Giovanni's Gift (42 page)

“Looking at this photograph, it's really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”

“The
H.M.S. Pinafore
outfit that I wore onone of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan's other workhorse operetta,
The Mikado
). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”

“Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.”

“I'm standing here with a group of beautiful young children somewhere in the mountains south of Comayagua, Honduras, in 1966, when I was serving as a medical assistant for Amigos de lasAméricas. This Peace-Corps-like experience in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti, at the time) absolutely changed my life. When this photo was taken, I had just finished inoculating the entire school body of this little village against smallpox and other diseases.”

“On the beach near Genoa, Italy, visiting the host family with whom I spentmy senior year in high school when I was a foreign exchange student living in Cuneo, not far from there. I lived with the Delpiano family: Minu and Aldo, my host parents, and Dario, Andrea, and the youngest brother, Davide, who's sitting here beside me, in 1970 or so.”

“In Littleton, Colorado, visiting my parent's house from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From the left: my beloved Grandfather Hoffman, who was a farmer in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until he lost everything in the Great Depression; my mother holding his hand; me in the middle with a pensive or else depressed look on my face (basically my mind must have been elsewhere); my equally beloved grandmother, Jenny Hoffman, to whom I attribute some of my storytelling skills; and my sister Deborah. Around 1972.”

“In my early twenties, camping somewhere in the Colorado mountains.”

“With the legendary James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, at a reception at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. The first issue of
Conjunctions
was a festschrift in honor of Laughlin, who published everyone from Ezra Pound to Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas to John Hawkes, Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, Patchen and Bowles, William Carlos Williams, and so many important modernists and post-modernists. 1981.”

“Bird-watching in the highlands of Scotland, on the North Sea. Late 1980s.”

“This is the barn on my uncle Henry and aunt Helen Rehder's ranch near Steamboat Springs. The ranch served as the setting for
Giovanni's Gift
, and this photograph was taken by me when I went to visit them at the height of their being harassed in the middle of the night by people who were trying to get them to sell their ranch so that it could be developed. Mid-1990s.”

“Me standing next to a low-rider car with an absolutely superb flame paintjob in the small village of Chimayó, New Mexico, where some of
Trinity Fields
and
Ariel's Crossing
is set. With one of my trusty Boorum & Pease journals under my arm. Mid-1990s.”