Sunday, August 24, 2008

The coolest story ever told and why my ass should now be considered a national treasure

I may have sat on a bar stool last night that was once occupied by Earnest Hemingway.
My life is now complete.
The came about as I was making the rounds saying goodbye to my grandparents (gets harder and harder everytime) other family.
After a rather stimulating conversation with Ty and my Uncle Mitch and Aunt Sue about the future of journalism, I headed back into town to hit up my Uncle Grant and Aunt Jamie.
We were talking about popping over to the Bahamas and down to the Keys when I mentioned that I wanted to explore some of Hemingway’s former stomping grounds.
Then my Uncle Grant told me a life-altering tale.

As my literary friends out there will know, Earnest Hemingway was living in Ketchum, Idaho, when he killed himself.
Well, back in the day my dad’s (Grant is his brother) parents opened a trailer park, gas station and depot outside of Wells at Crested Acres. When my papa opened the bar, he bought the actual bar, back bar and other wares at an auction for a place in Ketchum that was going out of business.
Turns out it was the bar Hemingway, that notoriously skilled drinker, used to frequent.
When my papa sold his ranch in Idaho just before he died, my uncle nabbed a couple of the bar stools that originally came from Hemingway's watering hole.
When my uncle told me this, I was more than a little bit excited. In fact, I had to go downstairs and sit on them and make Uncle Grant write me getting the stools into his will.
Of course they both have had their seats redone over the last 50 years and there’s a good chance that Hemingway never sat in them at all. But there’s a chance he did.
Hemingway and I are now cosmically connected by our buttox.
I'm pretty much guaranteed a Pulitzer Prize now, right?

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