Happy Birthday Pa! I love you!

Today I want to tell you the exciting story, how I found and met my father 36 years after I was born.

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not my original art work! Special thanks to Marc and Manfred for this great picture!

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As I told you in a previous post, I grew up without a father.

My mother and my father got separated before I was born, so my mother brought me up alone, and I never saw my dad.

It’s not that I missed something in my childhood. My mother was very caring and we had everything we needed to live a happy life.

But inside me there was this unknowingness. Something you cannot describe, because you never had or saw it.

I was a relatively normal child, except I was a little bit introverted. And, of course I didn’t have the knowledge about things, only a father could tell a son.

Father and Son.

Things, like soccer, motorcycles, car racing, boys and toys and of course men and women. I only knew one perspective of women, that of my mother.

But I didn’t miss anything. Only later when I was able to reflect my misunderstandings of my childhood, I got the feeling that if I had a father, I might have been more natural in my approach to the opposite sex.

My father is ten years older than my mother and there came a time, when I thought about him much more than before. He had a bit of age now, and he could have died anytime.

My wife encouraged me to start searching for him, but in the beginning, I wasn’t too keen to find him, perhaps because of the uncertainty and the expectance I had if I would find him. There was a kind of fear inside my heart.

But the best thing to do to overcome this fear is to approach it with courage and confidence.

To cut a long story short, some years later I decided that now the time would be ripe, to go out and find him.

I didn’t tell you what I knew about my father.

My father and my mother met in San Francisco, where they both worked in a shoe company, my mother was a German secretary in her oversea year in the United States and my father was a shoemaker, coming originally from Pirmasens, Germany.

But my father was married, had already a ten-year-old son, and therefore my father and my mother only had a short engagement. As you might have suspected, my mother got pregnant with me, but she wanted me to grow up in Germany, so some weeks later, she left the U.S. and went back to Germany.

They wrote a few letters before the contact was laid in, at last. The only information of my father’s whereabouts, was his last residence, which was in San Antonio, Texas and the company he was working in at that time.

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not my original art work! Special thanks to Marc and Manfred for this great picture!

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Now to my attempt to find him.

I had his full name and the company he was working in the early 80s. That was all.

So, I started a google search and found a guy with the name of my father who invented a Texan ‘Bratwurst’ in a Restaurant in New Braunfels, some miles away from San Antonio. That was a hint. But a shoemaker selling Bratwurst, that was awkward. I looked deeper and found an obituary of a guy with the name of my father to his beloved wife, that has passed away in 2014, written by her daughter in law. That was definitely a big hit. The author of the obituary didn’t only mention all the places my father has been residing and working during his life in the United States, which was all the way from New York, to the Midwest, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia up to California and from there to Texas, where he stayed with his wife and his son.

She also mentioned all the family members by name, his wife, their son, daughter in law and the two grandchildren.

So now I got names!

Names that I could look up on facebook the biggest social platform in the internet.

Can you imagine how excited I was?

I was absolutely sure, that I found the right family, my father and even my brother.

I immediately found these lovely guys on facebook, even my dad, but I didn’t know how to approach him. Maybe he had forgotten about me, he was now 76 Years old, perhaps he was demented or maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of me. Or maybe he would get a stroke the moment he realized that I am his second son and pips out.

That’s why I decided to write to my brother first, and sound out the situation.

Excitement was exploding inside me when I wrote the first lines to him.

I was very careful because I didn’t want to go like a bull at the gate.

Our conversation was like this:

Me:

“Dear Mr. H., you don’t know me, but may I ask you, if it is possible that your father was working in San Francisco at a shoe reseller company in the early 1980?”

Him:

“Hello Mr. M, yes my father did work in a shoe company in Frisco, why are you asking?’

Me:

“I am asking, because my father himself was working there too and I am looking for an old friend of him.

Him:

“That sound interesting when did your father work there? We were living in LA and my father was working there from … to …!”

Me:

“To be honest, it wasn’t my father who worked in that company but my mother and I have reasons to believe that your father had an engagement with my mother and I am the byproduct.”

BANG!

It was out!

And we would have fell into our arms and been crying for joy and excitement, because we both had found our brother whom we always wanted to have in our lives for so long, if there haven’t been some 1000 miles of distance between us.

Do you want to know how the story ends?

All right, let’s move on!

Marc and I agreed, that I should wright a proper letter to our dad, addressed to my brother. He’ll serve him his favored drink, bourbon with Coke on the Rocks ask him to sit down and then show him the letter.

No sooner said then done …

My dad read the letter and he was cool!

As my brother never heard about the story of my father and my mother in San Francisco, he had a lot of questions and they sat down and talked a lot. But everything went good and everyone was excited to meet the new family in Germany.

And as if it was previewed by god and the angels, they already were going to plan a trip to Europe, to visit England, France and Germany.

So, some months later, they departed, stayed 3 days in London, 3 days in Paris and 6 day in Geisenheim, my home town.

It was a pretty dank occasion.

As we’re living in times of smartphones and whats-app we messaged each other on the day I met my father right to the point, where they were coming around the corner with their borrowed van. My brother on the driver seat and my father on the front passenger seat.

My heart sank into my boots.

It was the day I met my father.

And I was pretty nervous, as you can imagine.

And he was also nervous, very tensed. But that was ok, it was the day we met for the very first time.

And it was very good time!

We had a lot of fun, drank a lot of beer, wine and bourbon with Coke on the Rocks, I showed him the gorgeous sites in the Rheingau, where I live and he showed me his home town and the gorgeous sites he knew.

A great time!

Only that after six days he left.

I was accompanying them to the airport and when he left for his plane we hugged each other and for the first time I got really sentimental and had tears in my eyes.

I met my father and now I had to let him go again.

I was really sad, I wished I could have gone with him.

But I have my family here, my beautiful wife, my lovely kids. Leonard even accompanied me to the airport. So, I had to let him go.

Let it Be!

He Left and I didn’t see him since.

But we stay in contact and I’m whole again. The lost part of my family came back into my life.

And some day I will go and visit them in Texas

So, that was the story of the day I met my father.

It’s a real one and it’s a good one, I suppose.

If you agree, give me an upvote, resteem this post and follow me here on Steemit for more good quality content.

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not my original art work! Special thanks to Marc and Manfred for this great picture!
from right to left: dad, me, Marc and Tristan, my nephew

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Thanks @scrooger for using his text dividers

Stay Steemed

Love, Unity & Abundance

Holger

A father is a man who expects his son to be as he meant to be.

[Frank A. Clark]

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Have a nice evening with your father or your son and enjoy having a family to share things with! Here is "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens!