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."