(This is from two years ago this month.)
Recently, my sister and brother-in-law took me out to dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the venerable San Marcos resort in downtown Chandler, Arizona. That resort has been around for a century, pretty much the whole time that Arizona has been a state. It boasts the state’s oldest golf course, and at night it reminds me of the kind of place Humphrey Bogart might turn up.
It might be a great place to stay sometime because it would be a perfect place for me to write.
Writing as a profession (or a hobby) is a moveable feast, of course, in the sense you can more or less do it anywhere. But I suspect what Hemingway meant by naming his memoir “A Moveable Feast” was slightly different — that the memory of a certain place or time can travel with you throughout the rest of your life.
For him that key place initially was Paris in the 1920s when he was still a struggling writer. Other places — most memorably Africa, Cuba, the Keys — came later. for him
For most people, multiple spots will need to be good for writing, too, because we move around so much. Hopefully, your main spot is somewhere you can go most every day, because writing simply must be done every single day — no exceptions — if you are serious about it.
Anyway, I’m no longer in Chandler but I *am* writing daily, so where I’m doing that is relevant. My airy, sky-blue room with its view of an old wooden fence, some vines and trees, the occasional hummingbird or squirrel, a swath of open sky and a few distant houses up the hill may not be as romantic as that old resort in Chandler, but it *is* home.
And at least according to Dorothy, there’s no place like home.
Anyway, before getting distracted by Bogart and Hemingway, I was going to return to an insight I had with my sisters in Arizona during our reunion last week. And there will be a point to this rambling, I promise.
First off, my three sisters and I span 19 years in age; I’m the second-oldest and the only male. I’ve always been grateful that I didn’t have any brothers and I’ll tell you why.
Boys can be such bullies. Girls can be mean too but in a different way — one I’m more comfortable with. Plus they usually don’t intimidate you physically.
Our family used to go to a certain aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving at Oxbow Lake in Michigan. The lake was frozen at that time of year, as is my memory of that place and time.
I dreaded those large family gatherings for a simple reason — I had to spend time with an awful group of cousins, all boys, all brothers, mostly mean and cruel. They would gang up on one another in various vicious ways, which I hated to witness.
None of this was particularly personal, as they normally didn’t gang up on me. I suppose as a quiet, skinny, cerebral kid with glasses, I was more or less irrelevant to their ongoing, self-destructive macho dramas. I was simply a bystander, a witness.
The uncle who hosted these frightful events, Uncle Jack, eventually got cancer and started to waste away right before my eyes. He just got smaller and smaller every time we visited.
Meanwhile my cousins only got bigger and fatter and meaner like a pack of hungry wolves. The youngest among them, a guy named Tommy, grew so tired of being bullied constantly by his brothers that one Thanksgiving he decided to pick on poor old Uncle Jack, who had shrunk to roughly his size.
My vivid memory is of Tommy pushing Jack in the chest, challenging him to a duel. The old man thrust his chin out in defiance, but fell back, holding his wasted body up against a work table until Tommy backed off.
Jack was dying and way too weak to take on Tommy, who was about ten but big for his age, so he retreated to the card table with the other men, smoking and drinking and telling their same old stories I’d heard dozens of times.
Jack died not very long after that confrontation and our family stopped going there on Thanksgiving.
So maybe that’s one example of what Hemingway meant about his moveable feast. I’m still tasting the memory, including its bitter aftertaste, some sixty years later.
So I promised I had a point and here it is. I’ve never written about the Oxbow Lake incident involving Tommy and Jack before. It only came up when my sisters and I discussed our very different memories of the time we spent out there.
That in turn birthed the idea that we all should maintain “joint custody” of certain events with the others who were there. We need to tell each other these stories — that’s my point.
And if you’re a journalist you might say I buried the lede
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