Something Accomplished Every Day

Soon coneflowers, later asters

There are days, I’ll admit, when getting the garbage bagged and out to the highway for early morning weekly pickup feels like a major accomplishment. That is, sometimes I feel competent and close to confident; other times life seems overwhelming and almost impossible. But yes, the puppy. Or, as I say when she jumps up and catches a tennis ball in the air after one bounce, “Yes, the puppy!!!” She is very athletic. And she is a reason, every morning, to get out of bed and outdoors, and once we are outdoors, I am happy to hear bees humming in the linden trees, to get busy digging new garden beds between throws of that tennis ball (or a Frisbee or just an ordinary stick), and after we work and play a while in the yard, we go back on the porch for breakfast, and she doesn’t seem to mind if I pick up a book for 15 minutes or so before we go outside again.

We think a deer slept here.

This has been a big week for Sunny and me. For starters, a couple of companies were doing autumn olive removal and eradication in our immediate neighborhood, and I signed up to have my meadow cleared of the scourge. I used to do it myself, spending two full days out there every June (here is a post from back in the old days when I regularly and actively managed the meadow myself), but something (age) happened along the way, and now it’s more than I can manage and three years since I last waged battle. Amazing how much faster four young guys with power tools can do a job than an old lady with hand tools! They were done before noon and did just what I wanted – no mowing, no clear-cutting, only the autumn olive taken out – so my meadow is still a wildlife paradise of native grasses, wildflowers, young trees, and lots and lots of milkweed. If in time it reverts to woodland, I can live with that, but I definitely could not live surrounded by an impenetrable thicket of autumn olive, so it feels great to have that job done. 

For future generations of monarch butterflies --

What does Sunny Juliet care about autumn olive? Why was that part of a big week for her? Okay, you got me there. She didn’t care about eradication of an invasive plant species at all, but she was thrilled to meet the crew! Very excited to introduce herself, so to speak! When she first ran up the driveway to investigate (they were working for the neighbors that day), the guys made jokes about who was in charge, Sunny Juliet or me, but when I got her leashed and sitting and then even lying down, one of them said, “You’ve trained dogs before, haven’t you?” Well, never one as challenging as Sunny, but we are coming along, step by step.

Friends stopped by on Sunday and again on Wednesday, and once again Sunny was challenged -- or I was, more to the point. She is very sociable, which is good; it’s the jumping we need to eliminate. She does, however, sit when told to sit and can be redirected with a toy or a treat, and so, aided by plenty of “high-value” treats, she did much better in puppy class this week than last, too. She is learning not to pull on her leash like a maniac every time the instructor approaches or another dog barks. Progress! Impulse control! 

 

I am also making progress in my reading of Progress and Poverty, by Henry George, and am happy to have at least one friend as excited about the book as I am. George’s arguments and ideas are different and exciting, but my friend and I are also enamored with his use of language. Here is an example:

 

Poverty is the Slough of Despond which Bunyan saw in his dream, and into which good books may be tossed forever without result. To make people industrious, prudent, skillful, and intelligent, they must be relieved from want. If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free. 

- Henry George, Progress and Poverty

 

I’m happy to have discovered recently nature writer Heather Durham and to have in stock now two of her books, Wolf Tree and Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust, and I’m also happy to have the new issue of the Dunes Review here at last. Between new books and old, there is something “new” at my bookstore almost every day, so my days are never boring at work – and with a lively young puppy to train, mornings and evenings at home are never boring, either. Exhausting, sometimes, but never boring. 

 

Then there is my exciting bedtime reading, bound galleys of a novel to be released right after Labor Day, Children of the Catastrophe, by Sarah Shoemaker (you remember her wonder Mr. Rochester), a family story set in early 20th-century Smyrna (site of present-day Izmir), and you will be hearing a lot more about that book from me in the weeks to come. As for Dog Ears Books, which opened down south on Waukazoo Street from its current location in 1993, we are now, as of July 2022, launched into our 30th year. (Sometimes it pays to be stubborn through the hard times, even if it means hanging on by your fingernails.) Please note that this will be the final summer for my late husband's gallery, next door to my bookstore. He died with his boots on, never retired.

 

A Different Kind of Summer

Different in What Way(s)?

 

Somehow a new blog post hasn’t been coming together for me this past week. I started one around the theme of “Falling Down on the Job” (since I was having so much trouble accomplishing the job of writing a post), but though I cranked out several sections, wandering around among local and personal job-related topics, what I got down into a file seemed uninspired. 

 

My heart wasn’t in it, I guess. As is true for my puppy, Sunny Juliet, my attention has been rather scattered of late. Other than my bookstore and my reading, I focus pretty exclusively on Sunny Juliet and my flowers. 

 

“Who will we meet today?” the Artist used to ask sometimes in the morning at the start of a summer day. Our Northport summer last year was about the busiest we’d ever seen, with books and paintings practically flying out the door, and in the course of any business day we would have countless conversations, some with old friends, but many also with people we’d never met before. Long, interesting talks sometimes took place only in the Artist’s studio, others stayed in my bookstore, and still others spilled back and forth between our separate spaces. Right next door to each other all day, however, we might only have five minutes together on some days while at work. The separateness of our days gave us a lot to share in the evenings, relaxing during supper on the front porch or taking a slow county cruise out for ice cream -- though sometimes we were too tired to talk much, and that was all right, too. 

 

This year is very different. There are still conversations during the day, out in the world, but the puppy and I have a pretty nonverbal relationship. Sunny Juliet can be vocal, of course, when she has a point to make, but my admonition to her to “Use your words!” only reminds her that she is supposed to nose the bell hanging from the doorknob, not bark, to let me know she needs to go outside. And in general my chatter to her is unremarkable. Telling her over and over that she’s a good girl and that I love her is not exactly small talk, but it’s certainly repetitious, while my stories about her “daddy” or her predecessors (Peasy and Sarah and Nikki) can’t mean much to her at all. Obviously, I’m really talking to myself….

But she always listens.

Book Stuff

My front porch book at present is Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. The book has been a bestseller since its first market edition in 1880, but if it opened a lot of minds, it certainly failed to change policies. Everyone on the political spectrum, it seems, finds something to love and/or something to hate and fear in George’s ideas. Fascinating reading, nonetheless. I’m almost ready to say I don’t want to discuss economics at all, even narrow questions like affordable housing, with anyone who hasn’t first read Progress and Poverty. 

 

…When we speak of labor creating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. …In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms desired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces – that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all wealth. 

 

And thus George traces economic depressions back to material progress, because it is progress that increases the value of land, which in turns leads to land speculation. Land is withheld from production, forcing prices for available land up, checking production, finally throwing people out of work, when demand for goods must fall because though people still desire to buy, they have not the ability to pay.

 

In the bathroom (doesn’t everyone have at least one book in the bathroom?) I have In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus, an edition with a lengthy and entertaining introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon (author of, among other things, The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery prize winner, in the year 1922) and delightful illustrations by same. Any book with van Loon illustrations is a book I will pick up and begin to read – wouldn’t it have been wonderful to receive illustrated letters from him? -- and it’s about time I got around to reading Erasmus, anyway.

 

I’ve been reading Empire of the Summer Moon off and on at bedtime for what seems like forever because, I must confess, I have set it aside numerous times for something else. My latest detour (Friday night) was a 1953 nonfiction book by Robert Gibbings, a wood engraver as well as a writer, whose books display both talents. The most well known is probably Lovely is the Lee (I say that because it is the Gibbings title I most often see among used volumes), but the one that came into my hands this past week is called Coming Down the Seine, and obviously, were my own Artist still with me, this is a book we would have been reading aloud to each other. The Seine! Magic memories!

 

These were tranquil days in the boat. There were mornings when, casting off at dawn, I drifted through long cool shadows, watching the sunlight on the trees creep down to meet the water, hearing no sound but the tremolo of the aspens, seeing no one but a chance sportsman and his dog. There were noons with cooling breezes when the forest rang with bird song and the river was a sheet of moving glass. There were nights when, looking skywards, the passing clouds seemed like new continents and islands marked on the inside of a mighty globe.

 

Neither is everything description. There are digressions into history and observations on what an artist must know.

 

I incline to think that one of the earliest and most important lessons to be learnt by any art student is the recognition of those qualities most suited to his particular medium, or alternatively of the medium most suited to the qualities he wishes to express. 

 

As a wood engraver, Gibbings finds little he can use in the “lavender haze above the water … typical of many dawns.”  Precise lines and contrast of light and dark are what an engraver needs. He tells of refusing a commission once for a stone carving because the subject “could only have been carried out in bronze.” 

 

Gibbings, an Irishman, author of many river books, is buried on the banks of the Thames, another river David had a chance to explore years ago. All in all, I can’t help feeling it not quite fair that we never had a chance to enjoy this book together, but such is life.

 

The library has been presenting their summer author series this month, and I’ve gotten to the second and third events. Betsy Emerson talked about her book, Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, and the next week Karen Mulvahill interviewed Gregory Nobles, author of The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. The fourth and final event in the library series will be next Tuesday, with Soon-Young Yoon and her book of memoir essays, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the U.N. Quite the stellar line-up this season! And it looks as if I may get around to a book launch come September, so stay tuned for exciting developments on that front. 

 

About Jobs

 

Here’s a question unrelated to anything in the rest of this post, a leftover from the post I’m not publishing. Have you ever quit or walked out on a job? If so, why? What to you makes the difference between a good employer and working conditions and something unbearable?

 

The Artist Remembered in Arizona

 

Before I left to start back to Michigan at the beginning of May, one of the owners of Source of Coffee, our hangout in Willcox, Arizona, asked if I would bring in one of the Artist’s hats so they could have something to remember him by. This past week the coffee house posted a photograph of the resultant memorial, the work of hatmakers Josh and Theresa – and I need to get a more complete reference for Josh and Theresa’s business. Must add to that to my to-do list.... But I love, love, love that our friends in Willcox are thinking of David and remembering him with love!

Dana in background; presumably Theresa in foreground

 

Catsup and Puppies and Books and Flowers

HI, there!!! I'm a better dog every day!!!

What do you call it?

Catsup? Ketchup? Catch-Up! When I was a kid, in our family we said catsup. Just what it was to us. (Red catsup, yellow mustard, green (sweet) pickle relish. No onions. "Onions don't like me," our mother always said.) We never specified tomato catsup, either, just catsup, but one year in Kalamazoo I made something called elderberry catsup, a fantastic counterpoint to fall game dinners in Leelanau County. This year? Maybe a little red elderberry catsup again in my near future! 

Okay, that whole line of what the Artist would have called quacking is going nowhere. I just needed an opening paragraph, so there you go. Take it or leave it. 

 

Puppy Class

We take a lot of stuff to class!

I wrote on June 29 that Sunny Juliet and I were going to our first puppy class the next day, because I hadn’t received an e-mail that would have told me that dogs were not supposed to attend the first session! It was orientation for us “guardians,” as we’re called. Oops! Of the six dogs in the class, one other dog’s owners -- excuse me, guardians -- had also missed the e-mail and brought him, so two rowdy six-month-old pups had to be crated in separate rooms while we humans learned what was ahead for all of us. 

 

This week Sunny and I went to the first real class. One dog and guardian pair hadn’t showed up, so there were only five dogs total, each in a separate lane, all facing the instructor, two of the dogs barkers. I cannot lie and say that Sunny is the class star. Far from it! (Though two of the young dogs or old pups, whatever you want to call them, have already been through an infant class and had a running start, so to speak.) But Sunny did not bark at all!She pulled terribly on her leash, but she didn’t bark! Big progress from where she started out in Arizona, as some of you may recall. By the end of the hour she had even settled down quite a bit, and the instructor assures me we’ll get to the desired “loose leash” in time. “Baby steps,” she said encouragingly. So I was happy and told Sunny over and over what a good girl she was. She is doing very, very well on responding to command words. Good dog!

 

The long drive to way south of Traverse City, an hour in a room full of dogs (the high-ceilinged room seems very full when a couple of the dogs are barking!), and another long ride home again takes a lot out of us both, and then I’m in a hurry to get up to Northport to my bookstore for what remains of the afternoon, SJ quite ready for some quiet crate time. In the evening we will be back together again and happy to play in the yard. And so, yes, day follows day relentlessly, the weeks racing by, summer in full blur-speed --.

 

My Recent Reading

 

There There, by Tommy Orange, was a novel I had to put aside for a few weeks, after reading all but the last 40 or so pages. Orange is a marvelously gifted writer – no doubt about it. Here is a small part of one of my favorite passages:

 

…The drum group played on the first floor – in the community center. You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. High-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song. 

 

Tommy Orange, There There

-    

 

My problem with the novel was not the author’s brilliant writing or his vivid characters or even the gritty urban lives and scenes. It was seeing where it was all going to end and not wanting to get there. What with my husband’s death, memorial gatherings, the ongoing political angst in our country, and never-ending COVID-19 concerns (let’s not even mention Ukraine or monkey pox, shall we?), I chose to postpone reading the final chapters until I felt emotionally able to do so. I will say that, in addition to the quality of the writing, this book is important in that it highlights an urban life lived by many Native Americans today, life that rarely appears in American literature, where it very much belongs. 

 

There were a couple books that I did not read carefully but skimmed through and skipped around, so they are not on my list at all. One of these was Claire Bidwell Smith’s Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. I gave it a look-through because grief as a subject matter always catches my attention these days, but I have not had the experience of anxiety the author says she found so often among her therapy clients and was only somewhat interested in that aspect because I have friends who, although not necessarily grieving, do suffer anxiety. But Smith makes the case that the anxiety component can come from long-ago, unresolved grief, and to me that sounds a little like some of Freud’s theories, in that supporting “evidence” can always be found, once the premise is accepted, while it seems immune to counter-examples. Who has not suffered some past loss – if not death, then something else to grieve? Handy explanation!  I did appreciate the author’s insight that the well-known attitudinal stages popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had to do with people facing their own deaths, not those mourning deaths of loved ones. 

A book of letters from and to the artist Mary Cassatt and her circle of friends I read also selectively, not in its entirety. Some of it interested me, some of it not.

 

I finally read all the way to the last page of The Outlaw of Camargue – mostly for the setting, the Camargue, which I found appealing – though for a while I thought I might not bother. The characters never lived on the pages for me (descriptions of appearance and dress insufficient to make them come alive), the story line was more a thin excuse than a plot, and the defense of royalism left me cold (although heaven knows the Revolution was guilty of violent excess almost right from the beginning), so I set it aside for a while to read the charming God Returns to the Vuelta Abajo, after a couple of nights with Cyrano de Bergerac. The Camargue book is interesting, however, if approached as a travel narrative, so that’s where I have it shelved – in travel and history – though noted as fiction. 

 

Cyrano – oh, my goodness! I have been reliving my own life lately, not only in photographs but also in letters, and after an emotional couple of hours reading from my own archive, how could I help being moved all over again by Cyrano’s story? And I’d forgotten the heartbreaking ending! Oh, heavens! My own love story was much, much happier --. Again, gratitude!

 

The list goes on…. as does the garden....

 

72.      Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (nonfiction)

73.      Mosley, Walter. Down the River Unto the Sea(fiction)

74.      Rostand, Edmond, trans. Brian Hooker. Cyrano de Bergerac (drama)

75.      Orange, Tommy. There There (fiction)

76.      Keiser, Melanie Earle. God Returns to the Vuelta Abajo (fiction)

77.      Sadlier, Anna T. The Outlaw of Camargue (fiction)