It's the Birthday of Ernest Hemingway

It's the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, (books by this author) born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He was just 22 when he moved to Paris with his wife, Hadley, having taken a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star. Even though he was making decent money, he liked the idea of living like a bohemian, so they moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter, in a neighborhood full of drunks, beggars, and street musicians. Rent was 250 francs a month, or about $18, which left them plenty of money to travel around Europe when they wanted to.

He rented himself a room in a hotel, and every morning, after breakfast, he would walk to his writing room and work. He said: "I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'" One of those sentences read, "I have stood on the crowded back platform of a seven o'clock … bus as it lurched along the wet lamp lit street while men who were going home to supper never looked up from their newspapers as we passed Notre Dame grey and dripping in the rain." ~ courtesy of the Writer's Almanac.

It's also the birthday of Candace Ruth Morris. Born to Bruce and Mary Whitney amid the desert air of Southern California in 1978, their youngest. In her youth she was often taken to spontaneous singing with a boldness that stemmed from her ardent desire for a true expression of love from her father and yet a sense that she was alone in the world and therefore couldn't possibly embarrass herself. At 24, she married Joel Hansen Morris, the son of a country pastor from Washington state whom she met at a rural Bible College in Northern California. Though she was initially fraught from wooing him, he would soon recompense this romantic redress with a lifelong tenderness and passion that would restore the young woman's heart bit by bit and evermore.

Perhaps it was the shameless consumption of Syliva Plath or the classical literary training that would inevitably find it's way to the page, but regardless of its origin, one day the world was given "Musings of a Melancholic." Within its web pages, Candace created a blog of soulish beauty. Whether she is featuring her brilliant photography, praising her husband (aka. The Saint), or recounting the painful, yet profound steps of a woman who manages to care deeply for others without losing herself, through this blog the world is granted passage into daily life through the mesmerizing turquoise of her watery eyes.

From there we found "Booklings" (a foreshadowing of the Bookish Wine Bar we are promised), "Pretty, Please" (An altar to coveting aestheticism) and "Secret Snob" (The shameless confessions of a faux-hemeian with a trained palate). Her words are a compass, a weather vane, the wooden mermaid carved into the hull of an ancient vessel retaining the remnants of a sea-stained teal paint all the more beautiful for the patina it has earned from each passing voyage.

Much is still to come from Candace Morris. She has tried her hand at waitressing, teaching high school English, executive assistance, and even home-making. Motherhood, I am sure, is soon to come. One thing is for sure, however, in whatever path she takes, her words will endure. To the world, she will be the sage that awes and edifies them. To me, she will be nothing more or less than the dearest friend I have ever known.