The Keys are Calling

I’ve always enjoyed reading books and short stories by Ernest Hemingway. He wrote of far away places, of Paris and Spain after World War I, hunting in Africa, short stories of time spent in my own state of Michigan.

Besides traveling around Michigan I’ve yet to travel to any of those exotic places described by Hemingway. In my younger days I wanted to travel to Spain and enjoy the festival he describes in the book The Sun Also Rises. I have no interest in attending a bull fight but I always thought it would be cool to run with the bulls through the streets trying to stay upright while avoiding the horns of a massive angry bull in some kind of wild delusional test of courage.

Now my 60 year old self is less enthused about the idea of running with out of control animals but that’s probably due to my creaky knees and the fact that I would need at least 20 minutes to warm-up to get my body ready to propel myself forward in anything more than a brisk walk.

I recently fell into a YouTube rabbit hole of watching videos of people exploring places in Paris where Hemingway ate and drank. In fact there’s an entire tour that can take Hemingway enthusiast to his favorite watering holes. The idea of wandering around Paris getting a drink at each little cafe or bar would be a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Sure the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre are must see attractions but close behind for me at least would be a cafe where Hemingway sat and wrote.

I recently discovered that Hemingway’s house in Cuba has been perfectly preserved and is open to tour. He lived there with his third and fourth wives for many years (he had as many houses as wives). He left suddenly after the revolution that led to Castro’s rise to power. When he left he assumed he would be back someday so he left all his personal affects as if leaving for a vacation. His clothes still hang in the closet, his eyeglasses on the nightstand, his toothbrush in the bathroom. A moment in time perfectly preserved.

As it seems highly unlikely I’ll be jetting off to Europe or visiting Cuba anytime soon, I’ve focused my attention on the place Hemingway lived and wrote for many years….Key West. That tropical set of islands at the southern most tip of the country was barely a tourist destination when Hemingway and his second wife settled there. He wrote in the warm mornings, fished in the afternoons and drank in the evenings. His carefully curated image of himself as the best fisherman, best fighter, best drinker and writer was largely forged during this time in Key West.

I remember being quite small perhaps 8 years old when we went on a family vacation to Florida to visit my uncle. I vaguely remember we took a drive to Key West and stayed for a few days. I don’t have many memories of that entire vacation, in fact it was so long ago I think the only evidence of it is some slides my Mom kept for many years. Once a year we would get out the slide projector and have a family night of looking at old vacation slides. Don Draper was right about the slide projector (if your not sure of that reference go to YouTube).

What I do remember is my Dad wanted to go to the bar where Hemingway hung out, I believe it’s called Sloppy Joe’s. Being quite small and not having read any Hemingway I was more curious about all the chickens that ran free throughout the city. Key West might have been at the forefront of the whole cage free, free range chicken craze and that was back in the 70’s.

Key West has become almost a bucket list place for people to visit, a destination all unto itself for the Instagram generation to snap pictures of sunsets and markers that proclaim your as far south as you can be in the country. I dare say most people who visit aren’t likely to care much about an old writer who drank too much, cheated on all his wives and wrote of long ago time and places, but when I visit I’ll seek out his old haunts as my father did and try to avoid the chickens.

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Peace and Love,

John

So Many to Read, So Little Time

Daily writing prompt

What books do you want to read?

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For the last few years I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read. Each year I try to read more than the previous year. This past year I read 17 books….. I believe that’s the most I’ve read in a year but I know it pales in comparison to some people, my wife is a voracious reader who can easily read 1 or even 2 books a week.

I like to to keep track of what I’ve read to see if I’m perhaps reading too much of a certain author or genre. I enjoy reading John Grisham books and each year I seem to read 1 or 2. Either he comes out with a new one or I find a title I haven’t read at my local library. I recently found one at the library that I hadn’t read. The story revolved around the theft of the F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from the Princeton library. It got me thinking that I never read any other works by Fitzgerald except Gatsby. It took me multiple readings of Gatsby to truly appreciate it. I was always hung up on the idea that it was just a story of the rich and privileged doing awful things and not being held accountable. Even though Gatsby is hung up on his high school crush it’s still a story of love and loss. I read that Gatsby wasn’t even a big success when it was written and Fitzgerald was bankrupt and so desperate for money and recognition that he was writing screen plays in Hollywood when he died. I think I’ll read more Fitzgerald this year to see if his other story’s are as good as Gatsby.

I’ve always been fascinated with Hemingway. He himself cultivated an image of a man who could drink more, write better, out fight and out womanize anyone else. As with a lot of mythology some of this is true and some of it is pure fiction, but the man could write. Not everything he wrote stands the test of time and some of his subjects are just plain puzzling nowadays, his fascination with bullfighting and traveling around Europe as part of “the lost generation” seems odd. His personal life may have been as tragic as the characters in his books but some of those books are pure genius. The subjects of love, loss and death permeate his great works and I think I’ll continue to read as much of his work as I can.

Being a sports fan I could easily spend a whole year reading nothing but sports books especially baseball. I think of all the sports, baseball is the sport that has the most books about it, perhaps it’s the history and tradition of the game or maybe just the simple pace and day to day nature of it but I do enjoy a baseball book during the long, dark, cold winter months. Reading a baseball book in the winter gives me something to look forward to as the seasons eventually change.

I read somewhere that the best story’s are about baseball, running and horses. Maybe it’s the solitary nature of running, the lyrical day to day grind of baseball and the simple beauty of a horse but I have read great books about all 3 of those subjects. But there are great story’s everywhere…..go find a book and read it

Peace and Love,

John

Finding My Way

Daily writing prompt

If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?

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Well for starters I can’t imagine anybody wanting to write a biography about me, but lets suspend reality for a brief moment and suppose that it somehow happens. I also can’t imagine anybody reading a biography about me. You know how you are browsing through a bookstore and they have the shelves or tables of bestsellers and then there’s usually a rack of staff recommendations……typically these are lesser known books or authors that the staff enjoys reading and they want other people to know about. Usually there is a little blurb about what the staff member enjoyed most about the book something like……

“I couldn’t put it down”…..or…. “a real page turner”…..or …….. “memorable characters”……

I would have a feeling that the poor staff member who was assigned to read my biography would have a hard time finding a positive blurb about it……it would probably be something like….

“well I finished it”……or…… “at least I wasn’t scrolling through social media”…..or…… “helped with my insomnia”……

Remember back when there were video tapes of movies and we all went to Blockbuster to rent a movie and you’d be browsing the aisles and you’d see some movie you never heard of but it just came out…..this was the infamous “straight to video movie”…….named for the fact that it never even was worthy enough to be distributed in movie theaters but the studio wanted to try to recoup some of the expenses of making it so they tried to sell or rent it in VCR format.

I don’t know what the equivalent of that is in book form, but that’s what my biography would be. Relegated to the bargain table as soon as it was published, offered for some low price to cover the cost of printing. Even the summary on the back cover would be underwhelming…..

Finding My Way

One average man’s journey from middle class suburbia childhood to hard-working middle class adult. The trials and tribulations, the joys and heartache along the way are a microcosm of our times. The struggle to find a worthwhile career, the improbable meeting of his soulmate, his strange childlike fascination with the world around him and much to his wife’s consternation his immaturity grows greater with each year that passes…… “I was more mature as an 18 yr. old than I am now.”

That’s definitely a book to be found on the bargain table or at a thrift store…..

Peace and Love

John

The Great Re-Read

Daily writing prompt

What book could you read over and over again?

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I don’t typically re-read the same book over again. If you’re a reader who enjoys many different genres then you always have a list of books to read and never enough time to read them. I occasionally will pick up an old favorite off the bookshelf and just open it and read a few pages but I almost never think about starting it all over from the beginning. Of course this begs the question of why do we even keep books once we’re finished with them ? If they’re just sitting on bookshelves or in piles around the house wouldn’t it be better if we gave them to others to enjoy and it would certainly free up space on shelves and desks for other objects. Perhaps the question of why we keep books we have no intention of reading again should be addressed on a future blog post but for now I’ll reveal the one book I’ve read more than once and surprisingly it was a book I didn’t even enjoy the first two times I read it, this book is……The Great Gatsby

I can’t remember the first time I read Gatsby…..it was probably when I was in high school, not that it was assigned to me but I remember reading it because I had heard so much about it and it was considered such a classic. I remember being enthralled by the first chapter describing that first big party thrown by the dashing, wealthy Jay Gatsby…..oh to be like him, hosting huge parties that spared no expense, but as the book dragged on I continually felt disillusioned by the characters……Gatsby desperately trying to impress an old girlfriend….really that’s it ? And all the other characters besides the narrator were just the most awful collection of self-absorbed people. I didn’t get it, I know it’s considered a classic and the definitive novel of a certain time period but I was disappointed….perhaps I myself was too immature to fully comprehend it’s genius.

Years went by before I re-read it….I tried I really did try to find the magic and see the wonder of it….but like before I didn’t find, couldn’t hear it, didn’t feel it. So there it sat on my bookshelf growing dusty, taking up space, destined to sit and be admired but not loved……until just a few years ago when I had the opportunity to listen to it on an audio book.

It’s funny how you comprehend something differently when you hear it as opposed to reading it…..at least for me there’s a deeper level of comprehension, or perhaps the narrator was particularly enthralling but I thoroughly enjoyed the audio book version of Gatsby far more than I enjoyed reading it. The words sung to me, they were lyrical and deep in ways I never picked up when I was reading it. I listened intently to each chapter even re-winding certain passages to hear them again the magic of the words dancing through my head. Yes there’s still very little redeeming qualities to most of the characters and the lack of accountability in the end is appalling and Gatsby’s futile attempt to win back Daisy is tragic ( c’mon Jay just move on ) but that’s the point…..writers know this, writers understand this…..happy endings are for movies and kids books.

So I once again re-read Gatsby….and I enjoyed it….I read it and heard the words and could see and feel the magic and I got it…..the story, the time period, the hope, the desperation and despair, the longing and the love and yes the tragedy that is life. So once again Gatsby sits on my bookshelf growing dusty occasionally opened and glanced at a page or two at a time but appreciated now for the great work it is

Thanks for reading….like or comment if you feel inclined

Peace and Love…..

John