IDEA - 9-26-2020
by
Patrick Ryan
1,713 Words
It's the middle of the workweek in Santa Cruz, California, and Phineas receives word that his father died in Nova Scotia. Most people will receive this information by e-mail, text, or phone. However, Phineas received it from a personal messenger. His father left when he was 14 years old; never looking back, never checking in, never seeing him again. But the messenger would not go until Phineas had come with him to his father's services. At first, he refuses, he ignores the messenger and proceeds to work. A few hours later, the boss visits Phineas to complain that the man who came to pick him up was sitting in the waiting room, singing Danny Boy continuously and annoying everyone in the room. His boss asked him to deal with it. Phineas agrees to go to his father's service if only to save his job. The messenger drives an extremely compact car; Phineas can barley get his legs in. The much shorter messenger has no issues and says this car will get them from here to Nova Scotia without charging. Phineas doesn't know what to focus on first, the fact that they're driving the whole way, the legroom, or the impossible car that can drive across the country without fuel. Instead, he dismissed all of his worries and made the best of it. His boss said he was going to pay him for the time he was away. So started what was intended to be a four day trip to Nova Scotia. The messenger had all kinds of stories about his dad. They made stops along the way, celebrating the life of a flawed man, from the time he left his family to Nova Scotia, where he died. The trip's start was no surprise to Phineas, his father, the dirtbag, tricking people out of money, running scams, and living a life of crime. But the more east they traveled, the more interesting the stories got. On this pilgrimage, he had a chance to see his father's transformation he had known to father Phineas he wished he had. When they get to the east coast, his father has completed his transition and became a productive member of society. Phineas also discovered that his father never stopped loving him; works of art were left behind as testaments to a man who wanted to start again. When they arrive in Nova Scotia, Phineas starts to see how the opportunity to reconnect never happened to his unexpected death. At the end of the day, Phineas understood why his father had to leave; he ran away from himself, running away from the person he used to be. All that was left behind was little signs that he was there, like carving initials into wood, that's all he had to show for his 58 years on Earth.
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