1.23.02

Dear Space Monkey X Readers,

I don’t know why I started that way today. Just felt like a change.

Yes, it is I, your broke-ass monkey friend. Although I got paid last Friday, the Spaghetti Reserve Corps was restocked on Sunday. These bills are just really pissing me off lately. Will this madness ever end?

However, my brokenicity did not keep me from enjoying my one night out in three weeks when I met a friend of mine after work for dinner at Hooters. I had my regular – Buffalo Chicken Sandwich with 911 sauce – he had his regular – 10-piece wings in wussy 3-Mile Island sauce – and our waitress reminded me of the girl from the Wonder Years. Actually, come to think of it, it probably was the girl from the Wonder Years. So after we’d downed our various buffalo chicken parts, my friend was feeling particularly saucy and got some buffalo shrimp which I happily helped him finish off. If you’d stuck us with a pin we would have bled buffalo sauce so hot it would have instantly cauterized the wound. The best part was, my buddy had gotten a huge bonus (more than my entire two weeks paycheck!) from his recently-gone-public employers and he ended up paying for the whole thing. He rules.

After our dinner at Hootaires (it sounds so much more sophisticated when you say it like that), we met another friend at the movie theater and took in “Black Hawk Down.” Let me give you a brief synopsis of the film: talk, talk, talk, gunfire, explosions, gunfire, helicopter fall down go BOOM, pissed off Somalians, dirt, sand, another helicopter fall down go BOOM, gunfire, gunfire, explosions, gunfire, talk. Needless to say we were absolutely glued to our seats and I think I might have breathed once, possibly twice, after that first half hour of talking was over. Was it the best film of 2002? Hell naw. Was it worth every penny? Hell yeah.

The most amazing part of the evening, however, was when we came out of the theater and found three inches of this white, powdery stuff covering the ground. Yes, we had our first snowfall of winter, which made getting home kind of a pain in the neck, but it was beautiful. In fact, it was so wonderful, I got out my pipe, stood on the balcony and just marveled at how pristine the world around me was that evening. By Monday, the snow was gone and I was wondering why they hadn’t turned the AC on in the office yet. I love global warming. Winter now lasts for a weekend.

Saturday was a pretty useless day. I saw A Beautiful Mind at the 12:30 matinee (good flick, great performances, but I really feel like it’s a bit overrated), went to the office for a bit, and then went home to watch more movies that I’d rented from Blockbuster. The best of the bunch was “MASH”, a movie I thought I’d seen before, but definitely had not. So far ahead of it’s time and such a dark, dark comedy that it suited me well. It’s going on my list entitled, “To Buy Whenever I Have The Money” behind about 48 other DVD’s. Someday…

Ok, now’s the big moment you’ve all been waiting for. This is why I emailed a few friends to let them know they needed to come read the site this week. Thanks for reading up to this point.

Saturday while I was at the office working on Daily Cup O’ Joe, I finally decided to make “the phone call.” As you might recall back in September, a fateful Sunday drive led me to the town I believed my birth father lived in. (If you weren’t here for that, go check out the 9.19.01 entry in the archives). Well, we spoke one more time after that when he called me to tell me what little information he had uncovered about his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts. He primarily gave me names of siblings and it was up to me to find phone numbers and actually make the call. I sat on that information for months. Not sure why exactly. Maybe it was the busy holidays coming up; maybe it was my hectic work and school schedule. Most likely it was the thought that with a single phone call I could possibly throw someone’s world into utter chaos. That’s a pretty big responsibility, ya know? So anyway, I didn’t make the call to any siblings to find out the location of my birth mom – that is until Saturday afternoon.

I’m not sure what possessed me to suddenly make the call, but for some reason I did. I did some looking on the internet and found one of her brothers still lived in the Kankakee area and figured he’d be the person to call. Needless to say he was quite stunned when I told him who I was and at first he thought I had the wrong person. Why? Because he wasn’t living at home in 1975 and hadn’t even known his sister was pregnant! Man, I am really springing this news on people. So he said he’d have to make some phone calls and check things out and he’d get back to me in a few days.

Sunday night I’m at the office working on a story and the phone rings. It’s my roommate telling me that a woman named Marla Raymond has just called. I get the number and call her back.

Well, now I know why my beard comes in red – she has dark red hair.

She was excited to hear from me as she had always wondered what had happened to me. I told her the story of how I found out the names of my birth parents; I told her the story of how I happened upon George, the birth father; I told her a brief life story and how I ended up in O’Fallon, Missouri.

She filled me in on some information as well, obviously. I found out I have three uncles and three aunts, most all spread out through the country as often happens. I have an older brother, which I knew from George telling me, but now I know his name is Doug. Now for the big shocker – I also have another older sibling out there somewhere!

Marla got pregnant sometime after Doug was born and gave that baby up for adoption as well. For some reason the doctor let her hold the baby after it was born – very unusual in an adoption situation – and although she couldn’t verify the gender of the well-blanketed child she held, she had a motherly feeling it was a girl. So I have an older sister out there somewhere that I might try to track down now. According to the law, I have more of a right to find a sibling than Marla does to find a baby she gave up for adoption, so it will be easier for me to find her. Thank God for the internet.

Obviously the two of us want to get together sometime, hopefully with George in tow, and see how things have turned out. They haven’t seen each other in over 25 years, so it’s an opportunity for them to catch up as well. I’ve been trying to contact George for the last few days but no one answers the phone, nor is there a machine that picks up; I’ll keep trying though. Whenever I do get to meet these two people, you can bet the event will be covered here and surely with photos for one and all to see.

Yes, I’m pretty freaked out right now. This is the kind of thing you only see on Oprah, ya know? Marla and I both mentioned that every time we see one of those adoption reunion things on TV that we get a little lump in our throats, wondering if our meeting would ever take place. Although I don’t think it’ll be on Montel Williams in front of a live studio audience, I do think that meeting will be happening very soon.

Thanks for sharing in this pretty big event for me and I hope you’ll stick around to see the outcome whenever it occurs.

Space Monkey X