After checking into the Pittsburgh Ramada Inn, we head out onto the streets to find a place to eat, but all the restaurants are closed and there’s practically no one around. It’s a beautiful summer evening, a bit of cool coming off the rivers that converge around this old city’s center; the sky is a dusty violet. All four of us are hungry after our long drive. Coming from Philadelphia, though, we are somewhat flummoxed by the lack of people. We wander the streets, temporarily forgetting the idea of food. We are simply in search of human beings.

It grows dark. We hear live music reverberating amongst the buildings, but it is impossible to locate. There are no people, but there is old, industrial-age stone and iron mixed with modern glass, polished marble, and granite. Ornate office buildings vault to the sky, shimmering in the twilight. Ancient brick and stone churches and storefronts crouch in the shadows, lit by the warm glow of light off the evening clouds. Everything is coated with a layer of dried coal syrup from more than a century of steel manufacturing. We peer through dark restaurant windows, scratching our heads. I begin to feel the day has been an omen for our quest: first the fierce, tangle of cars and families on the highway, now the ghost town of Pittsburgh’s famed downtown Golden Triangle. Our search will yield nothing but people all going their own way, then closed doors and darkened rooms.

“This is a lost cause,” I say to Marion.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she says. “There was a bar or something that looked open just off the lobby.”

As we begin to retrace our steps, I realize I am growing irritable. I need a drink desperately. I don’t want to think about what we’re doing, what I’m doing, what I may end up doing to another person. Finding her. Stopping her dead in the tracks of her reality and telling her what she may or may not want to hear. I’m your son. I’m forty-five. Do you remember me? What happened?

My family instinctively knows to keep their distance. They trail five to ten yards back, leaving their father and husband to his black thoughts and a growing sense of futility.

Coming back up a hill toward our hotel, we hear the live music again. At the base of the U.S. Steel Building is a mass of young business professionals drinking and cavorting with each other at Willy and Pete’s Bar. On the patio in front are a man and a woman playing electric guitars, singing Shawn Colvin’s song The Avalanche. The woman is attractive, and though petite, very athletic looking. She has dark features: long black hair, almond skin a bit darker than mine. Her face is at once Hispanic, Asian, Jewish and mulatto. I begin to wonder, stupidly, whether she is my sister. Not “Wouldn’t that be funny if she were my sister?” more like: “I wonder if she’s my sister.” Her voice is nothing special. There is a bit of range to it, the timber and vocal quality are pleasing enough, but my black mood, my hunger, my thirst for booze, and the overarching knowledge I have of how overwrought my thought processes are, do not let me appreciate the woman’s singing. I watch the crowd swilling it up and downing hors d’oevures, thinking how dumb they are in their contentedness. Something keeps me from going over the edge, though. The words: “No man is an island,” pop into my head. I am not a stranger here in this empty maze of hulking architecture. Behind me is my family, in front of me is a country of people partying and trading banter, on the prowl, about to consummate any number of relationships and deeds everywhere on this Friday night. It is raining somewhere. It is perfectly cool and gentle where we are, paused in front of U.S. Steel headquarters.

“I guess we’re eating at the hotel,” Jesse says, coming up from behind me, using his best quiet, wise eleven-year-old voice on me.

“I guess we are,” Marion sighs.

“I want chicken fingers,” says Conor.

We have a horrible meal at the Ruddy Duck, with slow service, bland food, over-salted meat, mushy vegetables, meager salads, and loud table neighbors with two noisy toddlers. But I do well enough at ignoring the demon thoughts lurking in my cluttered mind while I drink a beer and consume my cheap, stringy steak and a salad smothered in what is the only saving grace of the meal: a delicately flavored raspberry lime vinaigrette.

My brother Jesse is one of my best friends. I didn’t realize that until we were in high school. Another best friend is my sister Jennifer. They are both brilliant professionals now. Jesse is a USAID program director in Kenya, and Jennifer is a professor of anthropology in Australia. Our parents had suffered through four miscarriages before they adopted me. People used to say that my siblings would never have been born if it weren’t for me.

When we were teenagers my brother and sister both read over one thousand words per minute and had near perfect recall. I could barely read five hundred words per minute and had maybe eighty percent recall. Our parents were both dazzlingly brilliant as well, with information processing abilities similar to my siblings. I always felt stupid in my family, that I just didn’t have the intellect the rest of them did.

Our original idea for a summer vacation had been to rent a cottage in Maine or New Hampshire. Sam, my oldest son and from my first marriage, spends Augusts in Maine with his mother at their family summer home. The rest of us thought we would all four go up and maybe spend a few days in the Penobscot Bay area learning about sailing from Sam and exploring Maine’s maritime setting. We miss Sam desperately every August. But the cottages we wanted were all reserved during the week available to us. We had waited too long to make reservations. Confronted with this obstacle, I jokingly suggested we drive to Pittsburgh to see a baseball game at the Pirates’ new stadium. Jesse and Conor thought that was a great idea. Then I suggested we go to Missouri to visit my dad. On the way, I said, we could stop in Richmond and go to the library to see if we could find a picture of Dana Black in an old Richmond High School yearbook. Marion liked that idea, but topped it by suggesting, “We drive to Richmond and find out what we find out.”

“What about going to see the Pirates?” Jesse asked.

“Well, let’s go to Pittsburgh first, then,” Marion said. “We’ll spend the weekend in Pittsburgh, then drive on to Richmond. And we’ll find out what we find out.”

“Wow,” Conor chimed. “A picture of her is in a school yearbook at the library all the way out in Indiana?”

In February 2003 I turned forty-five. My family gave me lots of nice gifts. After I’d opened them, we sat around the dining room table eating cake and ice cream while I told stories of growing up in Missouri. After awhile I began to wonder about all the things I did not know about my life. I’d had a couple glasses of wine. It didn’t take long before I started thinking about my birth mother, wondering if she ever thought about me on February 26th.

Telling my wife and sons to wait, I rushed upstairs to the desk in my study. The folder was still there in the back of file drawer. I yanked out my birth certificate and hurried downstairs. As I entered the dining room, I contemplated for the hundredth time the fact that I had no idea where the term formality of occurrence came from. I sat down at the table wondering whether I had made it up myself.

“You all have been so good to me,” I told my family, “now I’ve got something for you.” I handed my wife, Marion, the sheet of paper and watched her unfold it. Sam, Jesse, and Conor crowded around. Sam was fifteen, Jesse almost twelve, and Conor nearly eight.

After a few seconds they understood what they were looking at.

“Your mother’s name was Dana Black?” Sam asked. “And your name was Anthony Tobias Black?”

Marion seemed annoyed. “How long have you had this?”

“A few months.”

“Why would you keep something so important from us?” she asked. I could tell she wasn’t exactly mad, more disappointed, feeling left out.

“I start thinking so many things about this that I don’t want to think anymore,” I finally told her.

“You should have let me know,” she insisted. “This is important to me, too…and your sons.”

“I am. Right now.”

“Yes, you are.” She let it all drift away then by shaking her head a few times and chuckling at me.

“I came up with this concept of the formality of occurrence,” I went on hurriedly. “I can’t remember where I got it from–the formality of occurrence. I could swear it was a reference by some psychologist like Jung to something a philosopher like Wittgenstein or Alfred North Whitehead said about time and coincidence. I thought I had a book with a chapter in it called “The Formality of Occurrence,” but I can’t find a thing. I’ve looked everywhere.”

My wife just shook her head and laughed quietly.

When you’re adopted you’re less than an accident–you don’t know the circumstances of your birth; your conception seems to have come about by the snap of two fingers in the back seat of a car around 11:30 P.M. on a rainy Saturday night; and, in my case anyway, you have no idea what your racial or ethnic heritage is.

I remember thinking as I lay in bed that night that I wished I could chuckle at me, too. I had given a name to the malaise plaguing me: “The Formality of Occurrence.” But I didn’t really know what it meant, nor did I know where it came from. The term was like me: confused, disoriented, and without origin—somehow made up, unconnected, plucked from chaos, just four words, confounding, and yet, oddly defining.

Photo to the left is me with my first-born son, Sam, circa spring 1989. What were we? Where did we come from?

August 15, 2003

We set off west for Richmond, Indiana and the traffic is like a line of cattle cars beginning in Philadelphia migrating all the way to Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the Pennsylvania Turnpike ever being so congested and dense with automobiles and trucks and people and confusion. The rest areas are a mass of humanity and smell of disinfectant, cash, body odor, new plastic, sugar drinks, and fried food. You are risking your life getting off this three hundred mile strip of highway to grab a snack and take a leak. Re-entering the road is like trying to attach your car to an alien freight train doing seventy-five, driven by thousands of desperate engineers.

I didn’t know why we were taking the trip, really. We had a name. That was all. In 1992 the state of Ohio created a process for adoptees born before 1970 to petition the state for their original birth certificates. I found out about this in 1996. It took me a year to work up the energy to obtain all the pertinent documents Ohio wanted me to file, but then I just let them all sit for another eighteen months after I discovered that I needed to send in a notarized form with copies of my social security card and driver’s license attached. I couldn’t find my social security card and didn’t have a copier, nor did I have the mojo required to apply to the Social Security Administration for a new card, go to Kinko’s, make the copies, and then walk half a block down the road from Kinko’s to our local AAA office where as a member I was entitled to one notarized signature a year. Finally, I just left the documents I had in an unmarked folder on the corner of my desk and forgot about them. Over the next year they were buried underneath other folders and magazines with articles I intended to read.

September 11, 2001 came along, though, and got me thinking about how limited life can be if you let things go. That day of insanity got a lot of us thinking about a lot of things. I knew several people who’d lost loved ones in the fall of the Twin Towers. They hold your gaze when you look at them, and make you feel that you need to do something with your life.

I spent a whole year thinking about my adoption and what it meant after that day. When you’re adopted you’re less than an accident—you don’t know the circumstances of your birth; your very conception seems to have come about by the snap of two fingers in the backseat of a car around 11:30 P.M. on a rainy Saturday night; and, in my case anyway, you have no idea what your racial or ethnic heritage is.

But on the first anniversary of that beautiful morning ushering us into the realities of the 21st century, I took the day off and pulled all my documentation together so that I could finally make the state of Ohio happy. Three months later I received a copy of my original birth certificate in the mail. My biological father” was registered as “Unknown,” but my birth mother’s name and even her address at the time of my adoption in 1958 were listed. I spent several days trying to track her down on the Internet, all to no avail. I used MapQuest to plot out the address given on the document. But cartoon maps are not very satisfying when you want answers to real questions. After a week or so of dithering, I put the document away again in the folder, but this time labeled it The Formality of Occurrence. It was a bright yellow folder and I hid it in the back of my file cabinet. The term was something I’d read somewhere. The formality of occurrence. When things happen they become formal; they move from what is possible to what is real. By formal I do not mean sophisticated or academic. I don’t mean that it is necessarily complex or something to be studied by science. The formality of occurrence is simply the recognition that something has happened, something beyond the five senses, something that is real to the mind and to our understanding. The formality of occurrence is the nexus of fate and individual existence. It is the answer to the question: “What if all of this is just a figment of my imagination? What if I’m just dreaming all of this? What if I’ve just made up all of you?” The formality of occurrence seemed to me the process whereby each of our realities becomes as real as every other possible reality that could have been; the process that makes one life no more worthy than another.

The formality of occurrence for my life, though, was incomplete because I was adopted. I was stuck in the infinity of possibility, a story with no beginning. Somehow, I felt that putting things in that yellow folder was the only way I could come close to filling my identity up with even a semblance of significance.

After that, I began to put everything I came across about adoption and racial identity in that folder: how people chart out their connections; all the articles I could find on Kevin Bacon and the five degrees of separation supposedly connecting our entire culture; little essays by famous writers on what it felt like to adopt a child; feature pieces on the dilemmas and joys of inter-racial adoption. I remember thinking that I had no idea what I was doing. I was just stuffing this file folder full of anything that seemed significant. I couldn’t even remember where I’d read about the formality of occurrence. I walked around for months with that term in my head, scanning magazines and the Internet for anything even remotely relevant to the notion of the story of lives and the fragile net of connection that we all seek all of the time, even if we’re not aware of our seeking. The phrase fell into my head once years before, but its origin at that time had dissipated into the ether. It just seemed like an appropriate title for a file folder that I intended to fill up with this almost useless information. I think I hoped that the accumulation of enough material would someday lead to a transformation–if not real, then at least something intellectual.

I put the official Ohio birth certificate away in that folder, then stuffed it in the back of my filing cabinet. I told no one about what I’d received in the mail. My birth mother’s name roiled around in my head after that, but it became almost frightening to consider her after awhile.
Her name was Dana Faith Black. The backup documentation to the certificate also gave the name of the baby–Anthony Tobias Black…me.