Dad

We call it the "man-cave." It goes by other names, including "Dad's arsenal" and the unpretentious "room in the shop." We built it underneath the loft in the glorified garage called The Shop and filled it with masculine necessities: a fridge of soda pop, a Nerf basketball hoop, cable TV, and couch. That's the front of the room, at least. The back of the room is made less navigable by two gun safes, overflowing shelves of ammunition, racks of fishing poles, and Sportsman's Warehouse clearance items. There's always a soft hint of gunpowder lingering in the air; you might say the room is a little volatile.

On this particular day I found my dad working in there. A car had just exploded on the television, but the sound of the conflagration was muted and some REO Speedwagon chorus thumped from the shelf above Dad's head. Dad turned to me, his grin resembling the one on Dr. Brown's face when he first shows Marty McFly the time-traveling DeLorean.

"Ryan," he said, "have I showed you the new one?"

Dad crossed the room and spun the lock of one of the gun safes. From its confines he withdrew a gun I recognized from countless action movies.

"AK-47," my dad explained, though no identification was needed. "It's not automatic," he added, "but semi-auto's still cool." He went on to touch on the pesky government regulations against civilians owning automatic weapons."You want to go shoot these out in the desert?"

I noticed several other guns on his shelf for cleaning, all of which looked to have been plucked out of action movies of various subgenres.

"Yeah," I said, grinning.