The Hemingway Lecture
Following in the great man’s footsteps and nearly driving my date off a cliff.
On stage with a bag of old clothes, I touch the spirit of the man himself
Did Papa pass a kidney stone in Ketchum?
I took the pills in the car, and when they hit, they wiped out my memory of having taken them, so I took another two. I knew this because Amanda, my new then-girlfriend, said to me, “You already took some, Walt!” I believe the pills were Valium — I don’t remember now. My mother, a registered nurse, had recommended them to ease the misery of a kidney stone lodged in my left ureter, one of the pair of delicate, thin tubes that drain urine to the bladder. The pain when one is obstructed can range from a dull ache to how it might feel to give birth to a hacksaw.
It was September of 2010, a cool, clear morning, the trees along the freeway already golden. We were driving from our home in Montana to Ketchum, Idaho, where I was set to speak the following day at a Hemingway festival at the public library. Ketchum is the idyllic mountain town where the stoic, troubled writer, fresh off a series of treatments for …
The Fugitive Road
Invisible ink, invisible maps, lead you to the Valley of the Moon.
Hunter Thompson, M.F.K. Fisher, and Jack London’s ghost all dwell herein.
Harvesting flowers with Jesus leads a man to marry a farm.
M.F.K. Fisher, known to friends and family members as Mary Frances, boasted that she wrote her books in “invisible ink” and that she had “invisible maps” of places where she had made her home, like Aix-en-Provence. I didn’t catch up with her until she settled in Glen Ellen, California, an invisible town, until folks like Jack London and, much later, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson found that it suited their fugitive ways. Mary Frances wasn’t a fugitive from the law, but she maintained a very low profile in Glen Ellen, where she hosted intimate gatherings where she served champagne, real champagne from France, and oysters from Hog Island on the Sonoma Coast, an hour’s drive away.
I’ve long loved the idea of writing in invisible ink and consulting invisible maps; they appeal to my underground self, the self that wants to be in hiding and only surface on rare occasions. Mary Frances might have written her …
The Last Cigarette
No civilization worth preserving was built on vape pens and Nicorette gum
Manly habit that helps protect against Alzheimer’s and dementia is also key to finding love, solving America’s spiritual crisis, and winning wins.
If you’ve got ’em, smoke ’em
1989 was a foreign country; I go there often. A magical land where cell phones were still a distant threat, where McDonald’s still fried their hot apple pies in honest-to-God grease, and where every hamlet in America still had at least one conversation factory like LaGrone’s Drugstore.
Among my fondest memories are those in which I am crawling headfirst onto the bench seat of my papaw's 88 Ford, blue with a white stripe, savoring its rich masculine bouquet accented with notes of leather, Old Spice, and Lucky Strikes. When the last bell rang, he would be waiting for me in the parking lot of Portis Elementary with his windows rolled down, blaring Hank Williams’s “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do” and puffing on what must have been his 60th cigarette of the day. Then we would cruise the quarter-mile down Main Street over to LaGrone’s.
Though Fred LaGrone had been our town’s lone pharmacist …
