Summer’s Busy, Warm, and Swiftly Moving Days

Bookseller Pamela Grath introducing author Kathleen Stocking

There you have it! Another author event, and for a change I got into a picture with my guest speaker for the evening, Kathleen Stocking, thanks to friend and customer Kirk O’Green.

Last time around, I wrote of the difficulty of scheduling summer events. So much is going on, every week of the season, that it is impossible to find a date that won’t conflict with something else. Kathleen and I chose our date before realizing we would conflict with the annual Leelanau Conservancy picnic. Then I found out it was also the first night of “The Music Man” and, if that weren’t enough, also Northport Village Council meeting night. Another spell of warm days, what people elsewhere might term a “heat wave,” was somewhat discouraging, also, to a bookseller without air conditioning (although I always think A/C for one or two weeks a year is plain silly, so I don’t want it). Would it be just the two of us?

One by one and two by two, e-mail and Facebook acceptances trickled in. Then I would see someone on the street who said, “I’ll be coming on Thursday for Kathleen’s talk!” So I assured my guest she would have an audience. “At least nine people,” I told her.

So David and I set up chairs, as usual. I mixed punch. We kept most of the gallery lights off to avoid excess heat, and people began to arrive. I introduced Kathleen, as you saw above, and she began to tell her story. Meanwhile, people kept arriving, and I kept squeezing more chairs into the gallery until, all told, we had at least twenty-five people in the audience, an amazing outcome on a warm evening with so much else going on throughout the village and township.

Lights off so as not to increase heat in gallery

And the audience loved her! I thought they would never let her go, even after she moved out of the gallery and into the bookstore, preparatory to saying good-night. If there is anything as gratifying to a bookseller as having a gracious writer as guest, it is having a warm (you should excuse the adjective), appreciative audience for that writer.

Kathleen Stocking

An author event is like a holiday, long anticipated and then, unbelievably, a past event. Kathleen Stocking’s books, however, I will be re-reading, as well as selling, for a long time to come, from Letters From the Leelanau through Lake Country to her latest, The Long Arc of the Universe.

Water in sunlight

“Possible thunderstorms after eight p.m.” or even “after midnight” never did materialize. The orchard workers, out shaking cherry trees long after midnight, were no doubt glad the rain held off, but my little home boardwalk garden was thirsty on Friday morning. Out came the hose! And then there was farm market, and then another bookstore weekend began.

Summer! Swiftly flow the days! There are only momentary pauses in which we catch our breath before plunging on to the next summer event. At Dog Ears Books, that will be another Thursday evening, August 10, with photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl sharing stories from their adventurous series of hikes around our beautiful Leelanau peninsula, memorialized in Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Hope you can join us again next week!

Momentary pause