05-14-00

When my mother was a senior in high school, she decided to study in Argentina for a year. She stayed with several families in and around Buenos Aires, making lots of friends and learning to speak spanish fluently. When she returned from Argentina, she discovered that she was several months pregnant with me. The father? A 23-year-old student that she met and dated a couple of times.

After giving birth to me, my mother went on to college and worked hard to raise me. She sent letters to my father in Argentina, but he never answered any of them. Fearing he wasn't getting them, she had her friend hand deliver several, and he never responded to those either. I don't really blame him for not wanting to be involved with me, he was just some dumb kid who accidentally knocked up a girl who lived on another continent, half a world away.

Growing up, I never gave much thought to my parentage. I have a large enough, loving family on my mother's side to more than make up for the lack of a strong paternal family. Over the years, I extracted what little knowledge my mother possessed about my father and stored it away. She didn't have any pictures, which doesn't surprise me. I don't even have pictures of the boyfriend I lived with for a year. How can I expect her to have ones of someone that inadvertently impregnated her? I'm sure, "Hey, I better take pictures of all the men I sleep with just in case I need to snow them to our accidental bastard offspring someday!" didn't cross her mind.

He was an agricultural student. He was from 25 de Mayo. His parents were both Italian immigrants, making him first generation Argentinian. He had goldeny-brown skin and straight black hair and a moustache. I looked in the mirror to see what part of me didn't resemble my mother. I have his straight, silky hair and his goldeny complexion. I had his aquiline nose, but that's another story. Other than these little things, I look a lot like my mother, and the older I get the more I look like her.

I used to fantasize about finding him, and writing him or talking to him on the phone. He'd apologize for blowing me off, and he'd tell me about his farm and his beautiful wife and my dozens of beautiful Argentinian half-siblings, and he'd want to see me and I'd visit and see the Pampas and the llamas and the gauchos with my father.

Realistically now, I want to know things like whether or not there are health-related maladies in his family, because I lack that knowledge about half of my ancestry. My American half has traced our lineage back to the 1600's. I know that I am 13th generation American on this side. I know that I am 1st generation on his. I guess I would like to know something about myself that I don't already know.

And so it occurred to me to look for the Buenos Aires white pages online, and see if I could find his name. I found one entry for all of Argentina with his name. One entry for a small town directly outside of Buenos Aires. One entry with a phone number listed.

But what am I supposed to say?

Yesterday and Tomorrow.