Hemingway Tradition Read Online Free

you care?
I argued with myself.
    As long as I completed the assignment and got a passing grade, it shouldn’t matter what I wrote. Of course, thinking that and actually believing it weren’t quite the same thing. My father had trained me better than I realized.
    It was kind of ironic how that had worked out. While my dad was alive, I’d wanted to be just like him. But since his death, I was working all the time to prove we were entirely different.
    To anyone besides me, and maybe my mom, that would probably seem really dumb. After all, my dad was a great guy. Everyoneliked him. He was smart, passionate about his work and family, and he loved life.
    At least I always thought he loved life. But according to the note he left, he’d had problems that were too big to handle. Problems I hadn’t known anything about.
    Woooff!
Like a gasoline explosion, the blistering vision of his death began to burn the back of my eyes. I squeezed them shut, trying to extinguish the fire.
    Why wouldn’t that memory leave me alone?
    â€œGo away!” I growled through clenched teeth.
    And then, as if all I’d had to do was ask, the blood-soaked bedroom began to dissolve. It slid down the walls of my mind as if it were being hosed into a storm sewer. I watched with fascination. I felt the tension in my body drain away with the dirty water.
    Gradually I became aware of a gentle rocking. And then the lazy lapping of waves on the hull of a small boat. My body melted deeper into the molded seat of the runaboutand I squinted at the sunlight winking on the water. Dad, wearing the old, threadbare sweater he kept strictly for fishing, was stretched out on the seat across from me with his feet propped on the gunwale. His eyes were closed, and his long, lean body was swaying with the rhythm of the boat. His fishing rod lay across his lap, its line dangling idly in the water, slack and then taut as the current tugged on it. My line was hanging out the other side of the boat. But Dad and I weren’t really fishing. In fact, we hadn’t checked our bait in over an hour. It was enough that we were sharing the morning in that secluded cove.
    After a while Dad sighed, and without opening his eyes, he said, “I wonder if it was times like this that inspired Ernest Hemingway to write
The Old Man and the Sea
. That book was really something. Almost the entire story was set in a tiny boat with just one character — two if you count the fish. Must’ve made dialogue a bit of a challenge.” He opened one eye to see if I was listening.Then satisfied that he had my attention, he shut it again and went on talking. “He was quite the outdoorsman, Hemingway was. Learned to fish in the rivers and lakes of Michigan with his dad.” He opened his eye again and smiled lazily. “Kind of like you and me.”
    I put the memory on pause and stepped back to look at it. It was so real. I felt like I was living that morning all over again. Part of me wished I could drift in the boat with my dad forever. That’s how I wanted to remember him —
alive
and in my life — fishing, skiing, playing golf, pulling practical jokes, sharing books and writers and writing.
    Though he’d had to travel to promote his books, my father had been a homebody at heart. Early morning and late night were when he did his writing. The rest of the day was for living, so that he’d have something to write about — that’s what he used to say. And anyone who ever met him knew he meant it. My dad squeezed as much out of a day as a person possibly could. It wasn’t somuch that he was always on the go; it was just that he savored everything he did. For Dad, morning coffee on the deck was as special as a tropical cruise. And because he got such a kick out of everything, Mom and I did too. You might say his way of looking at life was contagious.
    I felt my throat tighten. But it hadn’t been real.
He
hadn’t been real!