March 11, 2024, 7:31 AM ET
You could say I grew up not knowing who I was. I knew that I’d been born in an Indianapolis hospital in 1968, and that my parents had adopted me when I was 10 days old. That was it. I didn’t know who my birth parents were, or why they couldn’t raise me. I had no medical history.
If you had asked me in my younger days, I would have said that this didn’t bother me much. I was one of three sons of public-school teachers who filled our house with books and with their love. I had a genealogy—that of my adoptive family. When other kids asked if I wanted to find my “real parents,” I’d say I wasn’t interested.
But this couldn’t have been correct. Kids only asked because they knew I was adopted, and they only knew because I’d brought it up. Apparently, my past meant something to me. In high school, friends said I sounded like David Letterman, who was from Indiana and old enough to be my father, and I wondered about that for years. Yet I made no attempt to search for my birth parents. I knew that some people who tracked down their birth families didn’t like what they found, and I had a family I didn’t want to hurt.
