We Are All Human Beings

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple.

To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences.

Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

—BKJ

Excerpt from We Are All Human Beings

By Paul Kimball

For about a week I called the two numbers. As I recall, the New York number had a strange answering machine message. The L.A. number would just ring without any response. Try to imagine what this feels like. If she answers, I am going to speak with my birth mother for the first time. Perhaps this isn’t her, just a coincidence. I don’t know what to expect. I am so frightened. Once she answers there is no turning back. Both of our lives are changed in an instant. She has no idea that I am trying to contact her. I planned out my opening remarks carefully.

And then she answered.

It was the L.A. number. The one that kept ringing. This is how I remember the phone call. Luckily, I wrote this in my journal back in 2000.

Birthmother Wendy: “Hello.”

Me: “Hello. My name is Paul Kimball and I am with musicians local 189 in Stockton, California. I am looking for a professional cellist named Wendy Brennan.” With this information, she could hang up on me but always be able to find me.

Wendy: This is she. Later she told me that she thought that she was being asked to play chamber music.

Pause, pause, pause.

Me: “I don’t quite know how to say this but does the name Frank Novak mean anything to you?”

Pause.

Wendy: “It might.” It might? Does this mean that she knows who I am?

I don’t remember the next exchange.

Wendy: “Are you of Armenian descent?” She knows who I am, and I know who she is. No one but my birth mother would ask that question out of the blue.

Me: “Yes I am half Armenian.”

Wendy: “Oh my God. Where were you born?”

Me: “In Fort Bragg California, November of 1962. I think we both know who we are.”

We talked on the phone for three hours.

It was so friendly. I was ecstatic! I have never felt so complete in my entire life. A hole had been filled. I had a new friend. If that is how you describe being reunited! We were both classical musicians. We both played in orchestras. We were both nice and friendly. I had a birth sister who did not know of me. I was married with two daughters. She had performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as a soloist to good reviews. She had lived with Nadia Boulanger, the esteemed teacher of composers and studied cello with Paul Tortelier, the great cellist. She had been in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski and played in Broadway Pit Orchestras. I conduct orchestra pits for musicals. She had a New York accent. She split her time between L.A. and New York. I loved this woman. “The capacity for love had expanded.” She had a 31-year-old daughter who attended Juilliard as a child flute player and was involved as an actress in T.V., movies, and commercials. I act in plays and was even in a dopey local T.V. commercial in Stockton that aired constantly. People still talk about it on occasion.

We decided to meet as soon as possible. We had thought of a halfway point, but I wanted to drive down to her apartment in L.A.

I was teaching elementary music at T.C.K. at the time. I updated my fellow teachers on the story. I will always love them for their compassion.

The night before I left, I visited my adopted parents, Lorna and Bob. I held their hands and told them that I loved them. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to do this. They assured me that it was okay. Mom said that she didn’t feel threatened. From my journal in 2000. “I love them so much! They are my best friends. I tell them everything. I never want to lose them, and I get scared I might. I also don’t want to lose Wendy and Raya (birth sister). Both families are very important to me as are the Mullers (In-laws). I need all of them. I love Jeanette, Seth and Amy. I love Dominee, Alyssa and Ashley. These are my family members and I love them.”

It was time to drive to L.A. That week I had been only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. The evening before the drive I went to bed at 11:45 p.m. and woke up at 3:30 a.m. I copied down my story of Scream as well as a tribute to Jacqueline Du Pre that I had put in my journal in 1987. This was 13 years before meeting Wendy. When I wrote this, Jacqueline Du Pre had just passed away. I had no clue that my birth mother was a cellist.

The following was written 32 years earlier.

Reflections on Jacqueline Du Pre – October 23^rd, 1987

Jackie died on October 19^th of the ill fated disease, Multiple Sclerosis. She was 43, I believe. She has been and probably always will be my favorite musician, the one that I listen to more than anyone else. I consider her one of my teachers even though we never met.

I first heard of her when some fellow Berkeley High students were talking. They had seen and heard Schubert’s Trout Quintet on PBS. Jacky, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta were the players! Later when Rebecca (Strauss) and I were in the Berkeley Public Library we came across a Du Pre record and Becca said: “Paul. Check this out. I’ve never heard the record but you will love Du Pre.” When we listened to it I felt almost sick with emotion. I was struck by the absolute sincerity of her playing. She expressed so much that there was simply no way to miss it. Her tone is golden. It is her pure soul with nothing to disturb it. Every time I hear her, I am inspired, embarrassed by my own inhibitions in music, bewildered, determined, determined to not miss the wonders of life as I pass through it. Her second recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is one of the greatest musical accomplishments. In some of my most emotional moments I have often felt them by reliving her performance of this piece. The opening theme after the great introduction represents so much painful longing. It reaches into space, searching, searching for something. To me it is so lonely. Perhaps I relate this to the loneliness I felt in college. I often remember going for long walks and thinking about this theme with her yearning tone and feeling sad, yet expressing the sadness, not just holding it in. Lorna would be proud!

In my own playing I hear her traits. Trying to achieve a personal tone, letting the wonderful stresses in phrases come alive, but most of all, trying to be absolutely free and deeply sincere in expression.

Thank you Jackie. I love you and am grateful for your greatness. May you rest in peace having lived a difficult but important life.

Little did I know that in a way, I was paying tribute to my lost birth mother; my original musician, cellist. I felt sick with emotion listening to Jacqueline Du Pre but didn’t know the full reason. How could I? I was remembering Wendy’s playing from before I was born.

Paul Kimball is an active musician, choir teacher, French hornist, and actor in Stockton, California. As a baby, he lived in foster care and was eventually adopted by a liberal Berkeley family in the 1960s. He is married to Dr. Dominee Muller-Kimball. They have two daughters, Ashley and Alyssa. Look for his book here. 

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