Banner

Bert

Bert Hodge

  • 904.669.0687

Lonesome Bert Hodge, raised and marginally socialized in Palatka, a Tom Sawyer town in north Florida, wasted his youth chasing Confederate ghosts and skipping stones on the St Johns River. His first real job, delivering Coca-Cola, moonshine and reefer to the turpentine camps, exposed him at an early age to the joys of Saturday night jubilation, intercultural romance, and the “pine-pitch honky-tonk” musical style.

A perfunctory scholar, Bert coasted through school on the merits of his eidetic memory, fetching up finally with a BA from FSU, an award based almost entirely on his recitation of Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” after a single reading. Shortly thereafter, a career opportunity interview with his draft board propelled him into the US Navy, where they taught him to fly and rain death from the air on mid-ocean marine life.

After most of a lifetime of commercial airplanes, deep-woods land surveying, and rental property wrangling, Bert discovered the thrill of street-corner busking, and became a finger-picking folk-singing fool. He writes his own material, because who else could? He has even written his own epitaph: “Born lonely, lived lonesome, lasted a long time and gone” and is working on a Gypsy jazz  arrangement for it.

Today Lonesome Bert is considered the go-to man for any Irene project for which no other recourse can be found. He can fix anything, from the crack of dawn to a broken heart, and is willing to undertake any conceivable undertaking, such as dragging the dead opossums from under the house for a proper burial, or exploratory excavation of the main drain sewer line on a Christmas eve, all done for the tiniest of rewards and quickly overtaken by subsequent events.

As to his position in Irene’s stable of indispensable talents, you could say “He has a good beat, and you can dance to him.”

Irene Arriola Real Estate, Inc.
81 King Street, Suite B Saint Augustine, FL 32084
Email: [email protected] | Office phone: 904.829.2002
Cell phone: 904.669.0691 | Fax: 904.829.2029