Since arriving at the high school where he teaches aerospace and military leadership, Greg can’t stop checking the clock.
Throughout homeroom and morning classes, he can’t focus. By lunch, he has little appetite. The butterflies in his stomach beat their wings furiously. By the afternoon, he wonders if any of his students might sense that he has something important on his mind.
At 2:45, he dismisses his last class and double-times it down the hall and out to his pickup truck. He races home and, after a quick hello to his wife, drops his things and takes up position behind the screen door, clutching his phone. Greg wants a clear view of any approaching vehicles.
His nerves on edge, he thinks about having leaked what’s going on to his boss at school. When his boss asked, “Holy cow, this is all happening?,” Greg responded, “Yes. Trust me, we need to go have a beer.”
Blaise is nervous too.
That morning, he flew from San Francisco to Seattle and rented a car, and he is now barreling toward Greg’s home in Yakima, Washington. A year and a half earlier, Blaise had been the first person in his immediate family that Greg contacted, and since then, the others have met him—in person. Blaise will be the last.
He pushes through Snoqualmie Pass and the Cascade Range, well over the speed limit, with only one thing on his mind: meeting Greg.
Blaise is making such good time that he pulls over at a TacoTime fast-food joint to slow the clock. As he gets closer, it happens again: He’s early. He stops at a Starbucks. He doesn’t want to get to Greg’s before Greg does.
It is March of this year, and Greg and Blaise are about to see each other for the first time. One man is waiting behind a screen door; the other is watching the clock from the road.
For Greg, this moment represents the final piece of a lifelong puzzle. He’s a few months shy of 60. He’d grown up, enjoyed a distinguished career in the military, gotten married, become a teacher, and raised three children—almost six decades of living without knowing who his father was, or if he had any paternal relatives at all.
The not knowing was confusing, maddening, and painful. Greg learned to compartmentalize it, to bury it deep, to internalize it. To put it in a little box and just shove it aside as he lived his life.
And yet, the longing never left.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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WHAT’S IN A NAME: Meet Greg Smith
I was born in 1966, at a hospital in Valhalla, New York, to Barbara Bynum, who was not married at the time. She was living in White Plains and listed her close friend Dewitt R. Smith as the father on my birth certificate. When I was a toddler, Mom married Peter Reid, but they divorced about a year later.
After becoming a nurse, Mom joined me in Franklin, Virginia, where I had been cared for by an aunt and uncle while she completed her degree in New York. I grew up surrounded by loving relatives and with a special bond—a single child to a single mom. I was, however, keenly aware that my complexion was lighter than my relatives’. In family pictures, I was the flashlight. It was like the lyric from that Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong.” Not that I didn’t belong, but there was something unique about me.
During my early years, I assumed that Peter Reid, who was briefly my stepfather, was my biological father. When I was young—I don’t remember how—I learned that was untrue. Clouding things further was my last name: Smith, different from my mom’s. I would ask my aunts and uncles if they knew who my real father was, but they’d never give me a straight answer. I remember overhearing one of my uncles get upset with my mom and demand that she stop telling me lies about who my dad was.
Things came to a head when it was time for me to enroll in high school. My mom would give me reasons why my last name was different and why a man with the name Smith was on my birth certificate. She told me it was to protect me, that there was a stigma to being born without a father.
I had grown tired of offering excuses and making up lies and sidestepping questions about our different last names. I desperately wanted a clean start to ninth grade. So, with my mom’s approval, I legally changed my last name to Bynum. I was 13 and made a decision: I’d move on about not having a father, and that is what it is.
“WAIT, WAIT. WHO’s ASKING?”: BLAISE GETS A NOTIFICATION
At the beginning of my journalism career, I wrote for newspapers and magazines in Virginia and Texas, before coming to California. While working at Wired, I attended a TED conference and received a free kit from 23andMe, the DNA health and ancestry site. During the 20 years since, I’ve frequently received notifications about so-called DNA relatives. Initially, I’d read them and learn about some fourth or fifth cousins. During the past decade, I’ve almost always deleted the messages without opening them. For some reason, I didn’t do that on November 19, 2024. Likely because I was bored, waiting for a flight at the airport, so I clicked on an unopened email from the day before.
My first thought was, Whoa, a half brother? Is this a scam?
So I looked Greg up on LinkedIn. And I thought, Wait a minute, this guy looks Black, and my family is like the Osmonds.
I called my wife, who agreed that it had to be a scam. I quickly researched the accuracy of 23andMe. Apparently, it’s almost never wrong. My mind, naturally, was reeling.
Next, I texted my siblings—two sisters and two brothers—as well as a cousin who is the family’s de facto genealogist. Everyone was shocked. My siblings and I had moved our parents into an assisted living facility only two weeks earlier. My mother had a full-blown case of Alzheimer’s, and my father was suffering from cognitive decline. We had marveled, as a family, at their love for each other and their great marriage: 60 years and counting.
I messaged Greg on LinkedIn, and we set up a phone call for the next day. Greg made clear that he didn’t want to upset anyone. He’d be happy just to shake his father’s hand and look him in the eye. We texted each other family photos, and it was undeniable. There’s a father-son resemblance between Greg and my dad: same eyebrows and nose, similar height and build. Both are lefties but play golf as righties, both were in the military, both are (or were) schoolteachers, and both love literature and talking about books.
The next call—well, that was going to be interesting: my father.
I say, “Dad, does the name Barbara Bynum mean anything to you?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” he goes. “Barbara’s great. Yeah, I know Barbara. Wait, wait. Who’s asking?”
COVID REVELATIONS: “DEAR GREGORY…”
I have always had a sense of adventure and loved to travel. However, it was listening to the ol’-timers at the local barbershop tell their stories of war, serving overseas, and camaraderie with their fellow soldiers that piqued my interest in joining the military. After high school, I served in the U.S. Air Force for 14 years, attaining the rank of a noncommissioned officer. It’s where I met my wife, Sue. Questions about my name change and my father’s identity would come up when I was being reviewed for a top-secret security clearance.
In 2001, I was working for Harley-Davidson in Kennewick, Washington. Prompted by the 9/11 attacks, I joined the Oregon National Guard, where I enjoyed a great career before finally retiring after a combined 27 years of military service. I then became a high school teacher and settled in Washington State with Sue and our three children. The kids would sometimes ask me about their paternal grandfather.
When my former stepfather passed away, my mom mailed me a copy of his obituary. I knew he wasn’t my father, but I couldn’t resist skipping to the “survived by” portion—alas, no listing of my name.
In 2020, when the pandemic struck, I was in Washington, and Mom, who was in her late 70s, was living in North Carolina. As the months wore on and the death toll surged, her fears of mortality grew, and she wrote me a letter.
Dear Gregory,
I have been praying and asking God to let me be honest with you concerning your father.
I learned that my father was a white man, “Guy Dennis,” who had sold her insurance and with whom she had a short-lived, memorable affair. He was married, with two kids at the time, she said, so she knew there wasn’t a future for them.
I never experienced anything like that before or years after.
When I received the letter, I called Mom to tell her I wasn’t angry—that I loved her and always would. It is, I thought, what it is, just like I thought when I was 13.
Mom revealed that “Guy Dennis” wasn’t the full name of my father. She claimed she couldn’t remember his last name, but that it might start with “Z.” I sensed she was obfuscating but didn’t press her.
After the pandemic eased, I occasionally searched online for any Guy Dennis who had lived in White Plains, New York, in the mid-1960s; I also looked for Dewitt Smith. I came up empty.
In the fall of 2024, I was at a family funeral when an aunt suggested to me that my dad was Charlie, a deceased uncle who had married into the family. Charlie’s daughter agreed that there was a strong resemblance between us, so we did a blood test.
The results were negative, which was emotional for me; a part of me had hoped, in a way, to wrap this up.
My wife suggested 23andMe, which I had resisted trying, as the suspicious part of my brain was very leery of sharing my DNA with anyone, especially a company. But I hoped that just maybe I would be able to put this situation to bed. Yes, I did just refer to my history as a situation. Call it a defense mechanism. So, I spat in a tube and mailed in my sample, which kicked off a roller-coaster ride: I kept checking the site, obsessed, every day, just looking, looking, looking.
A week or so after my profile became active, I received a message about my DNA results. I saw the initials “B.Z.” sitting there, and it said, “You have a half-brother.” And I’m pretty nervous, I’m not going to lie.
THE BROTHER HE NEVER KNEW: BLAISE’s RECKONING
My father, in major cognitive decline, is not the most reliable narrator. I told him over the phone that I’d received a message online from someone named Greg who is looking for people who may have known his mom when she lived in White Plains. Dad says to me, “Well, how would I know Barbara? I’m not sure if I know her.” Maybe he’s covering up about her. Is it his dementia? I hung up the phone not convinced of anything, quite frankly. All I could think was, Wow, this is crazy.
All of my siblings wanted to talk to Greg: his new half sisters, who live in Westchester County, and his other new half brothers, one in Connecticut and one in Rhode Island. Eventually, our dad was open with all of us about Barbara and Greg. I urged Greg that, if he wished for any meaningful time with our dad, time was of the essence to go see him.
As for us siblings—we had a broad range of emotions. We convened a Zoom call to air out our feelings. We also had to consider our own children. We coordinated the careful delivery of the news that they had a new uncle and cousins. While there was nothing but sympathy for Greg, and a desire to embrace him, initially there was anger and disappointment, as well as an array of conflicting feelings, toward our father.
Anger that he had violated his wedding vows. That he had cheated on our mother around the time that she was giving birth to me—Greg is just eight months younger than I am. That he had risked breaking up his young family. What other secrets might he be keeping? Was our mother aware of his affair? Of Greg? Given her Alzheimer’s and Dad’s memory issues, we would never know.
And how do you wrap your head around an affair that’s 60 years old? You can’t. My dad and mom were young—early 20s—and if she knew, it’s their business. Same for my dad and Barbara: It’s their business. It’s not my place to forgive or forget.
Our resentment was accompanied by a profound sense of sadness. While Barbara may have wanted to protect our dad and his family, surely our father had an obligation to Greg. But we gathered from Barbara’s letter to Greg that, given the circumstances, they had done their best. They had broken it off before she learned she was pregnant; she phoned him to let him know before Greg was born. We were not surprised to read that, after Greg’s birth, Dad visited her several times, met their baby, and loved him. But when Barbara married Peter Reid, who was Black, perhaps she and Dad thought it was best to go their separate ways. Then they simply lost touch. This was, after all, a time before the internet, social media, and DNA testing.
It was also an era of racial restrictions and social taboos. Greg was an infant in 1966 in White Plains, where race relations were better than in other parts of the country. Consider that Virginia, where Barbara was from and where she later raised Greg, enforced a law prohibiting interracial marriage until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1967. A Black woman with a white man likely raised eyebrows anywhere they went.
Even recognizing these circumstances, as much as I love my dad, I was unable to let go of my feelings of hurt and sympathy for what Greg went through. I couldn’t imagine growing up without knowing who my father was. At the same time, I was grappling with the notion that I might not know him as well as I thought I did.
I am confident that Dad thought of Greg often. Call me vengeful, maybe, but I hope that tore him up: That’s what you get. You should have listened to those thoughts and stepped up and reached out, Dad, and you didn’t. When you’re in that mode, whatever you’ve done—and we’ve all done something—you just start feeling worse and worse, until you fix it. And he never fixed it.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK: GREG TAKES A TRIP
It’s Christmas 2024, about five weeks after I had sent Blaise that first message. Here I am, sitting at the airport in Seattle, having second thoughts. I looked at Sue: “What the heck are we doing?” Because I’ve lived my whole life without knowing, why do I want to open this? Why do I want to bring this into our world right now?
She looked at me and said, “We can get back in the car and go back home, or we can get on the plane.”
I remember telling her, “Man, but they’re so daggone nice. If they weren’t so nice, this would be easy. Nobody’s been a jerk.” So we got on the plane.
The first night in New York, we had dinner with my four half siblings who live on the East Coast; one of my sisters hosted. (Blaise couldn’t make it because of a previous obligation.) I didn’t only meet spouses. I met in-laws and nieces and nephews. Everyone remarks about the strong resemblance I have with one of my nephews; another one is also a lefty; some of my kids, I see, share physical traits with their new cousins. We exchange family pictures. One brother and both sisters are teachers; Blaise has a military background too. All these shared traits that lead straight back to our father.
The next morning, it was time to meet him.
Our father—my father—lives in a private apartment within an assisted living facility, coincidentally in White Plains. His wife, my siblings’ mother, resides in the facility’s memory care unit, on a separate floor. Three of my siblings are already there. Sue and I knocked on his door.
One of my sisters introduced me to my dad. I shake his hand, and we start off with pleasantries: Where am I from, nice to meet you. In some ways, of course, it’s weird. Holy cow, did I see some traits! The eyebrows, the eyes—that’s what solidified it. There were some pleasant surprises. At least I know I’m not going bald. What got me is his sense of humor. And when I looked around his place and I saw the books? I was like, OK, because I love to read. And then we started talking about who’s your favorite author? What’s your favorite thing? And then teaching, and the classroom, and the Marines.
Sue and I spent several days with the new branches of our family tree, including more visits with my father, who got a kick out of the fact that we live in Washington State. He repeated a story several times (a frequent symptom of his memory problems) about two friends who moved there after college. They didn’t know anyone. “What’s out there?” he asked them. Nobody knew. “They went anyway,” he says, “and never returned to the East Coast.” Now, he no longer remembers their names.
It’s great to know where you’re from, to know where some of your traits originate, to be connected to this history and lineage. My poor wife, she jokes with me about having to get used to brothers and sisters, and now she’s like, “I have in-laws. I never had in-laws. Oh, man, this is awesome.”
Last year, I visited again over spring break, to spend more time with my dad. Something else we have in common is our sweet tooth. I picked up some macarons, and he and I killed the box—we just ate them all. We talked more about books and about teaching. I can tell that he would have brought a classroom to life. He would know his students. We have that in common.
The weather was warmer, so my sisters and I drove Dad to Long Island Sound for a walk. It’s one of his favorite places on the planet, I discovered, and he answered my questions about the family and shared tales of his own upbringing.
I don’t know what I was looking for—maybe his voice, or words, or other things that are similar? I never pushed him about my mom, because I didn’t know what the reaction would be.
In November, almost a year after I first reached out to Blaise, both of our mothers passed away. My mom was in a facility in Virginia, and Blaise’s mom was in the White Plains home. They were both in their 80s, and they died within a few days of each other.
ARRIVAL: HUG IT OUT
Greg is looking out the window, wondering, “All right, where’s he at?”
The plan was to meet around 3 p.m., shortly after Greg got home. Because of several wrong turns, instead of being early, Blaise is running 10 minutes late. Nervous as hell, he had sent several texts to adjust his arrival time and at this point is convinced his overcommunication has become annoying.
And then Blaise’s white minivan pulls up.
Greg comes out of the house, toward him. Blaise steps out of the van, and they hug. They stand with their hands on each other’s shoulders, look each other in the eye, and then hug again, tightly. They’re the same height, the same build, they both wear glasses. Even with their different complexions, you’d know they’re brothers.
At the Starbucks on the way here, Blaise had downed a double espresso. He didn’t want to be half asleep when he arrived. He wanted to put on a good show.
For Greg, this is not closure so much as a full-circle moment: the first brother he talked to and, it’s kind of ironic, the last one he gets to meet.
The brothers spend three days together, Blaise sleeping at Greg’s house—Sue insisted, and she is a gracious host. They recognize how nice it is to be in each other’s company and see that their shared history is, truthfully, just beginning. How does one make up for 60 years? How do they reconcile being born eight months apart with the same father?
It’s significant, to Greg, that Blaise was so put out with their dad about Greg’s not knowing him. Greg guesses he has those same feelings sometimes, too, and is mad at his mom now and then: “Seriously, this is how I’m conceived?”
But he reminds himself that his mom was told by doctors that she could never have children. And he thinks, maybe, that’s what his mom and dad believed when they had their affair. In his mom’s letter to him, she called him her “miracle baby” and wrote that he was “made by two people who in our understanding loved each other even though we were in different situations.”
Greg tells Blaise that, before she passed, he told his mom about visiting his father. She was relieved. After her death, Greg found an entry in her journal.
They finally met one another. Thank you, Lord. They met and it was great.
I’m truly happy with this togetherness.
In Greg’s living room, the brothers muse about how well things have turned out. Blaise describes how he often mentions Greg on calls with their father. “His main concern,” Blaise says, “is that you turned out all right. ‘Is he a good man?’ he asks. ‘Is he a good, reliable person?’ ” He assures their father that it is the case, and it brings him joy.•
Master Sergeant Gregory Bynum (Ret.) is a U.S. Army Junior ROTC and STEM aerospace instructor at West Valley High School in Yakima, Washington.
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
