Apogeo, commercial theme by Consorzio Creativo

A new round of emails began, more difficult this time because my French is limited.  I emailed a dozen sources that somehow seemed connected to the Isle of Chausey- webmasters, tourism bureaus and media sources in the prefecture of Manche, the closest place on the mainland to where Chausey was situated.  I received responses immediately, interested and polite but nothing definitive or encouraging.  Several weeks after this flurry of emails I received an email from one of the contacts by the name of Hervé Hillard saying:

Sorry for this late answer, but I first thought your mail was some sort of a joke.  

When my dad enlisted in the army he was 29 years of age- older than most of the boys who were signing up for service and barely out of their teens.  My dad had been married for almost 6 years and there were no children.  Perhaps he had some sense by that time that there were to be no children forthcoming from his union with my mother.  Maybe he had wanted to adopt a child years before he adopted me.  It made sense.

There were no names or locations written on the back of the three photographs that the boy was in.  On one photograph, however, there was a notation. There was a picture of my father and the boy and written in my father’s hand on the back was “Me and that French kid and my gun on the Island before going duck hunting.  The spot we are standing in is covered with water when tide is in”.  With that piece of cryptic information I asked myself, where exactly should I start?

Being adopted is something I don’t often forget about.  It goes in and out of my consciousness, like a sporadic radio signal on a Sunday night driving down some rural road.  Even when there is no music or talk coming in, I am still aware of the static of white noise filtering through the speakers, somehow comforting and disquieting at the same time.  The idea of adoption looms large in the life of an adoptee, even when so much time passes that you are the parent of adult children, coloring everything in one’s life, imperceptibly most of the time, like a cloud passing across the sun.  You know that somehow the light has changed but don’t stop to think of the reasons why.  So when my 95 year old aunt, doyenne of the family, casually mentioned to me over dinner one night that my father, her brother, dead 6 years at that time, had wanted to adopt a child he met in France during his service in World War II, I put down my fork and listened.