12. Papa and Chink

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.
Hemingway in GH of Africa.

From the Hemingway school of personal accountability
Every damn thing is your own fault if you are any good.
[GH of Africa.]

I was thinking about beer and in my mind was back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the calf and came home that night around the mountain with the moonlight on the fields of narcissus that grew on the meadows and how we were drunk and talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wisteria vine at Aigle when we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the horse chestnut trees in bloom and Chink and I again discussing writing and whether you could call them waxen candelabras. God, what bloody literary discussions we had…

…I hung my booted legs over the side and let the my feet cool and drank the beer and wished old Chink was along.

…Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our ways had gone a long way apart.

Quoted verbatim from Green Hills of Africa