I’ve been driving West-ish today and I must have been somewhere in Missouri when I got one of those thoughts that shuts down my mind. All day thoughts (crazy and sublime) travel through my brain, but every once in a while a thought will grab a chair and stay a while. This is all well and good, except it happens to block up the rest of the passing traffic.
So today’s roadblocker was a thought about visiting Ketchum, Idaho, the place where Hemingway sucked on his shotgun after apparently losing much of his memory from earlier rounds of electroshock therapy.
Sounds like a vacation waiting to happen. Some choose rollercoasters and adults in animal costumes, but I choose this. I’m not always sure about the stability of the chair my mind often offers to passing thoughts, but oh well.
So in my great geographical mind I figure hell I’m in Missouri (where I may never drive off the highways again), I gotta be closing in on Idaho, right?
Well I hope they fired the guy who laid out the atlas, beacuse it appears he’s got Idaho was over by Washington and Oregon, clearly a mistake. Them taters can’t travel that far on the railroad and still be fresh at our Wal-Marts can they?
Suffice to say I am not heading to Ketchum, but it got me wondering about my home state. I believe I’ve heard somewhere that Hemingway used to retreat to Northern Michigan to write at some point. Or maybe he just wrote about Northern Michigan from travels there as a child. Heck, now I can’t seem to remember what I remember at all. I guess that means it’s time to pull the chair out from under this thought and move forward with the day.
SIDE NOTE ON ARTIE: Joyce called and we talked a bit about Mary’s son Tom. Mostly we were both just flapping our gums because we don’t have any information on him at all. The only real noteworthy information shared is that Joyce spoke with her aunt Ern in Vermont, who really isn’t her aunt at all but had been real close to the family when she was growing up, and her aunt said that she used to try to keep track of where Tom was. She said Tom moved every year, sometimes more than once a year. Aunt Ern said she’ll look around the house this week and see if she can’t dig something up. So perhaps we are closer. At this point I’m really trying not to get excited about any new information because I’ve already sent myself up and down and all around with excitement and let down on several occassions. So we shall just wait and see, as they say, what tomorrow brings.
peace
