Did You Ever Get to Edinburgh?

By Richard Haviland

Royalties from the sale of this book are being donated to
Autism Speaks
And
Special Olympics


When we’ve gone without something, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend what impact the void has had. While we can imagine how things might have been different, there’s no true point of reference that enables us to say whether it’s left us better or worse off, richer or poorer as a person.

So it was with the absence of author Richard Haviland’s father. Having never really known him, combined with the presence of a caring stepfather, he rarely thought of himself as not having had a father in his life. He didn’t spend his childhood or adolescence feeling deprived or cheated.

But a series of conversations at work and home prodded Haviland and forced him to consider what could be, not just for him but for his wife, a new baby daughter, and the other children they planned to have.

In Did You Ever Get to Edinburgh?, Haviland shares the story of the search for his birth father. It chronicles a journey of love and loss, pain and joy and, ultimately, reconciliation with the man he needed most to meet, a completion of the circle of life for the father and son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982261740

Richard Haviland

Richard Haviland is an award-winning short story writer whose work appeared in two national anthologies, Wings and Waking Dreams and Families, Friends and Strangers. He lives with his wife and their neurotic cat, Chloe, in West Chester, Pennsylvania surrounded and loved by five children and twelve grandchildren. Haviland has five children and twelve grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2021 Richard Haviland.

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and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use

of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical

problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The

intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help

you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-6173-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6175-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6174-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900513

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/12/2021

To

my wife, Linda,

For

Encouraging me to find my father

And

To my children,

Kate, Drew, Tori, Juli and Amanda

And

My grandchildren

Who are constant reminders

That fathers and children need to have the

Opportunity to love, watch, help and know each other.

I love you all very much

To my father

For never letting go of faith, hope or love

Royalties from the sale of this book are being donated

to Autism Speaks And Special Olympics

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue Edinburgh, Scotland 1995

Chapter 1: Something Was Missing

Chapter 2: Looking For the Needle

Chapter 3: Did You Ever Get to Edinburgh?

Chapter 4: A Card in the Door

Chapter 5: The One and Only Christmas

Chapter 6: Knights of the Round Table

Chapter 7: In Retrospect

Chapter 8: The Heart is a Lonely Hitter

Chapter 9: What Does a Kid Do With a Bathrobe?

Chapter 10: Be a Soldier

Chapter 11: Ben

Chapter 12: Love at First Sight

Chapter 13: Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines

Chapter 14: Junior Birdman

Chapter 15: A Sense of Humor Always Helps

Chapter 16: Nathaniel’s Gift

Chapter 17: Life Goes On

Chapter 18: Your Father Wasn’t Ready

Chapter 19: Titles Can Be So Inadequate

Chapter 20: We Could Pass On the Street

Chapter 21: Happy Birthday…Love, Dad

Chapter 22: God Cried

Chapter 23: You Could Be a Peanut Farmer

Chapter 24: Life Changed With Her

Chapter 25: I Knew Your Father

Chapter 26: What Do I Call Him?

Chapter 27: Photographs and Memories

Chapter 28: The Reunion

Chapter 29: Words of Encouragement

Chapter 30: Two Saints

Chapter 31: Informed Sources

Chapter 32: You Can’t Have Both

Chapter 33: It Breaks My Heart

Chapter 34: The Heart Always Has Room

Chapter 35: Four Generations

Chapter 36: Avenging Angels and Guilt Offerings

Chapter 37: A Most Humble and Special Man

Chapter 38: A Gift of Grace

Chapter 39: Miss Blue Eyes

Chapter 40: Kevin

Chapter 41: Run to Daylight

Chapter 42: Speaking the Unspoken

Chapter 43: Bugs Between Your Teeth

Chapter 44: She Who Must Be Loved

Chapter 45: You Never Know Where Life Will Take You

Chapter 46: Full Circle

Epilogue

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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W ords are woefully inadequate in attempting to thank the many people who have brought this work to fruition. I have been blessed with family, friends and new acquaintances who have been wonderfully candid and supportive as readers, critics and cheerleaders as this book took form. Many demonstrated the patience of a saint on more than one occasion.

The wonderful messages and reviews from many who read the first edition of this book were touching and affirmed for me that there are stories in all of us that can, and should, be told because we never know how they might help others in unexpected ways.

I will always be grateful to Vincent Wright and his late wife, Susan, of Sunderland, England for introducing the manuscript to their readers’ circle and offering encouragement from my home away from home across the pond. Susan was an aspiring writer and the book of poems given to me shortly after losing her battle with ovarian cancer continue to move and inspire me to write. My wife and I cherish our last visit with her just weeks before her passing.

My fellow writers at the Writers’ Club of Delaware County Pennsylvania are a part of any success this work might enjoy. Your sheer love of writing, determination to never stop trying and constant support has been more than anyone could ask. In particular, Janet Burgent, my writing angel, was always there to urge me on.

To Hugh Abernethy, senior editor of Abbeywood Press…what can I say? You were the first person to put my stories in print and in bookstores. Equally important, you boosted my confidence and convinced me to keep working on my craft. What I prayed for, you envisioned.

The accomplished author Alice Wootson has been an inspiration. Her encouragement, reactions to the story and the sharing of her own journey as a writer have re-energized me on more than one occasion and helped me recognize how important it is to pursue your dreams.

Throughout this journey my wife and children have endured, supported, encouraged, criticized and loved, always at the right time and when most needed. You have, on more than one occasion, taken on the formidable task of being my editors and critics, always offering your constructive criticism. My apologies to you for not always having sufficiently thick skin to accept it in the same spirit in which it was offered. Without you I would never have begun the search for my father, never known him, never had a story to tell and, most of all, never known the joy of being a husband and father.

I owe a special thanks to my daughter, Tori, a skilled editor who chose to take on the imposing job of having her father as her first client. Her attention to detail, creativity and candor have not only enriched this novel but earned her a chapter in the next edition of Profiles In Courage. Her education as a developmental psychologist have, I suspect, helped her understand and cope with me on more than one occasion.

The staff at Balboa Press encouraged me to publish this second edition and tell the stories of the loss of both my father and mother since the first publication. My last moments with both were healing and spiritual experiences.

My thanks also to Michael Fortney of the Chester County Book Company for his assistance in the cover of this book to convey why the walk up the path to Edinburgh Castle was part of the circle of life.

To all those who choose to read this story, my prayer is that when you have completed it, you will tell someone you love them, hold them a bit closer, cherish them in new ways and, most of all, recognize the gift of having them in your life.

Richard Haviland

West Chester, PA

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INTRODUCTION

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T his is a true story. It concerns a man’s ambivalence about looking for the father he vaguely remembered meeting three times in his life, all before the age of nine. After the third meeting, the father disappeared for over twenty-five years for reasons the child never understood and finally chose to seek answers to as an adult. With his wife’s urging and the impetus of the birth of their first child, he decided there were things he needed, and wanted, to know. The journey was undertaken with a range of mixed emotions. There was anger, a sense of loss and abandonment, of being cheated out of a relationship that should have been a birthright. Fear of what might or might not be discovered was a constant companion during the search, as was a desire not to hurt those who had loved and nurtured the child who was now a man.

The search that resulted led him not only to his father but to a whole new family and the memories of a parade of wonderful people who had been there for him when his father was not. Some of those people did more than others, some for longer than others, but collectively they enabled him to learn, grow and know that he was loved. In doing so he was able to look at his own relationships differently and re-think what kind of person, husband and father he wanted to be. We all should, in fact, frequently reflect on what we are and are not giving and being to those we care about. We should consider what memories we are creating for them. It can be both a humbling and affirming experience.

What the man finally came to realize was that love is truly a matter of the heart, not miles or geography. He also discovered that love and pain are often co-mingled and that people can do hurtful things, intentionally and unintentionally, in their attempt to love. Necessary losses became an unavoidable part of the sojourn back to his father. Above all, he learned that love has an amazing capacity for endurance, which neither adversity nor time can diminish.

The story is mine. I was the child who never knew his father but was blessed to find him as an adult. This book actually began as a personal diary that became cathartic, therapeutic and something I could share with my children. It was one of my daughters who urged me to tell the story on a wider scale.

The names of some people have been changed, either at their request or through my own choice. However, all of the characters are real, as are the events. I share it with you in the hopes that it might touch, help, heal or uplift you and those you love.

Richard M. Haviland

West Chester, PA

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PROLOGUE

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Edinburgh, Scotland

1995

C ities and what we do while there create memories. Sometimes they change us, move us. We depart a different person than when we arrived. The passage of time does not diminish what we felt in those moments. I remember the first time my wife and I kissed strolling along the Seine under a starry sky in Paris. Her touch, her warmth, the moment it created stays with me, and whenever I need to, if I close my eyes, I am there reliving it. Paris taught that love is often found in the simple acts we sometimes take for granted. Watching a sunset in Key West reminded me that beauty surrounds us and that the wonders of nature and God can soothe, calm and reassure in difficult times. The joy in my children’s eyes as they soak in the sensory overload of Disney World moves me to be a child again, admittedly with a degree of self-consciousness, but a kid nonetheless.

Cities can also take on a deeper, almost spiritual significance. They give us a connection and take on a meaning, the depths of which may take years to fully comprehend. For me that city became Edinburgh, Scotland.

I had never planned on being there. Over the years my business travels had taken me across the United States, throughout Europe and the Far East to some of the world’s great cities. Each of them had been interesting in different ways. Some were wonderful and the kind of city you couldn’t wait to get back to. Others were smoggy, crowded, dirty and sometimes frightening; those were the ones I prayed fate would not call me to again. My work was fascinating. Each project brought new challenges and a range of personalities that always kept things a bit unpredictable, which was part of the enjoyment of it all. But I had never been to Scotland and, like many uninformed people, equated it with kilts, cold rain and sheep.

If anyone had asked me to what new cities I expected to go, Edinburgh would not have made the list. Not in my wildest imagination would there have been any reason to think that city would need me or I would need it. Least of all would I have ever expected it to be the city that would change my life and how I looked at myself and those I love.

From the day the letter arrived, it was Edinburgh that took on significance and meaning for reasons that had nothing to do with my work. The simple question posed in the letter, Did you ever get to Edinburgh? was the first step in letting go of years of resentment and hurt. Over time, the letter led to talks and new relationships that began to answer questions which had haunted me for years. Those discoveries often created new questions and frequently brought unexpected pain and loss that I still deal with. The enduring lessons have been about love, loss, forgiveness and reconciliation.

The letter was from the father I had neither seen nor heard from in over twenty-five years. I remembered being with him only three times in my life, all in a period of six months when I was eight years old. Then he was gone. From that time on, I grew up being told he had abandoned me, that I had been an inconvenient surprise my mother had announced only a few months after they married. The next years were spent forgetting him, not liking him and sometimes denying that he was a part of me.

But twenty-five years had passed, and a question about Edinburgh in the letter had come to represent my father’s enduring love. In the often unanticipated directions in which life or fate or God leads us, Edinburgh became the one place I most needed and wanted to visit. It was a sunny May day, and I was there.

The journey and personal discoveries would never have happened had it not been for three people, two present and one always absent. There was my wife, Linda. It was she who first recognized that not knowing my father troubled me and, at times, caused trouble for us. It has been said that each of us needs someone in our life who will help or force us to look in the mirror and come to terms with who we are; Linda has always been that person for me. From the beginning of our years together, she held the mirror up, sometimes suggesting I look in it and consider what I saw. At other times, she would put it in front of me and not let me look away until I admitted what was there. The decision to find my father was one of those occasions.

The second person was a colleague and friend, David Cross, who, without knowing the background of my life, called me one day to ask if I could join him to work in Edinburgh. A bolt of lightening would not have jolted me like David’s request. It was a phone call that would bring me full circle with my father.

Ever present was the ghost of my father, a person physically absent but always there in my mind, even when I wouldn’t admit it or had pushed his existence into my subconscious.

From the moment I arrived in Edinburgh and checked into my hotel, I wanted to go to the one location in particular that represented so much and would allow me to answer the question in my father’s letter. I quickly got my room key, entrusted my luggage to the bellman, picked up a visitor’s walking guide and set off to see the place from which my father had, years before, sadly contemplated if he would ever see me again. I needed to stand where my father had silently looked out over the city and missed the child he had not seen since a brief Christmas and birthday visit that seemed like another lifetime.

As I stood outside the Caledonian Hotel looking up at Edinburgh Castle, perched atop the cliffs rising from the midst of the city, the climb to it appeared as insurmountable as the task of finding my father had seemed not long ago. But just as soldiers had been able to scale the walls of that fortress in centuries past, I had been able to overcome a number of obstacles and found a path to the man I had never really come to know.

Walking along the base of the castle cliffs, I made my way through Princes Street gardens, in full bloom on this unusually sunny and warm Scottish day. Coming around a bend in the path, the castle looming above, a gorgeous scene unfolded. Winding its way in switchbacks, a walking trail traversed an expansive grassy hill up the cliffs to the main gate of the castle. Awash in yellow daffodils, the trail would lead me the several hundred feet to the fortress and many years back to my father.

Each step along the path opened up a more magnificent view of the New City section of this ancient town and, at the same time, brought me closer to completing the circle of my life and securing my roots. I would be able to tell my father that I did get to Edinburgh. Stopping to catch my breath near the top of the cliffs, I turned again to take in the unfolding scene below me. As I did, in the distance near Waverly Train Station, the strains of a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace flowed across the morning. Fighting back tears, the notes of the hymn reminded me how the search for my father had become a reaffirmation of faith, buoyed along the way by hope and, ultimately, a lesson about the power of love to endure. At that moment I truly felt, deep in the core of my soul, the amazing grace the song describes.

Passing through the castle’s main gate, statues of Robert the Bruce and William Braveheart Wallace on each side, I thought of my own children and for the first time began to understand something of the loss my father must have felt when he came here. He had walked these same cobblestones and wondered, for reasons I would not know for almost twenty-five years, if I had in fact ever gotten to Edinburgh as he had heard I planned.

Walking into the castle, it struck me how full of ironies, surprises and miracles life is; the circumstances that brought me to Edinburgh had taught me that. Standing on the ramparts was as magical as my father had told me it would be. The view was a panorama of ancient buildings, firths, mountains and green fields, each with a different beauty and spectacle attracting the eye and spurring the senses. As I turned in a circle, taking it all in, I began to think about my life and the people who had been a part of it. The family and friends who had filled the void of an absent father came most quickly to mind.

I was reminded of those who gave freely the love and support needed over the years. They were caring people who had nurtured, disciplined, encouraged and helped me grow. Some were still with me, others were gone. Death had taken some from me before their time, their lessons always with me. A few had been travelers through only portions of my life but no less important for what they gave. Looking out from the castle, I considered how loss is part of the journey and life’s lessons. All of those wonderful people were with me at that moment, close by in my heart and mind.

Being in this old and historic city, I knew that what I had gone through to get to this place and moment in life were all worth it. Everything. The sadness, joy, heartbreak, anger and happiness are necessary parts of the crucible that makes us what we are. We can’t always recognize or appreciate the shaping as it occurs. The lessons to be derived from life’s events are often revealed in slow and agonizing ways, but there is, I have come to believe, always a fundamentally positive purpose in the hand we are dealt. For me, Edinburgh was a confirmation of that truth.

As surely as I could turn in an uninterrupted rotation on the rampart where I stood, my life had truly come full circle. The journey, begun by a card in a front door on a Christmas more than twenty-five years ago, was made complete due to a wife’s persistence, encouragement and love, as well as a colleague’s fateful phone call. Standing in this castle, in this city, I knew who I was. Along the way life taught me that family, forgiveness and love are among its essential ingredients for meaning and fullness. The events during and since that day in Edinburgh have convinced me that some force greater than coincidence shapes and moves our lives, often when least expected and most needed.

My wife’s frequent questions about my father had made me realize how much I needed to know about him. Gazing into the eyes of our first child moments after she was born began to surface the sense of separation I had felt, but perhaps denied, for many years.

There had been the chance business encounter with a woman who met me and remarked that I looked exactly like a man with the same last name in the town where she had grown up over thirty years before. As it turned out, it was the town my father lived in until he was twenty-one and I would discover years later that the man she described was, in fact, my father. After that strange experience, I remember driving home wondering if events were telling me it was time to begin my search. But it had been twenty-five years since I had last seen him. A child of eight, I met my father for the first time on a Christmas long ago in time but as clear in my memory as though it was yesterday.

Now, walking the streets of Edinburgh, I accepted and recognized how those events had served a purpose. Had it not been for them, my father would still be unknown to me. Edinburgh had become the city that symbolized not only my father’s love but also the fact that he had never forgotten, never given up hope.

Leaving the castle, I made my way to the campus of the university where I had planned to attend graduate school in the late 1960’s but chose instead to stay near home. As I sat on a bench in the quadrangle, taking in the sights and sounds of the students, I thought about the missed opportunity.

But, most of all, I thought back to the question in my father’s letter: Did you ever get to Edinburgh? How had he known about my school plans? For years I had asked myself the question over and over. How had he known? Absent from my life since my eighth birthday, how could he have known about something that occurred when I was twenty-one? I did not know how painful the answer to that question would be.

My mind went back to the day the journey to my father began. Linda posed a question that had lurked in the shadows of my mind, either from neglect, denial or avoidance.

Don’t you want to know something, anything about him? was all she asked at first.

It was a question that begged an answer and would forever change my life and those I love.

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CHAPTER ONE

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Something Was Missing

C onsciously or otherwise, I suppose there had always been a desire to know my father. As a teenager and young adult, when my friends talked about a resemblance, personality trait or quirk that they could relate to their parents, I could only comment about my mother. Jokes about gene pools were embarrassing rather than amusing. On one occasion, I had tried to ask my mother for some insight about my father but usually got vague or noncommittal responses. After the three visits from my father, my family life taught me that he was not a particularly welcomed topic of discussion. There were no pictures of him, at least none that were ever offered to me, and the dim memory of meeting him at age eight faded with the passage of time.

My mother had happily remarried when I was four to a caring and loving man named Tom Brigham. It was the way he cared for and loved me that made it feel relatively unimportant for me to find my father. Even at an early age, Tom taught me that being a father is about the positive impact we have on our children, not a title. Do we love, nurture, help, encourage and