All the News You Can Use

Part I – How I Stopped Loving A Place

The leaves are falling off the cherry trees and turning them back into the haunted orchard where leaves crackle and owls hoot. The mystery is even creepier when it is a full moon and you can look into the orchard with clarity and still think that there is a live shadow behind one of the trees. The nights are cold and crisp and so quiet.

We have decided to leave all of this. Nicole and I are going to move to Providence, Rhode Island this next year. We knew that we weren’t wanting to live here anymore. We love the haunted orchard and the eagle caves and the back winding gravel roads that all lead to Wy’east, but we don’t have any community here and we feel that there is really no community to be had here. 

We originally thought about moving back to Portland. We have a very strong community there. My family is there. We know what we can do there. We know the power of Portland. For all of the negative aspects of that town, Portland has a lot to offer still. 

Nicole has wanted to move back to the east coast since I met her. For the first part of our relationship, this knowledge of her was heartbreaking. I am a west coast kid. I am from the snow-capped mountains and the wild Pacific Ocean. I am misty fir valleys and pine deserts. It scared me that our relationship could end because she needed or wanted to go home. I love it here.

Here is the thing though, I don’t love it like I used to love it. This isn’t a soapbox moment where I belie the sins of the New Portland or who is at fault, but just the matter that I fucking looooooove my wife. She is so much more than a place. My home has stopped being a place and became a state of being. I want to share a place with my wife and she will be happier near her home. 

Not to say there isn’t anything about a place. Guess what though? Baseball is there. Museums are there. New York is three hours away. Boston is one hour. Newport is down the road and I’ve always dreamt of going to the jazz festival there. Beaches are everywhere. Colleges and Universities are everywhere. 

I have moved before so I know that Providence, Rhode Island is not Portland, Oregon. I will be the stranger in a strange land. I will be isolated from a place that Nicole knows like the back of her hand. I know that no place is perfect. 

I will miss Portland, but I hope to be able to come back often. My family is still here, my friends. I hope to set up life out there where friends and family can come to us with ease and comfort. 

I have grown up reading books by guys who live in this area watching leaves fall to the ground and wearing ridiculously long scarves. Maybe I can be that guy.

Part II – How I Learned To Love What Can’t Be Defined

In 1997 I was seeing a therapist. I had just moved to Eugene, Oregon and I was having some substantial depressive spells. The sinking in the bog and life is an extremely cruel and meaningless venture that no amount of meaning could explain or excuse. It didn’t seem to be coming from anything in particular. I was sober and living my best life. I was surrounded by people that loved me, I was very active in my many communities. I was creatively on fire and had a huge outpouring of art and media. None of it meant anything, so I went to the modern oracles to find out why.

There are lots of theories about depression. While I also saw a medical doctor and got on Zoloft, I also dove into my psyche for things that were loose. I was adopted. When I was born I was sick and stayed in the hospital for two months and was touched very little. My parents picked me up and provided me a safe, loving, supporting home where I grew up. I got into drugs and had some serious behavior issues. After several attempts of getting help through my desperate parents sending me here and there, I got sober and slowly, oh, so slowly, I got better. The depression hung on though and the therapist kept jabbing the adoption thing with a stick.

After several sessions bleeding into 1998, I went off into the world to look for my biological mother. This was supposed to have some kind of sub-conscience closure that would unravel some of the chains of melancholia off of me even though I had my doubts.

Not that being adopted didn’t cross my mind. All I was told was that my biological parents were young and that there was some Sicilian ancestry. The idea of being Sicilian lead me down some paths for identity. We live in a world of identity. Now more than ever with social media profiles we must list our identities so that others can identify us either for community or for advertisements. People talk about their ancestry lines with pride and flourish. “I am part English, Welsh, Scot, French, German, Norwegian, and Cherokee”. Other people would have such strong ties to their blood that they had cookbooks and other heirlooms handed down from generation to generation. While my parents were great and they did everything they could to love me and support me, I felt an emptiness when it came to my ties to being a Fisher. 

I got the name of a woman who gave birth to me. I went to find her and found her life path to be what I was about to get into when I was doing drugs and hustling. It made everything make sense. I found her at the end of the paperwork path in a grave in Missouri. A sad tragic life trying to shake the monkey off her back and the monkey won. I met an uncle through that, her brother, and we started an email correspondence. He knew the father and he was in New York somewhere in jail for a long time. In 2010 my uncle and I met and sat down in Mahhatten over an espresso and gelato and talked. The big news was that I was Jewish.

My friends who are Jewish were not surprised. One Jewish friend even said, “Duh, Dave, you hate yourself and cover it up with humor”. I had an identity finally!

A few years ago Nicole and I did the 23 and Me tests. We were excited to see the spectrums of our heritages. Since we both had Sicilian blood, we also wanted to make sure we weren’t related. This is funnier to us than most of you, but took the test we did. 

Mine came back and was different than I expected. A lot different. The Italian part made up less than 6% while English (ugh) made up 75% or more! This was not the blood of what I was lead to believe, but then again, I had proof.

Shoulder shrug emoji.

2020 happened and every day was a punch in the face. A few months ago I received an email from a woman who found me on 23 and me and had been identified as my 1st cousin. She wrote that I was probably the kid that her aunt gave up for adoption and would I like to email her.

This was a huge gut punch. I had grieved a woman who I never got to meet. I already did the emotional labor of searching and preparing for a slammed door or a cold dismissal. I already did the work, and now as it sat in the foggy memories of my mind, a reminder and a new path. I wasn’t done with this chapter of my life, and that everything I thought I knew about my identity is wrong.

It took me a week to respond. I called the state and investigated the fact that someone who is not the dead woman is possibly my mother. After being on hold and being transferred a few times it basically came down to this: before computers came along a lot of filing errors occurred and that the facts presented by 23 and me are probably correct.

So I gave my cousin my email because this time I wasn’t going to do the searching. I did that already. I wanted to be sure that this woman wanted to know me. 

And an email came and it turned out to be this nice woman from the east coast. She told me that I had her toes. She had found my website (this one!) and read through my life. Saw my struggles with depression, meaning, cancer, and the highlights. This put me at a disadvantage, for I was an open book and she was a blank canvas that she will need to fill in for me. Nicole says she can see the familial resemblance.

While it has been an emotional roller coaster for me, I’m glad this happened now. I wouldn’t have been ready for this before. I now care less about identity than I ever have before. I am comfortable with who I am and there are no labels that can define that.