He may have been the young man I remember walking down the hall toward me from reception. On a Saturday night his single row of shoulder length hair would have been backcombed and doused with enough got to be glue that it would stand up an impressive 9 inches off his head. In that moment, I regret that I had to stifle my fashion judgmental streak.

He’d made an appointment with me after learning that his now ex-girlfriend had gotten pregnant and was intending to place the baby for adoption. He was there to talk about how this all worked. He was proud to tell me that he’d found his calling: his ADHD was perfect for the loading dock at Fed Ex. He’d been awarded Employee of the Month for three straight months in a row. He was a sweetheart of a person with a fashion sense quite different from my own.

Today, it might have been that same young man leaving a message meant for me. He said that he hoped I was the person he remembered from 35 years ago and that he had some news for me, news “about something pretty cool that has happened”.

In this age of deep fakes and darker threats to those of us striving to appreciate the diversity of human experience and expression, I was truly ambivalent about returning his call. I certainly didn’t recognize his name. I also knew I wouldn’t sleep until the mystery was solved.

I called three times, never able to leave a message in a mailbox that had never been set up. About 30 minutes later I answered a call from a number I didn’t recognize and not the one I had been calling. A young woman asked my name. Still cynical, I turned the table on her and asked who was calling. It seems cynicism runs rampant these days as he was reluctant to answer the call from my unknown number. She identified herself as the caller’s daughter-in-law, I’ll call her Katie, and went on to set up a conference call between us.

Her father-in-law, I’ll call him Joe, asked if I remembered him or the mother of the baby. I didn’t at the time but after a lousy night’s sleep, I vaguely remembered the young mother’s name and, maybe, her dark curly hair. I’ll call her Nelly.

Joe went on to tell me about our first meeting after he learned about the birth of the baby and Nelly’s plans for adoption. He also remembered coming to my office to sign the relevant forms.

Most touchingly, he told me that that baby, now 35, and the mother of two children of her own, had recently searched for and found him. I’ll call her Gabby. He had met her and her adoptive parents, I’ll call them the Fondas, and was thrilled to learn that her daddy was a carpenter since among his own extended family of origin were many carpenters. He happily reported that they had plans to get family portraits taken the next weekend. I asked him to consider one of his smiles as one from me. I love that an entire village was committed to supporting all aspects of this reunion.

All of this was lovely, and I told him how happy I was that this reunion had gone so well. All reunion stories don’t. He let me know that he had written letters to this distant daughter over the years telling her of his own major life events. That’s where I come in, apparently.

It seems he was recently searching through boxes of memorabilia like those all of us tend to lug around too long when he came across my card from so many years ago. He told me that he had mentioned me in one of the letters he had written to Gabby in care of her new parents when her whereabouts were still unknown to him (this type of non-identifying communication is common in closed adoptions, btw). With this information in hand, Gabby, being of the generation good at these things, took it upon herself to find me on the Internet. She then encouraged her father to reach out to me to let me know how their story unfolded.

According to Joe, I reached out to him weeks after the adoption papers were signed inviting him to come talk to me. He reminded me that at this meeting I told him he had to get clean, to get off drugs. Hearing this, I laughed and said, “Nervy even back then, I guess!” To Joe’s everlasting credit he did get clean. In fact, he left rehab on Gabby’s 1st birthday and has been clean ever since. Apparently, those letters to his baby daughter and the parents entrusted with her upbringing testified to the role I played in his getting sober.

By now, I’m crying. Letters between a young father and the adoptive parents of an infant he never even saw documented this young man’s coming of age. How beautiful is it that he wanted his infant daughter to know that he was OK? I wonder what inspired me to claim this power in this young man’s life in that moment. I suspect the real power was in the idea that he had a child whose opinion of him would eventually matter much more than mine ever would.

It is a source of great sadness that I was not able to make a similar difference in the lives of my mother and sisters. Their lives were dominated by addictive substances until their untimely deaths. But this young man, whose face I can only pretend to remember and his baby, whom I met only as an infant, credit me to some small degree with a bit of the happiness found in their lives.

Thank you, Emily Dickinson. I have my “one fainting robin.” Thank you, Joe and Gabby, Katie, and the Fondas, for knowing what a gift this story would be to this old, nervy woman.

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