George Hodgman's Blog, page 11
March 1, 2015
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February 26, 2015
This will sound so corny, but reading these comments from people who I and my fa...
This will sound so corny, but reading these comments from people who I and my family have known for years, people who I have not spoken to in thirty, forty years has been such a tremendous experience. It's really just kind of blown me away, this coming together of people who remember me or, more often, my parents. I think everyone should write a book to feel this, this sense of really being rooted in a place and having a home. I am sometimes sad that the places I come from aren't' what they were, but the people are the same. Always thought I'd head back to NYC eventually. Not sure I can now. Thank you. I would really encourage people from Madison and Paris to look through the comments here. You may stumble on some friends who got lost along the way. It's a reunion, really. XO
February 25, 2015
From Bettyville:
The last time I saw my father was over Christmas a few months...
From Bettyville:
The last time I saw my father was over Christmas a few months before he passed away. His face was pale; it had gone from gray to pallor hard to gaze on without fear. Because of his arthritic knees, stiff after two operations, he could barely get around, though he made a cane for himself in his workshop in the basement. He kept calling my attention to that cane; he had tried to make it special, something beyond an old man’s walking stick. When, unbeknownst to him, I watched him trying to go a few halting steps without it, I knew that the life we had shared together was coming to a close. A few days before my arrival, before our last holiday, he pulled his sciatic nerve struggling with the mattress on the antique bed where I try to sleep, trying to make it comfortable.
A few days before I left to go back to New York, he was in such pain that I took him to the emergency room. My mother stayed at home, but—still astonishingly spry then-- ran out into the street as we left with the gloves he forgot to wear, old work gloves from his lumber yard days. It was the coldest kind of winter afternoon and he hurt so badly that even breathing seemed hard labor. I watched him as he dragged himself to the admissions desk—weak, sad, and sick. He needed something fast for relief, but when the nurse said we would have to wait, probably for a couple of hours, he made no complaint, just shrugged his shoulders and made a joke. He made the old starched nurses feel like babes.
I remember my father at church, passing the communion plate during the service to the old, blue-haired high-school principal, finally retired. “Take two,” he told her as he handed over the tray with the grape juice in tiny cups, “They’re free, you know.”
For the longest time, there in the emergency room, he got no help and we sat with me on guard, watching him, his cheek still wet from melting snow. So tightly did he clutch the handle of that cane that I thought his fingers would leave marks in the wood. Finally someone saw the shape he was in and ushered us into an examining room. A doctor scrawled a prescription, but Big George could barely make it back to the car. When I found an open pharmacy, I think he was scared to wait alone. His heart was so vulnerable, ready to give out; something could happen and we both knew this and it was hard to leave him even for a moment.
He watched me, my every step away, from behind the frosted window of our old Lincoln as I trudged across the snow to buy the pills. On the way home, he looked straight ahead, not at me, and whispered, “Getting on time to die.”
When he did leave us, he was all alone, in the basement, at his workbench, on a quiet Saturday afternoon in February. The phone rang at four p.m. in New York. My aunt Alice called, my mother was somewhere in the background. Betty just could not tell me, Alice said.
I flew at 6 a.m. the next morning. At home, I felt his presence. The place was filled with him, as it had been, though he was missing and his big chair, where I had last seen him, empty. Near his workbench, I spotted two gifts, handmade, left for me to find: the first was a small cube with photographs glued on every side. To keep the pictures safe, to make them last, a coat of polish had been carefully applied. The photographs, views of our backyard at different times throughout the year, showed the way it looks in snow, in springtime when the trees are in blossom, in summer when all is green, and in the fall when the leaves are colorful. There is a picture of rain falling with the woods behind the house just greens run together, like in some old painting. There is an image of a foggy morning when the ground is hidden and the bare trees reach out of the mist.
My father’s hands were swollen when he made this memento, all the seasons of home, for me. He was dying. He could barely grip a pencil. Notes and old checks I find from this time in the drawers of his old desk are written in a hand so shaky I can barely recognize it.
In the city, in my apartment, on the bookshelf by the cube of photos, I also keep his second gift, a wooden hand created by tracing his own on a piece of wood. Like the cube, it was carefully polished. At the base where the wrist is, there are three letter carved: GAH, his initials and mine.
I was grateful for these gifts. I had wanted some goodbye and he had left it, without saying anything. My old silent man.
The last time I saw my father was over Christmas a few months before he passed away. His face was pale; it had gone from gray to pallor hard to gaze on without fear. Because of his arthritic knees, stiff after two operations, he could barely get around, though he made a cane for himself in his workshop in the basement. He kept calling my attention to that cane; he had tried to make it special, something beyond an old man’s walking stick. When, unbeknownst to him, I watched him trying to go a few halting steps without it, I knew that the life we had shared together was coming to a close. A few days before my arrival, before our last holiday, he pulled his sciatic nerve struggling with the mattress on the antique bed where I try to sleep, trying to make it comfortable.
A few days before I left to go back to New York, he was in such pain that I took him to the emergency room. My mother stayed at home, but—still astonishingly spry then-- ran out into the street as we left with the gloves he forgot to wear, old work gloves from his lumber yard days. It was the coldest kind of winter afternoon and he hurt so badly that even breathing seemed hard labor. I watched him as he dragged himself to the admissions desk—weak, sad, and sick. He needed something fast for relief, but when the nurse said we would have to wait, probably for a couple of hours, he made no complaint, just shrugged his shoulders and made a joke. He made the old starched nurses feel like babes.
I remember my father at church, passing the communion plate during the service to the old, blue-haired high-school principal, finally retired. “Take two,” he told her as he handed over the tray with the grape juice in tiny cups, “They’re free, you know.”
For the longest time, there in the emergency room, he got no help and we sat with me on guard, watching him, his cheek still wet from melting snow. So tightly did he clutch the handle of that cane that I thought his fingers would leave marks in the wood. Finally someone saw the shape he was in and ushered us into an examining room. A doctor scrawled a prescription, but Big George could barely make it back to the car. When I found an open pharmacy, I think he was scared to wait alone. His heart was so vulnerable, ready to give out; something could happen and we both knew this and it was hard to leave him even for a moment.
He watched me, my every step away, from behind the frosted window of our old Lincoln as I trudged across the snow to buy the pills. On the way home, he looked straight ahead, not at me, and whispered, “Getting on time to die.”
When he did leave us, he was all alone, in the basement, at his workbench, on a quiet Saturday afternoon in February. The phone rang at four p.m. in New York. My aunt Alice called, my mother was somewhere in the background. Betty just could not tell me, Alice said.
I flew at 6 a.m. the next morning. At home, I felt his presence. The place was filled with him, as it had been, though he was missing and his big chair, where I had last seen him, empty. Near his workbench, I spotted two gifts, handmade, left for me to find: the first was a small cube with photographs glued on every side. To keep the pictures safe, to make them last, a coat of polish had been carefully applied. The photographs, views of our backyard at different times throughout the year, showed the way it looks in snow, in springtime when the trees are in blossom, in summer when all is green, and in the fall when the leaves are colorful. There is a picture of rain falling with the woods behind the house just greens run together, like in some old painting. There is an image of a foggy morning when the ground is hidden and the bare trees reach out of the mist.
My father’s hands were swollen when he made this memento, all the seasons of home, for me. He was dying. He could barely grip a pencil. Notes and old checks I find from this time in the drawers of his old desk are written in a hand so shaky I can barely recognize it.
In the city, in my apartment, on the bookshelf by the cube of photos, I also keep his second gift, a wooden hand created by tracing his own on a piece of wood. Like the cube, it was carefully polished. At the base where the wrist is, there are three letter carved: GAH, his initials and mine.
I was grateful for these gifts. I had wanted some goodbye and he had left it, without saying anything. My old silent man.
I posted this before, but FB or someone took it down. So many of you have been s...
I posted this before, but FB or someone took it down. So many of you have been so loving and supportive during the promotion of upcoming book, Bettyville, that I wanted to give you the opportunity to post remarks about your own parents and caring for them in their later years. Anything you want to share from Annville or Claireville or Billville or Maryville. Anything you'd like to post about your parents or about taking care of them--a special time, something that made them happy. A few years back, Laura Zigman posted these wonderful things about her dad before he died. In the original version of this post, a woman wrote about her parents coming to the U.S. I'd like to give you something back and create a mini-page here, a little celebration of our parents' lives. I hope those of you wise posts and photos were lost will repost. Thanks and XO
February 23, 2015
From Bettyville, coming March 10 from Viking.
"I can never be a person who has...
From Bettyville, coming March 10 from Viking.
"I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, “This is how it has been, and it is okay.” I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother’s strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. I will see her walking, haltingly, in the dark, doing her best to find her way. We have sometimes struggled with words, but I am Betty’s boy. There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville with my old suitcase."
“In his tender, sardonic, and fearless account of life with Betty—who has never acknowledged that her son is gay—Hodgman delivers an epic unfolding of his lifelong search for acceptance and love.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“This is a superior memoir, written in a witty and episodic style, yet at times it’s heartbreaking . . . filled with a lifetime’s worth of reflection and story after fascinating story.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“The book is instantly engaging, as Hodgman has a wry sense of humor, one he uses to keep others at a distance. Yet the book is also devastatingly touching. Betty is one tough cookie, and she is crumbling. Hodgman as a young man came out around the same time AIDS did, complicating his already complicated feelings immeasurably. There’s a lot for Hodgman to handle, yet he does, despite the urge to give in to his own sadness. A tender, resolute look at a place, literal and figurative, baby boomers might find themselves.”
—Booklist
“Hodgman writes with wit and empathy about all the loss he’s confronted with. Betty’s poor health is mirrored by the fail¬ure of towns like Paris, whose farms and lumberyards are now Walmarts and meth labs. Coming out in the age of AIDS, he lost the people he was close to when he had nowhere else to turn. . . . That doesn’t mean Bettyville is without humor—far from it. Paris eccentrics (one woman shampoos her hair in the soda fountain) com¬pete with Hodgman’s colleagues in the office of Vanity Fair. . . . This is a portrait of a woman in decline, but still very much alive and committed to getting the lion’s share of mini-Snickers at every op¬portunity. When things are left un¬said between parents and children, it leaves a hurt that can never be completely repaired, but love and dedication can make those scarred places into works of art. Bettyville is one such masterpiece.”
—BookPage
“Hodgman chronicles his return home to care for his mother in the small Missouri town where he grew up. . . . Humor infuses the memoir with refreshing levity, without diminishing the emotional toll of being the sole health-care provider to an elderly parent. . . . An emotionally honest portrayal of a son’s secrets and his unending devotion.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Movingly honest, at times droll, and ultimately poignant.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, “This is how it has been, and it is okay.” I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother’s strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. I will see her walking, haltingly, in the dark, doing her best to find her way. We have sometimes struggled with words, but I am Betty’s boy. There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville with my old suitcase."
“In his tender, sardonic, and fearless account of life with Betty—who has never acknowledged that her son is gay—Hodgman delivers an epic unfolding of his lifelong search for acceptance and love.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“This is a superior memoir, written in a witty and episodic style, yet at times it’s heartbreaking . . . filled with a lifetime’s worth of reflection and story after fascinating story.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“The book is instantly engaging, as Hodgman has a wry sense of humor, one he uses to keep others at a distance. Yet the book is also devastatingly touching. Betty is one tough cookie, and she is crumbling. Hodgman as a young man came out around the same time AIDS did, complicating his already complicated feelings immeasurably. There’s a lot for Hodgman to handle, yet he does, despite the urge to give in to his own sadness. A tender, resolute look at a place, literal and figurative, baby boomers might find themselves.”
—Booklist
“Hodgman writes with wit and empathy about all the loss he’s confronted with. Betty’s poor health is mirrored by the fail¬ure of towns like Paris, whose farms and lumberyards are now Walmarts and meth labs. Coming out in the age of AIDS, he lost the people he was close to when he had nowhere else to turn. . . . That doesn’t mean Bettyville is without humor—far from it. Paris eccentrics (one woman shampoos her hair in the soda fountain) com¬pete with Hodgman’s colleagues in the office of Vanity Fair. . . . This is a portrait of a woman in decline, but still very much alive and committed to getting the lion’s share of mini-Snickers at every op¬portunity. When things are left un¬said between parents and children, it leaves a hurt that can never be completely repaired, but love and dedication can make those scarred places into works of art. Bettyville is one such masterpiece.”
—BookPage
“Hodgman chronicles his return home to care for his mother in the small Missouri town where he grew up. . . . Humor infuses the memoir with refreshing levity, without diminishing the emotional toll of being the sole health-care provider to an elderly parent. . . . An emotionally honest portrayal of a son’s secrets and his unending devotion.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Movingly honest, at times droll, and ultimately poignant.”
—Kirkus Reviews
I wish Lady Gaga could substitute for me on tour.
I wish Lady Gaga could substitute for me on tour.
February 19, 2015
From Bettyville, to be published March 10 by Viking:
On the day of my graduatio...
From Bettyville, to be published March 10 by Viking:
On the day of my graduation from the university, my parents had arrived to drink some champagne at the apartment Carl and I shared. Before we left for commencement, my father kept getting up to look around the apartment. He lingered in both bedrooms, the one crammed with stuff with its double bed and the other with the tiny, narrow bed where, I hoped they believed, Carl slept. My father just could not stay in his chair. He seemed interested in every detail in our place, determined to uncover any clue he could find to the life of his son. When I walked into the bathroom, my father was there, spraying a bit of Carl’s Royal Copenhagen cologne on his fingers. Rubbing them together, as if he were wary of actually taking a sniff, he caught a glance of me behind him in the mirror over the sink. My face reddened as our eyes met in the mirror that Carl always kept so clean.
That night, we had dinner with some of my friends and their parents. There was the feel of a festive evening, though I was nervous and just wanted to get it over. We arrived at the restaurant, Jack’s Cornado, before anyone else and my father went to the bar. As my mother headed toward the bathroom, he began the process of slamming down four gin and tonics one after the other. He drank quickly, downing each in an instant.
At dinner, my mother sat up in her chair, growing stiffer and stiffer, her hand wandering to her head occasionally to secure an errant lock. The restaurant was filled with laughter, the cheerful noises of special occasions. In the corner of the room, a young man played cocktail piano. Not songs, just riffs. Before the dinner was over, my father, less gregarious than usual at the table, got up, red-faced, and threw off his jacket. Then, moving to the side of the piano, he began, to the astonishment of his unwitting accompanist, to sing his song: “Old Man River.”
His words ran through me, stirring my emotions, my love, my regets, the loss of home and change, growing up, away from them. My father sang as if the restaurant was his. He sang as if all the guests at Jack’s Cornado Steak House had bought tickets for this occasion. He sang emotionally, his waves of feeling flowing through us all. The river rolled on and on, like time and change, and all we might hold back if it were possible.
It was a mysterious performance. I didn’t know whether to consider it a blessing, a resentful usurping of the prominence of others that evening, or a crying out as the river’s waters swept me from his world, his extended hand, the place where it was possible for him to try to save me.
On the day of my graduation from the university, my parents had arrived to drink some champagne at the apartment Carl and I shared. Before we left for commencement, my father kept getting up to look around the apartment. He lingered in both bedrooms, the one crammed with stuff with its double bed and the other with the tiny, narrow bed where, I hoped they believed, Carl slept. My father just could not stay in his chair. He seemed interested in every detail in our place, determined to uncover any clue he could find to the life of his son. When I walked into the bathroom, my father was there, spraying a bit of Carl’s Royal Copenhagen cologne on his fingers. Rubbing them together, as if he were wary of actually taking a sniff, he caught a glance of me behind him in the mirror over the sink. My face reddened as our eyes met in the mirror that Carl always kept so clean.
That night, we had dinner with some of my friends and their parents. There was the feel of a festive evening, though I was nervous and just wanted to get it over. We arrived at the restaurant, Jack’s Cornado, before anyone else and my father went to the bar. As my mother headed toward the bathroom, he began the process of slamming down four gin and tonics one after the other. He drank quickly, downing each in an instant.
At dinner, my mother sat up in her chair, growing stiffer and stiffer, her hand wandering to her head occasionally to secure an errant lock. The restaurant was filled with laughter, the cheerful noises of special occasions. In the corner of the room, a young man played cocktail piano. Not songs, just riffs. Before the dinner was over, my father, less gregarious than usual at the table, got up, red-faced, and threw off his jacket. Then, moving to the side of the piano, he began, to the astonishment of his unwitting accompanist, to sing his song: “Old Man River.”
His words ran through me, stirring my emotions, my love, my regets, the loss of home and change, growing up, away from them. My father sang as if the restaurant was his. He sang as if all the guests at Jack’s Cornado Steak House had bought tickets for this occasion. He sang emotionally, his waves of feeling flowing through us all. The river rolled on and on, like time and change, and all we might hold back if it were possible.
It was a mysterious performance. I didn’t know whether to consider it a blessing, a resentful usurping of the prominence of others that evening, or a crying out as the river’s waters swept me from his world, his extended hand, the place where it was possible for him to try to save me.
February 17, 2015
People have been nice enough to ask about the March event in Columbia, MO. Here...
People have been nice enough to ask about the March event in Columbia, MO. Here is the information. Thanks.
I will be reading in NYC--Manhattan and Brooklyn--March 10 and 11. Would love to...
I will be reading in NYC--Manhattan and Brooklyn--March 10 and 11. Would love to see you there.
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