Hero's: Papa

9/4/2020

by Michael Easterling

Ernest Miller ‘Papa’ Hemingway

Born  July 21, 1899   Oak Park, Illinois    

Died   July 2, 1961   Ketchum, Idaho

Why did he do it?

He was so full of life.

Bigger than life.

He filled every room, 

no matter whoever else was there.

Women wanted to be with him

men wanted to be him.

And no wonder.

He looked like a movie star

and was built like a fullback (6ft 2 and 220).

He could talk about anything and everything

and had been everywhere.

He had lived in or spent great amounts of time 

in the most romantic places on earth - 

Paris, Milan, Venice, Pamploma, Austria, New York, 

Cuba, Key West, the Serengheti.

He was friends with Picasso, James Joyce, 

John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein,  

William Yeats, Ezra Pound 

and Gary Cooper.

He had done everything -

skied the Alps,

run with the bulls,

hunted big game with Paul Percival,

fly fished in the purest trout streams,

caught world record big game fish, 

been in the front lines in three wars,

hunted for German subs in the Caribbean.

He lost count of the women he had loved

although they never forgot him, 

and he could drink everyone under the table.

He won

the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,

the Noble Peace Prize for Literature,

the U.S. Bronze Star for Heroism

the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery

and almost countless other awards and citations.

But Papa was only human,

he could only take so much.

He had been in two plane crashes,

had been shredded by an Austrian mortar shell,

was in several car wrecks,

had 2nd and 3rd degree burns, 

Was shot accidentally while fishing,

had broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and a fractured skull

and several cracked vertebra.

His  body was racked with illness -

encephalopathy from head injuries,

haemachronmatosis,

diabetes and shingles,

cancer and possibly syphilis,

failing eyesight.

All this meant he  ultimately lived with

great pain almost every moment of his life

coping on scotch, vodka and and morphine.

But he could bear all this.

Like his father and grandfather, and brother and sister

what he could not face anymore 

was the existential Black Hole.

And no more adventure

no more travel

no more more reading and writing

no more quality of life

no more anything and everything.

But he did have his favorite shotgun left.

And he did have enough strength left

to lift it and     to      pull      the     trigger

So with pen and paper in hand

he commenced his greatest journey,

he began his greatest adventure.

Writing about  the gods, the angels and the spirits,

about beings never seen on earth,

about unimaginable mountains and valleys and seas

about the creation of new stars and galaxies

comets zooming and meteors colliding,

colors beyond human experience,

endless space and unending time.

The “Old Man” finally got “the big fish” to land.

Magnificent and unscathed.