What am I doing here, anyway?

What am I doing here?

 

Five in the morning. Coffee. Thinking about blogging. Thinking about writing about blogging. Why on earth?

 

As a family or an orchestra comprises its members and a handwritten diary is composed of chronological entries, a blog is made up of chronological posts. A post is what is written and published on any particular day, and the blog consists of the entirety of its posts, from the first to the last. Since ‘posting’ is also a verb in the world of blogs, a post can also be referred to as an entry, which is legitimate usage, in that a blog is a kind of diary, although not usually added to on a daily basis (and how many people write in their diaries or journals every day, regardless of the origin of those words?).

 

The term blog (which some linguistical purists find abhorrent) comes from two separate words, web + log. The worldwide web, the ‘www’ in Internet addresses, needs no introduction online. ‘Log’ deserves more consideration.

 

In the early days of sailing, a ship’s log or logbook was, for one thing, a daily record of speed achieved and distance covered, as measured by how many knots passed through a sailor’s hands when a log trailing a knotted rope was thrown from the stern of the ship. (Hence the speed of a boat recorded in knots rather than in miles.) The captain’s log, however, also included important information on crew, passengers, and cargo; routes, ports, and destination; weather; sightings; damage, maintenance, repairs; unusual occurrences; etc. With its daily and sometimes hourly entries, the log provided essential information not only to captains on board but also, later, to the owners of sailing ships. In the longer and larger scheme of things, geographers and cartographers learned much about the world and its seas from ships’ logs. 

Nowadays sailors often keep logs electronically (samples online provide models and templates), although handsomely bound blank books remain available for the purpose and would probably be the choice of those adventurers hoping eventually to publish writing of their travels. In any case, keeping a record, whether handwritten or electronic, of a boat or ship’s positions and travels is mandatory, like the flight logbook kept by air pilots, and in both cases details are crucial. 

 

No one is obligated, unless by some condition of employment, to maintain a blog, however, and very few of us who do post daily. As the origins of the term indicate, posts reside online rather than in handwritten pages, although more than one blogger keeps electronic files on a personal device. Ephemeral in one sense, in another sense blogs seem to take on a life of their own, with old posts often remaining online long after their authors have moved on to new lives or, in some cases, even died.

 

The first blog I followed was written by a woman I had not yet met at the time but who lived only about ten miles from me. We have since become acquainted in person. Another I discovered (and followed for as long as the blogger kept it) was written in French by a young Chinese woman, a university student from the countryside who eventually earned her master’s degree in French and went to work in the wine industry in China. I learned a lot about China from her blog, both city life and country life. Her parents were my son's age! 

Yet another blogger, a librarian, was a collector of children’s books and caregiver for his elderly parents, and posts on his blog, “Collecting Children’s Books,” stayed close to his subject for the most part, but after a while he joined Facebook and posted more personal stories from his life there, while at the same time keeping up his book blog. News of Peter's unexpected death was announced by his brother on the blogger’s Facebook page, and from the outpouring of grief and condolences there I know I am not the only one who misses the years when he was posting to his blog and sharing his life and its concerns to a limited public on both venues. It all felt very personal. He was a friend I never met.

 

Which reminds me of another way that blogs are different from log books, diaries, and journals: they can be, via reader comments and blogger replies, interactive. Conversations can take place in the space of a blog. This doesn’t seem to happen as often as it did formerly, now that more and less demanding social media have proliferated, but when it does it can be delightful.

 

Of course some blogs, like podcasts, are short-lived. The daughter of an old friend of mine is a podcaster, and from her I learn that only about half of podcasts have any kind of extended life, while slightly over a quarter of them never go past the initial foray. But that is hardly different from anything else in life – learning a musical instrument, taking up a sport, starting a business or a novel. Maintaining enthusiasm for something over the long haul can be tough. And sometimes other enthusiasms come along and take precedence, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  

 

A blog can be personal or commercial or some mix of the two. It can be private and readable only by subscription, perhaps restricted to family members, but most are public and available to anyone who stumbles upon them. In the beginning, part of my own first blog’s stated mission (I have a few lesser blogs where I post other sorts of interests) was to provide year-round connection between my bookstore and my bookstore customers, many of whom visited Northport only for a week or two in the summer, but by now, in its fifteenth year, Books in Northport has taken many unexpected turns and often has nothing at all to do with either books or Northport. Friends back home in northern Michigan and farther afield seem to appreciate my road trip stories, and everyone, it seems, loves the dog tales. 

 

Quite frankly, my artist husband and I have never been gifted at what these days is called monetizing, and sharper, more savvy participants in the online world would probably consider my blogging (in the unlikely event they gave it any thought) a rather pointless waste of time. I’m not selling anything here, and it isn’t as if I’m writing a book (and why am I not?), so why bother?

 

I don’t have a good answer. It’s what I do – at least, it’s some of what I do. This is the fifteenth year I’ve been blogging, and, like keeping a journal (which I’ve been doing for over a year now), like writing letters (which I’ve done all my life), it is a habit. It’s also my ongoing “Kilroy was here” statement, and it allows me to look back occasionally and revisit thoughts and impressions of my earlier self. So it has at least that personal, private value, and I keep at it. What more can I say?

Log-like entry: This morning I’m out in southeastern Arizona, in the high desert, in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, nearing the end of my “seasonal retirement” until winter comes around again. High winds have been blowing for days, kicking up dust storms from the playa in the Sulphur Springs Valley. Summer birds have returned, and migrating species are passing through. There are clouds in the sky at 6:30 a.m., but rain would be a miracle, although we need rain desperately. 

Soon I will get dressed and go outdoors with my dog, little Peasy, the “dog with issues” (I may post more about those issues soon), and maybe we will scare up a cottontail or two. Later I’ll go to town to do laundry and post this entry to my blog. That’s how my morning looks so far. And a few weeks from now the Artist and I will return to northern Michigan, where I will re-open Dog Ears Books for the season, and the Artist will happily re-inhabit his studio and gallery, and the two of us will spend many hours mowing grass around our old farmhouse, because in June that task admits of little pause. In other words, we will move our life's base of operations from one ancient seabed to another, from the basin and range region of the Southwest to the Great Lakes shoreline.

We won’t always be here, any of us, “here” being far from a singular place as life’s hours fly by, but we’re here now. We’re alive. I’m here in the ghost town this morning, very much alive, and grateful for my present companions in life’s journey.

When Letters -- on Paper -- Were Everything

Reading a diary from before the Civil War, I am struck by the number of letters the young male diarist tells of regularly writing and receiving. His lawyer brother in New Orleans seems to have written to Silas almost every day, and it was a rare day that Silas did not write to James or to Warren or to one of his sisters back home and perhaps also to the editor of a local newspaper. And all his correspondence was, of course, conducted in longhand (Does anyone still say ‘longhand’? Or was it only necessary to make the distinction when secretaries took dictation in shorthand?), with every cranny of space filled.

I have trouble considering anything a book if the words aren't on paper. Likewise a letter. E-mail messages can be important and precious -- I don't pooh-pooh them. But they are not letters. And a "diary" kept in digital format? Really?

 

Silas did not write in his diary every day, but when he did, it was in addition to letters he had also written that same day. The diary he kept for himself; the letters were to and for others. Way back then, without cell phones or e-mail or so-called social media, letters were the way he and others kept in continuous contact with family and friends. His letters to newspaper editors, less frequent, were a way to voice his opinions publicly, as he also did in amateur debates and public addresses.

The debates in which he participated, like his letters, were as much public entertainment as they were communication. Conversation, reading books, and playing musical instruments were ways to pass a quiet lamplit evening at home in those days, and letter-writing was another way, but Silas also made preparation for a debate or for offering a public address by writing longhand notes in the pages of his diary, another occupation that filled his evening hours and also served as preparation to reaching out to others, near and far. Back then, townsfolk and country people regularly traveled to schoolhouses, village halls, and churches for evenings spent listening to debates, public addresses, and sermons. Yes, even sermons were entertainment in those days, with visiting sermonizers critiqued afterward in depth by audience members -- often as much or more for performance quality as for theology, judging from Silas’s diary.

 

In our time, now the third decade of the 21^st century (can you believe it?), a general “felt need” for handwritten correspondence seems almost to have disappeared. We have public forums for our every thought and deed in social media, the instant gratification of texting (often with almost instant replies), and none of it requires paper or stamps, let alone a trip to the post office. But if letters are classed by collectors as ephemera, what can digital exchanges be called? Even if the storage media are somehow preserved, is there any guarantee it will be readable in future? Whereas I can take in my hands Silas’s diary and the handful of private letters tucked into the diary pages, all written over a century and a half ago, and read them as if they were written yesterday, how many of the thoughts and experiences shared on Facebook will anyone be able to visit a century and a half from now?

As thrilling as it is for me to time-travel via Silas’s diary, it is just as thrilling or more so to find a letter in my own mailbox, written to me by a sister or a friend, bearing postage and return address and cancellation that tell of its journey and the thought that went into someone caring enough to reach out to me over hundreds of miles. I can tear the envelope open in haste or slit it carefully with a knife, read the letter immediately or tuck it away and carry it with me to enjoy later – or I can do both, reading it eagerly at once and folding it away to read again an hour later, beginning already to form in my mind the reply that will eventually becomposed and sent off, a personal, intimate, committed-to-paper, taken-time-to-write missive sent to one person alone -- although perhaps to be shared with a partner or friend at the other end, too, because once the letter reaches its destination it belongs to the recipient. The gift has been given.

Then there are the enclosures that letters may contain, as delightful in their way as the letters themselves. This old bit of "ephemera" captured my attention, and I wish I still had new snapshots every week to send with my own letters. Sadly, our photographs are another thing we rarely commit to paper any more.

The biggest problem for me with Sundays is that there is not even the possibility of finding a letter in the mailbox. Monday’s return to mundane, everyday life does not trouble me at all, because the postal carrier may bring me news and thoughts from someone I love.

 

One friend back in northern Michigan who shares my enthusiasm for written correspondence is doing more than writing letters: she has started a movement for slow correspondence called Leelanau Letter Writers. You don’t have to live in Leelanau County, Michigan, to join. There are no membership fees, no meetings. 

You may also elect to join the LLW pen pal group, but you don’t even have to do that. Just let it be your inspiration to write and mail letters. Will you write about what’s really on your mind? What will that be? You need share that only with your recipient. It's that personal. Who will receive the next letter you write? No need to tell me -- just write and send that letter. On paper.

 

Incomplete But Nonetheless True Confessions

Spring is here.

I have not yet (ever) read The Handmaid’s Tale.

 

For any serious reader but especially for a bookseller (female, yet!), this is a pretty serious confession, and two years ago I vowed I would read Margaret Atwood’s modern feminist classic over the winter. I didn’t, though. And I haven’t yet. 

 

I’m not intentionally avoiding the story, but sometimes when any book has already captured the attention of so many other people I don’t feel a huge amount of personal responsibility for hurrying to get to it myself. Bestsellers are already bestsellers, after all, and classics are not going to stop being classics overnight. I’ll get to The Handmaid’s Tale in my own good time, as I’ve gotten around at last to many other long-neglected and worthy works of literature.

My book corner: you've seen it before.

I am usually reading multiple books at any given time. 

 

One of the books I’m currently reading is a different Margaret Atwood novel, Life Before Man, set in 1970s Toronto, a book that came to me serendipitously, as so many of my books do. I couldn’t have sought it out, because I don’t recall hearing the title before. Written in the third person throughout, the story presents multiple points of view, one point of view contained in each short chapter. I find it difficult to stop at the end of a chapter, feeling almost compelled to begin the next.

 

My car book these days is Crazy Weather, by Charles L. McNichols, first published in 1944. Lewis Gannett, reviewing Crazy Weather in Books and Things, wrote of it:

 

Crazy Weather is the story of a white boy who, through four days of torrid weather and cloudbursts, goes glory-hunting with an Indian comrade [Mojave] and returns to discover that he is, and prefers to be, white after all.

 

South Boy’s ambivalence is clear from the very beginning of the story, and no wonder, given the opposition of character presented by his father and mother. Hal Bortland wrote of the story:

 

This is the story of a boy who became a man in four days. Into it Charles McNichols has packed an amazing amount of action, adventure, Indian lore, and satisfying psychology…. 

 

Sterling North loved it, too. I wonder what reputation (if any) the book holds in our own day, particularly among Native American readers.

 

After our nightly pack time and movie, before going to sleep, I picked up another J. A. Jance mystery featuring fictional Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County, Arizona. Part of this particular novel’s action took place on the old Charleston Road between Tombstone and Sierra Vista, and I read the description of the road aloud to the Artist, who instantly recognized the road we had taken to see water in the San Pedro River and been surprised by the locks on the footbridge.

 

I have been known to go on a genre fiction binges.

 

Yes, it’s true. While I called myself “a serious reader” at the top of this post, I do go on these binges from time to time. Presently it’s J. A. Jance. At other times it’s been Lee Child or Alexander McCall Smith or Sara Paretsky or James Lee Burke. Don’t get me wrong, though. This is a confession, not an apology.

Current binge books --

Mystery series books, books that develop a main character through time and through multiple crimes solved, I make little to no attempt to read in chronological order (whether reading for the first time or re-reading the series).

 

As a bookseller, I am very familiar with readers who feel they must begin a series at the beginning. A few won’t even start reading until they have the entire series lined up. I, on the other hand, would be hard pressed to name a series I started with the first book. What usually happens is more like this: I realize that such-and-such a writer is immensely popular and that it would behoove me to have some slight acquaintance of her or his work, so I pick up a book from the series and try it out. If I like it, I reach for another. Eventually I worked my way through the entire Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency series in that haphazard, nonchronological manner and still feel comfortable picking up any book in the series whenever the mood strikes. I dove into Jance’s Joanna Brady series the same way and continue as I find more books in the series.

Arizona dry wash

Escape is probably one of the reasons I read so many books. 

 

There are so many reasons for reading books, and like many readers I can’t say a single reason explains what some might term an addiction. I read for information, for understanding, for pleasure – and, I will not deny it, for escape. But my life is wonderful! Why do I need escape?

 

I am a worrier. 

 

I wrote once in this blog that I have come to believe needless worry, the kind of fretting that we do completely apart from taking action, is a form of superstition. Here’s some of what I wrote on the subject a while back:

 

As I try to tease apart this mystery, it seems to me that we hold a vague, unconscious, and unreflective belief that by worrying we feel we are making time payments to ward off future disaster. Pay now, play later! The focus of a worry, remember, is an undesirable outcome (or, all too often, multiple undesirable outcomes on a variety of fronts); thus worrying is suffering in advance that we feel should be subtracted from the outcome. If my hypothesis is correct, this same unconscious belief explains our worry over loved ones, as well. If, for example, I worry myself sick over my son’s late return home, I am paying the price that might otherwise have to be paid by a terrible accident befalling him. Or so says my superstitious belief.

 

Anyone who may want to read the entire post can find it here.

 

What I thought and said and wrote then and still believe today is that such worrying is irrational. And yet I continue to do it! I don’t worry that much about myself (What is this rough patch of skin? Should I have it looked it? Okay, when we’re back in Michigan) as I do about others. 

 

Since my former husband died a year ago, I’ve talked to my son nearly every day by phone. He is doing fine. But once a mom, always a mom! When I don’t hear from friends, I worry that something might be amiss with them. Situations of those I love facing surgery or recovering (I hope!) from same: another source of worry. 

 

I worry about drought in the Southwest, race relations across the nation, family, friends, the future of the country, the fate of the earth -- and especially, these days, what is going to become of my rescue dog, the “dog with issues,” little Peasy. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about Peasy’s future and have to turn on the light and read myself back to sleep ... because ...  

Along the Kansas Settlement Road

I have fallen in love with Peasy. 

 

It wasn’t “love at first sight” when I first laid eyes little Pea. (It was hard to get much more than a glimpse of him, the way he hid from anyone who came near!) He was cute, though, and needed a home, and I needed a dog and figured I could work him through some of his issues. Together we have made great strides! And naturally, gradually day by day, I have come to love him more and more. The way he looks at me! How can I help it?

Good boy!

David and I were absolutely smitten with our Sarah. Besotted! The thing is, though, anyone would have loved Sarah, and quite honestly I think she could have been just as happy in another home, with another family. Not only beautiful, Sarah was also supremely confident and easy-going and able to adjust herself to any situation. (She barely had a startle reflex at all.) When people asked if we had “rescued” her, I used to say we were just lucky enough to find her before anyone else did, and that was the truth. That little puppy spent only a single night in the shelter before we scooped her up took her home, and she was about as easy to train and live with as a puppy could possibly be.

 

Peasy, now -- quite a different kettle of fish! Not easy-peasy! Picked up as a stray, he was held in the pound for over three months because no one wanted him! What a challenge that boy was his first week with us! 

Now people who see him tell me what a beautiful dog he is, and I see him as beautiful, too, where at first he was only a funny, kinda cute, goofy little scaredy-dog, way too skinny and with a coat full of mats. He is still afraid of strangers, though, and just about everyone is a stranger. And so --

 

I could and would give him up, out of love for him, if I found someone who could give him a better, fuller life here in Arizona than I can hope to give him in Michigan. At least I think I could....

 

Because he is so happy here! He behaves and minds me very well. He has an absolutely joyous time when we go out with our neighbor and her two dogs. If the Artist and I leave him alone for a couple of hours, he greets us with happy wiggles when we return. And he blisses out when he joins us for 15 minutes to half an hour of nightly pack time up on our bed. He is, as I say, a happy dog. But still a dog with issues. And back in Michigan I won’t have the freedom of my “seasonal retirement” to devote myself to his training and exercise. I cannot see Peasy leading a rich, fulfilling life alone all day and/or in a cage (call it a “crate,” if you like, but it’s a cage all the same), and he has a very long way to go when it comes to acquiring social skills. 

Clockwise from left: Buddy, Peasy, Molly

I still think adopting him was not only good but the best thing for him. He could have languished in that sterile cell forever! Instead, he has had love and lessons and increasing freedom, and he begins and ends every day a happy, happy dog. (I know I am repeating myself. He is lying contentedly at my feet as I type these lines. How can I help myself?) And that’s what I want to continue: a happy, rich, fulfilling life, with as much outdoor work and play as possible. 

My Peasarino is a good, sweet, loving little dog. Given the right situation for him, for the dog he is, and given a kind, attentive, patient, owner who will love him as much as I do, I think he has potential to be a great dog. It's just that (I can't help thinking) someone else might be better able to bring out his full potential.

 

And yet I’ve done almost nothing to find another Arizona home for him. 

 

It’s so hard even to think of giving him up that I don’t look much more than a week ahead, if that, telling myself there’s no need to rush, that I still have time to work with him. But as hard as it is for me to think about his long-term future, it’s equally hard to banish those thoughts or worries from my mind, because there’s no way I’m going to “surrender” him, even to Aussie Rescue or the well-run shelter in Willcox, without knowing where he might end up. I am the one who adopted this dog, and that makes me the one responsible for his life.

 

And so continues the unfolding saga of Peasy, dog of the desert.

What Can I Call This Potluck of a Post?

Intriguing window treatment, no?

Bisbee, AZ

It post is a miscellany, but I'll back and start with our 2021 trip to Bisbee, which is where my eye was drawn to that Kafka book set against a brown paper-covered display window. Some of you might remember a time when I warned against going to Bisbee on a Monday. Lesson learned. So this year we prudently waited until Tuesday to make the trek -- and found the town was closed up just as tight! The high point of the trip was being allowed to sit on the outdoor gallery of the public library (library itself closed; pickup only) to try to read a New York Times (available nowhere else in the county) in the wind. 

There are always interesting sights to see while walking around Bisbee, however, so the long drive was not a complete loss. There was that Kafka book in the window, after all. Not many posters advertising events, but a utility pole studded with staples caught my eye. And I don't remember this attractive building from other visits to Bisbee.

Now home of a recording studio, we were told

The amazing part of this thin-on-plot story is that we didn’t acquire a single book the whole day. Library, FOL bookstore, and Meridian Books (down the Rabbit Hole), all highlights of former trips to the county seat, were each and every one closed and locked. But yes, we do have plenty to read as it is. 

 

Reading -- and a Book Review

 

In general, I’m not one to observe a lot of official days and weeks and months, but I’ve made more of an effort for Black History, Women’s History, and National Poetry Month this year – really, don’t you think history should be inclusive every month of the year and that poetry should be part of our daily lives? Anyway, be that as it may, think what you will, I’ve been reading Thomas Lynch, Jim Harrison (always), Judy Juanita (below), Marge Piercy, and Anne Sexton the past couple of weeks, and it’s Judy Juanita I want to write about today. 

 

When a young friend asked me once, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her it depends on who you were, how old you were, and where in the world and country you happened to be. Virgin Soul, Judy Juanita’s semi-autobiographical novel, published in 2013, was my first introduction to her writing, when an ARC from the publicist found its way to me at Dog Ears Books. Like her fictional protagonist, Juanita found herself “where it’s at” during her junior year of college. She had joined the Black Panther Party in 1967, and when Huey Newton was jailed he appointed her editor-in-chief of the Panthers’ newspaper, which began as a strike journal, resulting in the first Black Studies program in the United States. Since then Juanita has published a number of plays, poems, and essays, and now a new book of her poetry, Manhattan, My Ass, You’re in Oakland. 

 

The title is a preview of the poems in the book: Here is a poet who pulls no punches. Whether her subject is love, sex, or friendships, violence against women or racial injustice, her distinctive voice tells the story in a way you’ve never heard it before and might not have the nerve yourself to repeat. She has the nerve, though. Her voice is clear and unhesitating, her command of a variety of poetic forms sure, as she uses those forms in her own new ways. Juanita has performed her poetry on occasion, and though I’ve never seen her in person or heard her with my ears, I hear her voice in my mind when I read her work. I’m not alone, either. Kirkus Reviews has called her poetry “unsettling, important, and unforgettable.”

 

Manhattan, My Ass, You’re in Oakland

by Judy Juanita

EquiDistance Press

Paper, 101pp

$9.95

 

Horse and Dog Stuff

WJRA lineup

It isn't only books that take me to exciting places, though, and the Artist and I don’t have to drive all the way to Bisbee to have a good time. This past weekend was once again WJRA – Willcox Junior Rodeo Association meeting out at Quail Park. As we were leaving, after a very satisfying couple of hours watching and admiring and walking around with my camera (see my completely incomplete visual story here), I said with a happy sigh, “There’s nothing about it that I don’t like!” My happiness of the day included a very dusty little dog that reminded me of a smaller and much older and wiser version of Peasy. “Wouldn’t this be the perfect life for Mr. Pea?” I asked earnestly. 

old dog at rodeo

For now, however, we are making the most of our silly little snuggle-bug, whose "pack time" personality could never have been guessed by the skittish, fearful performance he put on in that cold, bare cell at the pound. 

silly boy at home

Spring Break Trilogy: Poetry, Dog, and Sunsets

another dawn

Until it does no longer more (an hour that comes eventually for us all), life goes on, here in the high desert and mountains as well as back in northern Michigan and everywhere else that that shelters family and friends. Sunrise, sunset, both moving north now that the equinox is past. Who knows how long we will be here or if we will be here again? But we are here now. 

 

Spring has played hide-and-seek this year in Cochise County, Arizona (as it always does back in Leelanau County, Michigan), and I see in my photographs of previous springs that wildflower blooms are tardy this year, compared to the last two. This is also the dustiest year we (the Artist and I) have ever seen here, though not necessarily the dustiest that has ever been. Dry, dusty, and very windy. I attribute late wildflower bloom and more frequent dust storms to a common source, drought, but that is not one of my three topics for today, so let’s move on. 

 

Poetry

 

Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems

by Thomas Lynch

Boston: David R. Godine, March 2021

Hardcover, 256pp.

ISBN: 978-1-56792-701-6

$25.95

 

When a mature poet offers us “new and selected poems,” it’s cause for celebration, but such a best-of-plus album is not to be hurried through in an evening or two. Initially I wanted to publish a post about Thomas Lynch’s new book for St. Patrick’s Day. Then for the book’s March 23 release date. And now – well, here I am, still gratefully reflecting as I linger over pages and turn back and forth to re-read.

 

Reflection invades poems that first appear to be simple snapshots. All the “heaving, tidal pulses of creation” are here. Do they rise from quiet hours of preparing bodies (the poet a funeral director in the family business since 1973) or simply any Irish man or woman’s penchant for dreaming and regretting? Or, most likely, the gift of poetry itself, bestowed unpredictably, like grace and then refined and distilled by the earthly craftsman. Particular poems pull me back to church, to Michigan waters, and then across larger salt waters to the land of my mother’s father, land I’ve never seen,

 

                                          …the land

between hayricks and Friesians with their calves

considering the innocence in all

God’s manifold creation but for Man,

and how he’d perish but for sin and mourning.

two parishes between here and the ocean:

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,

please God, and breakfast in the morning. 

 

The Sin-eater fills his belly at the bedsides of the dead, consuming their various sins along with bread and beer provided by the family of the deceased, that their dear departed might not languish forever in purgatory. After he“feasted on Easter Duties missed,” along with more repulsive sins that upset his digestion and gave him bad dreams, from time to time he considered retirement (or raising his rates, at least) but feels his living to be a mission equal to that of the priests. Although the twenty-four pages of poems selected from an earlier collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary, initially struck me as longer than I wanted to spend with old Argyle, I find now that it is these poems that haunt me, much as Argyle himself was haunted by the dead whose sins he had consumed by their bedside.

 

Which is not to ignore new poems that stopped me in my tracks. America and Ireland; families and outsiders; landscapes, realities, and fantasies (the fantasy of “Casablanca”); the quick and the dead; cats, cows, dogs, and horses – not only the Bible-inspired but all Lynch’s poems are about “the spiritual life” as he understands it, which (he tells us himself) is faith in “the life of language and its power to make us known to one another and to ourselves,” a faith in the possibility of connection. And to a poet, more than the meanings of words matters in making connections with language. Vowel sounds matter, line lengths matter, enjambment or its absence, internal rhymes rather than an end-of-line rhyme scheme. There is so much here, so many levels, that the table at the rich ongoing feast is fuller every time one looks. Thus does art work miracles.

 

As I’ve already said, this is not a book to hurry through (no book of real poems is), and I salute not only poet Thomas Lynch but also Boston publisher David R. Godine. Thank you both so much!

 

 

Dog: Peasy Tales Continue

 

I’m not sure what to report about my rescue dog. “You’re a better dog every day,” the Artist tells little Peasy in all seriousness, and it’s true that my sweet Pea is much calmer and quieter in the mornings now (usually) ... and that we are able to take him with us in the car or leave him alone for hours at a time, as weather and inclination dictate ... and that the three of us adore our evening “pack time” cuddling and snuggling. Such a good dog in so many ways! But you know how some people will say, “I’m a people person”? Well, Peasy is not a people dog. He is in love with me and looks up to the Artist and is happy being part of a family and having a home but still very fearful and skittish of other humans. Not a take-anywhere dog like Sarah. So (words of my mother that I dreaded above all others), we’ll see. 

 

 

A Sunset Drive

 

Sometimes, if we have an early supper and don’t immediately sink into our reading chairs with current books, the Artist and I like to drive a few miles to the east and take quiet leave of another day with the long, open views down across the buttes of the Sulphur Springs Valley to the the Chiricahua Mountains and Cochise Stronghood in the Dragoons, driving back to the ghost town after sunset. I’ll let images tell the rest of the story and wish you a pleasant, restful, and safe spring break, however you will be spending it.