Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?

Ernest Hemingway reading books with his dog Negrita at Finca Vigia in Cuba. Photo courtesy of “Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston”

We have only one thing in common really, Papa and I. We both cut our teeth in the word stringing game as young newspaper reporters. I think by that definition,this is where our similarities end. I didn’t go to war,suffer grievous injuries, move to Paris and hobnob with the literati of a Lost Generation, write a seminal novel of the Twentieth Century or live like this is the only day I’m going to get, then make sure it is.

Minor maladies helped me avoid my war, I only suffered a broken heart (chronically), I moved to that other cosmopolitan city starting with P: Plattsburgh, NY, and my ink-stained, scribbly hobnobbing was with characters called Bags, Botsy, and Burly. My brushes with death were a whitecap-skipping airplane flight armed with a camera and an apple farmer threatening me armed with a gun. Oh, and a heart grown too hard that inevitably turned me perhaps too soft.

But Papa’s words in my throat, my heart and a location south of there made me a writing man as much as a man who writes.On this, his birthday, I recognize I’ve never hunted lion in Kenya, never pulled four spouses and God knows how much tail, never drank enough to make a belligerent difference, never forget I’ve outlived him and know I’ll never pen last words of any piece I’ll ever write that are so incongruously sad as, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

I just completed my semi-annual reading of the novel that has informed my life as a writer probably more than any other, “The Sun Also Rises.” And today is the author’s 117th birthday. So I share with you a piece of my relationship, personal and professional, with Ernest Hemingway. If he ever read this clap-trap, I’m sure he’d cut 50% of the words and punch me 100% in the jaw.