How I Found My Birth Father (Let's hear it for synchronicity!)

It was really weird how I found my father. I wasn’t even looking for him.

In 1991 I kept pretty busy teaching junior high school English and driving my kids to school and soccer games. A dull depression had dogged me for past six months, and I wanted to know what it was about. As I’ve learned to do, I stated out loud that I wanted to know what the depression was about.

Within days, I walked into the teachers’ lounge and sat down at the table. Lying before me was an October 1988 edition of American Heritage magazine, which, to me looked like a high end Saturday Evening Post.

Bored, I opened the magazine scanned some pages featuring the portraits of artist Irving R. Wiles, a contemporary of John Singer Sargent. One particular portrait stood out to me, a painting of a young military officer in his whites.

Instead of stopping to read about the painting, I continued skimming through the magazine, noticing its id-west and east-coast focus.

Then I returned to the portrait of the young man.

Something about his eyes. And his ears. And his forehead. He looked oddly like my brother, with whom I’d been adopted. (Jim's picture is up on the header, sitting next to me. See the resemblance?)

Then I read the young man’s name.  

Lt. Col. William Roscoe Jepson.

Roscoe Jepson!

When I’d found my birth mother in ’81, she told me my father’s name was Roscoe Jepson.

Shivers roared through me.

I stole the magazine (I have to this day) and brought it to the copier room, where I ran off two copies. Copiers then aren’t what they are now.

I mailed a copy to my brother Jim in Santa Barbara and one to my sister Cecilia in Lubbock. (Cecilia is my sister I found when I found my birth mother. She is five years younger than I.)

In a couple of days, I was getting answering machine messages: “He looks just like you.” “He looks exactly like Jim.”
When school closed for the summer, I made the trek to Happy, Texas, the town without a frown, to confront my birth mother with the portrait.

Her response?

“Yes, that’s Roscoe.”

And so began a new chapter in my life. And new wounds needing to be healed.