Part of my Not Playwrighting series…
What I know: My father was abandoned as a child.
What I believe: He was emotionally stunted because he was abandoned as a child.
What I know: Starting at the age of six, my grandmother sent my father to live with family and friends of the family, many of them unkind and interested in child labor.
What I believe: She shipped him off because my dad looked like his father (she kept my Aunt Iris with her.)
What I know: My father was three years old — I think — when his father left. I'll verify this with my brothers. He saw his father once more, at a train station, when he was ten.
What I believe: (Simplified version) Because his father left when he was so young, whenever a man would befriend my father later in life, he never questioned their friendship. He was desperate for their companionship.
What I believe: People smell desperation. Healthy people are repelled by it and parasites are drawn toward it.
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