Did Ernest Hemingway’s great, great, great grand cat steal my sunglasses?

By John Toth

The Bulletin

During our recent visit to Key West, Florida, one of our must-see stops was Ernest Hemingway’s home.

When Carnival Dream ported there, that was one of the places we headed to, and that’s how one of the descendants of Hemingway’s cats may have wound up with my favorite pair of sunglasses.

Ernest Hemingway was known for many things, including his love for cats and writing. At his home in Key West, he kept a colony of cats, many of which were polydactyl, meaning they had an extra toe. These cats, known as Hemingway’s six-toed cats, have become a beloved attraction at the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum.

Hemingway was a superstitious guy. So much so that when he came across a six-toed feline in Key West, he was convinced it would bring him good luck. With that thought, he decided to surround his Key West home with them.

Hemingway was an American journalist, novelist, war correspondent and short-story writer who became a prominent 20th-century literary figure. His works included “The Old Man and the Sea” and “A Farewell to Arms.”  

From the way our tour guide described him, he was also known for many other things, which resulted in four marriages. He died at the age of 61 on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But his cats survived, reproduced, and their descendants live happily at Hemingway’s Key West home.

Our visit started with paying a $19 cash entry fee, after which we were given a generic ticket stub and were invited to walk around the property until the tour started. We found a shady place, occupied by a bench, a cat house and a cat who was asleep nearby. Or, was he?

I had placed my favorite sunglasses on my shade hat and proceeded to wait for the tour to start. I then placed the hat on the bench. When they called us for the tour, the cat was gone. It was a beautiful ginger cat. I don’t know if he had six front claws for each front paw, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did and used them to help himself to my sunglasses.

I didn’t think much of it until the end of the tour, when I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be found. I went back to the bench where I sat to see if they might have fallen behind it. The sunglasses were not on the ground or the bench.

Then I remembered that I did see the cat move around while I was sitting on the bench and conversing with Sharon, my travel editor, who had a better view of the cat than me, but she doesn’t remember seeing anything fishy.

These were not expensive sunglasses, and I took two more pairs with me just in case we ran into a thieving Hemingway cat, or I were to just lose one somewhere.

Sharon suggested buying a new pair. We found a gift shop that was going out of business, and everything in the store was on sale for $5. They had a large selection of sunglasses, but I didn’t like any of them. To me, they all looked like the ones sold at a dollar store for $1.25.

We abandoned that project and started looking for a place recommended to us by someone where we could buy key lime pie by the slice.

If I had to lose a pair of sunglasses, or have them pinched, I could not find a better place for that to happen than the grounds of Hemingway’s historical home.

 If that ginger cat  - that may or may not have six claws on its front paws – turned out to be a cat burglar, all the power to him. If I just lost the glasses, I hope he was the one who found them.

He is probably parading up and down the property, showing off to all the other polydactyl felines what a cool cat he is.

And, he is probably bumping into things, because the sunglasses were also bi-focal reading glasses.