I found the envelope at 3 a.m.

It was wedged into my mailbox at school, a packet the size of a large book. I didn’t normally check my mail after a late night editing The Alligator, the University of Florida student newspaper, but for some reason I made the detour.

I pulled out the envelope and flipped it over. There was my name in my mother’s perfect calligraphy. “Oh my God,” I said out loud. “She actually sent it.”

Inside might be the most I would ever know about my father.

I had been asking about him since elementary school. Back then my mother, single and a second-grade teacher in the Miami-Dade public schools, answered my questions about him in the same way she had announced her pregnancy to her students: The doctors helped me. I wanted a child very much.

It wasn’t until I was 10 that she told me the whole story. At the age of 32, she said, she had gone to the South Florida Institute for Reproductive Medicine. She looked through the list of sperm donors and, after a week, chose a musician. Then, as now, sperm banks had their own specific requirements for donors, but most accepted less than one percent of applicants. There were height minimums — at least 5 feet 10 inches tall for white men — preferences for four-year college degrees and, in some cases, I.Q. requirements.