907 Whitehead Street

Just a few blocks from 907 Whitehead Street in Key West, there's a cemetery where blindingly bone-white crypts bake in the sun among scrappy patches of grass. Hemingway isn't buried here but his friends are, like Josie Russell, his fishing buddy and owner of his favorite watering hole at 201 Duval Street. You'll find Joe Russell's grave adorned with mardi gras beads and tequila bottles weighting dollar bills. It's always happy hour there. We weave in and out of narrow streets on bikes. It's quiet, except for an occasional crowing rooster or the wind rustling the palm fronds like pieces of paper. It's not long before we find 907 Whitehead, tucked behind a brick fortress and a tangle of island trees. This Spanish Colonial home is where "Hem" as he was known wrote some of his best works, where he would rise between 5 and 6 a.m. to write in his guest house overlooking the most expensive pool on the island, then go out on his boat--the Pilar--to fish until happy hour at his favorite bar.

The six-toed descendants of his 60-70 cats still wander in and out of rooms here, still sleep on his bed, his chairs, still drink from the converted urinal he salvaged from a bar that was being renovated. His typewriter is still there before an empty chair where he sat, long before he broke his back in a plane crash and had to stand to write. This room is bright, airy, full of sunlight, unlike the house where covered balconies steal the sun, where ceiling fans were replaced by his wife's revered European chandeliers. How he must have loved the quiet and cool of that space, followed by a stretch on the open water, unconfined, the full blast of sea air, the lapping of water around the hull of his boat, the singing of a saltwater reel bowed by a marlin.

How good life must have been when the writing came easily, when the money flowed like the waters of his beloved Gulf Stream, until the critics and his own demons began to turn on him. What is it about an old house--a piece of tile, layers of paint on wanscoting, a rusty lock, cracked concrete, tarnished brass doorknob--that invites recall or conjures images of a time gone by? Maybe the dream of creating a moment so vivid, so exact, that you can find the same magic he found. Recreate the beauty of that 1930's haze in which he lived, hear the lisp in his voice, his thundering footsteps, see the worn lining of his hat, the cracks in a belt worn over the belt loops. And maybe therein you can summon the magic, the "stuff on butterfly wings," he called it, that enabled him to write, to make money and awards flow from his pen. There's something about time, about years gone by that makes him bigger than he probably deserved to be. We walk by the front gate in the gloaming, just after the sun has dipped into the cool waters between Key West and his beloved Cuba, and it could be just another house on Whitehead with its olive green shutters. The windows and doors are still open, lights on inside. Cats lounge on the still-warm patio and if you stare long enough you can imagine him stepping outside, reaching down to scoop one of them up in a rare moment of tenderness that so few of his friends and family--before he alienated them all-saw of him. You can see him whisper something, the cat's giant paws splayed against his collar and scruffy, white beard before he puts it down gently and heads back inside, the screen door groaning behind him.

Living Life 'All the Way Up' Part II

On a seven hour flight to Hawaii, I found myself seated beside an archaeologist. What followed was one of the most interesting conversations I've had with a complete stranger. I listened as he talked about his work, envied his enthusiasm for it and took notes on everything he said, thinking I might write about him someday. And here he is. Denny told me he had spent the first decade and a half of his post-college career working in a meaningless job. And though it took several years to complete, he went back to school in his late 30s to fulfill his dream of becoming an archaeologist. Now, he works for the U.S. government organizing overseas digs for the remains of U.S. service personnel. On that particular flight, he was on his way to Hawaii for a briefing before traveling on to Vietnam.

I peppered him with questions. What was his most interesting dig? Finding Native American remains in the Rockies. What was the greatest aspect of his job? Never knowing what he's going to find or where he's going next. He gave me his card, "in case you should ever want to write a book about me," he said jokingly. "It's you who should write a book," I said. "You're living life all the way up." (Denny would turn up again a couple of years later in Washington D.C. to work on a project with an acquaintance of mine. The world is small that way.) As it turned out, Denny was a Hemingway junkie as well, so the rest of our conversation was set in Spain, particularly the Casa Botin in Madrid where Jake and Lady Brett Ashley share a meal at the end of The Sun Also Rises. It's a nice place to have a glass of sangria and imagine young Hemingway sitting at a table outside, a pencil poised in his hand and a glass of red wine warming in the Spanish sun. On this trip to Key West, however, I'll see him at his writing table in a room over the guest cottage. His beloved boat Pilar would be anchored not ten walking minutes from his front door. The lighthouse, visible from his second story balcony illuminates his way home from his favorite bar, Sloppy Joe's, where he would meet his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn. (In all reality, I'll see him everywhere. Hemingway Days will be underway, complete with a lookalike contest, drawing Papas from all over.) The irony is how quickly he peaked as the kind of writer who could live from desk to boat to bar and back again, with a war thrown in here and there. He's attained an immortality that invites imitation (much like Elvis), though we choose to ignore the heavy price he paid for it.

Living Life 'All the Way Up' Part I

What follows is the first of several previously published essays I'll be dusting off, revising and posting here. They come (mostly) from a column I wrote for several years for the Bristol Herald Courier , a weekly newspaper serving the Tri-Cities area in Tennessee and Virginia. I developed a love of creative nonfiction while writing that column, and learned a lot about myself in the process. I wrote this column in preparation for my first trip to Europe--Spain, specifically. Now, I'm resurrecting it as we prepare to go back to Key West, both places that bring a certain writer to mind. This is Part I of II.

Hemingway is all around me lately, probably because my husband Bryan and I are planning a trip back to Key West, where we were married. We had some time before the wedding, so we strolled around town (I in my strapless white wedding dress) with our good friends Troy and Meredith, who stood with us as we took our vows on the beach. We stopped by a floral shop, where some nice ladies put together a fragrant bouquet of stargazer lilies (my new favorite.) Ten minutes at the courthouse for the license and we were soon standing on the edge of brilliant blue water near the shade of a palm tree. We cried, partly because we were in love but also because we were squinting into a hot morning sun so blinding it seemed everything around us was made of chrome. We said our vows on the beach, then made the pilgrimage to Papa's house, where we took some wedding photos and stood in the doorway of his writing room, imagining the clatter of typewriter keys as he stood to write, the zip of paper as he pulled it from the platen and tossed it immediately into the garbage. I was turned onto Hemingway in graduate school but his style didn't excite me as much as his desire to live his life, as he put it, "all the way up." And he didn't wait until retirement to do it. In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes and his traveling companion, Robert Cohn, are in a French cafe when Cohn leans forward and says, "I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it," to which Jake replies, "Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters." Maybe that's what Hemingway was trying to do, when he traded his American lifestyle for the European, where he could mingle among other expats, drink freely, and write about the kind of excitement he sought for himself. Cohn says to Jake, "Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?" This is what Hemingway feared the most, I think, and explains why he was such an adrenaline junkie. His idea of a good time included bullfights, safaris, and fishing for sea life three times his size in places like Key West and his beloved Cuba.

We strolled through Hemingway's home after our little ceremony, buoyed by the thrill of new lives, inspired by the history that surrounded us. Five years later we're coming back with plenty of stories about what we've packed into a short time together. They don't involve big fish or big game, but there's a sense of peace in knowing that in our own way, we're living life "all the way up."