Adopted people tend to have more drama in their lives than the standard mom-dad-child nuclear family, or so it seems to me. There was little of it when I was growing up, as we were indeed mom-dad-sister-brother, a couple of grandmas and a grandpa. Divorce was relatively rare among the families of our friends and neighbors, or at least, that’s how I remember it.

Perhaps I grew up in a bubble. But that didn’t stop the fantasy I concocted about my “real” parents. Oh, I learned long ago to clean up that language. Those “real” parents became, with time and maturity, birth parents. Ruth and Bud Roesing were my real parents, the couple who loved me enough to make me their own, to give me a brother, and a room of my own in a brick house on a tree-lined street.

But those shadowy birth parents. Who were they? Why hadn’t they kept me? It’s the question that I suspect haunts all adoptees, and many never come close to answering it. Maybe most never even ask, leaving the shadows to lurk somewhere in their psyches.

Last week, out of the blue – I’d stopped looking years ago – a new relative dropped into my life carrying along the last shadow figure in my story: my birth father.

I’ve known his name for years, known quite a bit about his career, even the names of his other children, my half-siblings. I’d made an attempt to contact them long ago only to be greeted with silence.

“Trust me,” said the one family member I spoke with, “they don’t want to know you.”

As a cousin-once-removed on my birth mother’s side told me on our first meeting, “there’s a skeleton in our family closet, and you’re it.”

From him it was a joke, and he made me laugh. From my birth father’s side, it was serious.

Then, one day last week, I replied to a phone message from a fellow named Hugh and discovered another cousin-once-removed with both a sense of humor and humanity. Hugh is my deceased birth father’s great-nephew. And apparently the keeper of his family’s genealogy. It’s my family’s genealogy, too, as he’s made clear to me through a flurry of emails with links to our/my fascinating heritage. He’s eager to fill in the blanks left by my earlier attempts at connection to these birth relatives.

Hugh is a dedicated genealogist; he’d seen me on a genealogy site I’d filled in years ago. And somehow, not knowing I’d been adopted or how I’d come to be related to his family, the result of a no doubt hurried romantic fling between a student nurse and a sailor in the midst of war, he figured out how to find me.

He’s a student of history, as well. Many of our ancestors, scattered all over the mid-Atlantic states, and some up to New England, come with stories connecting them to our country’s early years. Although it was the link to a certain 16th century Shropshire highwayman, Wild Sir Humphrey Kynaston and his horse Beelezebub that caught all our attention; Hugh got in touch with my sons right off, finding all sorts of common interests. Still, who wouldn’t be thrilled to find an English highwayman in their background?

Or mortified that Old Alice, an enslaved woman renowned as an oral historian and who lived to be 116, had been the property of one of our ancestors?

My head is spinning with new information.

Wouldn’t you know, it’s all coming at the height of August, which in my family has meant a revolving door of relatives. I’m living both in the world of the web (highwaymen, early Quakers, and long-dead movers and shakers) and the real world of sit-down conversations with the sisters-in-law I haven’t seen in years, getting re-acquainted with a well-loved nephew and welcoming back the niece who lived with us during Wally’s last months.

And wouldn’t Wally have been intrigued with all of this? I’ve said it, thought it dozens of times this past week. We’d come together 54 years ago with exactly one branch on our combined family tree: his mother. He didn’t know who his father was and of course, I didn’t know either of my parents.

Slowly, slowly we filled in the blanks. I figured out who my birth mother was 18 years after the sight of our first born prompted me to find her, only to learn she’d died 24 years earlier at the age of 43.

Next, we found Wally’s father the day he finally asked his mother – “who was he?” We left with photos of Wallace Case (no, we’re not Irish after all) holding his son, a toddler who had no memory of him. Wallace had died shortly after, 43 years old.

This past Saturday was a busy one in Lincolnville. By six a.m. the Beach parking lot was bustling with folks setting up for the Lincolnville Improvement Association’s 20th (or so) annual Blueberry Wing Ding. A casualty of the pandemic year, last summer’s Wing Ding amounted to a very successful bake sale in the parking lot, but no pancake breakfast. This year the pancakes were back but the venue had changed from McLaughlin’s Lobster Shack to the Lobster Pound Restaurant.

The three pancake flippers ­– Bob Heald, Cyrene Slegona and myself – set up in the Pound kitchen and with the cheerful help of the restaurant’s chef, Rory, found out what we needed to know. How to connect all the electric griddles the LIA uses every year, and for me, how to make the kitchen’s gas griddle behave. From my vast (!) experience cooking pancakes on one of these (Rick’s at the Lobster Shack and now the Pound’s), they’re finicky at best.

Having a bunch of amateurs descend on your kitchen can’t be fun, especially when you’re in the middle of an extraordinarily busy season, but manager Chris Miliano and chef Rory O’Donnor and his crew were cool and helpful.

Out front the tables of blueberry baked goods and white elephants were popular, manned by LIA members. Others were bus boys, waiters, juice, coffee and syrup people, ticket takers, and overseeing it all, Lee Cronin, who manages to pull off this event year after year. Lee says she looks forward to seeing everyone next year, August 9, 2022!

This year’s raffle winners were:

The money raised goes directly to scholarships for Lincolnville kids graduating from high school. This year there were four recipients of $1,500 each. Good job, Lee and all who worked on this fun event.

Library

Librarian Sheila Polson writes:

“We invite everyone to join the library book group for a discussion of Anxious People by Fredrik Backman tomorrow, Tuesday, at 5 p.m.! Poignant and charming, the book tells the story of a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears, and eight extremely anxious strangers. Please come if you're interested even if you haven't read the book!

“We ask everyone to please wear a face mask inside the library regardless of vaccination status.”

Remembering Tom

Janis Kay, Tom Sadowski’s wife, writes: “I’d like to invite everyone who knew and loved Tom to a Book Launch/Memorial for him on Saturday, August 21, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Community Building.”

Tom’s book, an anthology of over 100 of his popular Free Press columns, will be available that day. As his friend Tim Lawrence says, “Just a couple of days before his untimely death, after many edits, much deliberation and free advice, Tom sent his long-anticipated book off to his publisher.”