The Chance Encounter

I don't know who my mother is or my father. I'm not suffering from a case of amnesia nor am I going through repressed memory therapy. I mean that in a purely biological sense.

When I was about five years old, I found a photo in one of our family albums. It was a photograph of me in a child's rocking chair. Though the photo was in black and white, I knew the dress I was wearing was a maroon, velvet smock with lace along the hemline and collar. How is it I knew that? I remember. I distinctly remember my parents dressing me in that outfit, sitting me in the rocking chair in our living room facing the piano, and my dad snapping the photo while he sat on the piano bench. I had this big smile on my face and a ribbon in my hair. Underneath the photo was lettering. It said "Adoption final - October 1969". I took the photo to my mom and asked her what that meant. It was on that day I found out I was adopted at the age of three months old from a foster family in Lebanon County Pennsylvania.

Now, at the age of five, it really had no impact on me other than finding it to be a source of conversation with my friends. "Well, *I* was adopted." Those that understood the word would give me the "ooo" and "ahh" factor which made me feel rather special. It was even the source of envy amongst some of my peers. They would ponder on how they had a boring family where as MY family was different because I came from somewhere else.

Knowing I was an adopted child never stigmatized me the way some people might think it would. I never felt odd or distant from my family. They were the only family I've ever known.

I will admit, though, that I always had questions in the back of my mind. Questions like "Do I look like her?" or "Do I have any brothers or sisters?" or "Did they even love me?" That last one is a stinging source for depression. Imagine a parent telling their child, to that child's face, that they did not love them. Could you possibly picture something more traumatic in the eyes and mind of a little kid? Now, imagine if you will, that the child never hears those words but the words are still true even if they remain unspoken. How is the child to ever know if they are loved unless they ask the source point blank?

As I grew older, I still never questioned my being adopted from an angry point of view. My questions were always that of curiosity, of wonder. The "what if" type of questioning.

My young adult years were spent being an indentured servant for a bank. It was only meant to be a part-time job, to serve as a time waster for me while I was in between semesters at college. The part-time job turned into a full-time career partly because the money was decent and the work was light. I think being kicked out of college also played a major role but that's still up for debate.

I worked at a branch located in a steadily declining shopping strip center off a main drag through Northeast Philly. Many of the stores were folding up thanks to ridiculously high rent rates and gradually vanishing business. Besides the bank, the only other stores within the location were a post office, a Roy Rogers, a pet supply store, a delicatessen, some kind of electronics store, and a hot dog stand located at the bottom of a hill just below the center's parking lot. Almost all of these locations were clients of the bank, so in return for them patronizing the bank, I felt a strange obligation to patronize their stores.

One warm Spring afternoon, I felt the need to take a walk during my scheduled lunch break. Being as that I did not have anything packed for my lunch, I decided to walk down the bottom of the parking the lot, then down a small but steep hill, to get to the hot dog stand. There was a gentleman already in line waiting for his lunch and another one standing there looking like he was waiting for someone. I took my place in the queue behind the gentleman giving his order and patiently waited my turn. As I stood there, I felt a pair of eyes staring at me. I glanced to my right and saw that the gentleman who was just "standing there" was looking me up and down. At first I thought, "Damn old pervert". A creepy, uneasy feeling chilled through me as I stood there seemingly helpless. I knew I could have walked away; however, I was hungry and broke and the hot dog stand was my best bet for afternoon nourishment.

When the guy in front of me completed his order, I quickly gave my order for two hot dogs, a bag of chips, and a Coca-Cola. I still felt the eyes boring into me. Headlines of "young lady kidnapped in broad daylight from in front of hot dog stand" whipped around in my mind. I thought for sure my paranoid mother's worst fear of me disappearing and ending up in a ditch somewhere in north Jersey was about to come to fruition. The seconds ticked by increasingly slower while I waited for my food. I felt a pinch of irritation which opened up even more colorful thoughts. "How long does it take to steam or boil two hot dogs for gosh sake? It's not like I order Cordon Bleu!", I shouted silently in my head. The second my order was handed to me, I twirled around to leave only to be confronted by the strange old staring pervert.

"Excuse me, miss?" he uttered in a polite voice.

"Uh no," I thought to myself, "here it comes. Either he's about to give me a really creepy proposition or a tale of woe which he thinks will lead me to a van somewhere where he'll knock me out and drag me to off to north Jersey."

"Yes?" I weakly responded.

He smiled. It was a friendly smile. He couldn't have been any older than my parents which pegged him in his early 60's.

"I'm really sorry if I was staring at you. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"Oh, you were? I hadn't noticed." I lied.

"I am sorry, but it's just that .... Where are you from?"

I cocked my head and gave him a strange look. I thought his question to be rather odd.

"Right here in Northeast Philly. Been here my whole life."

The man looked both shocked and disappointed, like I gave him the completely wrong answer.

"Were you or anyone else in your family from a different part of the state?"

I went on to tell him that because of my last name, a lot of people mistakened me for someone in a locally famous family-owned landscaping business. I believe I babbled a little too much about the subject because it looked like he could have cared less about what I was saying. I told him that I had no relation to that company and that my family has been in Philly for as far back as I can recall.

Again, the gentleman had a bit of disappointment etched across his mild mannered face.

"Oh. O.K. then. It's just that ... you look so familiar. You look just like this gal I went to high school with."

I chuckled.

"Oh. Where did you go to high school?"

He shook his head and smiled. I could tell he thought it was futile to even mention where he went to school

"Oh," he replied, "I went to a high school out in Lebanon PA. You probably wouldn't know it."

I felt the blood drain from my face. Words and images raced through my mind and played out the same scene in my eyes. Over and over, the same four words repeated:

He knew my mother.

I pictured in my mind what she looked like. I saw her as a student in high school back in the fifties. Her hair was drawn back into a ponytail and she wore blue jeans. She sat in class looking slightly attentive yet bored, just like I always did. Circles and lines adorned the margins of her notebook because she couldn't pay attention, she didn't want to pay attention. Whatever the teacher was talking about held no interest to her. She wanted to go home, to listen to the latest 33 1/3 record she recently purchased. She rebelled in her own way: wearing blue jeans all the time, listening to rock and roll, writing poetry. I painted a portrait of a young woman who had ideas and thoughts foreign to her peers and unique all to her own.

I was painting myself.

"Miss?"

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I had no idea how long I was standing there lost in my own world. My eyes glanced over to the stranger's hand. Did that very hand ever touch my mother's?

I looked into his eyes and forced out a grin.

"Sorry, I don't even know where that school is."

He thanked me for the polite conversation and apologized for the intrusion on my personal life. I looked back up the hill and across the parking lot in a hazy confusion.

When I got into the branch I sat in my teller's chair. I assume the look on my face was one of being disturbed because my boss came over to ask me what was wrong. I told her what had just happened, the encounter with the stranger at the hot dog stand. She threw her arms up in the air like a coach who was just told by her best player that the kid no longer knows how to throw a ball.

"What's wrong with you? Go back there and ASK him if he knew your mother! Tell him about your adoption! If he knew her, you might find her!"

A sudden jolt of joy stuck my heart like nothing I ever felt. With a smile plastered across my mug, I pushed through the branch's double glass doors and ran across the parking lot back to the hot dog stand. When I got there, my smile turned to something more painful.

He was gone.

Holding back tears, I tiptoed down the hill and asked the stand's owner if he had seen where the old man went to.

"Sorry, honey. I haven't seen anyone."

Feeling the tears wanting to come, I looked away from him and scanned the busy roadway. I desperately ran up and down the street in a panic. I looked in every car and every bus that drove by me, hoping to see his face again. I charged back up the hill and went to each store in the strip mall. I asked anyone who looked like they even gave a damn if they had seen the kind, old man that was standing with me at the hot dog stand. The reply was the same each time: no.

I walked back into my branch a defeated person.

I moped past the front line of tellers, past the new accounts desk where the head teller sat, through the security door, past my branch manger, sat down at the kitchen table, and cried. My manager came back to sit with me. I looked at her with bleary eyes and a tear streaked face and just cried until the tears were no longer flowing form my eyes. She sat there and hugged me and babbled something that I never fully heard. I asked her if I could just sit in the kitchen for a while and she said she had no problem with it. No one else bothered to disturb me. I'm sure my manager had told them what happened and that I just needed time alone.

Everyday after that afternoon, I would go to the hot dog stand to get my lunch in hopes to see if the gentleman would ever show again. He never did. Five months later, I was transferred out of that branch.

I rarely ever drive by that area now. I had heard that the shopping center where I once worked is up for demolition and that the hot dog stand has long since disappeared from its landscape. To be honest, it won't break my heart to see that decrepit, little shopping mall get razed. It stands as a painful reminder of my one chance encounter to know who my mother was. The opportunity to relieve myself of my "what if's" was in the palm of my hand, and I let it slip through my fingers.