I am the son of two fathers. Yet both are strangers to me.

The man who gave me life I saw once in 33 years. The other, the villain in a divorce drama witnessed by the 12-year-old boy that was me, I saw twice in 26 years. The last time was in 1978.

I became a man without them, but was never free of them.

Time and again I played with the idea of seeking out the one whose face I could not remember, even if I tried. But I never took that first step. Fear held me back.

I wanted no part of the other, the one I once embraced. I remember standing in front of my second-grade class on show-and-tell day and proudly proclaiming: "I have a new daddy." My anger over that marriage's unraveling cast him out of my heart. I dropped his last name and reclaimed my natural father's.

Then, within the space of one year, my fathers found me. And I still wonder what it all means, what I am to make of their re-entry into my life.

It began with a phone call.

My mother called to say Mickie Thompson had called her. He was having a family reunion and wanted to see my brother and me. We are his oldest children. I am his first-born son. I carry his name. She did not give him my number, and I did not ask for his. I'd be damned if I was going to make the first step.

There was safety in that decision. I'd spent a lifetime with him on the outer reaches of my mind, achieved an emotional peace, settled accounts as best I could. Why open the door, for who knew where it led?

Looking back, it seems it didn't matter what I did. Fate, or something very much like it, was at work, sweeping me along.

I came home from work one day last May to find two messages blinking on the answering machine. Nothing unusual in that. I pushed the replay button and strolled around the kitchen, listening.

"This is for a Michael or M. Dion Thompson. My name is Diane Amos. I'm Mickie Thompson's daughter."

What! I went into full alarm. His daughter? My heart pounded. The second message came on before I could replay the first.

"This is Mickie Thompson. I'm his father. Please ask him to give me a call if he gets the chance."

By now I was hyperventilating. I replayed both messages once, twice, a third, fourth and fifth time, walked around the kitchen in ,, total confusion, talked to myself, waved my arms, stopped to listen to the recorded voices. His daughter? Not once did I ever think my brother and I weren't his only children. She sounded matter-of-fact. He sounded hesitant, as if my recorded voice had caught him off-guard. He was brief and to the point.

"I'm his father. Please ask him to give me a call . . ."

He'd flung the door open, and all I could do was smoke Marlboros, pour glasses of Chivas Regal over ice, babble to myself and pace around and around. I played the message again. Michael? His daughter didn't even know I was named after him!

I called my mother, frantic and out of breath, no longer safe in my isolation. Should I call him? I asked. She said I should. But when? Now? Tomorrow? Maybe I should wait until the weekend. I'd have settled down by then. Call him now, she said. I forced myself downstairs, stared at the phone, played the message again and wrote down the phone number, my nervous hand shaking, my heart hiccuping. I dialed the wrong number. The false start drained off some of my anxiety. I dialed again, whispering each number to myself.

It was one of the most surreal conversations I've ever had, cordial, pleasant, without rancor or pain. I found myself asking questions, giving answers, all the while thinking: This is too weird. I was talking to my father. My father? The word felt empty on my tongue, foreign, devoid of any emotional resonance.

I was relieved to learn he hadn't completely abandoned us. Part of his pay went to child support. He was retired from 20 years at Reynolds Aluminum. He has a grandson named Deon.

"I'd really like to see you," he kept saying.

I held back. Just because the door was open didn't mean I had to enter. I'm a busy man, I said. There's this and that going on. I stalled.

He said he would call again. I didn't believe him. He'd passed through my life once before, come to our home after my mother's second divorce, then disappeared. Why should this time be any different?

I was a child then. This time I was a man, unsettled by childhood yearnings, memories, the faint, dim remembrance of a father who brought his two little boys a firetruck and cars you could crash into walls and put back together.

This time there was a chance to get answers to questions never asked: Where did you come from? Where did you go? Did you ever think about me? A chance to see his face. I could lay it all to rest, but not really. One door only leads to another.

I stepped through the open door.

'We have found each other'

My letter began: "So, we have found each other." I sent along a photo of him holding me a lifetime ago in a Los Angeles forever lost. He responded with photos of his own, group shots of him and his current wife, his friends, his family. I knew him on sight.

The coming reunion consumed my thoughts. My wife, friends and co-workers became sounding boards. What should I do? They answered as if with one voice: You must go. And so I went to the San Fernando Valley.

I went with trepidation, hesitation, apprehension, fear, curiosity. Go, and be done with it, I told myself. On the day I was to meet him, an old friend from graduate school, sensing my anxiety, looked me dead in the eye and said:

"Fear is the one thing we have to overcome."

And it is true. Fear kept me from seeking him out, fear of rejection. Fear and an unwillingness to disturb the peace. Yet, now, what was there to fear? My mother, brothers and sister were going with me. I would not be alone. But the joke was on me. They weren't going this night, perhaps later, the Sunday picnic, but they would not be with me on this first meeting.

I was thrown off-balance again, became as nervous as a schoolboy on his first date. I dilly-dallied around the house, straightened dishes, checked my shave, my hair, the drape of my shirt.

With nothing else to do, I forced myself out into the dusk, stopped to buy film and saw a man walking through the parking lot. His T-shirt read: "A father is . . . " The rest was obscured. In a visit rife with symbolism, this last was too much. I felt I'd been handed some sort of cosmic fill-in-the-blanks quiz. "A father is . . . "

I arrived fashionably late, gave my full name: Mickie Dion Thompson. He wasn't there. I waited, made small talk with strangers to whom I was connected in the most primal way: blood, a shared lineage. I kept having to remind myself that this was all real. These people were family, my family. When he pulled up, I turned away. I wanted a better meeting, not an idle wave as he passed by, a bag of ice in his arms. I'd come too far -- 3,000 miles -- waited too long. I wanted something dramatic. I studied my drink, bided my time. Seconds dragged by. Then a newfound uncle called out: "Mickie, I've got a surprise for you."

I was out of my seat in an instant, spirit dancing, surrendering to the moment. We embraced, and the physical connection was made. I tried not to stare at him, having been raised to know staring was not polite. Yet, I could not help myself. Had torture been the price of looking, I would have suffered it. I kept shaking my head, laughing softly, saying: I never thought this day would come.

Yes, he had often thought about me, but life and another family got in the way. And there was fear. As I had often wondered if he would slam the door in my face, so too did he fear I would do the same. We laughed about that. The door could have been opened years ago, had we the strength and courage to do so.

I left with questions answered. He was from Monroe, La., but found Jim Crow intolerable. He joined the army and went to Europe, re-enlisted and was sent to the Korean War.

I lost one of my most cherished fictions that night. I've always been called Dion at home, never Mickie. That name was for the world outside. From college on I told friends this was because my mother didn't want to invoke the absent father's name each time she called his child. I was wrong. I've always been Dion.

I don't know why I made up the story. Perhaps out of a need to define myself, and to exhibit the wound I carried. The revelation left me oddly relieved. It gave me one less thing to hold against him.

Our parting came too soon. We lingered by his car, while his teen-aged granddaughter sat inside, fuming, waiting. She wanted to go. This meeting between her grandfather and a man she didn't know meant nothing to her. For us, it was a priceless gift, a chance to find each other, to build with words and bits of time a bridge across the years. Why stop because some girl wanted to go home? But she could not be ignored. Finally, reluctantly, he got in the car. We agreed the past could not be recaptured. Those years are gone. There is only today, and maybe tomorrow.

"The next 30 years won't be like the last 30 years," he said. "We'll be in touch."

I waved goodbye and drove home, satisfied. The night had gone better than I'd expected. I had a face to put with the name, a biographical outline to pass on, and a door I could walk through without fear. But the year of reconciliation was nowhere near its end. I still had to meet my stepfather.

Still the villain

Two months ago my grandmother, his mother, told me he was coming to Baltimore to exhibit his sculptures and clay masks. She gave me the dates, a number where he could be reached. I did nothing. This time I wasn't curious. I could have done without this meeting. Fred Wilson was still the villain.

Not so 31 years ago when, on a beautiful late summer day, he and my mother, two artistic souls, married in a ceremony held on the Mojave Desert with the sun going down and the purple sage in bloom. The "new daddy" had arrived.

Five years later he was out the door. It was 1968, a year of assassinations, fierce riots at home, bloody jungle battles in Vietnam. Yet all seemed well with us. After years of wandering -- I spent parts of fourth and fifth grade in three different schools -- we'd come to rest in a four-bedroom rancher deep in the suburbs of the sprawling western San Fernando Valley. Cantara Elementary's black population doubled when my brother and I enrolled.

By now, our family had grown by three kids, ages 4, 3 and 1, fathered by Fred. All of us, save for him, had gone by train on a summer vacation to my mother's homeland in Texas. He picked us up in a new station wagon, brought us home to a new dinette set. My child's mind, addled as it was by too much television and a world of white, middle-class friends, saw in this the stamp of success. We had things. We were just like white folks.

That first night back my mother stopped me in the hallway and said: "He's going to leave."

I didn't believe her. But she has a sixth sense about such things. And she was right. He was gone by October. Soon after, the dining set was gone, marshals were at the door talking eviction, and we were on welfare. I was dumbfounded, confused, powerless to stop the upheaval. My perfect world of things disappeared. During the holidays, I put a can of wax beans in the school's donation box for needy families, only to have those beans, like bread tossed upon the waters, return to my front door.

We did not leave the valley. We stayed right there in that house, sheltered, inspired, prodded, nurtured by a demanding woman who would not let us fail. At times I wanted to wallow in my fatherlessness, our near poverty. It set me apart. My mother did not have time for such childishness. "Sing Me No Sad Song," is the poem she wrote to me.

"You say that your daddy left your mama, huh? What's that got to do with you? You were a complete idea before first you breathed on planet Earth. You say you were on welfare. Yeah, well, so what? So is the president . . . I say: If you don't make something out of your life, it's because you didn't want to be nothing . . . If you don't want to pay the price, then you can eat red beans and rice. But remember, sing me no sad song."

I sought out Fred once, rode my bike across the valley to his studio. I guess I wanted to see for myself that he was still alive, living just a few miles away. He was there when I arrived, working, tending his kiln. I groped for words, a clear and precise language to explain why I had come, searched for a spark of kinship. Finding none, I left knowing only that what was broken would not be put back together.

Years later, while in college, I went on a disastrous trip to show him his children, those three babies he'd left behind. It was an emotional horror show in which I stood in silent rage, listening to my baby brother screaming as his father tried to cut his hair. I wanted to yell: How dare you do anything to him? You don't even know him! But I held my voice, and closed my heart.

Stunning encounter

That's where I left it until his phone call last month. I put on my emotional armor and went to meet him, determined to let him know I still held a grudge.

"Hi," I said, my voice flat, the child inside me brandishing sword and shield.

I stuck out my hand, as if meeting a stranger, or a professional acquaintance. He did not take my hand. He hugged me. It came without warning, a psychological jujitsu move. I felt like a wrestler who steps into the ring prepared to grapple his opponent but instead finds himself, in an instant, flat on his back, woozy, wondering: How did that happen? Or like one of those National Guardsmen from the 1960s and early 1970s ordered to stare down students who do not charge, but drop roses and carnations down the barrel of his M-16.

I surrendered quickly, put away my armor and sat down to dinner. Our conversation was revealing, yet unsatisfying. He accepted no responsibility for the long-ago cataclysm, and I did XTC not push him. To what end? I wondered. It was a lifetime ago. I let him ramble, accepted his gift, a beautiful clay sculpture of a polar bear, said the appropriate words when he showed me pictures of his kids -- two boys and a girl -- white children from his wife's previous marriage. There was genuine affection in his voice. He had become comfortable with fatherhood. He was going back to watch one of them play in a baseball game.

This I grudgingly accepted. I'd learned my mother's lesson. Sing no sad song about a father who left you, who was not there to cheer you, your brothers, your sister, but who now hurries home to whisper encouragement. Sing me no sad song about what was done. Move on.

A cooling anger

I seemed outwardly calm, knowing soon he'd be gone. Yet, I could not stop talking about this meeting with my stepfather. Had I been too easy on him, too willing to let go of the anger I'd held close since I was 12?

And why, when he mentioned that he and his wife needed a place to stay in town, had I stood by, struck dumb, a spectator being swept along as my wife offered him room and board in my home? He was going to spend two nights under my roof! The symbolism was not lost on me. God, how I wanted to rescind my wife's offer. And I would have, had this meeting occurred years ago. But the old anger had cooled. Anger, like love, is a fire that needs to be stoked, tended, kept burning. I had not done that, and now it seemed petty, childish, to dredge up the old hurts, to call him and say: "My wife was mistaken. There is no room for you here."

A friend from China gave me some insight into what had happened: "When you are young," she said, "it is easy to hate. But when you get older, sometimes you want to find balance. The hate is like a block of ice that melts, and it becomes water, never to become frozen again."

I was nowhere near being balanced. I thrashed in my sleep, arms flailing as I wrestled old, old demons buried deep down where only my subconscious mind could find them.

I kept my distance. It was enough to have achieved this emotional detente. I studied him, heard a brother's voice in his, saw my grandmother's gestures in his.

He kept calling me "Mickie," as if signaling our estrangement. The sound scraped against my ear. He had never called me that. Yet now he addressed me as those who do not know me. I told him to call me Dion, used my credit card to hold a rental car he later paid for. Riding back from the airport, we approached a light on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It had just changed yellow. I knew we could make it. He slowed, stopped as the light turned red.

"We could have made that light," I said.

He nodded. "Yes, but when you're 60 years old, you don't take any chances."

It was another revelation, a sudden realization of how much time had passed, how long I'd been carrying the burden of bitterness. let it go. The 12-year-old boy inside me understood.

Open doors

Fred was not the bogeyman, only a man, flawed in his own ways. Yes, he had hurt me, left a mother and five children to pursue his dreams. But through him, because of him, I experienced the best times of my boyhood -- shadow movies by firelight; fascinating artists who talked deep into the night, welcomed me and pulled quarters out of my ear; life in a rural black village on the edge of Los Angeles County. Those excellent memories do not exist without him. That, too, I have come to accept.

I rose early the morning he left, saw him off, calmly embraced him, congratulated myself for putting aside the pain long enough to close the ancient wound.

Having met my two fathers, my soul debates what to do now. The final accounting still eludes me. Both have left the door open. There is still some baggage, but the weight is lighter. I do not forget, but I do forgive.

I hope to become a father and pray I can take the best of what these men gave me, improve upon it and, most important, do my damnedest to stick around. If I succeed, I just might be able to complete the sentence I saw on that T-shirt last summer in the San Fernando Valley: "A father is . . . "

=1 Perhaps, one day, I'll find the words I need.