Chapter 1
Other than my wife, I hadn’t told a soul about it. I was afraid to. Nobody wants to be labeled a kook. Nobody likes being stared at from the corners of dubious eyes. But now, after all I’ve been through, I couldn’t care less what people think. For reasons I will explain later, I am now sure that in July of last year, I spent four days with Ernest Hemingway.
Granted, Papa had been dead for five decades. I realize that. But a force far stronger than any of us mortals know did bring us together. Odd as it sounds, I’m as sure I was with him as I am that your eyes are narrowing as you read these words. Bear with me. If you will hear my story, I think you, too, will believe it.
To begin with, I haven’t always been a Hemingway aficionado. Sure, I did read The Old Man and the Sea when I was eleven years old. But after that, like most young men on the lower half of the social ladder, the closest thing to literature I ever read was the sports pages. That was about it, that and an occasional peek at Playboy Magazine.
But then a funny thing happened when I was in my early thirties. I started making trips to the local library. And soon after that there was always a stack of books alongside my recliner. Since I, like Hemingway, had a great love for sport fishing and certainly didn’t mind knocking back a few brews from time to time, I started taking a keen interest in the man and his work.
The more I read about him, the more I realized he and I weren’t all that dissimilar. Oh, I never had the kind of money he did or a boat as fine as the Pilar. I never traveled the world or earned fame the way he did. But deep inside, I believed that along with our common interests, we had also thought along similar lines. Considering that our births were seventy years apart, and so were our worlds, I thought that our many likenesses were quite odd. I suspected that Hemingway, just like I do, would have had a serious problem living in this maddening twenty-first century world.
But despite all we had in common, I always doubted that, had I ever met the man, I would have actually liked him. I wanted to believe I would, but after reading so much about his overblown macho attitude, I didn’t think so. In the farthest stretches of my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined that I’d someday find out.
Last July, I had to be airlifted from my home to a hospital in West Palm Beach after a highly-unlikely accident. I had just bought a utility trailer for my lawn care business and backed it into my driveway. The trailer was fully enclosed with a metal roof and sides. After lowering the tailgate, I set up a makeshift ramp using two wooden boards. I then cranked up my rider mower and tried to drive it up the incline. But it was steeper than I’d realized. After two failed attempts to get the mower’s front wheels over the very top of the ramp and into the level bed of the trailer, I had to throw it into reverse and back the powerful machine down again. Going backwards on such a sharp angle was quite precarious. My better judgment kept giving me hell—telling me I shouldn’t be doing this; I should drive over to Home Depot and buy two longer boards. But I didn’t listen. It was a Saturday afternoon, and because we’d had a lot of rain all week, there were still three lawns I simply had to get done.
On my third attempt, I revved the mower up really high and sped up the ramp. Scary as it was, all went well until the front wheels finally did clear the top of the ramp. Just as that happened, I realized my head was about to slam into the leading edge of the roof.
It all happened so fast. Reflexively I jerked my head to the right, but that didn’t help. Fast as I’d been driving the mower, it kept right on going, all the way into the trailer. It’s amazing my neck didn’t snap. Instead, with my head lodged against the roof and the mower continuing forward, I was literally pulled out of the seat—by my head.
