Son of Dick

Son of Dick?

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         One day when Sam Adams was on home leave from his job in the Foreign Service, he was hanging out at home in Berkeley with his 80-year-old mother who was suffering from dementia. It was one of his last coherent conversations with her, as she was soon lost to the world, and died three years later after living in a nursing home. He and his brother and sisters had to find a place for her. Sam had gone home for that unpleasant duty.

         As often happened, they ended up talking about books, as he had inherited her love of reading. She read two to three books a week but had recently been reluctantly slowly giving up on reading. A sign of coming dementia that took her mind and eventually her body.

         He mentioned that he was reading a Philip K Dick book. She smiled and said

         “You know I was with him before I was with your father?”

         “Really?”

         “Yeah, I read many of his draft stories. I quit seeing him when I met your father because, well, he was way out there – totally crazy but not in a good way. And well, your father and I had a problem after your brother was born, and I was briefly bad with Philip. I never told this to you or your father, but perhaps Philip was your real father.

indent}And your father looked the other way, he knew about the affair and forgave me. When you were born he decided that he would raise you as his son because well it would be difficult to prove that you were not his child.

         I never told Philip about the possibility that you were his son because well things could have gotten ugly and we were in any event through as a couple. Your father never liked him, thought he was a radical leftist communist sympathizer.”

         Based loosely on a true story. My mother did date the writer Philip K Dick before she met my father. The secret confession is fictional. As far as I know, the affair ended when she met my father.


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Write a STORY or POEM about a secret exposed during a family reunion. It can be a good secret ... or a dark one.