Finding my father

My father is listed on my birth certificate as "unknown,"  And the only person who could have told me something about him, my mother, died in a car accident when I was an infant.

No one knew my father's name and it seemed impossible that I would ever find him.
But that didn't stop me from searching.  

I had reason to believe he was an Air Force Officer, and so I formed an image of him as a jet pilot. Tall and handsome. A hero.  I imagined him on holidays, sitting at the head of a table in a tastefully furnished suburban home, maybe somewhere in California, surrounded by his loving wife and his grown children (my siblings) all with interesting careers and hobbies. 

I searched for eight years, but didn't find him, and came to terms with that fact.
I grieved for my unknown father and moved on. 

But then everything changed as the result of the increasing popularity of DNA tests.  So many people have taken these tests - in the interest of genealogy or just out of curiosity - that it is now fairly easy to find biological relatives this way.

As the result of several DNA tests, and some determined detective work,  I finally learned the name of my father last month.

Ted Hadley died in 1990, but I have learned a lot about him from my newly-found paternal relatives.  I have been given many photographs and a DVD of his home movies.  So, even though I will never meet him, I feel like I know him a little.

I am extraordinarily amazed by all this, and yet it is such an ordinary thing:  to know my father's name. 

As it turned out, my father was not a jet pilot.  Not a hero.  And not what you'd call a family man.  But he sure was handsome.  Also hard-working.  And fun-loving.  "He liked being the center of attention," my  half-sister recently told me.   

This is a photo of Ted Hadley in his costume for a children's television show that 

was broadcast in LasVegas in the early 1950s.

National Adoption Month

November is National Adoption Month and here is my opinion about that:

Adoption is not something to celebrate.  It is always the result of a loss of one sort or another. Something has gone wrong in someone's life in order for adoption to be necessary.  We should aim for a world where adoption is not needed, and celebrate that.

Six decades

In celebration of my 60th birthday, here are some photos of me in each decade I have lived  (so far!) 

1954  with my mother in Sunnyvale, California 

1964 - I gave myself this haircut

1974  - Kalamazoo, Michigan 

1984 - with my sons

1994 - in Chicago with my grandmother

2004 - camping in Muskegon Michigan

2014 -   DC with Beth 

Acceptance

One of my short stories has been accepted for publication by the literary journal, Minerva Rising.  Just when I was about to give up!

I have had two stories published in online journals, and that's nice, but it's nothing like actually seeing your work in print.  (AND getting paid a small amount for it!)

I have been trying to get my three favorite short stories into print for a couple of years. I've spent a lot of time on these stories and I love them.  I believe they deserve to be in print, but the constant stream of rejection notices caused me doubt. I gave up working on new stories because it seemed so pointless. Perhaps the constant rejection was a sign from the universe that I am really not much of a short story writer after all.  But now I am inspired to polish up those other two stories and send them out there once again.  And maybe even get back to work on some new ones.

Five years of Movies

I have seen 140 movies and documentaries in the last five years.  I know this fact because of the lists I've been keeping on this blog - a thing I wish I'd always done.  I'd love to be able to look back at my movie list from ten or twenty years ago.  I'm sure I've forgotten so many.  

I have rated each film with one to five asterisks, (based only on my personal enjoyment of the film.) And after five years, only eleven were deemed worthy of a five asterisk rating: Doubt, The Visitor, Frozen River, UP, Julie & Julia, Iris, An Education, A Single Man, Midnight in Paris, The Flat, and Five Broken Cameras.

The films I hated and gave only one asterisk are:  Gran Torino, District 9, Inception, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I'm Still Here, I am Love, and Blue is the Warmest Color.

So:  I only hated 7 out of 140 films.  But I only loved 11, which seems pretty low to me.  I am so often disappointed at the movies these days.  So many films are ho-hum.  

In memory of my Mom

Today is twenty years since the death of  my mom, Marie Kathleen Bocianowski. She had just turned 70.  Here are a few of my favorite photos of her:

Happy New Year

I only posted to this blog five times in 2013.  But since it seemed like I wasn't blogging at all, I'm kind-of surprised by that number.  And since this is my first post of 2014, I guess this blog isn't completely dead yet.  And I wonder how long it can exist?  Will it still be here somewhere on the internets ten years from now if I don't purposely take it down? Will it still be here in twenty years? Fifty?  I doubt that.  But who knows.

I didn't take as many creative photos last year as I usually do.  But here are some of my favorites from 2013: