I have two brothers – Clifford and Clayton. Clayton still lives in Kenosha, the last I heard, but we don’t keep in touch. Clifford however, I have no clue about. When our father passed away in 2008, the attorney for his estate use a Private Investigator to try to find Clifford, but was unsuccessful. The last time we saw or heard from him when our mother’s funeral in March of 1992.

Clifford had a lot of issues with not paying child support after divorcing his wife Kyle, and his son Jayson has no interest in looking for or re-connecting with him at all at this point.

Jayson and I keep in touch well and he turned out to be a great kid, and an excellent father and husband. He and his mother Kyle live in Arizona just outside of Phoenix and are doing well. It’s quite the trip from Kenosha, but I’ve managed to make it out there a few times over the years for vacations, and always have a good time visiting and seeing the sights.

So at this point, after more than 10 years since the Private Investigator couldn’t find him, I am giving up hope myself and moving on. I have kept a couple “Google Alerts” setup since right after my dad passed away– one with the keywords “Clifford Trottier” and one with just “Trottier”. This results in a daily summary e-mail from Google which contains anything new it finds on the web containing those keywords. I figured if Clifford showed up in any newspaper articles or any web posting, I might have a chance of finding him. But in ten years I’ve seen nothing. Sure, I’ve gotten results, but only on the “Trottier” keyword. I am now well aware of Trottier Middle School in Southborough, Massachusetts and pretty much everything that’s going on there, as well as all of the Canadians in the news up there, especially the famous hockey player, but I am growing weary of shuffling through these e-mails daily hoping to find an inkling of news about Clifford.

I deleted the alerts this morning. I certainly hold no ill will toward Clifford, and hope that he is alive and doing well wherever he may be, but at this point I assume we may never know. (If anyone’s interested though, Google Alerts are pretty simple to setup and manage, just go here.)

Oh wow… as I am typing this post I have a slideshow of our photos going on my phone in front of me on my desk as I always do, and an old photo of Clifford just appeared with him from his Graduation in 1974 – white shirt, and a big smile on his face. A sign or just the luck of the draw? Out of the 50,000 or so photos it goes through, with him in about 75 of those, what are the odds? Seriously. How do I calculate those odds? I don’t know how.

Wait, re-edit. I think I got it: (75 / 50000) x 100 is the calculation, I think, for percentage of odds. So there’s a 0.15% chance of Clifford appearing in the slideshow at any given time. But there’s probably much less of a chance than that of him actually show up anywhere again.