—He Came From Somewhere Back in His Long Ago ♪
In Which The Accidental Initiate goes to the movies.
I thought I was going to merely take in a film. That was my first mistake.
Newsreels. I’d heard of them, of course, but I’d never actually sat in a movie theater and watched one the way people once did.
They came from somewhere back in our long ago.
Before television, you went to the movies and got some news along with them. Wars, elections, disasters, celebrities—a few minutes of the outside world before the feature started. Or at least the parts of the outside world somebody decided to put on the screen.
I knew this. Eugene had written about the Bonus Army.
What I hadn’t known was how little of ordinary life inside the camps made it into the newsreels while thousands of veterans were peacefully living and organizing there. The cameras became much more interested when the whole thing ended violently.
Maybe people peacefully living in a protest camp wasn’t much of a story. Or maybe showing thousands of them doing it wasn’t something you wanted to advertise. These scenes were purposefully ignored by the newsreel companies as reported in the book, The Bonus Army; An American Epic
Hmm.
The reel ended. Okay, now the movie.
No. Another newsreel.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The McDonald/Arch juxtaposition was entirely the AI image generator’s doing. Our LLM Wrangler didn’t ask for it or notice it until afterward. Synchronicity?]
Michael McDonald?
This one started with a randy fourteen-year-old Michael McDonald, the adolescent version we later knew from old records. There was a girl, there was a baby, and there was an adoption.
A closed adoption.
Right. Closed adoption really meant closed in those days. Identifying information about the biological parents was ordinarily kept from the adoptive parents. Records were sealed. The two families were supposed to remain strangers.
The baby arrived unnamed, and Kay Goessling gave him one.
Michael. Nothing strange about that. Michael was a common name.
Then the screen gave me the biological father’s name.
Wait.
Closed adoption. Kay Goessling hadn’t named the boy after his biological father. She had just named him after his biological father.
Apparently there is a difference.
Was that really what Michael meant?
I looked it up on my phone. Same answer: Who is like God?
I got stuck on the first three words. Who is like? Well, who is more like a father than his son? Okay. Put the phone away. Looking things up wasn’t helping.
That sounded familiar. Of course it did. Michael McDonald had written it the other way around years before any of this came back to him.
Almost sixty years passed. Then somebody sent some spit to a laboratory.
You’re not supposed to spit into the wind. Everybody knows that. It comes back at you. The results came back to Michael McDonald’s children as a half brother:
Michael Goessling.
And eventually, a father: Michael McDonald.
Science had found him.
Wait. Wasn’t science supposed to make things less mysterious?
Nearly sixty years and nobody knew. The name had been there all along. So had the relationship.
Technology hadn’t created either one. It had just turned on the projector.
I wasn’t sure I liked that thought.
Coincidence. Of course. That’s the word. A baby was placed for adoption without a first name, and his adoptive mother named him Michael without knowing that his biological father was named Michael. Nearly sixty years later, DNA brought Michael back to Michael. The Council used the same word—coincidence. I was beginning to suspect they didn’t think it explained very much.
The screen went black. I waited for the lights to come up, but they didn’t. Instead, another title appeared.
AND NOW…
OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION
Wait.
Those were only the newsreels?
I left.
The Entire Up-To-Date Epiphany Series From The Accidental Initiate Can Be Found: HERE
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