The MacGyver Pocket

At the age of 26 I found out I have a different father than my brother. I eventually learned that almost everyone in the family already knew the truth about my father. Everyone except me. Somehow, no one ever said a word. I do not hold that against them. In a strange way I find it amazing. A secret that big, held that long, by that many people, and not one person slipped. That is not conspiracy. That is loyalty to my mother, to her fear, and to her dignity.

After my mom told me the truth, I eventually met my biological father. I learned about his life, and in the process I learned things about myself, traits, quirks, and tendencies that no one else in my family had. For years I had felt like the black sheep in certain ways, and suddenly those pieces clicked into place. It was not dramatic. It felt more like a quiet internal “Oh… that explains it.”

I met him and his wife a few times. She was kind. I also met my sister Brandi and my younger brother Scott, both of them warm, open, and shockingly familiar. Brandi especially felt like meeting a version of myself raised in a different house. Growing up, I was always the little brother getting pummeled by a sibling four years older. I never had a younger sibling to pass the pain down to. Meeting younger siblings as an adult felt like the universe playing a joke twenty years too late, but I took it in stride. Life doesn’t always give you symmetry.

On his second visit, we all went out to eat, him, his wife, Brandi, Scott, and their kids. We sat at a long table. He and I were on one end, and the rest of the family sat a few seats away, giving us space to talk. When the bill came, I pulled out my credit card and said, “Put it away, you got it last time.” What he pulled from his pocket was not a wallet. It was a situation. A wad of cards, a driver’s license, old receipts, a rubber band that served no purpose, loose change, and other assorted debris. It looked like what MacGyver might carry if he had lost all his coolness and forgotten how to build a bomb out of chewing gum.

I stared at it. He noticed.

“Yeah,” he said, “I do not like wallets. They get sweaty and smelly. And pickpockets would have a hard time getting anything off me.” He grinned. “I know it is weird.” I stammered. “No, that is not what I am thinking.” Then I pulled out my own wad of destruction. There it was, the same strange quirk sitting between us like a genetic joke. It was a live demonstration of nature versus nurture unfolding at the end of a restaurant table. Two men who had barely known each other, pulling the same ridiculous wad of pocket chaos from the same pocket for the same irrational reasons.

My mom hated that I refused to use a wallet. She always said, “You are going to lose your money one of these days.” But I could not stand the feel of a wallet in my pocket. Too bulky. Too sweaty. Too something. And here he was, the man I had barely known, doing the exact same thing. In the days that followed, I kept thinking about it. Life is strange. How we inherit things we do not even know we are inheriting. How someone can be absent and present at the same time.

Years later, when I gave presentations to incoming college freshmen, the last event before their parents said goodbye, I started telling the wallet story. I described the wad he pulled from his pocket. I told them I did not learn about him until I was twenty six. That he had not been there for my childhood, my teenage years, or my milestones. That I grew up believing he had no influence on me at all. Then I pulled out my own wad of chaos.

I said to the students, “Just like my dad had been with me all that time. I just did not know it yet. In ways I still have not figured out.”

Then I turned to the parents.

“You think you are leaving them today. You think you are letting them go. That is not what is happening. You will always be with them, in ways you cannot even fathom. In what they believe. In how they react. In what they eat. In what they love or hate. Maybe even in the wad of stuff they keep in their pocket.”

Because that is the truth. We carry the people who shaped us, even when we do not know we are carrying them. We did not stay in close contact after those early meetings. In fact, twenty years passed without a word. Then one day something, call it intuition or a nudge or whatever you want, kept tapping at my mind. Call him. It would not let go. So I did. He was glad I called. We talked for a while, catching up on the surface level things people say when they are trying to bridge decades. I told him I had lost my mom a few years earlier. He offered his condolences. Then he got quiet.

“I always thought you were mad at me,” he said. “For not being there when you were young.”

I told him the truth. “I was not mad then, and I am not mad now. I told you the first time we talked. I just wanted to say hello, learn a little about you, and let you learn a little about me. I never wanted to disrupt your life or your family.” He seemed relieved. Another person carrying a burden on my behalf that I never asked them to carry. Once again, I felt bad that someone had lived with that weight for so long.

He said, “When I thought you were mad, I didn’tt want to bother you.”

Before we hung up, we made plans for me to visit after he got back from a trip to the VA for some treatments. We spoke a couple of times while he was in the hospital that week. I could tell things were not going well. I told him I would come up the following Monday. He agreed. On Sunday, I got a call from his son.

“This is Scott.”

“Yeah, Scott, has something happened?”

He hesitated. “Dad told me you were coming up tomorrow. I wanted to let you know. Dad passed away last night.”

I offered my condolences. We talked briefly. I did not want to keep him long, he had a thousand things to handle. Before we hung up, I said, “I really appreciate you calling me, Scott. I will talk to you later.” In the weeks that followed, I thought about the years I might have wasted. I also thought about the timing, how something in me insisted I call him in the final days of his life. I did not know it was the end, but something did.

Then one day I got a text from Scott. Two photos. Each was a page from a small photo album his father had taken with him to the hospital. On those pages were the wallet sized school photos of me, kindergarten through eighth grade. He had all of them. I stared at those pictures for a long time. I wanted to ask where he got them. Did my mother give them to him? Did someone else? Had he kept them all these years? Had he followed my life from a distance? Had he wondered? Had he cared?

I will never know. My mother was gone. He was gone. The answers went with them.

For years I thought he never gave me a second thought. But he had known about me the whole time. He had carried those pictures with him into the hospital, into the last days of his life. It opened a hundred new questions. I try not to dwell on them.

I do not know where he got the photographs. I do not know how often he looked at them. I do not know what he wondered, regretted, feared, or hoped. I do not know what he told himself about me during all those years.Those answers left with him. Some questions do not need answers. Some truths are meant to be held but not solved. Maybe that has to be enough. In the years since his death, I have realized I have more answers than I once believed.

I know he knew about me. I know he carried my school pictures for decades. I know those pictures were important enough that he took them with him to the hospital. I know he thought I was angry. I know he was not carrying that burden when he died.

I know he liked me. I know I liked him.

Not all the answers left with him. The ones that mattered most stayed behind.

For me, that’s enough.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.