Is This My Dad?

I've known my Dad my whole life, and yet just this evening, I may have discovered a new part of him that I always expected was there but which I never had hard evidence of. Every picture I own of my dad has him as a soldier or a lawyer - a man in a uniform of one kind or another. This is as much my fault as anyone else's - all those casual moments when I never had a camera are overshadowed by the "official" pics of anyone's life - graduations, weddings, formal shots of one kind or another. Tonight I found this picture, sent by a total stranger, and sent it off to both my father (who rarely checks his email) and my godfather (who checks his as often as any San Franciscan and has a better memory anyway.)

Is this my dad? I asked my godfather. And he replied:

I would say yes and probably on the way back from Korea.... The more I look and think, it's him. That's the Bob I remember. Ready to fuck, fight or run a foot race.

Here, more or less, is the story of this possible discovery of my father as a young man, after the war, before college, before law school, before marriage and children and responsibility and a Lexus and a beautiful house in the 'burbs of D.C. A fucking role model I could be really proud of - both in this moment, and in what was to come.

03/13/06, 10:45pm

Bogie:

There's a guy on the Internet who is the postmaster general of New Brunswick in Nova Scotia whose life's work is to fill out the Pleshaw family tree. He got in touch with me a few years ago, (I being the only Pleshaw on the Internet at the time) and began feeding me all these documents. The Pleshaws, it seems, first landed in the New World in the 1700s in Nova Scotia, and while a few made their way down to the States (notably, Halifax and Framington, Mass., where my step-grandfather is from) most still remain up north in the Big Cold.

He sent this picture to me a year ago, and for some reason (probably a lot of spam in my inbox) I didn't open the mail. (Subject header: IS THIS YOUR DAD? probably seeming too ludicrous to bother with. ;-) The name of this man is Greg Brown, and at one point I remarked to him the irony that while he was researching a bloodline of his family tree via the Pleshaw name, Pleshaw is not a bloodline relation to me - but Brown is, as it is my mother's maiden name.

In any case - while I was in Mexico, I made a new friend - named Greg Brown - from Canada. I had forgotten about the other Greg Brown (the postmaster) but my new friend wrote a note to my mother looking for my email address, and remarked to my mom, "Hey, maybe we're related, hahaha" and then it all came back to me. I did a search in my inbox and found addresses for the old Greg Brown, the new Greg Brown - and this unopened message with this photograph that looked eerily like my Dad (though I also thought he looked a bit like Frank Sinatra and that this was where I was forming a sense of recognition.)

The old Greg Brown (I wrote to him earlier tonight) said he probably found the image on the Internet, but I can't imagine where. I did a google image search for Robert Pleshaw and found nothing. If this is my Robert Pleshaw, I'd certainly love to find the original, blow it up, and stick it on the wall of my apartment, for it is certainly the most festive picture of Bob Pleshaw I have ever seen.

Just for the fun of it, I have cc'd this message to the following people: the original Greg Brown, Geraldine Lynch-Brown (my mother), Robert Pleshaw (my dad), Patrick Pleshaw (my brother), Brenna McCarthy (my cousin on my stepmother's side) and the new Greg Brown, also of Canada and *maybe* related to some of us. I've enclosed the photo so we can all have a look. The original recipient of this message is Robert Bogiages, my godfather and my dad's best childhood friend.

Enjoy the excitement of possibility...

cheers
gregoryp(tm)