It's all in here: the sublime, silly, dangerous, petty, too cute for words, and a shed tear.

December 2, 2025

My banner photograph today is of the copper beech tree in Northport, brought from England long ago by a member of the Thomas family and still flourishing today. In which season is this venerable tree at its loveliest? I can’t decide but took the photograph above with my Samsung android phone one December morning, a little after 10 a.m., and to my eye it looked magnificent.

  

Ogden Nash

I don’t think it’s belittling his gift to call Ogden Nash a versifier. My discovery of Nash came in a volume called Parents Keep Out! on the shelves in my hometown library children’s room, and how could any kid resist a book with that name? What fun to memorize Nash’s poems, from two-liners to those of many stanzas! 

Here is probably the shortest verse Ogden Nash ever wrote. It’s called “Fleas,” and the entire poem is as follows:

Adam

Had ‘em.

Imagine my shock, however, to see that the site “All Poetry,” in analyzing the verse, refers to this clever couplet as a “witty quatrain”! Quatrain? A four-line stanza? Obviously not! Witty, yes. Quatrain, no.

Here is another two-line Nash poem, a favorite of my father’s and one of the earliest that I knew by heart without even trying:

God in his wisdom made the fly

And then forgot to tell us why.

One of my longer favorites was “Very Like a Whale,” which I leave you to look up for yourself by following this link—and then see if you can stop from reading more and more Ogden Nash verse. Fair warning: It is addictive.

Why do I drag in these humorous poems instead of some more ethereal ode to trees? Because Nash himself took off on Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” following Kilmer’s first two-line stanza with a second of his own:

 

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

 

Silly? Yes. Corny? Yes. But also irresistibly memorable, especially to a child discovering mockery of sacred literary cows for the first time.

 

Get Off of Your Cloud!

My son told me a couple years ago, “The cloud is just someone else’s bigger computer,” and with my initial skeptical aversion to cloud storage thus vindicated, I have continued to buy, read, and hold onto printed, bound books; to write letters and send them through the mail in stamped envelopes (treasuring written replies); and to store my digital files only on my own devices. (Note to self: Need a couple more flash drives, memory sticks, whatever they're called.) Here were my initial arguments against relying on the so-called cloud, i.e., “someone else’s computer,” somewhere else --

 

Ø How do I know the cloud won’t crash? 

Ø How do I know my data (i.e., my precious image and text files) will remain unchanged, uncorrupted, and accessible by me—and only by me?

Ø Finally, after reading about the massive amounts of water and power necessary to maintain those so-called clouds, and the dreadful 24/7 noise the data banks put out, why would I want to park in someone else’s backyard something I don’t want in my own? Better, I believe, to buy extra camera cards and additional flash drives and keep them in a safe place at home. 

If those arguments didn’t convince you, how about this one: Many people believe that massive data centers, currently touted for AI, are a bigger financial bubble than the country has ever yet seen. It all boils down to extractive industry and good old entropy. Most of the spending on the AI bubble, as is true of your beloved cloud storage, is not “virtual,” but very, very physical. Real estate. Buildings. Hardware. Electricity. Water. Now add to the deterioration of the surrounding physical environment and the rapid deterioration of electronic chips a super-scary degradation--the deterioration of information (“intelligence”?) gathered and synthesized as LLMs (Large Language Models) are put through post-training “learning.” 

Word of the day: sycophantic. Look it up. So-called artificial intelligence degrades rapidly the more it “learns” from what human beings say online. Garbage in, garbage out. Bullshit in, bullshit out. When put through post-training, AI becomes an obsequious flatterer rather than a knowledgeable advisor!

If you don’t understand how something is made, you should not invest in it. (Think cryptocurrency.) In the case of generative AI, the more you know about it, the less likely you are to invest. Seriously, watch and listen, because others are investing for you—your government, your money managers—and you cannot afford not to know what's going on. Has your community been asked to make room for a data center? Sooner or later, one will be proposed near you, so prepare yourself now with information.

Fonts and Politics???

Do you recognize the font I use on this blog? It's called Bookman Old Style, and I like both the name and the look, being a bookseller and always having been partial to serifs (particularly adnate serifs), those little extras that seem so graceful and generous. Do you see them as unnecessary furbelows? Consider:

Bookman Old Style example: AI

Helvetica example: AI

Which one is clearer to you? To my eye, the capital letter I without a serif looks like a small L or even the number 1. With a serif, there is no such confusion. And, as I say, I have always simply found serif fonts graceful and generous in appearance, overall more attractive, although many people see the matter differently and consider the sans serif fonts easier to read, cleaner, and more modern. 

One thing that would never have occurred to me would have been that a switch to a san serif font signaled some kind of political agenda, but leave it to Republicans to suspect liberalism's vile fingerprints on anything done by a Democratic administration, and so it isn't as unbelievable as it should be that Marco Rubio, current Secretary of State, has declared Anthony Blinken's switch to the simpler Calibri font a symptom of wokism and, somehow, “another wasteful DEIA program.” Good lord, it's almost enough to make me renounce serifs for life! But no, not quite. This insanity cannot last forever. For now, however, Rubio is reinstating the Times New Roman font “to restore decorum and professionalism” to the State Department. 

Ha! Wouldn't that be nice? To see “decorum and professionalism” again in our nation's capitol? (Why do I think that will take more than a change of typeface?) For now, who can tell me how eliminating serifs was more costly than restoring them will be? How petty can anyone be?

Just another red herring, folks. Another little brushfire to add to the giant smokescreen....

Turning Toward the Sun

No, not yet. It will be eleven more days before days begin to grow longer, and yet I'm sure I heard on the radio that yesterday was the year's earliest sunset and that tonight the sun will set marginally later. Can that be? Did I only imagine it? And will it matter, anyway, if clouds keep us covered? 

For me, though, every morning is a Sunny morning, come rain or come shine, and I know you want to see her, too, so here's the dog girl!

Her ears were blowing in the cold, cold wind!

Indoors, cozy and photogenic

We Lost a Most Memorable Northporter

It was a shock to learn on Monday evening that David Chrobak had died only that afternoon. My last relaxed visit with David (I'm not counting sidewalk chats outside the post office) was in his front yard one evening this past summer, and somewhere I have a photo taken from the yard, looking through hanging prisms and flowers to the Willowbrook Inn, but where can it be? Here, anyway, and much better, is a photo of David himself. The occasion was the 21st anniversary of my bookstore, which David on the cake he baked and decorated called “a love story.” David loved Northport, and Northport loved him back. There will never be another like him. David, we miss you already!

David Chrobak, Northport, MI, June 2014

From the Tenth to the Twelfth

Looking out onto Waukazoo Street

December

Oddly enough, the name of our twelfth month of the year comes from the Latin word for ten, decem, thanks to an earlier Roman ten-month calendar. New months January and February were added on at the beginning of the year on the new Julian calendar, rather than at the end, in 45 BCE, making the old tenth month the new twelfth month. 

 

To a friend who remarked gloomily the other day that winter “hasn’t even started yet,” I gave my own Pollyannaish (not my nature--I have to work hard at it) view of December 21: That’s when darkness begins to retreat, days begin to lengthen, so I see the official first day of winter as a happy turning toward spring—and don’t try to talk me out of it! 

Morning sun! A rare winter treat in Michigan!

 When Is Your Work “Finished”?

 

French writer Albert Camus died in a traffic accident at age 46, and his last book, an unfinished draft manuscript, was found in the mud at the scene of the accident. Russian fiction writer Gogol completed only the first volume of his projected trilogy, destroying multiple copies of sequels that failed to satisfy him. American poet and novelist Jim Harrison died in his writing studio with an unfinished poem on his desk. 

 

Some people find it tragic when writers’ last works are not completed. I find it inspiring. 

 

Is this an old Chinese saying or something that can be traced to Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi? “A man builds his house; then he dies.” My husband the Artist took it to mean that living meant working toward a goal, “building one’s house,” and that having finished the house down to the last perfect detail, there was nothing left to do but die. And so, the Artist’s thought continued, it was best to have many unfinished projects, goals to anticipate, and reasons to get up in the morning. Having finished all projects meant no more reason to live, as he saw it.

Unfinished, unsigned --

From time to time I wonder what people do with themselves when they retire, sell their houses, stop driving, and move to senior apartments. Some, I’m sure, remain socially active in their new environments, but what about life outside of socializing? What would I do if deprived of my housework, yard work, dog responsibilities, long walks and drives, travel, gardening and foraging, and my bookselling life? Reading and writing would remain, as long as my eyes and mind cooperated, and maybe I would even get more writing done—actually hold myself to a daily schedule! (There’s a concept, eh?) Physical tasks, though, have always been fruitful interludes during any big writing project (say, a doctoral dissertation) I’ve ever had. Washing dishes or raking leaves, shoveling snow or taking a long walk or drive—anything to jog the mind out of a rut, because getting away from a desk re-opens space for thoughts and words to find each other in the happy, cooperative way they can stubbornly refuse to do when a writer sits too long in one place. 

 

The Artist and I talked about taking a very long, meandering way home from Cochise County, Arizona, in the spring of 2022, driving north as far as the Badlands of South Dakota (he’d never seen my birth state) and then east to the Twin Cities of Minnesota (to visit kids and grandkids). He had in mind an experimental method for casting his wax sculptures and looked forward to trying that, also. A friend asked if he left unfinished paintings. Of course. But that’s just it. He went into the hospital that last time already looking forward to coming home and going on. He was living, not dying, until he died. For Harrison, life was writing poems, and so Jim, too, caught mid-poem, despite his acknowledged loneliness in the months following Linda’s death, was still living up to the end. 

 

“We must draw a lesson from this,” say the Chinese. What lesson do you draw? I say, don’t finish your house and call your life over. There is always more to do, and it’s good to keep living as long as you have breath.

 

 

Mailman Wisdom

When Stephen was laid off from a high-paying job as some kind of business consultant in the early days of the COVID epidemic, everyone else was laying off or being laid off, too, which is how Stephen found himself taking the test and training to become a rural mail carrier in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his home territory. Accustomed to feeling smart as well as being well paid, Stephen was overwhelmed by his new job and discouraged by mistakes. One day everything came to a head when he forgot that a house on his route was vacant, stuck his hand into the mailbox, and was attacked by hornets. “I can’t do this,” he tells a fellow carrier who has been helping him with the new route. Her advice is simple.

 

“…It’s like this for everybody. Just show up one more day. Just deliver the rest of this stuff and you’ll be done for today.”

 

“Okay.” 

 

“Don’t quit today.” 

 

-      Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

 

 

A friend and I were talking about how difficult life can be, especially these days, what with aging (for us), and political division, and what feels to us like the tearing-down of the America that had been built during our lifetime, and we acknowledged how easy it can be to slip into depression and say, “I can’t do it!” We talked about how often people say, “Take one day at a time,” when there is, after all, no alternative! 

 

When I told her about the mail carrier saying, “Don’t quit today,” she liked it as much as I did. Really, “Take one day at a time” and “Don’t quit today” may look like the same advice, but don’t they feel different somehow? For me, when things look particularly gloomy, “Don’t quit today” is all I need to promise myself. Not quit today? I can do that! I’m not looking at a whole long string of “one day at a time” days, just this one day I’m in. Don’t quit today. All right!

 

(I don’t need to tell myself that every day or even most days. Most days are either neutral or brightened by what Dana Frost calls “forced joy,” or begin and end in downright deep gratitude. Once in a while there are spots of bliss. It’s just good to be able to pull out a mantra that works when you need it.)

Postage stamps are miniature works of art.

I found Mailman an inspiring book. In one early chapter, I feared the author was going to bog down in procedural minutia, but I waded through those pages and was glad I did, because knowing how much the job involves makes Grant’s livelier stories all that much more vivid, and without ever having worked for USPS, I can appreciate and identify with his feeling for the postal service. They don’t cherry-pick profitable routes! USPS delivers to everyone. In that regard, they are like public schools and similarly foundational to the social infrastructure of the United States.

 

Coming from a family of letter-writers, I absolutely love the United States Postal Service! Their service is priceless! But how many of us know how hard the work is, how efficiently it is managed at the over 40,000 local offices, and what a downright bargain it is compared to postal prices in other parts of the world? Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, and thank you, U.S. postal workers, past, present, and future!

 

And now, a little shameless self-promotion

 

First, I’ll boast on behalf of my village and say that Northport’s holiday-decorated tree is easily the most beautiful in the county. Of course, you know I am completely unbiased, right?

 

What I have on offer now at Dog Ears Books is a postcard featuring that beautiful tree (from 2024), and on the reverse side, where you put a postage stamp and address to someone you want to remember with a written message, are the words “Happy Holidays from Northport, Michigan!” 

I’m asking 94 cents a card, so that with tax it’s just a dollar, and I’m also selling a dozen cards for the price of ten: $9.40 + tax = $10. You may not send out hundreds of cards for the holidays, but there are surely a dozen people in your life whose hearts would be warmed to having a greeting from Northport. Anyway, I’m hoping that’s the case.

 

New Playground!

Now that snow is falling and piling up and drifting along our driveway and in the yard around the old farmhouse, once more we have periodic morning visits from a snowplow. Sunny finds it alarming to have a truck drive right into the yard, but the great part for her comes after the truck leaves, having cleared a big new playground for us! Room for the bouncy ball to bounce! Room for Sunny to run and leap after a Frisbee! Maybe that old snowplow isn’t such a bad thing, after all!

Goodbye, November. Hello, Winter!

Holiday greenery at home

The Sunday after Thanksgiving came with more snow than I had expected. We’d had so little with the predicted big storm on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by continued clear roads on Friday and Saturday, that I had grown complacent, and even when snow began falling and blowing on Saturday evening, I didn’t expect enough accumulation to to get in the way of a visit to the dog park. 

 

I was wrong. 

That’s okay. Sunny and I walked in deep snow close to home, which she found exciting, and then came indoors where I began a project for the day: turkey soup. We live a revisable life, my dog and I, with much improvisation amid the constants.

 

Soup begins here.

It was the last day of November. Hanukkah will begin at sundown on December 14. The official beginning of winter is December 21. Christmas comes on the 25^th, Kwanzaa on the 26^th, and then, the following week, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, on the last day of November, as I neared the last page of Wieseltier’s book on Kaddish (mentioned and quoted in my previous post), I came upon the author’s remarks on closure, an idea he finds a “ludicrous notion of emotional efficiency” and a very American delusion.

 

Americans really believe that the past is past. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

This accords with my own life experience, with what I love in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and with what I see across my country and around the world today. What do you make of these words?

 

The soul does not heal as the body heals, because the soul is improved, and even enchanted, by its wounds.

 

Improved? I need to think about that. I remember being surprised by a French mother’s concern that her young child’s fall would result in a small scar. Life, I thought then, as I still think today, is the accumulation of scars visible and invisible. I remember, as a child, being very proud of the slightest scar, happy to have been visibly marked by life, with my own personal, unique history inscribed on my skin.

 

Another:

 

…Nothing happens once and for all. It all visits, it all returns. But ‘closure’ says once and for all. This is a misunderstanding of subjectivity, which is essentially haunted.

 

Enchanted. Haunted. It all returns.

"Love returns always"

A friend asked me to recommend writers who have addressed the question of the meaning of life, and her request alarmed me. Countless people through the ages have written books on the subject, from the simplistic and maudlin to the impossibly sublime, but why would anyone take a writer’s word for the answer? Why would anyone take anyone else’s answer? How could they? 

 

I can see, of course, the value of considering what other people have said, but I replied that I don’t think there is a singular correct answer to the “Why?” question (“Why are we here?”) or some unique hidden meaning already given for all to find by diligent searching. This is not intended to be an answer, mind you: I am only stating my personal belief, which is that we find our own life’s meaning by making it, find something to live for by giving our life to it. We can live for God or for love, for art or literature or history, for birds or dogs or elephants — the list is endless. We may attempt to grow a perfect apple or ear of corn or write a perfect sentence or build a perfect bridge or simply do our best in whatever small corner we find ourselves. Why not multiple meanings? And maybe, even probably, what is most meaningful in one phase of life will be replaced or enlarged by something else later on. 

 

My friend asked another question: How should we live in the world? I feel on more solid footing with that query and hesitate only to put my answer clearly and briefly: 

 

Toward others (and oneself), practice compassion. Toward the natural world, practice curiosity and gentleness. Pay attention to all around you and be grateful.

 

But then, maybe this answer too is an answer for me and not for everyone? I don’t know. I only know that it has been many years since I first felt that paying attention was my #1 job in life. It is such a miracle, after all, to be alive. And surely part of the gratitude we owe for that miracle is awareness of it in as much detail as we can take in. 

 

(Not that we can ever be fully aware of everything every moment. As I sit tapping out these words, it is all too easy to forget the patient dog girl waiting for my attention. And do I even notice the tiny spider in the corner of a picture frame? But what is not the central focus of my awareness is still there, nearby and all around. I smell turkey broth simmering and dried apples rehydrating in cider, see lamplight falling on a bowl of fruit, hear the wind driving snow across the meadow, and I remember noticing, only an hour or two before, that the tall dry giant bluestem grass in the meadow is the same toasted gold color of the highest branches of the black willow trees along the no-name creek.)

Not only is life a gift, but it goes by quickly. Friends who married each other in their 70s, a new start late in life for both, acknowledged that they were entering the game in the fourth quarter but realized that the game wasn't over. A widowed friend recently took the plunge and brought a new puppy into her home. I cut small cedar branches for the house for Thanksgiving and on Friday got out my little Santa band. Where there's life, there's life!

 

Winter beginning on December 21? For me, this year, it began November 29. It is here now. 

Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

Deer Season, Among Books

Another morning through the windshield

 

Oh, baby, it’s cold out there!

 

Donuts are disappearing earlier in the morning, and you are apt to hear gunshots as soon as the sun is up. It’s firearm deer season! Time to keep your dog leashed and to wear some blaze orange yourself. Question: Why is it called blaze orange? Why not just orange? Anyone know?

Field corn harvest is underway in Leelanau Township. Many trees have been wind-stripped of their leaves by now, but you can go over to Karen Casebeer’s blog to see the remaining rich browns of oak leaves, and I’ll give my own pitch here for beech leaves, which also hang on after maples and other trees are bare. Sometimes leaves on very young beeches stay attached all winter long, thinning as the season wears on.

 

This is not a podcast.

 

This is not my bookstore.
It's a photo (of my bookstore).

Someone who still reads bound books printed on paper, still handwrites letters to friends and family, does not have TV, has never had a dishwasher (and feels no need for one) – it should not surprise you that such a person is not sufficiently up-to-date to produce a podcast, but you don’t need to see me, anyway. Or, should you want to see me, you are welcome to visit my bookstore. I’m presently here five days a week and plan to be here four days a week through the long, cold northern Michigan winter. Otherwise, what I have to share in a public forum I will share on this old-fashioned platform.

 

Isn’t it frightening how quickly our innovative, cutting-edge modes of communication become old-fashioned? Blogs are not yet completely obsolete, however, and I’m comfortable here. Web + log = blog, a kind of ship’s log that has no need of an ocean, a diary of sorts that anyone may read. Quite public enough for me.

 

 

This is not a Substack.

 

That’s where the action is these days: Substack. Professional writers, professional journalists, counselors, historians, and other professionals of every stripe can all be found on Substack. Friends have suggested I jump on board, but I am content to keep my amateur status. Should I ever write a book, I’ll do what I can to see that it sells, but in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere I don’t ask anyone to subscribe and pay. My paid gig is that of bookseller.

 

 

Writing Letters: Not a Paid Gig, Either

 

My family has always been a family of letter-writers. Back in the days when telephone calls were divided into “local” and “long distance,” frugality dictated written correspondence, except for holidays and birth and death announcements. “Getting the mail” is still, for me, an errand brimming with possibility, and I take pleasure also in popping a stamped envelope into the mail slot, addressed to a friend or a sister, anticipating the recipient’s surprise and delight. 

Love this postmark! Love USPS!

[Note to self: Write more notes and letters soon! You are falling behind!] 

 

My posts here on this blog are a form of letters, too, stuffed into metaphorical bottles and thrown out onto a metaphorical sea, not addressed to any one particular person but intended for anyone who finds them interesting enough to read.

 

 

Old Friends and New

 

More than once here, I have mourned the passing of old friends, and today I want to make clear that my sadness over those losses is no reflection on newer friends! “No one replaces anyone else,” a dear old friend remarked years ago, and I have never forgotten her words. No one can ever take the place she filled in my life and still holds in my heart, but my new friends have found their own places. The silver and the gold....

 

Not the morning I expected

 

On Monday, my day to accomplish tasks and errands that don’t fit in with days I’m at my bookshop, the weather was cold, the sky grey. On Sunday, the strong, bitter wind had made it difficult for me to stay as long at the dog park as Sunny wanted to stay, but she deserved some fun, so I stuck it out. Now on Monday morning my first task of the day was to load snow tires into the back of my car so I could take them to the garage and have them mounted for the season ahead. Then, what would I do with myself while the car was up on the hoist? Van’s Garage opens at 8 a.m., but the library in Leland doesn’t open until 10. Trish’s Dishes was the answer to my dilemma, and I was the first customer in the day, six minutes after they opened at 8:30.

Good coffee. Warm, quiet atmosphere. Delicious breakfast burrito filled with vegetables and melting cheese, with a couple slices of melon on the side. My own little table up in the front corner, where I could look out and remember when my friend Ellen had her garden business and she and I planted daylilies in front of what was then her husband Bob Pisor’s Stone House Bread. Book to read, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, not a book that would be everyone’s cup of tea but one I was finding delightful. A morning I had been dreading unexpectedly delivered bliss!

 

The Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was one of the youngest members, invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to join them, but he kept his distance. Probably just as well. Members of the circle never grasped the significance in incompleteness that Gödel himself saw there, and Wittgenstein was similarly misunderstood. In question for both were the limits of language and whether or not those limits are also the limits of human knowledge. Goldstein contrasts the two misunderstood geniuses, Wittgenstein the dramatically tormented and Gödel the silent, reticent sufferer, and the two men live in her pages. 

 

Bliss! Except for the empty tables, I might have been back in the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, but besides the lack of other intently studious customers there was also the happy circumstance that I didn’t have to take notes and could simply enjoy my reading. I almost laughed out loud over Goldstein’s description of the way the Vienna Circle members, “sworn enemies of cognitive bewitchment,” worshipped Wittgenstein. I had a little taste of that in graduate school. A Wittgenstein study group (at the home of one of the professors) was practically a cult gathering, where LW’s texts were the sacred scripture, never challenged, although at times a member of the congregation would admit to being “puzzled” by a particular passage. ("Puzzlement" was permitted.) Following discussion, an acolyte served tea. All very formal and esoteric and refined and oh, so English! No, I was much more comfortable and much happier with my book and breakfast burrito and coffee, all by myself, a philosophe fauve, as my friend Annie once termed the two of us, both by that time far from the halls of academe....

 

After a heavenly two hours with my book, walking back to retrieve my car I encountered the only fly in the morning’s ointment, because what is more maddening than the roar of a leaf-blower? The roar of three leaf-blowers!!! Soon back in my car, however, armed against the future with snow tires, with beautiful guitar music playing as I drove toward home, I was eager to share a joyful time with Sunny Juliet by taking her to the dog park for the second day in a row, where I was glad to find the wind not quite as horrifically strong and cold as it had been the day before. 

"Wanna play?"

"Yes!"

 

More of the blaze orange story.

 

Its other name is “safety orange,” and the point is to make oneself (or one’s dog) highly visible against a brown leaf background or snow or blue sky, which we had pretty much already figured out, right? The other advantage of orange for hunters is that it’s not a color deer can see. They see blue and green, but orange to them just looks brown or grey. Okay, that makes sense, too. 

 

Here's another factoid new to me: “Caltrans orange” (no apostrophe, for some reason) is the name for the color as given by the California Department of Transportation for their construction zones and equipment. It’s easier to see in rain or fog than other colors, apparently. 

 

An article in the Paris Review, sharing from a book by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color, gives more background, not on the blaze designation but on orange itself as a color term. Before the fruit came to Europe in the 17^th century, Europeans used yellow-red as the color term. In the 1960s people started calling it hunter orange, thanks to an article in Field & Stream. 

What color would you call this?

Safety orange, hunter orange, Caltrans orange, OSHA orange, the color is government regulated, but nothing I’ve turned up explains why we so often call it blaze orange. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Safety first!