I'm Nick Casey. I'm the Madrid bureau chief at the New York Times.

When I was growing up I didn't really know what a dad was in the sense of other people's

dads because the man that I knew as my father was someone that would come and go.

He was working on cargo ships then. So he was a bit like this kind of magical pirate

who came from the sea showed up for a few days and then was gone again.

His next ship would take him out to Manila or to Australia or to Alaska.

We never knew where.

And then one day he came and after he saw us we never saw him again.

And I wanted some answers. I wanted to know who he was.

I wanted to know anything I could about him. And that was kind of the beginning of this search.

Which lasted a lot of my life to try to find out who he was.

But more importantly like where he was and if he was still alive.

And we realized actually my mother and I we had very little information to go on.

I spent a lot of years trying to find this man. Any scraps of information I could.

Any memories about him.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what it might be like the day that I actually found him.

I wondered whether I would be mad, whether I would be happy.

And then four years ago I finally found him.

And I wrote about it for the magazine just in time for Father's Day.

So here's my story. Finding my father. Read by William DeMarit.

This was recorded by Autumn.

Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.

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