I loved every minute of it. My favorite part was operating the forklift, which I used to unload pallets of clay, kilns, glazes and other products off the 16-wheelers when they backed into the loading dock. I was in control of the music back there (WHFS, of course, what else?) and I enjoyed autonomy pretty much across the board, in return for a decent paycheck. I liked the job so much that I stayed on after school resumed, shipping products out to customers on the weekends when the store was closed.

Frank made my senior year one of my favorites. It wasn’t until I had moved on to college in Vermont (I attended UVM my freshman year) that he and Mom broke things off. After that, I didn’t hear much from him. Dorsey took the brunt of his departure since she was still living at home and had grown quite fond of Frank and he insulated her from conflicts with Mom.

I haven’t seen him since. He made an appearance at Mom’s funeral but I must have missed him (I erroneously reported earlier that he didn’t attend). My aunt Betsy said she saw him off to the side and invited him to sit with the family but he politely declined. Years later, I thought I tracked him down in New Jersey but the voicemail I left was never answered.

Frank, if you’re still out there, you’re one of the best human beings I ever had the pleasure to know. I wish you only the best.

The past six years of getting to know my discovered paternal family, the Taylors, have been an unqualified positive experience. In addition to the wedding trips down to Florida, I’ve had the chance to interact with my siblings in person on a couple of other occasions.

The first was a visit that Charlie, Whitney and Tammie made here in Raleigh to see my band play at one of our local haunts. Music has brought me much joy in recent years. Despite my advancing age, I still find myself getting lost in the grooves and crescendos. It’s been a long time since a blood relative saw me play, so it was a treat to have three of them in the house that night. The rest of the weekend was just as fun – they rented an Airbnb not far from my house, and the following night we reenacted a sibling sleepover, replete with ridiculous pajamas, homemade music videos, and games. None of it felt forced because we had all let our guards down by then.

The second occasion brought Charlie together with my sister Dorsey and stepsister Ellie. I wanted them to meet so they could both see what kind of person Charlie was and gain a better grasp of what this family discovery means to me. We picked the North Carolina coast as the venue, and I rented a house where we could all stay comfortably and include my son and a friend. Charlie brought his surfboards up from Jacksonville and we caught a few waves. We watched silly movies with the boys at night. But for the most part, my sisters regaled Charlie with stories of growing up together, lingering over some of my more embarrassing moments to his great delight. And he gave them a window into what his childhood was like and the things that mattered most to him in life.

It was there that I landed on the theme of Laura’s son for this retelling. As much as this story has been about making new family connections, it all goes back to the decision that kept me from making them sooner. There was a lot to unpack there – and not just filling in the blanks involved with the breakup between Mom and Lester and my subsequent birth. What was it about Mom that prompted her to sever all my ties to my biological father and the family he would go on to have?

I learned only recently that there was a family echo that reverberated in her decision. My aunt Dana revealed to me earlier this year that her mother was brought up under very similar circumstances:

I don’t know if you know this, but history repeats itself. My mother’s mom did not want my mother to have a relationship with her father when they divorced. Therefore my mother never met her real father. Your mom did the same with you, which I didn’t approve of. After your mother’s death, I felt it only fair for you to know who your father was and the life he had after your mom.

In my mind, my situation went beyond simply following a familial pattern. If there was one theme during my sister’s and my upbringing it was that Mom was just fine doing things on our own and in her own way. In fact, I believe she wore being a single mother like a badge of honor most of the time. I don’t know if it was to prove her parents wrong, or ex-boyfriends who thought they had leverage over her. Maybe it was to simply show herself what she was capable of. But she definitely drew contentment from it. Being a single mom was a well she kept going back to for nourishment when relationships burned out. She’d raised us kids on her own before, I think she would reason, and she could do it again.

A condition of being part of our pack was being loyal to Mom above any other consideration. For my part, that meant never asking questions about my paternity. She demanded satisfaction from me about the state of things. And I went along with it because I bought into Laura’s lore that it was “us against the world.” It gave me an extra layer of armor against both adverse events and adversaries.

But in hindsight, it was a level of protection I couldn’t control. It seeped inside me, bottling my emotions up to a point where I couldn’t access them like well-adjusted people do. As a kid athlete, I never showed any emotion on the field, good or bad. My baseball teammates started calling me “Iceman.” I thought it was an honorific at the time, something to suggest I had “ice in my veins” during big moments when I needed to deliver. When I struck the last kid out to seal a championship for my team one year, I simply walked off the field, job done, while everyone else was screaming and high fiving.

One of my mother’s favorite movies was “Terms of Endearment,” the story of a strong-willed mother and her impulsive daughter. I think she liked it because she saw herself in Debra Winger’s character, the daughter, and likened Shirley MacLaine, who plays the mom, to her own mother. But the part that resonated with me was the relationship between the daughter and her own kids. There’s a scene after she has contracted terminal cancer. She is lying on the hospital bed, close to death’s door, and her sons are at her side. The younger son is openly affectionate and clings to her, while the older son is overwhelmed and angry at the grief he feels. When she asks him to tell her he loves her, he says nothing. The mother tells him not to feel guilty about it, that she knows he loves her.

Watching it the first time, I couldn’t help thinking “that’s me.” I’d always had a hard time telling Mom exactly how I felt about her. I loved her, of course, so deeply it hurt sometimes. But there were times, as I’ve written before in this series, when I felt betrayed by her. Mostly it involved her being physical with us, extending the awful pattern her father started with her. She was unpredictable in that way and in others, too. As Dorsey and I grew older, she traded in the wooden spoons for guilt shaming. If we didn’t do our chores by the time she got home from work, she would fly into a tearful rage, admonishing us for doing so little when she worked so hard to put food on the table for us. When we got caught doing things we weren’t supposed to, she acted like it was an attack on her personally.

Whenever she would soften and embody the figure of Eos I wrote about in The Goddesses chapter, these memories were too close to the surface for me to fully let my guard down. Mom had beautiful blue eyes that manifested her duality. On any given day, they could beam love straight into your heart or burn holes through you. Those were her terms of endearment: stay on her good side or feel her wraith.

Lest you think this is what any child would say of their stressed-out parent, we saw her work the same conditional light switch with others she brought into our life. The most glaring example was with a man named Frank Russo.

Frank entered our lives shortly after we left Alan’s house that police-involved night. He was a ceramics professor at a local community college where Mom was taking classes at the time. We don’t know when her love interest piqued in him, but they started officially dating after we moved into our new rental home in Kensington. I’ll have a lot more to say about him in an upcoming interlude because he was one of Dorsey’s and my favorite people in Mom’s orbit, and he changed us for the better.

As much as Mom loved him, and it was obvious that she did, even Frank couldn’t escape her ephemeral fury. They argued almost from the get-go. That’s probably too strong a word for it. Their arguments typically consisted of Mom letting Frank have it, and Frank giving her time to cool off. I don’t think he raised his voice once. That was not his way. Not even when she kicked him out of the car one snowy night in downtown Washington despite him having a broken leg. He limped home to Maryland on crutches through a foot of snow, rather than go blow-for-blow with her.

Frank was an exceptionally kind and patient man, but his frustrations mounted as the months rolled on, particularly when it came to her alcohol abuse. He knew like we did that she became another person when she drank. She didn’t seem to have a handle on how it transformed her. Frank would gently interject when he thought she was going too far with it. At first Mom deflected. But over time she became more and more defensive about it, saying there was nothing wrong with her level of consumption.

There came a point when, to avoid his criticism, she started hiding vodka in an Evian bottle under the driver’s seat in her car. Frank found it one day and confronted her with it. A shitstorm ensued. It wasn’t long after that he decided that he couldn’t take it anymore. Leaving Mom broke his heart but he couldn’t stay with someone who couldn’t break the pattern. It just became too much for him – this non-negotiable term of Mom’s endearment. It ultimately became a dealbreaker and we couldn’t blame him for ending the contract.

I never thought of walking out. Even after leaving for college, I visited often and actually moved back home for my senior year at Georgetown. I was always extremely proud of my mother, how she managed against all the odds to protect us and give us shelter. How she bounced back from every setback. How she always seemed to make it work no matter our circumstances. Then there was her evident pride in us. She was never shy about celebrating our achievements. Her positive reinforcement was an elixir that could fuel your tank for weeks or months on end.

But, as much as I rejected the notion when I was growing up, I don’t think I ever forgave her for keeping my biological father’s existence from me. Like everything else I found heavy, I had learned to stow away my feelings about it for most of my life. I know now that it was unhealthy response, one that likely triggered my quick temper and inability to emotionally engage with people in my life who deserved it. And it was probably the reason I fought so hard not to think about her after she died, because it would have forced me to think critically about someone I missed so much.

Looking back now, all I wanted was a choice. Here’s the information about your father, now decide what you want to do with it. Instead, it was kept from me like sealed testimony. I don’t know what I would have done with that information. It’s possible I would have filed it away, content with my life as it was. It’s also possible that being kept in the dark for so many years is what made me run to the light as quickly as I did when my aunt Dana sent me Lester’s obituary back in 2020.

I don’t believe in regret. Like the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, I believe every person would make the same decision when presented with the same preconditions, ten times out of ten. But I have spent the past six years wondering what life would have been like had I known my father. What I would have learned. What I would have absorbed. What my relationships with my blood siblings would have been like.

All I can do now is try to make up for lost time. And try to make sense of the choice that my mother made for me. Maybe one day I’ll get to talk to her about it. I think all the time about the conversations that the two of us could have had, me now a grown man with the wisdom that time conveys. I’m not the boy at the hospital bed anymore. More than anything, I would just like to tell her I love her one last time. That and to thank her for everything she did for me. Since I can’t do that, I’ll save the final chapter for everything I owe to her.

This is the 14th installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

Check your inboxes over the next few days for the latest podcast, which features my interview with Ellie about her dad and my mom and growing up together.

LIKE LIFE

Again the sunlight drifts like snow

Layer after layer lifts

The king of day departs

Leaving low bloody fleets

Of remembrance.

Silence and the dusk

Move the dying-crimson clouds

Across the brightening moon.

And now

The strong arms of winter enfold the sky

Orion stands strong with hunter’s eye

His diamond sheath hangs at his thigh

And might black chest is unconquered save by

The intermittent rush of some white meteor’s tail.

And the great bear chases the

The little bear to the moon

While the lazy moon floats through

The solemn trees like a child’s balloon

And the stunning dragon watches

And flashes his fearsome tail

And on her throne the queen sits

Surveying all.

These motionless actors

Move in fantastic circles

Rhythm and synonym of life,

The stars puzzle and play

Like folly-begotten children of royalty;

The sacred twins, the insipid snake

All move in marvel of the wheel.

And whirl in worlds

Pinwheeled light.

Guiding north star

Queen of birth

Dipper of life

You whose unmotion is the power of motion

Stop the wheel,

Pour the milk of the mother universe

And call forgotten choirs, apocryphal and benevolent,

To sing and shine a birth home.

At night, in winter, all great things happen.

Babes are born, love wakens the callow and cautious.

The dreams swarm our honeyed souls with sweets of survival.

Winter keep the sky

Queen, stop the king…

But the king comes putting out the dark

He has made echo

The faint dull sound

Of the three dead knocks echo

Slowly against the curtain of light which raises its royal folds

But all shall fall, dry crisped,

As dreaming is necessity

But it shall fall.

This is it. It’s called “¡Pia Peligra!” and it was one of a handful of short films I created starring Indy in her early years. I never wanted to be the dad who dragged a camcorder around, preferring to experience her life through my own eyes. So I spent hours writing and editing these projects instead. Each one is very special to me (I might post another one later), in part because they capture Indy’s innocence and maturation, but also because they feature some of our favorite people.

In this one, Alan plays the first legend (appearing at the 2-minute mark). My old friend Ian Kaplan plays the second, while my late father-in-law, Tom Colosi, plays the third. Most of you will notice a couple of other familiar faces in there as well (wink wink). The featured music is from the amazing duo Rodrigo y Gabriela.

This is the first time I’m showing this production outside of a circle of family members and friends that I would send our movies to each holiday season by DVD. I hope you enjoy it!

One of the limiting parts of packaging these stories in a serial is that key figures in my life don’t appear until very late in the sequence. But now we have finally arrived at the part where the chronology delivers, because it centers on the man who had the greatest impact on me.

His name was Alan Hirshberg, and I started calling him my stepfather starting around age 11, though he and Mom never married. They met when he was a solar energy consultant for Booz Allen & Hamilton working out of Bethesda, Maryland. Before that, he had worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, and was in the room when NASA’s engineers brainstormed a way to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home after one of the oxygen tanks exploded.

Mom was his secretary. We don’t know when the flirtations started but Alan was recently divorced and a charming guy who resembled Gene Hackman so much that strangers would ask for his autograph, which he gladly obliged by signing his own name much to their consternation. He had a quick laugh and a ready sense of humor. He also had an adventurous spirit – among his many travels and exploits, he made a routine of trekking in Alaska every summer with an old college buddy from Cornell named Tree. He was an avid skier and scuba diver, as well as a banjo picker. And he was an intellectual through and through. He wrote poetry and recited it on the regular. His favorite was the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the 21,500-word epic from which he could quote lengthy passages at will.

Mom and Alan started dating when I was in the fourth grade. I remember meeting him the first time at his office in Bethesda. It was after hours, and I marveled at the neatly arranged desks and computers as I made my way through the darkened corridors. What was this place? I asked myself. What did people do here? I had never imagined a life that didn’t involve working in some blue-collar trade like my grandfather and adoptive dad did. I couldn’t believe people got paid to sit inside a climate-controlled office building. When I met Alan that first time, he gave me a pen and pad of paper with the Booz Allen logo on it. I treasured it.

At the same time, he never tried to buy my affection. He was attentive to Dorsey and I but not overbearing. Stepfathers can be like that, trying to win your love on their time, not yours. At least that’s what I’d heard from friends who had them. I approached his entry into my life with caution and apprehension – no man had ever made it past a year or two with us. I figured he was just the latest in a long string of flings that wouldn’t last long.

But Alan brought something to the table that none of Mom’s other flames had: a child. An only child named Ellie. She and I were born two weeks apart – she has never let me forget who came first. I was determined to best her in everything else, but I was often foiled by her acumen at so many things. She was a tomboy who was brainy, athletic, fun – all the things I thought myself to be. She pushed me to better myself in every dimension.

When we first met, Alan was living in a high-rise apartment in Northwest Washington. Ellie, Dorsey and I would entertain ourselves by running across busy Connecticut Avenue to swim in the pool in the building across the street, or watching HBO movies we weren’t supposed to on Alan’s big screen TV, or trying to beat each other’s high scores at the Pac-Man at Higgers drugstore up the road. Like real siblings, we would bicker. I once got so upset with her sharing a handheld video game that I impetuously punched her in the stomach (which she also won’t let me forget).

But, ultimately, we became very close with Ellie, especially after we all moved in together in a large, spacious house in a new development being built about a mile away from my mother’s condo. While other kids might have bristled at living in another man’s house, particularly after our midnight departures from other men’s homes, Dorsey and I were both excited at the prospect. For the first time in our lives, we were getting our own rooms. The house had a yard we could play in, along with a garage where we could stash our bikes. And we knew from visiting Alan’s apartment that he always had a full pantry. No more butter-and-saltine sandwiches, no sir.

Alan would end up offering us so much more than that. From the start, he treated us as one of his own. He encouraged our interests to such a degree that he often became part of them. Soon after moving in with him, he volunteered to coach my basketball team and made me the point guard. On Sundays, we would watch Redskins games together after loading up on snacks and bagel dogs at Bethesda Bagels (I adopted the Giants to seed an in-house rivalry). He bought me books and figurines to sate my Dungeons & Dragons appetite and suffered through the picture-shaking amplification of my early years learning the bass. At one point, we even joined a father-son bowling league together.

Alan also expanded our intellectual capacities. He forced us to each find a favorite poem and commit it to memory (mine was “The Eagle” by Alfred Lord Tennyson). Dinner time brought instructions in table manners. One summer, he paid me to help organize his work files after he founded his own solar-energy consulting firm. It was then that I first glanced at his investment account statements and wondered at the amounts that could be made in the financial markets. Following up on this, Alan gifted each of us $250 in stock of our choosing one Christmas. I picked Circuit City because it’s where I spent most of my allowance – I ultimately earned enough profits to purchase my first car with it. Of course, that experience would end up being worth much more since it encouraged me to save and invest, which I did habitually no matter how much money I earned.

We also benefited from Alan’s Jewish heritage. Along with Christmas, we celebrated Hannukah each year. In addition to more gifts, we got lessons in the Torah and started each meal during the Jewish holidays by reciting blessings in Hebrew (“Baruch atah” has stayed with me). When he thought we were old enough to handle it, he took us to the Jewish Community Center to watch the 10-hour Holocaust documentary “Shoah” in its entirety (spread across several nights), which left a deep and lasting impression on me.

Before we met Alan, the furthest I had ever journeyed was from Florida to Maryland after I was born. Alan was all about travel. We skied in Utah and Vermont, beached it in Cozumel and Sonora Bay, Mexico, and snorkeled in Bonaire. One summer, Alan took off work so we could all enjoy our own “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” We rented a big station wagon in Arizona and spent a month driving around the west. We descended into the Grand Canyon on mules and camped next to the Havasu Falls. There was a week of learning to ride at a dude ranch in Jackson Hole, followed by a week of camping by horseback in the Grand Tetons with two guides. The trip ended in Los Angeles, where we got to stay at a friend’s pool house in the hills and take in the Summer Olympics.

Some of my favorite memories from those years were made in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Alan and an old friend of his had built a cabin on this big lake called The Bowl. We’d venture up there at least once a year, fishing and diving off the dock, swimming across the lake, biking into Stockbridge and Lenox, and playing tennis on a private court. If we were there during the Fourth of July, we would take the rowboat off the shore near Tanglewood, the outdoor concert venue, and lie on our backs to watch the fireworks while the Boston Symphony played.

It was times like these that I think truly humbled me. Sure, I could be a “pistol,” as Mom would say, and come up with things to complain or pout about. I was a kid, after all. But I was also in constant wonderment at our lives’ complete 180. Did we really deserve all this?

The first couple of years, I was on constant watch for the rug to be pulled out from under me. Mom’s history with men did not exactly breed confidence. But then we all just kind of settled in. As I said earlier, Mom and Alan never married – I don’t know if the suggestion was ever made. As much as he spoiled us, Alan was careful to keep his finances separate. In my records, I have a document he made Mom sign when she launched one of her hobby businesses with his startup funding; she pledged the equity in her Parkside condo as collateral.

Despite these carefully constructed guardrails, we made it for more than five years living under the same roof. My aunt Dana recently commented to me by text that my mother “always found a way to get what she wanted.” When I asked her what that was, she instantly replied, “Marriage!” But some of the happiest years Mom spent were with a man she never married. I think ultimately what she wanted, for both herself and her children, was more basic than that: stability.

And stability is what we finally achieved living on Valerian Lane. At least a version of it. While we never wanted for essentials like we used to, we had to learn to live with bouts of volatility. Mom and Alan loved each other but would still argue at regular intervals. Mom seemed to like quarreling, but he often deserved her vitriol. Alan could be incredibly self-centered, often in hilarious ways. When it came to the holidays, he would give each of us household items that all of us could use. He gave my sister a set of steak knives one year. My mother got an outdoor thermostat. Ellie would often compare her father to Royal Tenenbaum, the Gene Hackman character who was such a Narcissist that it caused him to be completely divorced from reality.

Alan could be like that. One trip out to Salt Lake, he grew so impatient with the line leaving the rental car lot exit that he drove out the entrance instead, puncturing all four tires on the “tiger teeth” waiting there. He then proceeded to drive the car on its rims back to the terminal, which he left parked in the arrivals lane as he marched inside to complain about the car with four flat tires that they had rented him (Hertz later billed him by mail for the damages).

Alan’s quick temper could get the better of him at times. He loved electronics and gadgets, but they would flummox him on the regular. Any device installation attempt usually left it bruised and battered. People didn’t get the same treatment from him unless he was pushed to his limit. Things boiled over one season he coached my basketball team. I was one of our leading scorers, but every player was supposed to be benched for at least one quarter, so long as someone else was available to play. During our elimination match in the semis, Alan left me into play all four quarters only because our team’s lone sub that day, Danny, said he needed to leave early to attend a birthday party. I ended up sinking the game’s winning free throws. After the game, the opposing coach challenged Alan, telling him that he forced Danny to leave. Seconds later, the two had their arms around each other and needed to be separated by the league manager.

You never knew when those episodes would happen, which lent a degree of uncertainty to every day. I wrote in an earlier chapter how I felt betrayed each time Mom took a hand to me. Alan’s blowups eroded my trust in him in a similar way. But there was never a threat of physical harm from him – at least not until the end.

During my junior year of high school, I was down in the basement watching a football game on the big screen when I heard a commotion break out upstairs. At this point in their relationship, Alan and Mom had been bickering more frequently but this sounded like an escalation. When I reached the top of the stairs, I looked up and saw Alan, Mom and Dorsey involved in a pushing match along the railing of the open second-floor hallway. “Where is it?” Alan was yelling, red-faced. I looked down in my hand and found the oversized TV remote there. Not thinking, just wanting to stop the fighting, I chucked it at him. I always had good aim, which made me a standout pitcher until kids start catching up with my velocity in high school. It was true once again. I watched as the device closed the 20 feet between us and caught him right in the face.

Alan was temporarily stunned, then took off running toward me. I’d tell you that I wanted to draw him away from my mother and sister, but in reality I didn’t have a plan. I just hauled ass. I ran through the kitchen, exiting the house through the sliding glass door. I turned to find Alan had caught up. Before I knew it, he shoved me off the raised side porch, seemingly with all his might. I landed on the flagstones on my back, hitting my head in the process. It ended up buying Dorsey enough time to call 911. It didn’t really hurt, at least not physically. But the look on Alan’s face stayed with me for a long time, well after the police came and we departed for my aunt Betsy’s house. It lingered even after we found a house to rent, bought furniture from IKEA, and made it our new home.

Alan was clearly despondent about it. He tried calling many times in the days and weeks after the incident. He wrote to me, apologizing and trying to explain his actions. Mom had already related the salient details. How she found out that Alan had cut off her credit cards after questioning her spending on one of her hobby businesses. How she discovered this when she was trying to refuel his prized Audi 500. And how she then decided to park it somewhere to hide it from him as retribution and walk home.

The facts didn’t warrant what happened, of course. I had acted out of defense of my sister and mother. He just wanted to get back at me. And I was just a kid, while he was a grown-ass adult. He should have known better, and he did, but after the fact.

Eventually, I started to soften toward him. I came to the realization that it was a terrible mistake, one that shouldn’t erase all the years of benefiting from his magnanimity, his fatherly embrace, or his teaching and wisdom. I don’t remember how we mended our broken fence, but we did. He and Mom did as well. They never got back together but were friendly once again. I think a détente between them was probably just as inevitable as their separation. Things had been deteriorating for months before that night. It was a lousy way to end things but not inconsistent with our past.

Still, it was the longest I ever lived under one man’s roof. Thinking back on those years still fills me with a great deal of happiness. Alan was the facilitator of some of my favorite memories, experiences that he engineered and played a leading part in. In the years that followed our departure, he did what he could to continue fulfilling that role. When I turned 18, he gifted me his house for the night so I could throw a party for about three dozen friends. When I went to college in Vermont my freshman year, he came to visit me. Every once in a while, he would send me a check out of the blue, always unsolicited but perfectly timed to fulfill a pressing financial need.

After Mom passed away, he continued to step up. He would invite me on ski trips. He treated my first wife and I to a week at a resort in Baja for our honeymoon. He championed my second marriage to Samantha and the birth of our daughter, Indy. Most important, he was always there if I needed advice, which he gave thoughtfully and after great deliberation.

And then we found out he was dying. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor after experiencing severe headaches on a ski trip to Utah. He returned to Potomac, Maryland, where he and his wife braced for a litany of treatments and radiation. It was going to be a long, painful goodbye. The year was 2007. We had been in Charlotte for only a couple of years and were still making friends there. Around the same time, I received a job offer to help launch a communications firm with two former Bloomberg colleagues. They needed someone to fulfill a speechwriting contract at the Department of Energy in DC. If it weren’t for Alan’s situation, and the urge to be near him during his last days, I don’t know if I would have taken it.

It turned out to be a great decision, and not just because I’m still with the same firm nearly two decades later. The three of us – me, Sam and Indy – got to spend time with Alan during his final years. As he had once become a father to me, he became a grandfather to our daughter, even if for just a little while. Even in his toughest days he found the energy to spend time with her. At one point, he gracefully agreed to participate in the annual homemade movie we made to send to friends for the holidays. It was a coming-of-age story about a young guitar prodigy from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was looking to learn from three masters. When it came time to film his scene, Alan dutifully put a sash over his bald, chemo-ridden head, picked up the banjo, and strummed away with Indy with glee while the camera rolled and my eyes filled with tears.

He passed away just a few months later. But Alan wasn’t done giving. As part of his estate plans, he had set up a trust to bring all of his extended family members together – nearly three dozen of us – as a parting gift. Years later, we all convened at a massive chateau in Burgundy, France, to fete his memory. Our son, Ozzie, had been born by then. During the time we were there, I cherished every minute. It was not lost on me that Alan had passed his love of travel all the way down to my own children, who were both transformed by the trip.

I recently unearthed a letter Mom had sent me while I was away at college. In it, she apologized to me for bringing both Dad and Alan into my life, but with a caveat.

“I realize that I have made several mistakes with the men I’ve picked—both your dad and Alan weren’t good choices for me and I dragged you and Dorsey through it all,” she wrote. “But I hope you learned something from both situations about the characteristics of each man and choose for yourself those qualities you want to emulate.”

It wasn’t always easy, but there is no doubt in my mind that Alan not only enriched my mind but fundamentally altered the trajectory of my life. He loved Dorsey and I, in his own way, and treated us as his own. He challenged us in ways that forced us out of our comfort zones. And he was unfailing in providing for us. So, yes, there has been plenty about Alan that I have tried to emulate over the course of my life.

But the most precious gift that Alan gave to Dorsey and I was priceless: a sister. We are still extremely close with Ellie. We have been there for each other during all of our watershed moments – our marriages, the births of our children, our biggest lifetime achievements. Though she lives in Salt Lake with her husband, Pat, and her son, Silas, we see each other at least once a year when we go to the beach with the Barnsley clan in Bethany, Delaware. Last year, the three of us started a new annual tradition when we traveled to Mexico City for a sibling getaway.

Life isn’t always neat. I’ve come to terms with that, along with the idea that family is what you make of it. On paper, we may have never been formally recognized as relatives. But Ellie is and will always be our sister – and the man who was her father did his best to fill those shoes when it came to the boy who never knew his own. He might have been one of the most complex individuals I’ve known, but I wouldn’t be the man I am today had Alan Hirshberg never entered my life.

This is the 13th installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

One of his comments was that the break between chapters can fog the reader’s memory and make it tough to remember who everyone is. With that in mind, I thought I’d use this week to post a who’s who resource that I will pin at the top of the series’ home page for quick reference.

This also buys me some time to wrap up the next chapter, which is an important one to me. I would post pictures of everyone here but there’s a limit to what I can include here and still be e-mail friendly, so names will have to do. There are a lot more family members than this, but these are the ones who’ve come up so far. I’ll update this as the series progresses (and I make up for omissions!).

The Barnsley Clan

Laura Barnsley Edwards (my mother)

Dorsey Fairbairn (my sister with my mom)

Samantha “Sam” Edwards (my wife)

Indiana “Indy” Edwards (my daughter)

Ozzie Edwards (my son)

William “Billy” Barnsley (my maternal grandfather)

Sarann “Teetie” Barnsley (my maternal grandmother)

Betsy Leigh (one of my three maternal aunts)

Dana Harris (one of my three maternal aunts)

Holly McAllister (one of my three maternal aunts)

Mal Harris (Dana’s husband)

Matt Fairbairn (my sister’s husband)

Tyler Fairbairn (Dorsey’s oldest son)

Dylan Fairbairn (Dorsey’s middle son)

Myles Fairbairn (Dorsey’s youngest son)

Gretchen Leigh (Betsy’s oldest daughter)

Robert Ellis (Gretchen’s husband)

Ethan Ellis (Gretchen’s son)

Ingrid Ellis (Gretchen’s daughter)

Courtney Leigh (Betsy’s youngest daughter)

Elliott Newcomb (Betsy’s paramour)

Eli Harris (Dana’s oldest son)

Jon Harris (Dana’s middle son)

Josh Harris (Dana’s youngest son)

Sara McAllister (Holly’s daughter)

The Edwards Clan

John Kip Edwards III (my adoptive father)

Taylor Edwards (my stepmother)

John Kip “Boo” Edwards IV (my dad’s oldest son)

Christopher “Chris” Edwards (my dad’s youngest son)

Cornelius “Neal” Edwards (my dad’s father)

Virginia “Ginny” Edwards (my dad’s mother)

Jeff Edwards (my dad’s older brother)

Tony Edwards (my dad’s younger brother)

Peggy Edwards (my dad’s sister)

The Taylor Clan

Charles Lester Taylor (my biological father)

Charlotte Taylor (Lester’s wife)

Charlie Taylor (my biological younger brother)

Cliff Taylor (my biological younger brother)

Whitney Taylor (my biological younger sister)

Tammie Taylor (my biological older sister in Colorado)

Kari Taylor (my biological stepsister)

Melody “Mel” Taylor (Charlie’s wife)

Carson Taylor (Charlie’s oldest son)

Braydon Taylor (one of Charlie’s twin boys)

Landon Taylor (one of Charlie’s twin boys)

Ella Taylor (Charlie’s daughter)

Gary Hancock (Whitney’s husband)

Jackson Hancock (Whitney’s son)

Savannah Pohnert (Whitney’s oldest daughter)

Shelby Thrift (one of Whitney’s twins)

Scarlet Hancock (one of Whitney’s twins)

Sadie Hancock (Whitney’s youngest daughter)

Peyton Taylor (Cliff’s wife)

Deacon Taylor (Cliff’s oldest son)

Rowan Taylor (Cliff’s youngest son)

The Hirshberg Clan

Alan Hirshberg (my stepfather)

Ellie Hirshberg (my stepsister)

Patrick “Pat” Greiss (Ellie’s husband)

Silas Greiss (Ellie’s and Pat’s son)

Grace Greiss (Pat’s daughter and Ellie’s stepdaughter)

Jennifer Hirshberg (Ellie’s mom)

Betsy, who helped look after Dorsey and I and is still the rock of the family, lives near the family seat in Kensington, MD. Dana is now in Idaho with her husband, Mal, and her extended family after departing Maryland for Nevada decades ago. And Holly lives in Australia, where she lives near her Aussie daughter Sara and her two grandkids. This photo is from her wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, when she married the bowman for the Australia II yacht that won the America’s Cup in 1983.

Dana told me that she always looked up to her dad. He may have had his mean streaks and wasn’t exactly a nurturing parent, but he was “a wonderful provider,” she said. “I adored my father, and I thought I was very lucky to have the life that I did.”

Dana is the family fixer. If something isn’t working right, she’s the one to roll up her sleeves and figure it out. When I bought a wagon one year at the beach that needed to be assembled, she did it in about 10 minutes with few tools at her disposal. Grandaddy never really taught her anything hands-on - that wasn’t his way - but she said she benefited from being around him, and watching him work. She learned skills through osmosis rather than apprenticeship.

“I enjoyed just sitting and watching him do things and learning,” Dana said. “He never taught me, I just had to teach myself.”

I learned more about Grandaddy’s wild past by reading a book of memories that Betsy recently created at her nephew Ethan’s request. It is chock full of revealing — and often surprising — stories about him. I asked her permission to excerpt some of it here. The first is from her chapter on him called “Wild Bill”:

My father was a hellion. When he was a child, his mother had such a difficult time managing him that she sent him to her sisters’ house to live with them. That fearless spirit followed Dad his entire life. In the process, he earned the nickname “Wild Bill” from friends and family.

As a child, Dad would dress for the snow, head out with his sled, and spend the day hitching rides on the back of his sled behind trucks and cars. Drivers would yell at him to let go but he held on and had a great, fast ride through the snowy, icy streets.

When I was in my early teens, there was a bank robbery in Rockville. My dad happened to be on Main Street when the robber exited the bank and pushed a young girl to the ground in the process of escaping. My dad was so irate about the push, not the robbery, that he took off after the robber and tackled him to the ground. He was described in the newspaper as a hero, but he said he was only made about the harm to the child."

Dad had a good friend who was a pilot and who owned his own plane. Our family was staying in Shadyside for the summer and Dad and Mr. Davis would fly back and forth between Washington and Shadyside on Mr. Davis’ plane. As the two of them approached our cottage, Mr. Davis would steer his plane within 25 feet of the bay. Dad would open the side window and yell to me, standing on the pier, “Tell your mother to put dinner on - we’ll be home in 20 minutes."

A lot of Betsy’s reflections about her dad involve their mutual love of horses. True to his trial-by-fire parenting style, Grandaddy would often put her in situations where she was afraid but learned to conquer her fears through the experience.

During races, Grandaddy would position himself at spots on the course where there was a risk of getting off track, and Betsy would look for him wildly waving his arms as she bounded through it on her horse, Night Easter. In the book, she repeatedly comes back to the theme of her father “muscling” through as a tutor and a parent.

Dad belonged to the Potomac Hunt Club and was a “whip” for the hounds. Horseback riding carries risks and horses following hounds across fields, hurdles and woods carry greater risks. I remember Dad telling me of a rider who tried to steer his mount around a tree while galloping through the woods, but only the horse cleared the tree. The rider was thrown into the tree and died. Dad approached all this danger as a great adventure.

My dad introduced me to horseback riding. He initially stabled his horse in another barn and would frequently take me with him to ride. During these outings, I learned the basics of riding by doing exactly what my father was doing, with my horse following his, galloping or jumping hurdles with no explanation — just doing it. He signed me up for classes in horse shows and point-to-point races with no discussion. Fortunately, the love of horses prevailed, but my availability for competition ended when I went to college.

But imagine living like this. No one knew how terrified I was to be riding in the point-to-point races and how glad I was each year when they were over. I could say it was worth it because on balance I had so many wonderful experiences with my horse pals. But this parenting technique did not continue with me. I guess I could say my father’s best advice was showing me completely how not to parent.

While the youngest daughter, Holly, never learned to ride, horses also became the focal point of some of her favorite memories with her father. An accomplished racer himself, Grandaddy loved to go to the track and he would take Holly with him sometimes.

We used to go to the track together. He used to take me up to Pimlico, and that was sort of our connection. He taught me how to go up to the paddock and look at the horses before the race, and look at their hind quarters specifically. He used to let me take a take a $2 bet up to the window. That part of it, you know, that was pretty cool. We drove up there in his yellow Cadillac, and I was always thinking I was hot as shit, making a couple bets, and I think I even won a couple.

Grandaddy’s buddy Don Bradley owned some racehorses and I have a few photos of the two of them standing side by side in the winner’s circle at Pimlico, Charles Town and Bowie, Maryland. Pretty cool.

By the time my grandfather and namesake, William Barnsley, turned 14, he already had a tattoo. It was a skull-and-crossbones etched into his upper arm that he got one snowy night in D.C. after “borrowing” the family car. He was so young when he got it, his still developing body stretched it out over time so that it resembled a frog when he was fully grown. He hid it from his parents as long as he could until one day his mother discovered it and tried to scrub it off him. Antics like that earned him the nickname “Wild Bill.” He was such a hellion as a child that his parents didn’t know what to do with him and sent him off to live with his spinster aunts on their farm in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Over the years, as the ink blotched on his skin, he evolved into a hard-working young man – one who was always reinventing himself. He worked with his dad at his ice company until freezers became ubiquitous household items. Next, they started a trash hauling company, which was very successful until the city of Rockville, Maryland, started offering curbside pickups. When that put him out of business, he started Rockville Paving, which principally laid fresh driveways in new housing communities. Billy, as his friends called him, liked to be compensated by the developers he worked for in cash – as long as I knew him, he carried a fat wad of bills in his wallet, and paid for everything with it.

The truth is, though, I never got to know him very well despite breathing the same air for more than two decades. The main impediment was his relationship with my mother. From an early age, Mom proved too much for him and my grandmother, Sarann. Mom was the second of four children – all girls – and she had a penchant for getting into trouble. From an early age, she liked to fib. In middle school, she famously told her parents she was going to be starring in a school play as the lead actress. When they went to watch the performance, she wasn’t even in it. Boys were the tinder in high school and she was the flint. Mom would hit the town after high school football games, often staying out past curfew and trying to sneak back in, careful to avoid the squeaky seventh stair on the climb to her room.

Grandaddy was quick to dole out the punishments, which came in the form of a willow switch, riding crop or garden hose administered to the back of her legs. It did little good with Mom. In fact, it probably firmed her resolve to be her generation’s Wild Bill. To hear Betsy tell it, her parents weren’t prepared to handle a child like Laura. Dana, the third daughter and another well-behaved one, said they were unable to give Mom what she really wanted. “I think your mom was looking for more love and nurturing. And when she didn’t get it, she would rebel.”

Holly, the youngest and an extrovert like Mom, said Grandaddy never told either that he loved them. “Laurie and I needed his approval and love and all we got was anger,” she told me from Australia, where she lives. Billy once hit her for laughing too hard at the dinner table. “Most nights, if I heard his car coming up the driveway, I’d switch off the TV and hurry upstairs,” she said.

When Mom had Dorsey and I, visits to Grandaddy’s house were exercises in avoidance. She would linger in the same room as us or hover within earshot, seemingly worried that he would lash out. I spent most of my visits outside, climbing the massive Magnolia tree in front of their house, walking amongst the tar barrels, rollers and dump trucks at the back of the driveway, or visiting the secret koi pond in a neighbor’s backyard. If I was in the house, I’d most likely be down in the basement, where Grandaddy confined his Airedale named Track when company was over. It was also where his bare office was and where he had meticulously stencil-painted directions on the bathroom door: “STANDERS ONLY. SPLIT TAILS UPSTAIRS.”

It wasn’t the only evidence of Billy’s mean streak. When my grandmother, whom we called Teetie, was out working in the garden he would let both horses out of the stable because he knew she was terrified of them. She would stand up and take a fright every time she stood and found one standing behind her, while he laughed in the background. Dana told me that when the family visited the Chesapeake Bay, he would take the girls out on a canoe without life jackets and rock the boat, so it felt like they were going to tip over. In the middle of the bay, he made each one jump out and swim under it.

I can count on one hand the number of times I spent alone with Grandaddy as a kid and two of them involved him trying to get my goat. When I was about seven, I stayed over one night and awoke to the smell of something delicious downstairs. He was frying up gray meat in squares in the frying pan in the kitchen and made me eat one. He immediately started laughing and then told me what I had just consumed. “It’s scrapple,” he said, chuckling. “When they’re done using the pig for all the regular food products, even hot dogs, they take what’s left over and blend it together.” The joke was on him —I still love scrapple (crispy, of course).

I was aged 10 the other instance. It was around Halloween and he got me out of the house one night, probably without telling Mom his plans. He told me he was taking me to a haunted house. On the way, he nearly ran a guy over in a crosswalk and he rolled the window down to yell something at the man that I won’t repeat here. I was so rattled by the experience that when we got to the haunted house and the first costumed creep jumped out to scare me, I yelled “f*** you!” at him. Grandaddy grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of there, asking, “What the hell is wrong with you?” He didn’t say a word to me on the way back home. For what it’s worth, he never laid a hand on me again.

I never seemed to fit the mold of what Grandaddy thought a boy should be. When I started playing soccer at an early age, he called it a “sissy sport” in front of me and told me I should play a “real sport” like football. He would assign me simple chores like sweeping the front walk and then laugh sarcastically when I didn’t naturally do it to his liking. I think he assumed a boy without a father couldn’t possibly grow up to be a man, like a wooden marionette couldn’t ever become a boy.

The irony was that he waited and waited for a male to arrive in his family and when one finally did, he wanted nothing to do with me. At least it seemed that way at the time. Over the years, I would come to learn that Billy started to suffer from depression when he hit his 50s. Alcohol, already a favorite pastime of his, became his medication. It was rare to visit and not find him seated in his leather recliner with a full glass of bourbon in his hand. We would sit in the living room and watch sports together without saying anything. When something exciting happened on the screen, he’d smile and look at me, bright-eyed in acknowledgement that we witnessed the feat together. In hindsight, those were some of my favorite times spent with him – I’m a huge sports fan and it’s probably because of him.

Once the bourbon started flowing, though, the barbs usually started flying. He would say things that would set my mother off or just pick at me. Every holiday meal, he made it a ritual to comment on how much food I had loaded onto my plate. “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” he would religiously say. I would make damn sure to finish all of it, even if my stomach hurt. We rarely made it to dessert. By the time the dishes were cleared, the two of them would start bickering and Mom would turn to us and say, “We’re leaving.” My cousin Gretchen, one of Betsy’s daughters, recently told me that one of her most common memories from those holiday dinners was seeing my sister and I putting our coats on in the foyer.

In his later years, Grandaddy seemed to soften when it came to Mom, but she never relented, committed to paying him back for what I’m sure she thought were the injustices of her youth. One Christmas, she carefully wrapped a present for him and giggled as she put it under the tree. When it was his turn, she made sure it was at the top of his pile. She couldn’t contain her glee as he opened the box and picked up the item, which was a “road apple” wreath. When he realized he was holding petrified horse manure, he dropped it back in the box and moved on to the next gift. Mom was sure to get plenty of pictures of the moment, but he never said a word about it.

While Grandaddy was either difficult or distant, Teetie was an absolute treasure. Every time I saw her, she left me with bright red lipstick on my cheek and a stomach full of sweets. To hear it told, she was quite the socialite in the early days and thrived in the role. She was a stay-at-home mom in the early years, which meant she managed her in-house “staff.” While other families of similar standing had maids and other household helpers, Teetie relied on her four daughters, directing them to tasks such as cleaning the baseboards with toothbrushes. Dorsey and I got roped into some chores, like picking up sticks in the yard or weeding the garden, but it never felt like work. Mostly, she just pampered us and made sure we were content. She liked to tease us, but it was always playful, usually emphasized by a finger poke tickle.

Later in life when she was on her own, I got to spend more time with her and loved every minute of it. Visits to her home usually meant a hearty helping of her sausage cheese balls and fried chicken. Even when she was close to succumbing to COPD and dragged an oxygen tank around with her, she never said no to an invitation. And she never lost her sense of humor. Once, on Betsy’s recommendation, I took her to see the movie “Memento.” Ten minutes into the film, I asked if she was following the plot okay through a hearing-impaired device the staff had given her. “I turned it off five minutes ago,” she deadpanned and then sat through the rest so I wouldn’t miss it.

I regret that I never had such moments with Grandaddy. The wall that he and Mom built up between them was unassailable. Throughout life, I always wondered what was really on the other side. Both Betsy and Dana remember their father quite fondly, both saying that he instilled in them lessons that they carry with them to this day. Dana told me that he could be thoughtful and sweet at times. Each Valentine’s Day, he made sure to find a funny card for each of his daughters. On Christmas, he would hide silver dollars around the house for them to find. Betsy recounted similarly touching memories of times with her dad, mostly riding their horses around together on the 200 acres of pasture that abutted their property. Even Holly admits that he set her up for success in some critical ways, like making sure she knew how to change the oil in her car before she was allowed to drive.

To me, Grandaddy was one big lost opportunity. He had so much to show me, whether it was how to ride a horse, or fix a lawnmower engine, or run a business. I never got the chance to bet on the ponies with him, a hobby he enjoyed so much that he eventually bought a racehorse to run out of Charles Town, West Virginia (some of Holly’s favorite memories of him were going to the races, where he taught her how to predict a horse’s chances by examining its hind quarters in the paddock). He and I never discussed his Army service during World War II, when he was stationed at a POW camp in Okinawa. We never played a round of golf or shot hoops together, though he reportedly excelled at both. When I finally relented and switched to football in high school, he didn’t come to a single game.

I often ask myself what all the gate-keeping was for. After everything my mother did to try to protect us from Wild Bill, she ended up repeating many of his harsher practices when she became a parent herself. She exchanged a switch for a wooden spoon when she hit our backsides as punishment, often telling us we were getting off easy by comparison. Following his example, she would make us sit at the dinner table until we finished our meal, sometimes with the lights off if we took too long. If we pissed her off while driving in the car, she would pull over and make us walk the rest of the way home. If we forgot to do something around the house, she would shame us by explaining how hard she worked, to make us feel bad. These corrective measures often felt like betrayals after hearing how hard Grandaddy was on Mom and how it still impacted her decades later.

I did my best over the years to appreciate him despite all their history. I admired his hard-working tenacity and ability to provide for his family. His homestead on Monroe Street became a mecca of sorts, a generous white-fenced lot that Rockville seemed to grow around, unable to penetrate. I looked forward to the holidays and those shared glances at sporting feats on the TV. I made myself smaller plates. And I waited to hear his laugh, which never lingered but was like manna for the soul when it happened.

Then, one day, he was lost to us. I was living in an apartment in Taipei, Taiwan, at the time, doing study abroad, when I learned that he had died of a stomach aneurysm. He was living on his own at the time, after he and Teetie separated and he got sober. I was two weeks away from completing my program halfway around the world and couldn’t come home in time for the funeral.

In his memory, I decided to climb Yangmingshan with one of my roommates, Erica. On the outskirts of the city, it’s a mountain that takes about two hours to ascend. The terrain is marked by steep, stone-paved trails and rope-assisted scrambles, and you summit in the clouds. As I was huffing and puffing near the top, I saw a middle-aged couple descending in front of us like they were just out for a Sunday stroll. Unbelieving, I asked them in my rudimentary Mandarin why it looked so easy to them. “We do it every weekend,” the man cheerfully said. “We just put one foot in front of the other.”

I even think I heard him use the expression “yugong yishan,” a four-character idiom we had been learning in class at the university. Translated into English as “The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountain,” it’s a story of an old man who is so frustrated by two massive mountains blocking the path in front of his house that he decides to remove one, stone by stone. He knows he won’t be able to do it all in his lifetime, but he tells all his doubting neighbors that he is counting on his children and their grandchildren to finish the job. The gods are so moved by his unyielding spirit that they do it for him.

For the rest of my life, it has served as my mantra, focusing me on the task at hand rather than the enormity of my predicament, just trusting that everything will work out all right.

Along with a Japanese flag signed by all the POWs at the army base, I inherited my grandfather’s tools. The ones he never showed me how to use. Among the planes, chisels and hand drills, there’s a large rusty coal shovel. It’s my favorite—I use it to collect leaves and garden debris. Every time I pick it up, I’m reminded of the man I was named after—and the one I wish I got to know better.

This is the 12th installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

See you next week!

One of the implications of adding a litter of younger relatives is that you reenter the wedding cycle. I thought I had pretty much washed out of it, outside of second marriages. But the first of what would prove to be several wedding invitations arrived in early 2021, setting the stage for my first trip down to Florida to meet the rest of the Taylor family. The bride-to-be was my niece Savannah, oldest daughter to Whitney and her husband, Gary. In the photos she posted on social media with her fiancée, Daniel, she looked smitten. And he was, by all accounts, a fabulous dude – a musician like me with a great sense of humor.

I felt reasonably comfortable making the trek in the middle of the pandemic, even if it was to a state where COVID apparently didn’t exist. Sam and I talked about the importance of the trip and noted it would be soon after I had received my second vaccination. The wedding would also be outside. I didn’t want to go alone but someone had to stay back with Ozzie, who wasn’t old enough to get vaccinated yet. To my surprise, my 19-year-old daughter Indy volunteered to go with me.

Her willingness to have my back during this all-important trip meant a lot to me. The spotlight would be glaring down there after all the attention Charlie’s social media posts had garnered over the preceding year. I was leery of being a distraction during the couple’s big day, and Indy would soften the glare while supporting me emotionally.

But it was also a big step for her. The past year had been a particularly tough one for her, with the pandemic forcing her school to go virtual. When it came time to graduate her senior year, she didn’t even attend the ceremony. The air had been let out of the balloon by then. Indy was also feeling deeply for her transgender friends who had unwillingly become targets of the far-right firing squad. She had attended an arts charter school where kids were allowed to be themselves. It was like the Breakfast Club if you took Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald out of the equation.

We were both more than a little apprehensive about the trip and mostly it had to do with so many of our new family members being devout southern Baptists. I had read and heard that the largest Protestant denomination was among the most conservative in the country, leading the anti-abortion charge and declaring homosexuality immoral.

In the months since our virtual union, text chains and social media posts were often filled with prayers for those dealing with illness or stress. Jesus Christ citations were frequent. These weren’t unsettling citations as much as they were differentiating. I felt like I had a healthy skepticism of organized religion after growing up Episcopal and being hitched to a Catholic in my first marriage. I had always found church to be relaxing. I usually enjoyed the sermons and put up with this repeated standing and sitting and kneeling. I got the hang of it after a while. And I looked forward to the “peace be with you moments” when you shook each other’s hands and wished your neighbors well.

But I didn’t connect at all with the liturgy. As an unbaptized, I was forced to stand and let my aisle mates slide by as they made their way to communion. It was routinely ostracizing, but I had no intention of taking the sacrament. I never felt God ferrying me through the worst parts of my life, just self-determination. I was proud of my moral code, one that my mother infused over many years through great advice, volunteering for places like battered women’s shelters, and bestowing a love of allegories such as Aesop’s Fables. If there was a heaven (I like to think our souls are just recycled), how could they keep out someone who tried to do right by people and help those in need, regardless of their allegiance to a creed?

It didn’t take long to dispel my anxieties. The night we arrived, Charlie picked us up at the airport and carted us to San Marco, a posh neighborhood outside downtown Jacksonville where we had rented an Airbnb. Charlie and Mel were renovating a new home they had purchased across the St. Johns River, and Charlie had found us the perfect apartment to stay the weekend. We had dinner with him that night and he peppered Indy with questions about school and her art. I expected this part to be easy – we’d both already met him. Charlie was Charlie, the nondenominational (but still Christ-following) extrovert of the family who worked extra hard to make everyone and anyone feel at ease.

But we didn’t taste any extra helpings of Southern Baptist piety when we met the rest of the family. There was no judgment – only open arms. Cliff took us paddling on the St. Johns the next morning. Instantly, you could tell why he was such a successful commercial real estate broker – he had a warm way about him, with a big smile and attentive presence. Standing 5’7’, Cliff’s stature was a perfect match for Indy, who inherited Sam’s family’s height limitations. Indy impressed Cliff with her tenacity on the paddleboard, constantly staying ahead of me and charging into a strong headwind on the way back home.

We met Whitney at the reception after the wedding rehearsal. She wrapped us in her arms and beamed at Indy. She made us feel like we weren’t distracting any of her attention away from Savannah and the celebration of her union. Instead, she felt like an unending reservoir of love and affection. We didn’t get much chance to connect that first trip, but I could tell she was special and completely embracing this twist in our stories. It was the same with Charlotte, who conveyed the same sense of caring as in her initial texts and the act of sending the family album.

Indy smiled through it all politely, not as quick to reveal her personality – until she met Scarlet, one of Whitney’s twins. The two of them instantly hit it off – so much so that I rarely saw much of Indy at the planned events. I think she was so relieved to find someone there who was sympatico, but it was made all the more special by the fact that Scarlet was family.

It wasn’t a long stay, but it was a revealing one. It turned out that these people who had grown up not knowing about me, not sharing the same belief systems, and not experiencing the same difficulties, had some obvious similarities. It wasn’t just that they were clearly decent people – they went out their way to make the circle bigger.

I was always the guy at parties to seek out the ones in the corner, the members of the group who didn’t relate to the conversation, the outcasts. I wanted everyone to have a good time and feel comfortable. Once, I told our friend Jenn about a neighbor of ours who didn’t like me. “How is that possible?” she asked. It wasn’t meant as a compliment but as a serious question. On the flight back home, I wondered if the Taylors had any enemies, concluding it was an impossibility. They were just way too likable and accommodating. And, yet, the chances of us ever getting to know each other absent being related were pretty much nonexistent.

I think that was one of the reasons why my extended family seemed to be taken aback by my interest in having any relationship at all with the Taylors. From the outset, I could tell that my sister Dorsey was a little put off by the exploration of my broken past. I had flung open the door to our shelter, one that the two of us had built brick by brick over the long years of braving it alone. We had gotten to a point long ago where we had made it our home. It was a fortified safe space, and only those who knew our anguish intimately were allowed in. When I shared some of the details of my news, Dorsey and some of my other close family members on the Barnsley side seemed surprised when it didn’t stop after the introductions.

It was their perceived unease that made me look inside for the answers. I started to build a case even though I didn’t really need to. This was part of my story – not theirs. But part of the reason for writing this series has been to explain myself to them. When I realized it was taking too long, I drafted a handwritten letter to my sister, letting her know how important she was to me. That she could never be replaced or appended. You don’t go through what we went through together and not feel bonded forever.

When our mother died, that bond became much stronger. I have always tried to be there for Dorsey during her biggest moments in life, and vice versa. When a racist shooter killed nine people in a Black church in Charleston in 2015, she organized a march across the Ravenel Bridge, starting with a group chat in a local Facebook mom’s group. I was among the thousands who lined up for the “Bridge to Peace” unity rally she led, and I couldn’t have been prouder of her.

But when it came to this new family connection, I also had to admit that I didn’t have all the answers. In part, I was seeking them out when I ventured down to Florida for the first time. And I got more than one bite at the apple.

The next invitation was for my nephew Jackson’s wedding in May 2022. He is my sister Whitney’s oldest, and only boy, and he is the adventurous type. He got his pilot’s license before he turned 18, and shortly thereafter jumped out of a plane (and not due to user error). He found his soulmate in Ali, who he met at church, and the two of them made such a striking couple.

I stayed with Charlie and his wife, Melody, who I finally got to meet in person along with their four kids: Carson (the oldest), Braydon and Landon (the twins), and daughter Ella (who was the only one still in high school at the time). I’m sure they were all like, “So we have another uncle now?” but they didn’t show it. I could see why Charlie saw so many similarities between our wives, beyond their Italian heritage and boy nicknames (Sam and Mel). Mel was so welcoming to me and playful with Charlie, and she mainly just let the two of us hang and be brothers. We stayed up the first night, drinking bourbon, playing video games, and watching “Step Brothers” while laughing nonstop.

The next day, Charlie took me out on his boat – his home on the river came with a dock. We were joined by his wakeboarding buddies, who ranged from the early 20s to the late 50s, as the group combines some of Charlie’s older friends with his boys’ mates. Some of the younger guys were fully tatted up like Charlie. I learned they played a game called “tattoo roulette” at their local parlor. It involved putting $40 into a tattoo vending machine and committing to getting permanently pricked with whatever art comes out of it. My favorite was one that simply showed a tombstone with the engraving “Doing Great!” A few of the guys thanked me for turning them onto my all-time favorite beer, High Life, which Charlie had dutifully adopted and celebrated by putting a neon sign of in his boathouse. They basically brought me into their circle that day, and even asked to play one of my band’s songs over the speakers as they jumped the waves and shotgunned beers while being dragged behind the boat.

Later that weekend, Charlie and I visited the fort at St. Augustine so we could recreate the scene of the first picture I had been shown of our father with my mom. We then tried to solve the mystery of the second shot. We knew it had to be close by, and the kind ladies at the fort’s welcome center gladly jumped into help. One of them had a eureka moment when they saw the legs of the statue standing behind them and dutifully pointed us to Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, which was just down the road. There, we found the exact spot where the statue of Chief Saturiwa waited. He was the leader of the Timucua people, who inhabited the area when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived and established St. Augustine in 1565. I had been looking at his bare feet for years without knowing his identity, and they had been covered over by vegetation in the years since.

Afterward, we met up with Braydon and Cliff and his family at the beach, where we spent a few hours tossing the football, bodysurfing, and catching up. Charlie chased my nephews around the beach, and you could tell they absolutely adored him.

If there was something missing from the weekend, it was the chance to meet my sister Tammie. She had only been able to venture from Colorado for the wedding shower, which took place a couple of weeks ahead of time. I had a feeling, though, that it wouldn’t be long if history held.

Sure enough, we were both beckoned back to Florida later the same year, when my nephew Carson was to be wed to his sweet girlfriend, Kaitlin. I went with Whitney and her youngest, Sadie, to pick her up at the Jacksonville airport. Sadie had drawn a welcome sign for her and ran to her as she came through security. I couldn’t help but think what that must have felt like to Tammie, having so few people to fall back on during her tough times, and seeing her new-found niece rushing to wrap her arms around her. After, I walked up to her and gave her a big hug. We all got teary-eyed and snapped some photos in the airport, then headed off for a day at Fernandina Beach.

Tammie was already talking at that point about moving to Florida. It hasn’t happened yet but I’m hoping it does because it feels like the inevitable evolution of our story. All weekend long, she looked comforted and fulfilled by the presence of family, especially Whitney. At the wedding, which was at Charlie’s house, we all seamlessly fell into sibling mode. Tammie and I finally got some alone time later around the firepit, as the sun was setting. She told me about losing her mother and how she has thought about it so many times since. She revealed how few people remain in her family, and how much all of this meant to her. I concluded there and then that if nothing else came out of this amazing family discovery, it would be enough for Tammie to find her true home.

As for my part, it would have been easy to feel like an outsider, venturing into the midst of a close-knit group of people who grew up together, spent every holiday together, and prayed together. But everywhere I turned, I was met with open arms that repeatedly pulled me inside the circle. During this last visit, I stayed with Cliff and his wife, Peyton, and their two boys, and they went out of their way to make me feel at home. At Whitney’s house, Sadie presented me with my own welcome drawing. I even got some one-on-one time with Charlotte, who only had kind words for my mother and the job she did in raising me.

This was a true family unit – the kind my mother seemed to both strive for and push back against at different times in our life. There was no question that the Barnsley family connections were strong. As kids, we were not starving for time with family. Some of my favorite memories were spending the holidays with them at the family seat, my grandparents’ home, in Rockville.

But that place was also the source of some of Mom’s greatest anxieties. Her fraught relationship with her own father, in particular, would repeatedly drag Dorsey and I into family conflicts. And it robbed me of the chance to really get to know a man who could have taught me so much more.

This is the 11th installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

As I waited for the day I could finally connect with my new family members in person, I tried to learn as much about Charlie as I could. Everything I learned impressed me. In addition to building a commercial security company from scratch, Charlie tapped his love of weightlifting and jujitsu by founding a local charity in Jacksonville that empowered young people with intellectual disabilities through physical fitness. He had restarted the Special Olympics powerlifting team years before and now used his foundation to provide an offseason training program through a gym network in northeast Florida, as well as host an annual powerlifting exhibition where athletes come to show their feats of physical strength, win awards and increase their confidence.

It turned out that we had a lot more in common beyond unruly eyebrows and thinning hair. We both met our wives in high school and our nicknames for them were both male in origin (Sam and Mel). Both of them also came from recent Italian immigrants. We loved the beach and Old-Fashioned cocktails. We both had tattoos, though he was loaded up while I had a solo seahorse on my arm that I got at age 30. We both coached youth sports. He expressed an interest in writing and learning to play the bass; I’m a writer by profession and have played bass in bands starting at age 13, still performing to this day. He wasn’t a High Life guy yet but I soon fixed that.

Charlie’s politics weren’t my own, but he proved thoughtful and independent. Though he was raised devout Baptist, he had decamped for a nondenominational church years before. Most of his friends were self-professed Trumpies but Charlie refused to be shoehorned. He once likened our political choices for the executive office as choosing between an endoscopy and a colonoscopy and professed as a businessman he would not hire most of the current candidates.

He has told me several times over the years that he always wants to learn why people vote the way they do to better understand their choices. When we first got in touch, I checked out Charlie’s Facebook feed and found many instances of level-headed, unifying posts, including one about the Black Lives Movement that urged his mostly white, conservative friends to try to see everyone else’s perspective.

Charlie regularly sought out my opinion about things his right-wing friends shared with him. He was particularly interested in my research abilities as a former business journalist. A family relative sent him an article from a dubious website purporting that Biden was about to give away US sovereignty to the World Health Organization and at an upcoming conference, and he asked me to check into it. We corresponded about the Second Amendment, a debate to which he brought a sobering perspective as a gun owner who thought the NRA’s influence had gone too far. He argued for bans on assault rifles and background checks, for instance.

At a time in our country’s history when families were breaking apart over politics, we were unifying ours through discovery. It would have been so easy to cool our jets at the first whiff of conservativism or liberal tendencies on either side, but our differences only enriched our budding relationship. We made sure to preserve the congeniality and politeness that governed our first interactions and brought an appropriate level of personal context to each disagreement. It didn’t always work – there have been times when we simply decided to take a break from talking about politics to lower the temperature, as we both valued our relationship first over any political views.

I grew to appreciate that we didn’t have to share the same policy priorities to be good brothers. Not for the first time, I wondered whether any of this was replicable on a broader scale. I reflected again on this later when I read a 2022 interview with the actor Tim Robbins, who talked about the blissful apolitical nature of rooting for the same baseball team. “I’ve always thought of baseball as a place where I can go and get away from the politics and just sit and high-five some dude that might have voted for someone I don’t like,” Robbins said.

It wasn’t baseball but video games that got us high fiving each other, albeit virtually. When we got in touch, I had only recently got back into gaming after growing up an Atari kid. We found a game we could play online together in Fortnite, which I had been researching to see if it was age-appropriate for my youngest. We set a weekly date to play and catch up. Our “Friday Fortnites” soon wrapped in a teenage nephew on his wife’s side, and our multi-generational escapades soon proved to be one of the things I looked forward to each week. Wearing headsets three states apart, we ribbed each other, rescued and revived each other, and celebrated wins like brothers who had been playing our whole lives together.

Finally, by spring 2021, we felt it was safe for Charlie to finally visit. All of us except my too-young son had received our first COVID jab by then, but we decided to play it cautious even so. Asking Charlie to stay at a hotel rather than at our house felt like an awful thing to ask, but he took no umbrage at the request, showing his true stripes once again. “Whatever makes you feel most comfortable,” he texted. “I’m just excited to see you and meet the family.”

As the day in March approached, I repeatedly made the rounds at our house, making sure everything was dressed to impress. I didn’t fear judgment, but I wanted everything to be perfect. We were in the middle of a big hardscaping project out front after losing a big white oak in a 2020 thunderstorm, and I was proud to be able to show him the dry-stacked Scottish stone walls going up among the terraced garden beds. I kept telling myself it was no big deal meeting Charlie in person because we must have had at least a hundred conversations by then.

But I was still nervous as hell. I’d never had a blood brother. I considered what must be going through Charlie’s mind as well. He’d been the big brother all along, at least to Cliff, and now he was being supplanted in the fraternal pecking order. Would I live up to the ideal?

We had agreed to meet at the Mexican restaurant below his nearby hotel, on the outskirts of NC State University’s campus. He texted me around 5 pm on the day of his arrival, and I made the 20-minute walk over in beautiful weather, passing a group practicing tai chi in a park.

I was still feeling the positive vibes when Charlie exited the hotel lobby a few minutes later. He had a wide smile on his face and pulled me in for a hug. I thought about our shared genes commingling somewhere down deep there in the embrace. My little bro wasn’t so little. I knew it from the pictures he’d sent, but years of jujitsu, wrestling and body building had added bulk, and his tattooed arms just kind of wrapped me up. Who was supposed to be the big brother, again?

We decided to order take-out from the bar and get some margaritas while we waited, telling the bartender that we were two brothers meeting for the first time. She reacted the way many others would in the months that followed – she looked honestly blessed to be there for this momentous event, part of the story.

From there, we just picked up where we left off from our last phone conversation. He brought me up to speed on his boys and their early-adult travails, and I recapped Ozzie’s last baseball game. There was a familiarity to it all, something that just fit. I’ve heard stories about long-lost twins who just melded when they met due to their DNA. It felt kind of like that – like we had enough shared strands that we didn’t feel like strangers but rather separated siblings. There was only the slightest twinge of regret as I sat there catching up with him, thinking about all the conversations that never happened between us before. Mostly, I just felt excitement at the prospect of he and I making up for lost time.

We drove back to my house in Charlie’s SUV so he could meet Sam and the kids. They didn’t know him like I did, so the novelty was still intact. We ate dinner on the screened porch and talked for a couple of hours, Charlie recounting his reaction to finding out about me and telling the kids all about their new cousins. Sam snapped a pic of us on the deck out back. When his wife Mel received it, she zeroed in on my forearms like I did on Lester’s when I saw my first photo of him.

We spent the next couple of days showing off our adopted home of Raleigh, eating barbecue, and connecting with his half-sister Kari and her family, who lived about an hour south of us in Coates. Charlie, Kari and I had lunch in town one day, and they filled the hour recounting old stories of Charlie and Whitney “getting into trouble,” which meant something entirely different in a Southern Baptist household. There, listening to a Beastie Boys album or pinning a Def Leppard poster to your wall was akin to getting caught smoking or shoplifting.

Then, Kari got around to her father reveal story. She was about 15 when she found out – and the details were eerily similar to my own haphazard discovery. Charlotte was driving the kids somewhere when she and Kari got into it, prompting her to say, “I don’t know why your father puts up with you. You aren’t even his.”

She told Kari her father had abandoned them shortly after she was born. They had just returned from living abroad with him in Turkey. Charlotte took it all in stride and immediately charted a new course. She was determined to give Kari a stable home and upbringing. When Lester entered the picture, it was a package deal – and he was more than eager to sign up. Kari, like me, was momentarily upset by the revelation but quickly put it aside. “It didn’t matter,” she said. “Dad always treated me like his daughter and the information didn’t change that.”

I thought back to reading the obituary for the first time, when I read that my biological father had died at 70 of complications from early onset Alzheimer’s. At the time, I noticed that Kari’s published birthdate made her older than me. Charlie had given me a quick summary of the facts before, but now it started to fill in the cracks. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Kari and I were on two separate but parallel tracks, now crossing for only the second time in our lives. One way to look at it is she got the far better deal, getting the love without the genetic liability. But I didn’t see it in those terms. I was only happy for Kari, and I left that lunch still feeling fortunate and excited to be running down the story of my life, even if my time was in fact running short.

That said, I have had to come to grips with the idea that I may not be alive or available as long as I once imagined. You might not know this about me, but I’m a worrier. Mom used to call me a “worry wart” all the time growing up. It probably stems from being a latchkey kid and never knowing when your parent will return home, but finances definitely played a part. It’s been decades since I lived paycheck to paycheck but for many years I watched my mother struggle to pay the bills and keep up with the rent. Then there was a period in my early 20s when my job prospects were thin and I nearly got evicted from my apartment when the $20 in tips I squeezed out of each waiting shift at a Virginia Chili’s proved disastrously inadequate and nearly forced me into bankruptcy. At my lowest point, my credit card debt and student loans topped six figures.

But Mom had always taught me the merits of hard work and learning to sustain yourself. I learned from her example. I already shared the details of my first job delivering newspapers for The Washington Star when I was still in elementary school. Before I graduated from high school, I had worked as a dishwasher, a bus boy, a grocery bagger, a forklift operator/warehouse shipper, and a deli manager. After my Chili’s episode, I started temping for law firms around DC and eventually landed a salaried paralegal job that paid well enough to help me save up for graduate school and launch my journalism career.

Even as the compensation rose, my money worries never abated. I was always sure something would come along to rock my financial world and put me right back to that moment when I was standing in the median of four-lane highway, bare-chested and ripping up my Chili’s shirt for all the startled drivers whizzing by.

It was just a few years later that my financial anxiety had to give way to a new threat in my headspace. Most people worry more about health as they get older, but I got a jumpstart after Mom died from heart problems. I can’t tell you how many EKGs I’ve had in the years since her death. At least a dozen since I turned 30. Every time I feel even the slightest tightness in my chest, I get it checked out. I’ve worn a heart monitor on at least two occasions. Each time, the pain and palpitations resolved, and I ended up looking like the guy who checks himself into the ER for heartburn.

So, you can probably guess the reaction I had to the news that I might be genetically disposed to contracting early onset Alzheimer’s disease. On the internet, many websites told me it’s basically a coin flip. Heads I have the gene, tails I don’t. The truth is more nuanced than that – plenty of research has indicated there is no single gene that decides your fate. Rather, certain single-gene mutations make you more likely to develop the disease. Either way, the news wasn’t exactly great, and I knew from Charlie that at least one other family member was already in an Alzheimer’s-induced decline.

Our brother Cliff had a funny take on it. He said my discovery had summarily reduced the chances of each sibling contracting the disease, based on the laws of probability. Flip a coin once and it’s a 50/50 proposition of coming up heads. But flip it five times and you’re most likely going to get tails at least once. When I found out that both Cliff and Tammie had tested negative for the Alzheimer’s genes, that math wasn’t exactly helpful. Cliff, the other worrier in the family, had a full body scan at age 30. Tammie found out by clicking on the health tab on the 23andMe site, which let her know she was free and clear based on an analysis of her DNA. Charlie and Whitney were still in the dark.

What would I do with this information? For a few months after finding out, I woke up every morning with a tendril of dread in the back of my mind. It had been so much more liberating to simply live in ignorance of this fact but now it was hovering over me, threatening to cut short my time and rob me of all the experiences I hoped to share with Sam and our kids. This ever-present possibility is the real reason I sat down to start writing all of this, out of fear I might not be able to at some point. Charlie told me our father started showing signs at age 60, when he forgot to show up for his birthday lunch. I’m 55.

As I was pondering the enlightenment or devastation that such knowledge would bring, I had a chance encounter that talked me out of it. One night, I was playing tennis with my buddy Richard, who works as a reporter at the News & Observer here in Raleigh, and I told him after our match that I was thinking of finding out. A simple click of the button on the 23andMe site would tell me all I needed to know, though I’d probably need a follow-up test to truly confirm.

“Why in the world would you do that?” he asked, incredulously. “It would be like living under a death sentence if it was positive.”

“Well, what if I could do something to stall it?” I answered. “I read that adding blueberries to my diet, for instance, might help.”

His answer has stuck me with ever since: “Then just eat more blueberries.”

He had a point. What if I just lived my life like it was an eventuality? If I adopted that mindset, it would simply mean doing all the things I had hoped to do later in life. It would mean maximizing my time with friends and loved ones now, prompting me to say “yes” to new experiences rather than postpone them.

It was around this time that the guys I work for approached me with a proposition. I was nearing my 15^th anniversary with my company, and they wanted to do something special for me. They proposed I take a sabbatical from work, in addition to my regular time off, and do whatever I wanted without fear of being wrapped in on any work while I was away. Sam and I decided then and there to book a trip to Italy. She and our adult daughter, Indy, wouldn’t be able to join for the full duration but my middle-school-aged son was young enough to pull out of school for a spell. I saw this as a huge green light to activate my new plan.

In October 2024, Ozzie and I flew to Rome to begin our month abroad. The girls met us in Sicily so we could all explore my wife’s ancestral home. When they flew back, Ozzie and I backpacked across the Amalfi Coast. It was one of the best experiences I have ever had. Especially with my son. I dragged him everywhere and he never complained. He was up for it all and I marveled at that. As a teen, I would have been put out by everything and would have let my Mom know it. But Ozzie basked in the experience and it made me cherish the family discovery in a different light because it had prompted me to do something I might have postponed until it was too late.

I don’t know what the future will bring but I know I want to make the most of the time I have. Adopting that same attitude after Charlie’s visit, I knew I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to get to know my new family members sooner rather than later.

That’s when the first wedding invitation arrived.

This is the 10th installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

I’m not sure if anything would have transpired differently had I received my birth certificate from Florida before my 23andMe results flagged me as a member of the Taylor family. The day it arrived, I simply placed it unopened with the rest of the mail in my kitchen drawer, busy with something else. The parcel had lost its importance in the grand scheme of things, despite the fact that I had never laid eyes on it over the course of five decades.

My understanding had been that Lester’s name would be on it, just as it appeared on the baby shower invitations Mom sent out before I was born. But when I got around to opening the letter from Duval County, it was another man’s name that appeared —John Kip Edwards III — my adoptive father.

Here’s what I knew — or thought I knew — growing up. Mom and Dad (Kip) knew each other from Maryland. Though they didn’t go to the same high school, they had mutual friends and started dating before Dad was drafted and served in Vietnam. Sometime after his return to the States, Mom and Lester separated and she and Dad had rekindled their old flame down in Florida. My aunt Dana had indicated that occurred after I was born.

“Mal and I spent a week with your mom and Les just before you were born in Jacksonville,” she wrote to me. “We thought they were happy together and we enjoyed our time with them. Your mom came to our wedding with you on April 3, 1971. She did not go back to Les.”

Most of the relatives on my mother’s side chalked the birth certificate mystery up to the laxness of the times. On the document, the “informant” is listed as my mom, but she was named “Mrs. John Kip Edwards III” even though they wouldn’t end up getting married until 1972. They reasoned that she either fibbed at the hospital, simply reverting to her last boyfriend’s name to obscure my real father’s identity, or later had the certificate revised after Kip adopted me. Back in the early 1970s, states had procedures for amending birth certificates but DNA testing was still not widely used, so the courts relied on sworn testimony in a lot of cases and it was left to the discretion of the administering judge to decide what was in the child’s best interest.

I ultimately decided that the only one who could clear all this up would be Dad. I reached him at his home in Stuart, Florida, where he had relocated from Maryland to run a charter boat business. We saw each other at least a few times a year, but I was still worried it would be a tough conversation for him, as we had never really talked about those early years.

He quickly put me at ease. Dad told me that, after returning home from the war, he had gone to Florida to take in Daytona Bike Week with some friends in 1971. “We were all at this hotel pool, and I guess your mom found out I was there and came walking up, pushing you in a stroller,” he said. They started talking and Dad learned that Mom had been living with Lester in a little house in Jacksonville.

And then he told me something I never knew before: that it was Lester who was the reason he and Mom had ended their first relationship, which only started after he returned home from the war. She was working as a flight attendant for Northwest Orient Airlines and he was so smitten with her, they moved in together shortly after they started dating. “Your mom and I were living together in Takoma Park and one day she came home from work and told me she was leaving,” he said. He found out she had met Lester at a biotech lab where she had started working. It wasn’t long after that the two decamped to Florida.

Dad was heartbroken. It wouldn’t be the last time. After the rendezvous at the hotel pool in Daytona, Dad returned to Maryland but got a phone call from Mom shortly thereafter. She asked if he would take her back. He assented and drove down to Jacksonville, where he helped her extricate her things from the house she shared with Lester. Then he tried to give it a go. He got a job at a donut shop, then a pizza shop. He was going to do whatever it took to make her happy. But after they moved back to Maryland and had my sister, Mom had an affair with a jewelry store owner in Frederick. Dad found out because the man’s wife hired a private detective. Still, he was willing to try to work things out. But she related, through her sister Betsy, that their relationship was over. I believe this is the only photo I have left from those early days when we were all together.

These revelations would send me down a path to a place I can only equate to the Upside Down. For my entire childhood, Mom had made Dad out to be the bad guy. She told us that he was too busy to see us after their divorce, and that was why we saw him so seldom some years. That he would fall behind on child support, prompting her to threaten him with jail time. That he was a philanderer, as evidenced by his children with at least four different women, including her. It was a never-ending stream of accusations and she allowed no room for rebuttals.

But my sister Dorsey and I both knew better. And we knew it because we saw firsthand the kind of man he was.

Dad was one of the most hard-working people I ever met. He spent most of his life in the restaurant business. If you have worked in the industry, then you know the type of hustle that is required. Much of the time we spent with Dad was at the restaurants he managed: The Apple Tree in downtown Washington, G.D. Graffiti’s in Rockville, MD (a Mafia-styled spot where they brought the menus out in violin cases seemingly fit for Tommy guns), Mum’s on Dock Street in Annapolis, and Red Hot & Blue in Arlington, Virginia.

Everywhere Dad went, he set a high standard, toiling from dawn until dusk. He charmed the customers with his quick smile while keeping the employees on their toes with sharp barks and piercing looks.

The first time I worked for him was at Mum’s as a dishwasher. I was 13. For some reason, Mom relented and let me live with him in Annapolis for the summer with his new wife, Taylor, and their two young boys. It was one of my favorite summers. They lived in a rowhouse on a cobblestone street not far from the harbor, and I’d start most mornings running down to Rookie’s to pick up a pack of Newports, some Pepsi, and the morning paper for Taylor, who would pour the soda in a wine glass, light up, and consume the day’s news. She is still one of my favorite people to this day, a fashion maven seemingly plucked from the pages of Vanity Fair who is full of dry wit and a warm familiarity that makes you feel like you were born on the same team. To this day, she still jokingly refers to herself as my “evil stepmother.”

I’d pop down to Mum’s after delivering the goods, helping Dad mop the floors, take the stools off the tables, and hose down the sidewalk while Steely Dan and Steve Miller played over the speakers. The popular dining spot (among Navy midshipmen and the women who hit on them) had three floors, and one of my favorite places to visit was the sous kitchen at the top, where an elderly Asian couple we called Mama-san and Papa-san prepped the produce and offered daily hugs.

Dad was as thorough with his instructions as he was demanding with his expectations. If I didn’t do it right the first time, I’d do it again until I got it right. It set me up for success in many aspects of my working life, and it put real money in my pocket for the first time. I’d spend some of it after the lunch rush over at the City Market, where $5 could get you some fried chicken and potato wedges wrapped up in tin foil. A scoop of ice cream at Storm Brothers, devoured while swinging my legs over the water, was the perfect follow-up.

Dad played a lot of softball back then and infused me with a love of baseball. The Orioles had just won the World Series with rookie Cal Ripken on board, and he and I bonded over our love for the team. Some nights, I’d hang out at the local racquet club, watching him play racquetball with his buddies followed by quarters on the bar afterward. He taught me how to catch grass shrimp and fish off the dock, took me to see the Blue Angels fly over the Severn River (and sometimes under the bridge), and introduced me to his and Taylor’s coterie of close friends who liked to party in Polos and Docksiders.

While I didn’t get to see much of him outside of that formative summer, I do remember spending time with him at the beach. Dad loved being in the ocean – bodysurfing, in particular. At an early age, he taught me how to step into the crashing waves and form an air pocket under my chest to sustain the ride. To this day, it’s one of my favorite things to do. Music was another thing we shared a love of. I remember many a time crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in his Ford pickup, his ring finger keeping time on the steering wheel to the likes of George Thorogood or The Georgia Satellites.

It wasn’t until I was close to adulthood that he became more of a presence in my life. After the discovery about my paternity, I found ways to spend more time with him. Being able to drive helped, as I was no longer reliant on my parents to coordinate. My senior year of high school, I started bussing tables at Red Hot & Blue, a new BBQ restaurant he helped found in Rosslyn known for its slow-cooked ribs and Staxx Records jukebox.

It didn’t bother me anymore when people said I didn’t look like him. I got to spend time with him, that was all that mattered. I especially loved his laugh - it was like an adult version of the one Emmanuel Lewis employed for his TV character Webster, but more involuntary and infectious.

One day my senior year, I asked if he would be willing to sit down with my girlfriend (and future wife), Samantha, to talk about his war experience. We were both in a class called 20^th Century Issues and were required to interview a Vietnam vet. I had never talked to him about it and was worried it would bring up some bad memories. But he happily agreed, and Sam and I sat at a booth at the restaurant with him as he relived his tour with us. He shared details I had never heard before, like how he was assigned M79 grenade launcher duty and often killed those he couldn’t see. His Marine brothers called him by his nickname from high school – Meatball – even though he’d lost all excess weight by then. I also found out how he became deaf in one ear – a patrol member of his fired a pistol too close to his face and blew out his eardrum.

When I turned 21, Dad took me and some close friends of mine deep-sea fishing to celebrate. We were joined by the restaurant’s head chef, Sonny, an absolute gem of a man. We all got silly and crammed into an Ocean City motel room the night before, rising the next day before dawn with pounding headaches. Dad was an experienced deep-sea fisherman and a great captain – he always knew where to troll. Sure enough, he hooked a Mako shark for me and I brought it in. The thing was so damn big we got coverage in Coastal Fisherman, and the steaks took us nearly a year to finish off.

After Mom passed away, he stepped up even more in my life. When I graduated from Northwestern, he flew to Chicago to be there. He was the best man at my wedding and shared in the cost of the rehearsal dinner with my mom’s mom and eldest sister. He came to my band’s shows. He’d take my own kids out on his boat, which earned him the name Skipper whenever they referred to him.

All these experiences made it difficult to call anyone else “Dad.” It made for some awkward early conversations with Charlie, at least from my perspective. The name would stick in my throat if I tried it out in that context, so I defaulted to Les or Lester instead when referring to our father.

Ironically, it was the discovery of the Taylor family that made me start to actively reassess my relationship with Dad and whether I had given him a fair shake over the years. For our entire childhoods, Dorsey and I had only heard one side of the story – and it was becoming increasingly clear that it was a dramatically reconstructed one, with glaring omissions.

It was hard to reconcile Mom’s version of him with his long history of doing what was right for his other kids. He had an extensive track record of living up to his responsibilities. He raised two amazing boys with Taylor, Boo (Kip the Fourth) and Chris, both of whom have carved out very successful careers and are stand-up gentlemen. When he discovered in the 1990s that he had a daughter he never knew about with a woman in Virginia, he countersued for full custody when she filed for child support – and won.

If there was a common denominator in the not-so-successful parenting cases of his life, it was a difficult ex-spouse. I realize in instances of messy divorces, the truth often lies somewhere in the middle of the competing narratives. There were clearly times when Dad dropped the ball. Dorsey remembers times, for instance, when she sat in front of the house excitedly waiting for Dad to pick her up for a visit that never happened. As the number of children from different women would repeatedly underscore, family planning was never his strong suit.

The biggest mark against him happened when my sister and I were both young and staying with him in his Parkside condo in Bethesda. It was early morning and we were getting ready for school. Some eggs were boiling on our gas stove but Dad ran down to his truck to get something. In the two minutes he was gone, Dorsey pulled a stool up to the stove to stir the eggs and her Halloween costume caught on fire. I was sitting in the living room when she started screaming. She ran into the room one big ball of flame. I yelled desperately for help and a kindly middle-aged woman in the next-door apartment rushed over and rolled Dorsey up in a rug. She earned third-degree burns on her hands for her heroic act. Dorsey’s scars were much more extensive, requiring multiple graft procedures and months in the hospital.

Mom never forgave him for that. I don’t think he did either. He even made a point to pull my sister aside at her wedding to apologize once again. But nobody ever talks about how Mom was in charge when I tripped and fell through a taut leaf catcher that very same winter at her boyfriend’s home in Lutherville. I was trapped in his pool’s icy cold water with all my clothes and my school backpack on and couldn’t find the hole to rescue myself. Luckily, it was the shallow end, and before running out of air I was able to punch through the barrier by forcing myself up. Mom was startled when I ran into the kitchen, dropped to the floor, and cried my eyes out.

Over the course of my life, I let Mom’s version of events hold far too much sway over my relationship with Dad. Earlier this year, I flew down to Florida to catch some spring training baseball games and spend some time with him and his longtime girlfriend, Rita. We talked about the mystery birth certificate – he had no clue how his name had appeared there.

More importantly, though, he had a chance for the first time to clear the air about his time with Mom. Hearing him talk, it was obvious that he loved her deeply. It was his love for her that led him to forgive her just a year after she broke it off, adopt me even though I was the other man’s son, and move to Florida to be with her, finding work wherever he could get it. And it was his love for her that led him to agree to move back to Maryland, move in with her notoriously difficult father, and even go to work for him laying asphalt in the brutal DC summers. It was clear how much she had hurt him, and that she had persisted in making life difficult for him after the divorce.

In her version, she had to repeatedly take him to court for child support. In his, he was the complainant – repeatedly asking judges to enforce his visitation rights because he didn’t get to spend as much time with Dorsey and I as promised. When those visits did occur, they happened only because he or Taylor was willing to drive the hour-and-a-half round trip from Annapolis to pick us up and drop us back off. Mom never reciprocated and often canceled due to competing circumstances.

Dad shared something else with me, too, about a subject Mom didn’t like to discuss with us when we were growing up. After Dorsey was born, Mom got pregnant again. I would have had a little brother but he died at birth. He didn’t make it to his name day and was buried at Holy Cross Hospital. I’ve heard stories about what that does to couples and can’t even imagine what it’s like to go through. It certainly couldn’t have helped their relationship.

I thought about what it would have been like to grow up with a little brother. And now I have not just one, but two, from the man who played such an integral part of my story but never appeared in it. I’ve said this before – I’m not a religious guy. But it just feels like the universe keeps trying to make things right in my life. And I am so appreciative, not just of the people who recently joined my inner circle, but of those already within who sustained and supported me all these years.

When I found out that Dad wasn’t my “real dad” back in high school, I wrote him a card letting him know how much it meant to me that he treated me as one of his own. I’ll say it again and with extra meaning this time: Thank you, Dad.

This is the ninth installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

When I received Charlie’s email it was June 2020, just four months into the global pandemic. The country was losing thousands of lives to it by the day, and we – as many of our friends – were freaked out. Our youngest had a brief history of breathing problems, sending us to the emergency room the prior year. They weren’t sure what caused him to hyperventilate that night, but we were both on high alert after that. The early reports of the virus attacking the lungs made us play it safe. Assuming he was at increased risk seemed like the right call at the time, with limited information.

We battened down the hatches, canceling visits by relatives and not allowing anyone outside of our household in. We loaded up on N95 masks and left them on the dashboards to bake any bacteria. We washed hands like it was our full-time jobs. And at the slightest whiff of a sniffle, we rushed the kids to one of the free local testing sites. We visited so often we felt like we should have had our own designated parking spot.

In Florida, the pandemic was merely a minor inconvenience. According to Charlie, not much had changed in his community. The restaurants and stores were still packed, masks were optional, and residents there just shrugged their shoulders at everyone else’s precautions, insisting once again that “Florida is gonna Florida” in Charlie’s words. They pointed to circumspect state health data showing that deaths from COVID were lower than in many other areas. They argued against lockdowns because of the damage they would inflect on businesses. But mostly, they just didn’t want to be told what to do.

To his credit, Charlie wanted to hop in his truck the day after we first communicated but understood our predicament. “I’ll come see you whenever you guys are ready,” he said.

That one sentence took him up another notch in my estimation. There was no judgment, just understanding. He even recounted the story of a neighbor around our age who recently had to have his leg amputated because he was on a respirator for too long. Charlie told me how he struggled with the mask as a person with a hearing impairment – he couldn’t understand anyone who was wearing one because he couldn’t see their lips. And he laughed with me later about people in his immediate circle who bought into stories that the vaccines magnetized your arm because they embedded some kind of tracking chip. We each videotaped our own hilarious, futile efforts to get metal objects to stick to our arms.

The delayed union gave me some time to reflect on our vastly different childhoods. In Florida, I had three siblings who grew up in a strict Southern Baptist household where you could “get into trouble” for listening to a Beastie Boys album. Out in Colorado, I had a sister who was basically endangered on the regular, robbed of parental connection. Their stories made me rethink what I had always perceived to be a disadvantaged upbringing.

Yes, my sister and I went through it at times. Those middle-of-the-night departures from boyfriends’ homes after blowout fights weren’t fiction. The never-ending displacement took its toll. By the time I reached middle school we had covered most of Maryland, with stops in Salisbury, Frederick, Lutherville, Aspen Hill, Rockville and Bethesda. Each move meant losing touch with childhood friends, and feeling constantly unsettled.

But there was also the relative freedom of being a latchkey kid. When we lived in a quaint condominium at Parkside in Bethesda, my days were of my own making. After school at Garrett Park Elementary, I would head over to Joe Hickey’s house for ColecoVision, soccer in the side yard, and grilled cheese sandwiches made lovingly by his mom, Rose. When his older brother Mickey (yes, Mickey Hickey) wasn’t home, we’d go down to his basement room to check out his beer can collection and listen to the Rolling Stones. If Joe was busy, I’d head over to Dzung Pham’s house for ping pong and fried rice, or Chol Jung’s house for Ultraman and ramen. A group of us played Dungeons & Dragons once a week, which I still credit for helping me develop my creative capacities.

It wasn’t just my friends’ parents looking out for me, either. When we were younger, our longtime sitter Janine Davis was a steadying presence for my sister and I. A delightful divorcee, Betty Hatch, lived in the condo next door with her daughter, Leslie, and served as our go-to in case of emergencies. And my aunt Betsy, who lived nearby in Kensington, was always just a phone call away.

But mostly, my sister and I were on our own, and I think we both thrived from our independence. Starting in fourth grade, I took on the responsibility of a delivery route for the afternoon newspaper, The Washington Star. I’d put the wrapped bundle in a wheeled basket behind my bike and hit up the 100 apartment buildings in our community every day. The paper even had me handle collections – when the envelopes weren’t waiting for me on doorsteps at the end of each month, they had me knocking on doors with hat in hand (the paper folded in August 1981, handing me my first and only job loss).

Like many kids of my generation, we learned to be alone. And to wait. My mother was chronically late to everything. Being picked up from soccer practice usually meant juggling the ball in the parking lot well after the other kids left, sometimes until the sun went down. This was way before cellphones, and leaving the pickup spot to find a pay phone risked missing her arrival.

Every workday was a question mark. Dorsey and I would often feel the hunger pangs at night waiting for Mom to come home from her job as a secretary, sating our appetites with whatever we could find in the kitchen, like butter on saltines or raw hot dogs (thus the added benefit of visiting friends’ houses). Mom had affixed a picture of a starving Somalian child to our fridge with a magnet, and it was supposed to remind us to clean our plates because many other kids in the world weren’t nearly as fortunate. But we didn’t need any encouragement by the time Mom got home most nights, and all the rakish child did was make us feel sad.

All that said, it never felt like neglect, nothing on the order of what I heard from Tammie many years later or wrote into my child abuse case summaries as a paralegal working for the DC government. Against those examples, the occasional wooden spoon on our bottoms felt like minor league stuff. And Mom was doing what she needed to do to provide for us – we knew that.

Despite this, the two of us almost got Mom in big trouble with the authorities. As a kid, Dorsey suffered from anemia and used to bruise easily. One day, a teacher at our school asked her where the bruises on her arm came from. I think the two of them had had a little argument before school, and Dorsey responded with, “My mommy beats me with a knife.” That got the police involved. The night they were going to send over an officer to interview us, Mom sat us down to stress that we simply tell the truth and everything would be okay. When the nice male cop asked me whether our mother hurt us, I froze, then turned to Mom. “What did you tell me to say?” I asked. Mom was unsurprisingly apoplectic. “THE TRUTH, WILLIAM! THE TRUTH!” Somehow, they let us stay with her despite our best efforts.

Mom would freeze us with her Athena stare at times like that, burning the lesson into our very souls. Of course, there were gentler instructions she regularly imparted on us. Put your shoulders back. Stand up straight. Hold the door open for others. Say “please” and “thank you.” Don’t quit what you started or do anything “half-assed.” If you make a mistake then you should own up to it, like this one when I was home alone one day and was practicing a little too hard (though the money I left didn’t come close to covering it).

The nature of our independence meant that we learned a lot on our own. Every individual success built up our confidence as much as Mom’s daily reminders. There were plenty of humbling experiences too, some that came from growing a little too big for our britches. One such case was the story of John Butz.

I was feeling pretty full of myself as I progressed through elementary school. I had a group of close friends and we were all into sports, so we got picked first at recess. The dodgeball or kickball games were ruthless, and our rivalries became epic. Plus, I was doing well at school, which came pretty easy to me. A girl I had a crush on started “going out” with me, which meant we held hands and went to White Flint Mall after school sometimes.

Ms. Paide, my third-grade teacher who also ran the safety patrols, elevated me to sergeant one year. She was always looking out for me, knowing my situation, and often let me into the teacher’s lounge before school to sip some hot chocolate. As part of my promotion, I was sent to safety patrol camp in the Poconos. We mostly just played soccer, swam in the pool, and told ghost stories at night. I loved it. Every once in a while, the police officers who ran the camp would show us an instructional video in the packed gymnasium. In one such tutorial on the dangers posed by crosswalks, a car careens towards kids in an intersection before a bucket of red liquid is tossed on the windshield, simulating blood. We all laughed our asses off until one of the cops yelled, “This isn’t funny!”

I came home with some great memories and a shiny brass badge. That’s when I met John Butz. He was a new kid at school, very shy and willing to go along to make friends. We would later learn that he was nephew to the Redskins’ legendary defensive tackle Dave Butz, which earned him some playground cred. John’s parents signed him up for the safety patrols and he was assigned to man the cones with me the first week of school.

The cones were the temporary obstacles we placed up the street and around the corner from the school. They prohibited parents from driving into the parking lot and endangering the children arriving or departing on foot. That was, with one exception – a mom who drove a red Chevy Citation. For years, she had refused to honor the system, demanding to pick up her daughter in front of the school. After a time, Ms. Paide just told me to let her through to avoid any conflicts, after she had crumpled more than a few cones.

I came home from safety patrol camp determined to finally stop the lady in the red Citation. I brought little John up to speed on the situation, and firmly told him, “We are not letting her through anymore.” John didn’t say anything. He just dutifully took his place behind the barrier, mimicking me as the school buses arrived and we removed and replaced the cones for them.

About 10 minutes in, I saw her pull around the corner down the street about 200 feet away. If you know Garrett Park, I’m talking about Kenilworth Avenue, a beautiful, leafy street lined with picturesque Victorian homes and colorful bungalows. A Norman Rockwell street. “There she is,” I told John, planting my feet. The Citation started to pick up speed about halfway from the intersection.

By this point, we had usually removed the cones, so the move was meant to intimidate us. But neither of us budged. The car accelerated further, and when it was about 50 feet from us, I started to side eye a soft little patch of grass to my left. Just before she closed the gap, I dove for it. She missed me but, as I landed, I heard a dull thud and a crunch behind me.

Wouldn’t you know it but that crazy bitch had hit John Butz. Plowed right into him and broke his leg. I looked up and he was writhing in pain in the gutter. She didn’t even stop – just kept driving, turning into the school to stick to her pickup schedule. I sent a kid running back to the office to tell the staff to call 911 while I stayed with John and tried to comfort him.

Ultimately, the lady in the red Citation paid the price. There was a trial and I was the star witness. When I took the stand, the defense attorney tried to make something of my nearsightedness but when asked if I could identify the person who had hit my friend, I had no problem picking her out in the courtroom. She served time and had to go to counseling. I think she withdrew her daughter from our school out of dishonor.

But I also bore some shame and learned an early lesson in the abuse of authority. It was just one of many mistakes I would make while being given the freedom to figure out life. And I think they helped shape the man I am today, along with Mom’s influence. She used to collect these handcrafted mobile figurines from an artist in Rockville. Styled after Icarus, each depicted a woman flying with the help of a kite or feathers. I still own two to this day, and every day they remind me not to get too full of myself lest I fly too close to the sun.

In the heat of this new family discovery, I wondered what lessons my siblings had learned in their very different households, one with an ever-watchful eye and the other raised by TV parents since she had none on hand to teach or provide tenderness.

But I didn’t have much time to stew on this question for long, because a new mystery arrived one day in the mail after the 23andMe results confirmed me as a Taylor. It was my birth certificate from Duval County.

Lester’s name wasn’t on it.

This is the eighth installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.

About a week after Charlie’s first email arrived, he texted me that he needed to tell me something. By that point, we had already talked on the phone once. Charlie was eager to hear my voice, to see if it had our father’s ring to it. He detected a hint. On that first call, he caught me up on his family’s reactions to my news, how the discovery had become the talk of the town, and how many friends had reached out to share their enthusiasm.

This time, he had news of his own. “I hope you’re sitting down,” he said. “I found out about this two days after you got in touch, but I didn’t want this new discovery to take anything away from yours. We have another sister.”

Her name was Tammie. She was born on a US Army base in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 1967. Her grandfather was a commanding officer at the installation there during the Vietnam War and had brought his wife and adult daughter with him. After a time, Tammie’s mom met a charming younger officer at the base and the two started spending time together. His name was Charles Lester Taylor. Within a few months, she got pregnant and the two were wed at the base. But some time before Tammie was born, the couple decided to split and the marriage was annulled. Once the newborn arrived, her grandfather sent her and her mom back to Monterey, California, where they were from, while Lester and his brother were transferred to another base.

Not long after, Tammie’s grandparents returned home. One night, the four of them were out driving when her grandfather had a heart attack behind the wheel that killed him almost instantly. His wife was able to steer the vehicle to the shoulder without crashing, but Tammie’s mom was never the same after that. It would take years to diagnose it, but the trauma from the tragedy caused her to suffer from schizophrenia. She turned to alcohol for relief. Young Tammie often went without food or supervision, and her pleas for help at her school went largely unanswered. She would come home and make a sheet tent in her bedroom and watch “The Brady Bunch” to see how families were supposed to act.

The neglect went on for years before Tammie’s grandmother ultimately intervened, assuming legal custody of Tammie when she was 15. There was one stipulation: she needed financial help to support her. They knew where Lester lived – Tammie’s mom had told her he lived in Florida but had moved on with his life and had a new family. Her grandmother tracked him down and filed for child support. The checks started coming not long after, and Tammie finally found some stability.

It was only a respite. Years later, Tammie wed her sweetheart of seven years, but after just three years of blissful marriage, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Three months later, he was gone. Tammie would later have to fight her own battle with cancer after doctors found a lump in her chest. The hits just seemed to keep on coming. I thought about the travails my own sister and I had been through and how we always had each other in some of our lives’ worst moments. Aside from some distant uncles, Tammie had nobody she could count on like that, especially after her grandmother passed in 2011. Instead, she joined a ministry, which revitalized her.

When the pandemic arrived in 2020, Tammie was feeling particularly alone. One day, she bought a 23andMe kit at Walgreens pharmacy and dutifully spit into the vial and sent it away. Five weeks later, she woke to a notice from the company that her results were in. And there, at the top of the relatives page, was a man named Charlie Taylor. The findings revealed him to be her brother.

“She’s been through a lot and up until now didn’t really have anyone in her corner,” Charlie told me over the phone. He sent me a photo of her – she was perched on a boulder after summitting a fourteener, pointing to the heavens in thanks. It’s a joyful pose that expresses gratitude while simultaneously delivering a message: “I will not be broken.”

She was clearly a fighter, empowered not just by her faith in God but perhaps also the genetic disposition that helped our Cherokee great-great-grandmother hide in caves to survive the Trail of Tears. How many tears had she shed in her own life? She sure didn’t show it – not in this photo anyway.

I got off the phone and immediately thought about what the Taylors must be going through. Out of the blue, two perfect strangers had come out of the woodwork, attached to them by shared genes but no shared history. Many of the Southern Baptists saw it as a sign of God’s existence. It was kind of tough to argue the point – out of all the years, months and weeks of our disconnected lives, Tammie and I had chosen the same week to get in touch with them. It all seemed too coordinated to be a coincidence. And there was the fact that Tammie wasn’t exactly a surprise. Lester had been financially supporting her, and Charlotte found out about the checks at some point. She recognized it was the right thing to do, and the two decided to keep it between themselves.

But if the Taylor clan was disturbed by the twin revelations, they kept it to themselves. Charlotte, in particular, showed incredible grace during this time, often reaching out to relate things like the birthdates of all my new relatives. When my son’s birthday came up a couple of weeks later, a gift card arrived from her. Who were these people? How could they be so understanding and considerate?

The gift was followed two weeks later by another: my own 23andMe results. I got the email notification from the company and hurried up to my office computer to click on the link. The DNA Relatives link confirmed what we all knew to be true – Charlie topped the list with 28.58 percent DNA shared, and Tammie was right below him with a 23.7 percent share. They were two of more than 1,400 people I shared DNA with – an overwhelming number – but the vast majority were no more than third cousins.

The bigger reveal was in the ancestry tab. In addition to my known British heritage from my mother’s side, I discovered 14 percent of my lineage ran through Germany, the state of Baden-Wurttemberg specifically. I thought back to a trip my family had taken to France five years prior, which finished with a week in Lake Annecy, just across the border with Switzerland and in view of Mont Blanc. At the time, I had remarked to Sam how at home I felt there even though I had never been to that part of the world. Now, a quick map check revealed how close Annecy was to Germany’s most southern state – Stuttgart was just a five-hour drive. I scrolled through images of the Black Forest, the site of some of my favorite Grimm Brothers fairy tales.

The 23andMe site also revealed that my wife’s Scottish relatives still had reason to celebrate, as Glasgow popped up as the second-strongest DNA link in the United Kingdom. The puzzle was completed by Ireland, Finland and the Scandinavian region.

I quickly corralled the kids to share the news I had been wanting them to know since they had been born. They both smiled as they clicked through the countries, then laughed when they discovered that we shared a maternal haplogroup with Marie Antoinette.

After we had exhausted about every tidbit that the site had to offer, I took a screenshot of the page with Charlie’s and Tammie’s name on it and texted it to Charlie: “Confirmed,” I wrote beneath it. He wasn’t the least bit surprised.

The next day, the entire Taylor clan agreed to hop on a Zoom call so we could all see each other’s faces. When the hour arrived, one familiar face after another popped up in the window. Here were the people from the obituary family photos – but now they were my people. And here was Tammie, broadcast from her home outside Denver, positively aglow as if surrounded by a halo.

Sam and the kids sat behind me. Many of my nephews and nieces sat with their respective parents. Sadie, Whitney’s youngest, shared a picture she had drawn of the family. Whitney and Tammie cried. Hell, we might have all cried. Charlotte and Kari joined as well, big smiles filling their streams.

There was a lot of small talk but it didn’t feel small. This was grandiose, one of the biggest things that had ever happened to me. We all just kind of soaked it in and when the hour was up we all agreed to a repeat performance soon. I shut down the laptop and turned around, and Sam brought me in for a hug.

Now the only question was: When would we all be able to really meet?

This is the seventh installment of Laura’s Son, a story about my mother and the man I’ve become because of her. Check back about twice a month for updates, as well as additional content. I have tried to confirm stated facts to the best of my ability and sourced the original speaker where that proved difficult/impossible.