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.

The way the story went, she told, was that Joe, my dad, had met a child, perhaps an orphan, in France, and had very much wanted to adopt this boy and bring him home.  How did she know this, I wanted to know, without adding the qualitative question of why are you telling me this now.  Because my father told her so was the reply.  He loved children, she said.  I knew that, since I saw that love reflected in his own unconditional love for me and also in his deep affection for and devotion to his grandchildren, my own children, raised for the most part by me as a single parent.  He stepped up to the role as father figure to his grandchildren, and to other children missing a role model and was always a magnet for young people, his love for them reflected in the mirror of their behavior towards him.

I placed this information in the working memory of my brain, poised for deletion.  I was prepared to file it under the category of the ramblings of a woman approaching her centennial who confused one of the many events of her life with another.  There was just one thing I wanted to check out before I forgot about it; a small box of wartime photographs I had of my dads.  That box of photographs had lived in a crawlspace behind the basement stairs for my entire life growing up.  I was aware of the box, the pictures it held and I was vaguely interested, but it was always relegated to something that I’ll look through and catalogue when I have the time that, of course, never comes.  After his death and the death of my mother, the ritual of cleaning out their things, the pieces of a person’s life, took on the emotional load that every adult child experiences going through that liturgy of passage and loss.  Amazing how unimportant all of it is in terms of the world at large and how infused with the greatest and deepest significance a drinking glass, or a jacket, or a photograph can hold.  At the same time, meaningless and meaningful.

Photo of my Dad, Joe Baker in Carentan

I moved that box from my childhood home to the basement of one house after another, never examining it, as if that act would make me a modern Pandora, releasing some fierce emotions that would breach the bridge I had built between me and safety of my childhood, with its reminder of simpler and somehow safer times.  I located the box of pictures and found it contained about a hundred photos, each a revelation to me; places that I had heard of repeatedly in historical context but never from my father.  Amazed and humbled upon inspecting the images, I found: the ovens at Dachau, the liberation of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, a besieged and battered Belgium in a white out during the Battle of the Bulge, my Dad Joe in a destroyed cathederal in Carenten.  I found Omaha Beach.  Among the remarkable images none were more astounding to me than the images of a boy, about 12 or 13 years old, standing with my father, both looking back at me through 62 years, as if to ask me what had taken me so long to discover their story.

Seeing these pictures and sensing a deeper meaning in this for me, as an adoptee, it became imperative for me to try and find this child, now perhaps more than 70 years old.

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Next week in part 2

With only a photo and no names or locations how do I begin my search?

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For more information about the Daughters of D Day visit their website daughters-of-d-day

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