Word: hough
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...games in the first five weeks of the season. Sutton, the ace of the staff, like a former Dodger righthander, Carl Erskine, catches the corners of the plate with his curve - and batters looking at third strikes. On the infrequent occasions when the Big Five falter, in motors Charlie Hough from the bullpen...
Chosen Route. In this account of his own autumnal days on Martha's Vineyard, Hough, with great skill and charm, approaches the pangs and pleasures of aging in ways that very much recall Walden's formula: keep track of housekeeping details and the transcendental homilies will take care of themselves. At home Hough's day still begins as it has for years, with a predawn walk to Edgartown's harbor light. Graham goes along but does not always agree to the route his master has chosen, and, like many Americans, has "a weakness for excavation...
...Hough moves with an essayist's grace from lemonade to his dislike of meetings, from Virginia Woolf to George Borrow. He is never sentimental, but he does not give up on old affections either. He is master of the splendidly abrupt transition: "In December 1971 I threw out all my city shirts, hoarded since 1926." Or: "Today Graham ate a whole banana." Or, with drastic irony: "Someone is sure to mention sex." Perhaps predictably Hough has it in for Sigmund Freud because he feels that the good doctor unwittingly damaged the possibilities of romance and encouraged the adoption...
Secure Past. Like many older people awash in the shallow and intolerant present, Hough often finds himself on the defensive about the past. "I think I know of much that has been lost as I looked on," he remarks. "In New England there is hardly an alternative other than a furtive sense of having been conspired against, which, difficult of concealment, leads one's neighbors to say one has 'turned queer.' " Then he warns: "In age a man may become a stranger in his native land." He wonders, too, if the intense preoccupation with the future...
...Hough himself deftly ruminates on eras and how they end. Not large, dramatic chunks of history that close with a bang, noticeable to the world, but odd personal eras, those less obtrusive small changes that in retrospect loom large in the heart. Like the time, at the close of Prohibition, when Hallowell's restaurant in Edgartown got a liquor license and went to hell, gastronomically speaking. Or the introduction of offset printing in place of the old linotype at the Vineyard Gazette. At the time Hough, somewhat uneasily, one suspects, tried to see it all as progress. He quotes...