Richard McCarthy’s column “Tortured artists’ deaths no blaze of glory” (Gazette, Nov. 2) concerns the self-destructive lives of two writers, both of whom I taught for a decade at Clark University. Unlike them, I escaped my tortured-artist days, so that’s no longer of much interest. Instead, Mr. McCarthy’s words returned me to intersections that began in Kansas City, Missouri, many years ago.

I was 14 and following my father around to the apartment buildings he purchased after my parents divorced. He’d embarked upon a second career and needed a helper, and so after school, I dutifully handed him the wrenches needed to fix a tenant’s toilet, or, say, held the drywall in place while he drove the screw to attach it to the stud.

One building, The Chandelle, was on Warwick Boulevard in Midtown; mom was living there by then. One day, my father asked whether I yet had read Hemingway in school. “He supposedly lived somewhere around here at one time,” dad announced.

A bit later, my father introduced me to Bill Foster, the manager of a nearby building. His apartment was full of tobacco smoke and New Yorker magazines. My father, who went by “Bill” too, told Foster that I had written stories. “Hemingway wrote on the newspaper,” Foster said. “He lived around here though I don’t know what house.” He then mentioned a story to read, which I did.

This year, 2024, happens to be Hemingway’s 125th birthday and the 100th anniversary of that story, “Indian Camp.” It concerns the relationship between a son and his father, a doctor who saves the life of a woman after delivering her baby. In the following moment, her husband takes his life with a knife. The story was published in The Transatlantic Review, and the following year in his first collection, “In Our Time.”

Indian Camp is an early piece about the reoccurring Hemingway character Nick Adams, who was independent, clever and loved his father. The story was a springboard for themes Mr. McCarthy brought up in his column — death, violence, suicide. Hemingway was just 25 when he wrote it, but he’d already been injured on the Italian front and was drinking a lot, all which provided the unified framework for the rest of his cannon. He’d already spent six months as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star too.

When 17-year-old Ernest Hemingway arrived in Kansas City in 1917, the paper’s beloved founder William Rockhill Nelson had been dead two years, but his “Star Copy Style” sheet lived on. It contained “the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing,” Hemingway later said.

In fact, I was a few years older than Hemingway when, a quarter of a century after his death, in the 1980s, I was given the sheet by a former editor of The Wall Street Journal. It was in my first class at journalism school at the University of Kansas. The one-page guide begins: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

Today, I live by them as well. After all, later in life, doesn’t it seem like we’ve said most of what we need to say?

Especially that negativity and irony of youth — I like to think I used up my long, weak first paragraphs in my 20s and 30s.

And so using vigorous English to be brief and, above all, positive, is my aspiration.

Back in the Midwest with my father — it’s a lovely place for me to end up after reading Mr. McCarthy’s column.

While my father and I didn’t get along for a time — he, for one, didn’t like my teenage smoking and drinking — we became the best of friends in the last three decades of his life. He died last year in Kansas City at age 85.

Among the treasures dad left me was that sense of service and hope that I learned as a skinny 14-year-old trying to help him, serving the tools he needed to placate the tenants who constantly badgered us for help, hopeful to prevent the frustrations with the arduous repairs we oftentimes undertook.

As for Hemingway, dad clipped articles about him from The Star after I moved east. One that he sent me said that Ernest wrote parts of two novels in pleasant homes a mile from where our parents raised us five children. I remember thinking that Bill Foster would have liked the fact. He had died by then from smoking and booze.

As for The Chandelle, it turns out that Hemingway lived at a rooming house exactly eight doors down for a few months during that year of promise — chasing ambulances, following cop beat reporters, honing his style.

I guess Chandelle’s new owner found out where the budding writer had lived for that briefest of moments, which is, after all, what we all are challenged to treasure — our moments.

I get that now more than ever as my mother, 84, recently entered memory care. On a visit to Kansas City to see her, I noticed that The Chandelle was renamed to Hemingway Heights.

Michael Carolan lives with his wife in Dwight, a village of Belchertown, where they raised their two children.