Adoptees get a lot of misinformation over time and it piles up like barnacles on the hulk of a ship. I spent a lot of time in my teenage years hating my father for abandoning my mother when she was helpless and pregnant. I'd been told that my father was a drum major (one of those guys in the big fur hats that march around with marching bands) at Syracuse University. It wasn't until I was twenty that I happened to be walking around "SU" one day and realized that if my father was an undergraduate when I had occurred, there was a 75% chance that I was his age or older. Whoa. Was I ready for fatherhood? Nope. Did I blame him anymore? Nope.

When I was reunited, during my first conversation with her, my birthmother asked me if I wanted to know about my father. I wanted to know everything. She warned me to be careful, and if I wanted to find him, to look in the prison system. His name was Mark Stamey. I decided to get acquainted with her family before I decided to meet him.

I had my reasons for doing that. My adoptive father and I had not spoken for six years prior to my reunion, and I was hellbent on the belief that I did not need a father figure in my life. I looked up "Mark Stamey" on the web and remarked to my friend Taco Bill that it would be funny if my father was the one that lived in Flushing, since that was the sound made by a toilet. How was I to know that was one of my father's favorite jokes? I knew that my father had a brother named John. I saw that there was a Mark-John Stamey combination somewhere in North Carolina and that one of them was a state Senator. Neither of them responded to my e-mail. I forgot about John.