The late afternoon sun blazed across a vast meadow encircled by grandfather mountains. At their feet he stood waiting, white and deceptively small in the distance. Crossing the grassland felt like walking through water; I waded impatiently through invisible waves of sun-baked air toward the still, silent figure. It seemed forever.
When I finally reached him, he held out his hand and I clasped it. We sat side by side on the ground, bathed in light. Neither of us spoke or moved, but knowledge was passing between us in perpetual motion. We were learning all about one another through our joined fingertips. I glanced down at his legs and noticed he was naked. It was a small detail of no importance, but I was surprised at the remarkable paleness of his skin. He was, after all, the great-grandson of a medicine man. I let go his hand and lightly touched faded scars on his thigh. Then, abruptly, I awoke.
The rush of reality was a shock. I was instantly alert, yanked into the morning like a child pulled from the path of an oncoming car. Struggling to collect my wits, I remembered the dream with sudden clarity and sat upright in bed. After replaying it in my mind a couple of times, I grabbed pen and paper and quickly scribbled it down before the memory faded with the dawn. Then I moved to my desk and wrote it again, neatly, in a brief note to my father. I would drop it off at the post office on my way to work.
I wasn't until I pulled up to the mail drop that I remembered the scars. I added a note on back of the envelope: "P. S. Do you have scars on your thighs?" Sliding the letter through a cold metal slot, I reflected about this man in my dream. I had done little else since finding him a month earlier, but the anxiety that always accompanied these thoughts seemed to have disappeared. I felt at peace for the first time since our initial communication last Mother's Day.
I have no idea why I chose Mother' Day to finally establish contact with my birth father. It wasn't as though I needed the element of surprise; after a 38-year separation, we were both shocked that I phoned at all. I was a toddler when my parents divorced, creating the first loss of my still-new life. I know it must have left a painful void, but I can't remember--I have no conscious memory of this man who, I have since learned, I once adored.
I do remember learning of his existence. The man who I knew as Daddy told me of this other father soon after I started school. We were the only ones home that evening; I realized later that Mom's night at the movies was more than a chance outing. He called me into the living room and said we needed to talk. This was obviously to be a serious, adult conversation. I became very still inside, not knowing what to expect or what was expected of me. His eyes filled with tears when he told of the first time he saw me. Picking my mother up for a date, he was met at the door by an excited two-year-old chanting "Daddy! Daddy!" through the screen as he climbed the porch steps. Even at age six, I could see this had touched him. He wanted to be that man; he wanted to be the daddy I ran to greet.
I absorbed his revelation quietly, not wishing to say or do anything that might hurt this father I had easily grown to love. Truthfully, it wasn't much of a surprise. It was more like recalling a far-away dream you thought forgotten, or finding that missing puzzle piece under the bed long after you'd stopped looking for it.
I could hear my parents' muffled voices later that night, after I was tucked in and my mother was home. I listened for her footsteps, knowing she would appear in my door to see if I was sleeping. She came in and sat on the bed, asking how I felt. With no warning, I began to cry. This distressed her: "What's the matter? Why are you crying?" I stopped immediately. I didn't want to hurt my mother, either.
I did, of course, but not until I left high school and home. I spread my wings, clipped early on, and flapped frantically from one nest to another. I changed major, schools, styles, partners, politics, religions, houses, hairdos, careers, attitudes, diapers, towns, states and names. Now, years later, I had metamorphosed on the west coast as a single mother with two teenaged sons, a decent job and my first solid romance. All the loose ends of my life were coming together, wild hairs tamed into a single, placid plait. I finally felt secure enough to seek my birth father.
He responded to my dream letter quickly, adding a P. S. of his own: Yes, he had scars on both thighs from tangling with a barbed-wire fence as a young boy. He then wrote: "What was I wearing, a loincloth?" Even as I laughed at the last remark, the hair stood up on my arms concerning the first. Was a dim, early memory of my father's scarred legs buried in my subconscious? Or did my overpowering desire to finally know him catapult me into some tangible dreamscape while I slept? Perhaps my great-great grandfather, the medicine man, would know. Someday I'll ask him.