When you pass 80, even a stubbed toe is a major event, and my mother had multiple bruises from her accident. She was as close to black and blue all over as anyone can come. Still she was miraculously lucky. No internal organs were damaged, and the cuts on her head turned out to be minor, fixed by a few stitches and aspirin. She would need some time to rehabilitate in a nursing home — everyone thought a few days, but they were wrong. Like many simple things in life, it would not be so easy.
At her house, I saw the aftermath in her garage where the police had somehow managed to cram the remains. The car was twisted so badly it looked more like a heap of painted metal than a four-door. I decided her days of mobile independence had ended and prepared for a fight. I kept thinking how guilty I would have felt if she died in the accident or if someone else was hurt. I could have been without the mother who had been there for me all my life. When I visited my mother in the nursing home, she asked what make of car I thought we should buy her next, and I told her with what I hoped was both humor and sensitivity that it was yellow with the word "taxi" on it.
What should have been a week in the nursing home turned into a month. My mother did not do well in the nursing home, although she would say it was them, not her. My mother worried about having to go into assisted living and was depressed over her injuries.
She looked so dispirited when my wife first saw her, huddled and still in her sheets, that Pamela began to cry, thinking my mother was dead or dying.
I visited my mother almost daily and, looking for things to cheer her, took her candy, newspapers, magazines and cokes. "It's like a tour of duty in the army," I said. "You do what they tell you and when your time's up, they send you home." I also took her a copy of my newly published third book, Florida's Fabulous Trail Guide, which I had dedicated to my parents.
Home. A very powerful word. A place of familiarity and safety. There are times in life when, without a home, you are in danger of falling apart. On the first available Saturday, when my wife could help, we took Zella Ohr home from the nursing home for a short visit. I wanted mother to see return home was possible and to know good things were still in the world.
When home at last, she announced she had something to tell us. I had heard this before and did not pay much attention. On previous occasions, what was important was for me to promise to stay married this time, or that she loved me — something I had known as long as I could remember.
Then my mother told me that I'd been adopted.
ReelingIt was as if someone put a bell jar of white sound over my head. Her lips were moving, clocks were ticking, car tires were rushing over asphalt on the street outside, and I heard nothing but the inside of my brain pushing against my skull.
Zella could not have children, she explained, a result of illness and a large ovarian tumor. My father told her to keep my adoption a secret from me; why she did not know. She directed me to the back bedroom where, under a mattress like in a Dickens' novel, were hidden my 1946 adoption papers. Orphanages and foster homes full of the abandoned and discarded were my first family.
My wife Pam was in tears, but I tried to remain calm for my mother's sake. "No, it did not matter," I said, and "Yes, sometimes I had suspected," because I was so different, not only in appearance, but also in acquired tastes, like reading and music. My Eagle Scout father wanted an Eagle Scout son, I am sure, but what he got was a sort of teenage mutant who absorbed books whole, memorized classical music, while slapping on aftershave to attract girls.