Tonight is the night they crown the Ernest Hemingway look-alike king in Key West. The frolicking begins this afternoon at 1 with the "Running of the Bulls," wherein Hemingway lookalikes dash---as best as pudgy, middled aged men can dash---through Key West streets dodging wooden bulls on wheels.

   And Hemingway days celebrate the 109^th birthday of the famous drinking, shooting, fishing Sloppy Joe-eating writer who called Florida home for a long time. And I was unlucky enough to have been in the seventh grade when Ernest Hemingway died from natural causes in Ketchum, Idaho. I say natural causes, as his father had also died from lead poisoning as did his brother Leicester. I say unlucky, because it was the summer of 1961 and the Junior High English teachers had already locked in their curriculum for that fall. But the following summer, English instructors, mindful that America's Nobel literary laureate had eaten a shotgun shell, began changing the curriculum, and out went the Red Badge of Courage and a Tale of Two Cities, and in came For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Snows of Kilamanjaro, and by 1963, junior high freshmen across this land returned to class that September to hear for the first time, the dozen most terrifying words of High School English: "A Farewell to Arms, and In Love and War; compare and contrast." 

   I was just shy of 15. My heaviest reading thus far had been, "The Secret of the Old Mill," starring Frank and Joe Hardy, sons of renowned detective Fenton Hardy and chums to Chet Morton. A fine starting line for a lifetime of reading, for, as a literary writer once pointed out, the Hardy boys books introduced generations of greenhorn readers to the adverb. Joe and Frank and Chet and Iola never said anything. Rather, they chortled, murmured, gasped, muttered, mused, and upon occasion, ejaculated.

   Ernest Hemingway did not write To Have And Have Not for an individual who maintained a subscription to Uncle Scrooge and streamers on his handlebars. But we read as much Hemingway as the English teachers could cram into four years which caused us to resent Hemingway in our conviction that had he not selfishly elected to end his life so abruptly we'd still be on the Booth Tarkington and James Fennimore Cooper. And when the assignment was to report on our favorite Hemingway book, it would always be Old Man and the Sea because it was far and away the shortest. But over the years I have picked up enough Hemingway lore; the Ritz Bar, his Key West cats' descendants which still deliver litters of six-toed kittens, The La Concha Hotel where he stashed his mistress.

   It was because of him that when I was in Mexico on vacation a few years ago, I went to the bullfight to understand Hemingway's passion for it, which I failed to do, in that it was not a scene out of Death in the Afternoon or the Sun Also Rises, where it was written that "Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon." 

   But my bullfight began with the Dos Equis bikini girls dancing to Ricky Martin and tossing beer logo T-shirts into the stands, followed by spectators chosen out of the audience to chase goats and caballeros twirling ropes and then the bull came in looking mean enough. But it did not go well, in that it kept charging the pointy-stick people on the horses instead of the matador and then when it was a bloody mess it knocked the matador down and gouged him in the shoulder with a horn and walked across him before the matador jumped up and dared a few more passes before sticking the long sword into El Toro's spine which is supposed to put him down but it went wrong and the gringos hooted at him and the bull was still alive when the horses dragged him off so it was less than a Hemingway glorious afternoon.

   And out of respect for Ernest Hemingway I will decline to celebrate what would have been his 100^th birthday today because it is clear as Idaho springwater he sure-as-shootin' himself didn't wish to.

   Oh---and tomorrow is the Hemingway lookalikes arm wrestling photo-op.