What Can Be Discovered in the Word, Hodgepodge?

I begin by admitting to weariness with so much language that comes to our eyes and ears from the electronic world; and this weariness affects the way I write, which is to take dictation from an inner voice. And lately that voice is tired.  Yet sometimes playing with one word can restore my energy for language. That’s what happened three weeks ago when I could not find a way to unravel my thoughts (see the last three blogs for what I mean). At some point during a long afternoon, my mind in a muddle, I said aloud, “What a hodgepodge!”

The writer in me asked, “What’s the source of hodgepodge.”

That’s when I looked at a shelf beneath my printer where I keep dictionaries. First, I opened the Oxford American Dictionary, one compiled by noteworthy writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Two contributors were the late David Foster Wallace and the U.K.’s Zadie Smith. In the OAD under Hodge Podge (two words) I saw jumble, mishmash, and a word I did not know, gallimaufry.

Next, I opened my two-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and discovered that gallimaufrey comes from the old French, calimafrée, its origin unknown, according to the OED, which defined hodgepodge as a variety of hotchpotch or hodchpot, and is a “clumsy mixture of ingredients.”

As someone who does not know French, I asked myself what ‘hodgepodge” would be in Spanish. Mescolanza. Que bueno!  The sound mimics the meaning:  a mixture, a jumble, a hodge podge (written as two words). Putting away my Simon and Schuster International Dictionary (a gift from the State Department for withstanding 32 weeks of Spanish!), I opened a thick Synonym Finder and found 21 words for hodgepodge, including gallimaufrey. I cannot see this word without an image. My quirky definition is, “a way to fry fish in a boat’s galley.”

Por fin (at last), I opened a dictionary that I recommend to students and would-be-writers.  The Flip Dictionary has sixteen words for hodgepodge, including Katzenjammer, salmagundi, and olio. The latter word made me think of portfolio, and folio made me think of Willy the Shake, as I call him. That’s when I pulled Shakespeare’s Words from the shelf. This over two-inch thick book has no page numbers, and no hodgepodge, either one word or two.  But there was hodge-pudding!  What character in Shakespeare might have used this word?   None other than corpulent Falstaff, ever concerned with food and lust.

The L word led me to The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Might hodgepodge have a risqué meaning? No, only one dull definition: “irregular mixture of numerous things.”

Yet playing with the word pushed me through the stasis that afternoon of not having a voice with which to write.  And next week? A Frenchman, Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) and his concerns over 70 years ago, in the 1950s, about machines and technology.                                                              

He was her …North, South, East, and West

Then one Mother’s Day, a fatal stroke, and in days her husband was gone. I have borrowed part of a line from W.H. Auden’s poem, “Funeral Blues” quoted in the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral.  

I imagine the poem is used often. The same way people reach for commercial sympathy cards. Let someone else find the difficult words. I do know words fail me when confronted with acknowledging someone’s death.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest, 

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

https://allpoetry.com/Funeral-Blues

Above in my title, I substituted Auden’s “me” for “He.” While reading A Balanced Life, a memoir by Patricia Schultheis, I remembered Auden’s poem. Last week I mentioned the SMK creative nonfiction essay, “The Country Where I Live.” The combination of the Franz Kafka quote, the memoir, the narrative essay, led me to feel the “Guilty Blues.”  Why?  Not easy to explain in a page of prose.

Simply stated, I believe that countless friendships have ruptured because of Donald Trump. And this rupture relates to something I find vexing in our culture. Maybe I say this after living in a country where there was no separation of religion and state. I do know I feel annoyed if someone in the USA tells me their religion and politics are no one else’s business.  I respect anyone reciting, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” with its declarative first person.  But what about, “We the People?”  I think the plural suggests openness about political beliefs, not a scrupulous and earnest piety of “no one else’s business.”

My friend, the widow, and I parted because of this. I had no problem that she was Republican, but hopefully like those who declared themselves Lincoln Republicans.  I could not accept she would not disavow Donald Trump. She stuck to the “I” and no ‘one else’s business’ creed, and I to my plural, “We the People.” This is to say fixed ideas supplanted feelings. Which means I did not feel the painful loss of her husband, a man my husband very much enjoyed seeing.

For over a decade I was in a group of six writers. One member was already a widow, two more would become widows. Then this woman’s husband suffered a fatal stroke. Earlier the Pandemic had brought an end to the group.  Almost everything she shared with us had a married couple as the subject. We often suggested she bind her creative and humorous stories into a book on marriage.

My point is this. It was only when I finished reading A Balanced Life that I felt my friend’s loss, instead of my own grievance.  In other words, Patricia’s book was an axe for a frozen sea, in which no waves had washed me into an acute awareness of this former friend finding herself in the Country of Grief, and how that felt as a new reality.

What to do?  I am going to ask if she will meet me for coffee downtown one day. And if this happens, I will take with me A Balanced Life and offer the memoir to her. I will also take along a photocopy of Patricia’s masterful narrative, “In the Meantime” which is about mortality and creativity. The one a certainty. The other always an open possibility…

Next week:  Playing with hodgepodge and exploring this word in multiple dictionaries.

The Country of Grief

Last week I was mistaken.  I did save another winner from the Soul-Making Keats, not just “In the Meantime” by Patricia Schultheis. Yesterday in discarding more paper, I came across “The Country Where I Live,” by a writer in Oakland, California.  Her creative non-fiction entry begins, “About five years ago, I moved to Grief.”   I remember first reading this as Greece, though quickly saw in the line below, “I moved not to Greece.”

What follows are five pages of an extended metaphor about a country where the author does not meet Mr. Fake Smile and Ms. False Cheer, or those climbing the Ladder of Competitive Suffering. This writer says the Country of Grief is multicultural, and this appeals to her, “although some people have the mistaken impression that the way so-and-so peoples and their ancestors grieve is better than, say, the way such-and-such peoples and their kind grieve. Like the People with Solumn Eyes are better grievers than, say, the People Who Wail. It’s one of my grief-ances…that in the Country of Grief, these biases arise.” (Microsoft 11, an Old Testament, unforgiving God, is going nuts with this writer’s playful grammatical deviance.”)  All five pages of this second-place winner would need to be read to appreciate the country she creates.

You wonder, perhaps, where I am going with this? 

Directly to A Balanced Life, a memoir by Patricia Schultheis. She, too, takes a reader to the Country of Grief, as well as other countries, plus ice rinks and ponds. This Maryland journalist, fiction writer & book reviewer, frames her memoir through a lifelong passion as an amateur ice skater. I use the term, but Patricia states in the Preface, “I’m always careful to say, I skate, never I’m a skater.”  

Her memoir like the sport, has forward and backward movement.  She uses present and past tense to uncover and reveal the patterns and connections in her life. In 185 pages, she skates through time, recounting her life through a voice both lyrical & metaphorical, and factual.   

Her winning SMK essay, “In the Meantime,” recounts meeting Mr. Mort(ality) at the time of her older sister Sally’s death in 1995 at age 55 from cancer. (When I turn 81 on June 5th, that day will be the 29th anniversary of Sally’s death. This is one of the mysterious connections I share with a woman I’ve not met in person.)

Shortly after her sister’s death, Patricia’s husband Bill developed cancer of the larynx, fought on for years, then died in 2008. They were married for over four decades; and she reflects that in skating and marriage and parenting, no guarantee of remaining upright, of not losing balance. Add to this the death of her parents.  Patricia’s memoir has nine chapters, and each begins with a pithy and provocative claim.  Here are three: Among sports, only skating records its own execution (5).  We are born fallen (6).  I have an affinity for blades (8).

Another motif in her memoir is use of a diary. The first entry is from December 4, 1974. Patricia refers to her diary as “a spillway for worries, daily observations” and she uses it for orienting a reader in time. Then following her husband’s death, she writes to Bill, not just herself.  In a memoir, a writer must create a compelling identity on the page, which Patricia Schultheis has done in A Balanced Life.

Next week I will relate what this memoir led me to do, related to the Kafka quote in the Preface: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”