Look at this, TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Ryan W. Bradley, and no, he's still not Ryan Reynolds, has a new piece, "All Things Infinite," from his Alaska series up at the Potomac Review, that is all fathers and sons and goodness and sadness and ultimately quite righteous and sure to change your lives just like yours. Now, how about some excerpt? Cool."I drive four hours in my old man’s pick-up, his pine coffin rattling in the bed.
I stopped by his place outside of Palmer, now my place, and picked up his boat. It’s a two-person dinghy named “Greenberg” after his favorite ballplayer, whose Hall of Fame induction was the first clipping in my dad’s scrapbook. The book ranged from articles about baseball to pictures of halibut caught in Homer or Seward. There was never a night as a kid I didn’t see him lug that thing out and set it on the dining room table to do some cutting and pasting.
He built the boat when I was in high school. I had stopped showing interest in fishing, hunting, and every other father-son activity he came up with on his R&R’s. But that didn’t stop him from spending two whole trips home sawing, sanding, pounding nails. “How about a trip?” he’d said when the paint dried. I told him I had homework and he suggested the weekend. “Don’t have to head back to the slope until Monday.”
I grunted and left the room. He was always trying to fill those two weeks of being home, but I was too busy being upset about the eight weeks he was away."
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