Settling In and Reading in Paradise

Our reading-at-night book as we first began settling into our winter base on the Gulf was Farley Mowat’s Born Naked, and we enjoyed that book so much that I decided our next bedtime reading would be Mowat’s first published book, People of the Deer. (Both of these were among the books I bought in Micanopy last Wednesday.) It reminds me of Michigan winters back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when as the days and nights grew colder, I longed for them to be colder still. What Mowat calls Arctic fever surely had a hold on me. I think the Arctic appealed to me then for some of the same reasons it called to Mowat, though he also longed to recreate or build on an earlier experience and had serious, more or less professional interest in wildlife. But the Barrens, as he describes them, are country in which the struggles to be faced are not arbitrary. They have nothing at all to do with human politics and discord. Instead, the difficulties---at least then--came with the territory, with the geography and the climate.

Another book I’m reading at present is The Future of the Race, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Cornel West. (This one I picked up in Crystal River, where the bookseller at Poe House Books had a good selection of books on race relations and African and African-American history.) The essay by Gates, “The Parable of the Talents,” begins with his own experience at Yale and the black student leaders he met there. West’s essay is entitled “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization” and is very much a critique of the work both essays reflect in their thought, “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address,” by W.E.B. Du Bois. This book was published in 1996, only 12 years ago, and it is interesting to read in light of Barack Obama’s election, as it will be interesting to follow Obama’s presidency and response to it by public intellectuals such as Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

But my focus on serious reading keeps slipping. I take Sarah out for a walk and am greeted by a vista of fabulous wading birds.



David tempts me with a drive down to Tarpon Springs, and we share a gyros on the sponge docks and dream over the boats. Now our friends from Weeki Wachee have returned from a trip to the Keys, and Sandra and I have already taken two walks to the post office and a drive to Pine Island.





And Sarah has friends, too. Ida and Weiser visit almost every morning, and the indoor doggie play hour requires a bit of supervision. Sarah would be happy to run around Aripeka without a collar or leash, as do her new friends, but we don't think she is traffic-smart enough for that. Not to mention the mud factor....




One sad bookseller note: it appears that the Time Traveler, Dimitri, no longer has an open shop. We knew that he had moved from Tarpon Springs to Port Richey, and we found him in the phone book for Port Richey but not at the address listed, and no one could give us any more information, other than to say they thought he’d closed his bookstore.