Adoption | Adoptee
My Two Fathers: An Adoption Synchronicity Story
My Adoptive Father and My Birth Father Met 20 Years Before I Was Born
My adoptive father and my birth father, met for the first and only time in Galveston, Texas, at a west-end marina, sometime between 1953 and 1961, a decade or so before I was born.
I picture the moment. Bill Meyer, a heavy-set Hispanic man, sporting a white Guayabera shirt and Captain’s hat, turns around, net in hand, asking, “Shad or shrimp Partner?” I imagine Jerry Knight, a short blue-eyed twenty-something, locking eyes on the man ten years his senior, tugging at his straw hat, and pointing toward the tank. “Shad for the Pass, thanks.”
Scooping shad, Daddy probably reported on what fish had been running where, mentioned what fish were biting, during whatever tide, along whatever jetty, and wished the man luck.
“Don’t need luck, when you got skill,” the cocky angler would say, swinging the bait bucket into his truck bed, neither man aware that a decade later they’d share more than bait, tackle, and small talk — they’d share me.
Forty-odd years later, that young bait shop customer would be 69 years old, sitting next to me, the grown daughter he’d never known he had, watching old home movies from my adopted life. And there on the screen, Bill and Jacqui, my future adoptive parents, would stand and wave to the camera under the stilted Tiki-style marina, restaurant, and dance hall they owned and operated.
Bill would step forward in that white shirt and adjust his Captain’s hat, and Jerry’s eyes would light with recognition.
“I bought bait off that man,” my birth father would say, pointing at the screen. “There in Jamaica Beach, stopped in many times on my way to San Luis Pass.”
Little did either man know that after Hurricane Carla tore a path across the island in 1961, Bill and Jacqui would move to South Houston and try to start a family.
Nor did they know that in March of ‘69, Jerry would create a baby at his family camp, with a young lady he spent the evening with there along the banks of the San Bernard River. She would not tell him she was pregnant. The situation would be handled as a “private” adoption, and the baby would be handed to Bill and Jacqui on Jan. 11, 1970, along a curb outside a local Houston, Texas hospital.
“No way! Are you sure you remember him?” I ask.
“I’m certain that man sold me bait many times. You don’t forget such a big friendly guy wearing a Captain’s hat,” he confirmed.
I had heard that many reunited adoptees discover wild synchronicities once they find their natural families, like learning they both had the same major, or both like pistachio ice cream, but this was on a whole new level, leading me to believe synchronicity and reunion are real.
A few months later, my daughter Victoria and I would bring my birth father Jerry, who used the moniker Pop by then, back to Galveston, to gaze up at the beachfront A-frame where we had lived with the man who’d sold him bait four decades before. By the time I was 12, Daddy and my mother had returned to the island with me for a summer. They decided they wanted to stay.
Thus, from the ages of 12 to 21, 1982 to 1991, I lived on the west end of the island in a front-row home on the beach. In 1989, I gave birth to my daughter Victoria, and it was at this house where her father, Jack, and I carried her up the stairs, all of three days old, and placed her in her grandfather Bill’s arms.
Jack and I and the baby would live there with my parents for several fun-filled years. Bonfires and BBQ, fishing and fireworks, horseshoes and horses on the beach, fish frys, crab boils and poker nights followed; all set to a Fats Domino, Eagles, and Jimmy Buffet soundtrack. Victoria would grow to call her grandfather Baba, and share many special memories with him.
However, at the tender age of 6, on Sept 30, 1995, she would witness her Baba’s heart failure, and watch the paramedics carry his body down those same steps she was carried up. My mother would leave to join me and my daughter in Austin, Texas, and would never return to West Beach.
Thirty-odd years later, long after her father and I mutually went our separate ways, and two years after my birth father passed away, my daughter called me with ‘big news.’
“Mom, Dad wants to rent a beach house for Father’s Day. I told him we should get our old house; it’s a rental.”
And that is what they did. Her father Jack rented the house we once owned. My daughter and son-in-law, my two grandsons, as well as Jack’s three sons from a later marriage, and several other family members, came together to build new memories in this treasured spot. And, rather than be sad for a past now long out of reach, I am elated.
Victoria inadvertently found just the thing to ease the pain of facing my second Father’s Day without either father.
On our last night there, I took my oldest grandson to the crabbing spot where I learned to crab so many decades ago. We stopped by the marina my parents once owned, and as we made our way across the parking lot, “What a Wonderful World” drifted on the breeze from a nearby bar.
“That’s the song I played at my Daddy’s funeral,” I say, swinging our bait bucket into the trunk.
I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘How do you do,’ they’re really saying ‘I love you.’
“We love you too Daddy,” I say, handing Ethan a flashlight.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky tonight,” he says, as we head toward the pier.
“Don’t need luck when you’ve got skill,” I add, as a smile as wide as Galveston Bay spreads across my face.
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