Hemingway House (January 18, 2025)

Behold! Ernest Hemingway's typewriter. Inserting a paragraph literally meant "cut and paste." I've knocked over more than one glass of tea that was in the way of the carriage return, back in the day. 

Before destruction by a storm, a catwalk spanned from the upstairs master bedroom porch to Hemingway's writing studio. He wrote daily from 6 a.m. to noon, producing 500-700 words daily. Seventy percent of his works were written during the nine years he lived at Key West.

Hemingway spent so much time at his friend Joe’s bar [the original Sloppy Joe's] that when Joe was moving locations, Hemingway remarked that surely he’d spent enough money there to own a small chunk of it, and Joe laughed and gifted him with one of the bar’s urinals.

 

Hemingway's wife Pauline, upon finding a urinal in her yard, was understandably unimpressed, but made the best of a bad situation by adorning the urinal with decorative tile. Hemingway had the urinal, along with a large decorative Spanish olive jar that he’d brought from Cuba, fitted with plumbing and converted into a self-refreshing water fountain for his pets. The cats seem to like it and you have to know the story or stare hard to realize there’s a urinal involved.