In Need of Loving Care!

 

Eat a good breakfast!

Are you taking care of yourself? You need to. It’s been a rough week, and the road ahead doesn’t look any smoother. 

Dinner, too. Keep up your strength. (See that spinach?)

Now here, not that anyone asked, is my take on what’s going in in Washington: 

 

There is waste in every organization, and the federal government is many, many organizations, so of course there is waste. Serious, close, careful review of government programs with an eye to trimming budgets and reducing and eliminating waste would be make perfect sense, but that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Shutting down programs overnight is nothing but wanton, wholesale destruction. It’s as if you decided that an apartment building was inefficiently heated, so you immediately razed it to the ground and left its residents homeless. Shutting down foreign aid and medical research is a twin disaster-in-the-making, inviting world pandemics the like of which we have never seen before.

 

And to think that all this destruction is not being carried by responsible elected officials or vetted appointees but----! Well, if someone had written our current America as a novel even as recently as ten years ago, it would have been considered too wildly unrealistic for belief. 

 

***

 

But let’s shove that mess off the table and look for a minute at the soothing world of books. At least, I want to start with books, but it won’t take long for me to work in a metaphor and get beyond bookshops and libraries.

 

Books have always been threatened….

 

As time has gone by, threats to the survival of books have become more and more serious. The materials that make up books almost from the beginning and especially since the invention of printing have gotten progressively worse. Rag paper replaced vellum, paper made from shorter fibers replaced rag paper. Alum sizing of paper—a process which allows the paper to be printed on—replaced gelatin sizing and, in the process, made the paper highly acidic. Pasted-on endbands replaced sewn-on endbands. Binder’s board (a specialized cardboard) replaced wood for covers.

 

Accompanying the decline in materials was a similar decline in structure. Now the most common binding is the ironically named “perfect” binding. [The irony is unintentional. As a conservator, the writer sees irony in a term where others well might not.] It is an economical method of binding that unfortunately does not stand up to heavy use or allow for repeated rebinding. Modern hardback books are seldom satisfactorily rounded and backed and consequently their text blocks pull away from the spine even as they stand on the shelf. 

 

-      Saving Our Books and Words exhibit label, quoted in A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Books Arts Apprenticeship, by Annie Tremmel Wilcox

 

A beautiful story --

The quoted passage above calls up a series of thoughts for me. 

 

First thought: “Books have always been threatened” might seem to echo the challenging or banning of book content but actually has to do, we learn quickly, with the way the physical book is threatened by the physical world. It’s a specific example of the general truth of the law of entropy. Put simply, in time, things fall apart, order becomes disorder.

Second thought: Some things fall apart faster than others, and some books fall apart faster than others. As a dealer in used, old, and rare books, I see this on a daily basis. Cheaply produced novels from the early 1900s, e.g., much-beloved adventure novels collected by those who read and loved them when young, are often characterized by brittle pages turned brown with time. A cheaply made book is like an old, cheaply made violin: Quality not inherent at the beginning does not accrue over time. On the other hand, books originally printed on high-quality paper and bound with care can last for centuries. They are living messengers from past generations of human beings and can still speak to us today. What a miracle!

 

Third thought: My late husband, the Artist, could usually identify a book club edition right away when he picked it up, without needing to look for a blind stamp on the lower back board or checking the dust jacket to see if it lacked a price. He could feel the difference in the bargain edition’s flatter spine. He had both an eye and a feel for quality in materials and production in all manner of objects. It was the reason for his large collection of beloved Harris tweed sportcoats (34 of them!), and it broke my heart when local consignment shops had no interest in these garments because they were more than a year old. Well, yes, Harris tweed clothing is not “fast fashion,” to be worn a couple times and discarded! The garments are made to last! 

(Thank heaven one young Leelanau man, much taller than the Artist, was able to wear one of David’s sportcoats. He has a pair of the Artist’s cowboy boots, too. I’m glad there are some people who recognize and care about quality in all realms of human life.)

 

Fourth thought: In the story of book conservation, I cannot help seeing a metaphor. It is natural to me, personally, to see truths of inert materials naturally extending to the world of life, and it is natural to human language in general to work this way, but I’ll not be taking up that larger topic today. I’ll just tell a little story to illustrate my point.

 

Many years ago, editing a book on welding for a faculty member in a university school of engineering, I was struck by the way the writer’s facts about chemistry worked as metaphors for human connections. Some pairs of metals, I learned, can never result in a strong and lasting bond. No matter what degree of skill the welder brings to the task, that weld will always be weak. Different pairs when welded together, however, form a strong and lasting union. That is, some metals are, as it were, antagonistic to each other, like those little Scottie dog magnets—and others have such a natural affinity for each other that when welded together they are as strong as if they had never been separate. Think true friendship. Think strong marriage. Think soulmate. 

 

And so, as metaphor, I see in those quoted paragraphs on book conservation a truth applicable to American government today. It is not only the quality of human “materials” that is problematic (to put it mildly) in the current White House administration. Lack of experience is a problem, too, as is the abandonment of any criteria of qualification, other than partisan—no, more like personal--loyalty in crucial and essential government appointments. But beyond ignorance, inexperience, and lack of skill is the deepest, most chilling problem: These people have no loving concern for their work. They are not careful conservators of what has been laboriously constructed over almost 250 years “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Instead they seek to destroy what generations have built. Dismantle, if you want a gentler word, but there doesn’t seem to be any gentleness in an approach aimed at inducing trauma. This is the standard shock-and-awe approach employed elsewhere by our country but only now unleashed on the U.S. federal infrastructure.

 

I always seek to end each of my posts on a positive note, and that’s difficult this week, as a gang of unelected young men wet behind the ears has been given free rein to run roughshod through the financial data of every American, but maybe revisiting the Second Law of Thermodynamics can cheer us up. Did you follow the link to watch the video? If not, do it now. I’ll wait….

 

Okay, ready? At the moment, our country has pretty clearly descended into chaos, and chaos is a hallmark of despotism. In the interest of remaining calm, let’s step back and simply call it disorder. Our political system is horribly disordered at present. Things are not just falling apart,  but are being torn apart. Think vandals in a library. The destruction is intentional, not accidental, and order will not be spontaneously restored.

 

But there is still hope! Hope lies in the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and human beings are not a closed, isolated system. As a species, as a nation, as the population living in this present moment, we are continually drawing energy from other sources, and this energy is available for rebuilding and reordering society, as has been done in the past following periods of chaos and destruction. 

 

The arts are a source of energy on which we can draw, as are skilled craft, any manual work done with loving care, care for the earth and its creatures and each other, and so on and on. I have no plans to become a book conservator, but I do care for books that come into my little world, and I also care for the people who come to my shop seeking books, conversation, strength, and community. I try to use language with care, in this blog and elsewhere. Even if we are stumbling around in the dark much of the time, it’s important for us to do our best, whatever we are doing. Our poor, beautiful, irreplaceable gift of a world is so in need of our loving care!

 

Also, while this may seem a contradiction of the laws of energy, I find that when I expend energy in positive directions—when I focus on my writing (as I have been doing here) or contact my members of Congress or simply prepare a satisfying meal or play Frisbee with my dog—I do not feel my strength and energy depleted but renewed. And yes, the natural world around us is available as a source of strength.

Beautiful, life-giving sun!

This is the good news: I am not a closed system, and neither are you. The earth’s human population is not a closed system. We have sources of strength and energy all around us. Draw on them now! 

And that's my positive message for today from Northport. Bon courage, my friends!

Where all the women are trying to be strong!

The Subject Is Courage

Cold midwinter is the time to call on your sisu!

A good friend commented recently that citizens of the United States are now becoming “accustomed” to living with daily fear and uncertainty, adding, “Black people have lived this way for centuries.” The same can be said for Native Americans (and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world invaded by Europeans), certain (but not all) immigrant groups, gay people, etc. To survive and thrive under constant threat requires courage, and now is no time now for anyone to be fragile.

Former enslaved people who fled the South in the Great Migration knew fear both in the homes they fled and on the road north, and danger did not stop when travels ended. Whether the ultimate destination was the northern States or Canada, equality of opportunity was not granted upon arrival. Nevertheless, those migrants saw improvements in their lives. Perhaps most importantly, they gained hope. Courage they had all along.

Isabel Wilkerson‘s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration tells this story beautifully and is a good book to read, if you haven’t already, during Black History Month.

I am only about halfway through Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (and less than halfway through Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith), because at bedtime and in the middle of the night I turn usually to fiction. The King biography, however, is quite readable, and when I sit down with it in the late afternoon or early evening, the pages turn quickly. It is not, let me make clear, a hagiography. The author presents MLK’s flaws and self-doubts along with his courage and other virtues. (People often say of some admired person that he or she “was not a saint,” forgetting that those elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church were all human beings, and none was perfect.) His personal courage inspired others.

 

King’s fervor lit a flame in many of those who heard him. Jesse Jackson, who was fifteen years old at the time of the 1957 Lincoln Memorial speech and would go on to become a minister, activist, and presidential candidate, said King’s emergence offered concrete hope that racism could be fought and beaten. Before King, there seemed to be two options: “You could go into a deep dark hole,” Jackson said, or “you could adjust—adjust to be the best pool player, adjust to be the best singer, the best barber.” Now King offered a realistic third option, Jackson said: “You could resist.”

 

A younger friend once asked me, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her that depended on who you were, how old you were, where you lived, and what was going on your life. The Sixties were not the same for everyone, and neither were the Fifties.

 

Many historians would describe the 1950s as a time of tranquility, a time of prosperity, a time when the gap between the Left and Right narrowed and Americans, for the most part, agreed that they were fortunate to live in the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. But such descriptions overlooked many who did not feel so fortunate. Once those who were overlooked began to express their discontent, once they began to yearn for more, the picture-perfect image of America in the 1950s showed cracks. Where would the fight for real freedom spread next? It would spread almost everywhere, including Mongtomery.

 

When Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon or spoke at a rally, people were inspired by his fervor. No demagogue, King was also persuasive in his reasoning and offered a hopeful vision of the future. 

 

Fear is contagious. It resides in the most primitive part of the human brain, always ready to be activated by threat, real or perceived. Survival of the prehistoric group depended on the contagion of fear. 

 

But fear can be overcome, and courage, like fear, can also be contagious. 

 

Courage was contagious in Mongtomery, Alabama, in 1963. It was contagious during World War II in the French village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, where villagers took a united stand. I’m sure everyone reading my words today can come up with examples from personal experience, as well as from history. Real leaders are courageous and inspire others to be brave. 

 

“Courage is like a muscle,” in the words of John McCain. “The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.” Before he died, McCain worried that America’s cultural courage muscle was growing weak from lack of exercise, and that, he warned,

 

…means trouble for us all, because courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, compassion, and humility. In short, leaders who lack courage aren’t leaders.

 

--Here I want to shift gears, so hold on! Let’s take a look at standup comedy! What? Yes! 

 

Historically, jesters in a royal court, besides telling jokes and performing acrobatic tricks, were permitted to speak their minds freely, even going so far as to criticize the monarch. At times they were trusted advisors to kings and emperors, while at other times speaking truth to power meant they risked their lives. Their courage provided both a safety valve and a warning. 

 

And so it is fitting that in a country whose government is supposedly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” comedians all over our land provide criticism of nominal leaders (I really do intend that adjective), along with more general entertainment, and my favorite these days is Josh Johnson. This young man is both brave and funny! He makes me laugh! 

 

Laughter—how subversive! We are never thoroughly beaten down if we can still laugh. (Do you think Winston in Orwell’s novel 1984 ever laughed?) When someone tells important truth in a way that provokes spontaneous laughter, our courage can get a big boost.

 

Where do examples of courage in our world today, in the United States, give you inspiration and hope and make you feel a little braver yourself? I take heart from the examples of U.S. House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, California governor Gavin Newsom, and others. Even Senator Mitch McConnell—and I am no fan of his political views in general; quite the contrary—managed to locate his cojones and speak out against January 6 and vote against the abominable Hegseth nomination. The City of Brotherly Love has stood out en masse. Who stands out for you?

 

As for those of us who are not in Congress, not governors or mayors or ministers with large congregations, we can still spread the contagion of courage among ourselves and to others. Yesterday morning an old song came into my head, something my sisters and I learned as a hymn in Sunday school when we were little girls. Take a listen, and tell me if this doesn’t strengthen your resolve to do whatever you can, day by day.

 

Another Sunday school song: "Open up your heart and let the sun shine in!"

Forty-five Years Later?

 

On Waukazoo Street in Northport, Michigan

First, some bookshop news and blog notes:

 

Reminder: Dog Ears Books is open four days a week this winter, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 

Reminder: you can order audio books through Libro.fm and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore on the Libro.fm site, and we will earn a little something from each audiobook you buy that way. It will help us get through the winter. Thank you!

 

Blog note 1: This blog, Books in Northport, has been around since September of 2007. It has always been free and will be free as long as it survives. I make my living as a bookseller, not as a blogger. Neither will I be moving to a Substack account, although many professional writers and independent journalists are there now, and I encourage you to follow a few, upgrading to a paid subscription if you can afford it, especially those whose work is crucial to giving us real news, e.g., Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, and others. The importance of these sources will increase sooner than you might imagine.

 

Blog note 2: Call my blog a “labor of love” or call me a graphomaniac – however you want to characterize it and/or me, I’ve stuck to this project for over 17 years. Some of you have been with me from the beginning, while others are brand-new readers, but I appreciate every single one of you, however long you have been reading. My morale this year, however, could use a little extra support (I’ll be trying to provide support for the morale of my readers, too), so I encourage you to (1) sign on as a follower, (2) comment on posts, and (3) send links to your family and friends for posts you find particularly meaningful. There is no financial advantage to me in this, only personal satisfaction.

 

That’s it for bookshop hours, audiobooks, and blog! Now, for some book thoughts --.

 

Still relevant!

George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, an “instant classic,” first appeared in 1949 and hung over us like the sword of Damocles for 35 years. When the fateful year of his title passed, we in “the real world” heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t happen! We’re still free! Did we then become complacent? Oh, gripes about government continued, with “Big Brother” now used as an epithet. It took until 2019 for worry about corporations keeping tabs on us to start catching up with worry about government. In 2023 concern over corporate surveillance surpassed the worry about government. 

Where are we now? Is Big Brother watching us? Follow-up question: are Big Government and Big Corporations separate? 

 

In Orwell’s novel, was the fictional Big Brother an individual modeled on Stalin or a figurehead personifying the ruling party of the totalitarian state? Follow-up question: Does it matter? 

 

In the novel, there is no life of significance without Party membership, and for Party members there is no such thing as private life, as they are frequently reminded by ubiquitous posters and ever-on telescreen messages: “Big Brother is watching you.” Is it ironic or just pitiful that Americans in the 21^st century have not waited for the government to install telescreens in homes but rush to put their own personal lives online in videos for all the world to see, even grooming their toddlers as video stars? Follow-up question: How will that play out in the future of those children? 

 

Admittedly, this blog of mine has not been restricted to book reviews and bookshop news, and over the years I’ve shared quite a bit of my personal life, from photographs of my dogs to an account of my husband’s death and my cross-country trip home to Michigan without him. It's been kind of a memoir in installments. (This blog is not AI-generated. I am a real person, as well as a live bookseller.) I do, however, maintain a degree of privacy and intend to keep it that way.

 

January 30, 2025, Up North

However, back to the book --.

 

Winston, the protagonist in 1984, lives in constant uncertainty and fear. He doesn’t have to worry that he is breaking the law because there is no law! There are only bad thoughts. But if he is suspected of having them (as we pretty much know from the beginning he will be), there will be no possible defense. He is guilty when accused, accused because guilty, and all that remains is for him to confess and name names, specifically the name of his lover, since he is not supposed to have a private life. But no, that’s not all he has to do. He can’t just give a name. He must be broken. 

 

We Americans in 2025, forty-five years after the date Orwell's book predicted world totalitarianism, can keep our lives relatively private if we choose to stay offline and buy local with cash. All of us can do our best to seek truth and hold onto it in a whirlwind of public lying and stories that change from one hour to the next. Certainly we can ration our viewing of “reality” videos and so-called “news,” even completely unplugging for days at a time. 

 

All that done, even so, it’s hard to live in a country whose leaders have turned their backs on law. 

 

When, as now, in the last week and a half, the rules change day by day … and people appointed or elected to run government are not restrained by laws or held accountable for breaking them … and individuals formerly in positions of authority are persecuted because they believed in and followed laws and testified against law-breakers … then, with or without constant surveillance, with or without thought police continually monitoring our posture and facial expressions, we have been taken hostage by the world of 1984.

 

And yet--. And yet--. 

 

This morning on a back road I came upon a pickup truck that had run off the road and was half-buried in deep snow, and a little way up the road a man was walking. “Is that your truck? Do you need a ride?” He did. 

 

In the afternoon the sun came out and shone for hours, and our cold northern Michigan world was so beautiful. Shadows on snow are so beautiful! Sun on snow is so beautiful! 

We can still help each other and see beauty in the world, and each one of those small moments is important. Each such moment is resistance to tyranny.

 

In the wake of the Wednesday night air tragedy that resulted in the loss of 67 lives, the Blamer-in-Chief wasted no time in pointing the finger—in an absurd direction, naturally. It is his way. He does not want Americans to come together, either in joy or in sorrow and certainly not in understanding and love and mutual aid. Instead he wants all eyes fixed on him, his followers’ eyes in endless admiration, his opponents’ eyes filled with fear. He incites hatred, constantly whipping up frenzies as Americans with different agendas consider each other from across the political and moral chasm he keeps digging, very intentionally, deeper and deeper. He’s got the whole country in a dire game of the prisoner’s dilemma, and as long as he can keep us from joining together, he will keep pulling the strings and jerking us off-balance.

 

I must believe more people will finally see his naked narcissism and incompetence when it begins to affect their lives--although when hardships fall on MAGA families, of course he will tell them it’s someone else’s fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. President Harry Truman’s famous motto was “The buck stops here.” In the DJT White House, the buck doesn’t have time to catch its breath before it's thrown in someone else’s face. And it’s hard not to react to the absurd nonstop blaming with anger, but we cannot live every waking moment in outrage. It’s important to deny the Blamer his childish satisfaction. It’s also important for us to continue to love each other and love the world, our poor, broken world.

 

What helps you remain hopeful about our ability to heal the world? What strategies do you have to contribute to healing yourself and others? For putting the pieces back together again? To mend the world? 

P.S. Watch this. She pretty much covers everything, where I only gave sketchy hints.

Do I read too much?

What does SHE think?

That question is instantly joined by another: Why do I read? Then there is, of course, What else could or should I be doing? And right away we can discount Sunny Juliet’s opinion, since hers is a distinctly self-serving perspective. In her point of view (I cannot imagine I’m misreading her on this), all the hours I’m focused on objects held in my hands is robbing her of my attention, and there’s no amusement for her in watching me, either, as what I am “doing” seems so little like doing anything.

 

Oh, my dear, impatient, so patient companion!

 

Even with a beef bone, she hopes for play with momma.

What do I seek in all this reading? That’s the “why” question. One answer is understanding. I want to understand as much as I can of the knottiest, most insoluble human predicaments, problems to which I will never have a full answer as long as I live. That answer surely elicits another “Why?” What is the good of understanding that leads no further?

 

Oh, tree in the garden! What knowledge did its fruit offer? 

 

I see different kinds of hungers for knowledge and understanding in different human beings. The pragmatically scientific want to take things apart, see how they work, and then do things that have not been done before. They are eager to change the world. Why? Sometimes for the betterment of mankind, sometimes just “Because we can.” Around those seekers, always, are hangers-on and parasites with no intrinsic hunger of their own for the knowledge and inventions, who do, however, care very much for the wealth that can be generated, wealth multiplying itself into the future, if only one makes a reservation early enough on the investment bandwagon. Theirs is hunger for accumulation, which is qualitatively different from hunger for knowledge. 

 

And yet, honestly, don't most of us have a certain hunger for accumulation? I look around my life and see art on walls, books on shelves, stacks of photograph albums, dishes of stones and fossils, and physical representations of beautiful living things.

Beauty and memories, memories and beauty. Objects that invite my eyes and my hands, pages that carry me over oceans to inhabit other lives and other times and also let me relive my own past years. Associations carried by these material objects are my real accumulated wealth, the objects themselves only carriers.

Does the quest for understanding life look more to the past than to the future? “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” wrote Kierkegaard. We do seek hope in the possibility of applying our understanding to the future. For example, restricting the question of “how we came to be where we are” to immediate family and acquaintance rather than society as a whole, I can see errors I have made and try to avoid repeating them in what remains of my time on earth. Sadly, human societies, with longer spans than individuals but always peopled by those shorter-lived humans, have difficulty learning from previous generations. Somewhere in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the insatiably curious physicist wrote that we live our lives, see where we’ve gone wrong, and then die. For some reason, the simple truth of that statement, the flat-footed way he phrased it, amuses me no end. That's us, all right! And is that how it will be with our species as a whole? I wonder. They came into existence, succeeded magnificently for a while, then messed it up and went extinct. Maybe. Understanding too late--.

 

Besides understanding, however, there’s no denying the strong element of escape in much of my reading, and often these hungers pull in decidedly opposite directions. When the world is too much with me and I want to drown out the clamor of politicians who have once again invaded my thoughts with one outrageous act or speech after another, my hunger for escape pulls away from my hunger for understanding, and I can only feed them in turn, first one and then the other, these jealous rivals, setting aside Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith for The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes.

Looking for understanding,

the search continues.

Caveat emptor: I’ll stop here for a moment to remind myself and my readers that naming desires, like naming emotions, distorts our inner reality. They are not things and do not occur singly, and my attempts to tease out separate strands from an inchoate stream can be only a partial and misleading picture. All analysis distorts. Keep that in mind, please, and what I write here will not seem, perhaps, quite so absurd!

The open road! Escape!

And now I’m thinking that understanding and escape are very earthbound dimensions of reading hunger, very, very human, and that there is something else, woven tightly into these hungers and yet also very different, and that is our longing to live beyond the limits of our individual life spans, not only longer but also larger. You see instantly how the desire to expand beyond cannot be separated from hunger for understanding or for escape—and yet, do you also see that it cannot be completely expressed by those two hungers? We want something eternal, deathless. No theologian, however, I'll just leave that teasing suggestion right there.

 

I have more to say about the comfort of remembering, which also lets us slip time's constraints. 

 

Through the Looking Glass brings back, for me, the excitement I felt when I ran into the kitchen to tell my mother, “It’s a chessboard!” Lewis Carroll had not stated it so baldly, and my parents had not explained the story to me that way, but all of a sudden, reading it to myself, I had seen the chessboard when the Knight told Alice he could go no farther because he had reached the end of his move, and I had to run and tell my mother, who responded, “You didn’t know that?” No, I didn’t, but the excitement of my discovery was not dampened by her amusement, because I discovered it for myself, as I still remember with pleasure. 

 

If I were to pick up right now, today, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it would carry me back to the Parc Monceau in Paris (as merely thinking of the book carries me back), especially if I had the French paperback. One summer, day after day I went to the Parc Monceau with that book in hand, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’ être, lost in an Eastern European world inside the landscaped French world around me in my dream city far from home. 

 

And Wind in the Willows! I read that book to my son, giving the different animal characters different voices, and we had a wonderful time, which he still remembers. Then when the Artist and I had a layover in the Detroit airport on our way home from France, we read to each other (from a battered paperback copy that is here in my house somewhere, but where?) the chapter “Dolce Domum,” tears streaming down our faces, while all around us business people busily consulted their Blackberries and the contents of their briefcases. 

Are you still with me? Are you as tired as Sunny Juliet of my egghead ruminations? “Momma, get real!”

 

Real is snow in thick flurries and wind that drifts it across roads!

Well, here’s what was real for me on Monday evening as the blizzard swirled and on Tuesday morning when darkness had not as yet retreated: I was reading, for the first time in years, Jim Harrison’s novel, Dalva. First published in 1988, Dalva is written in the first person, the first and third sections in a woman’s voice, and what inspired me to revisit this book in 2025 was the new collection of Jim’s work in French translation that concentrates on his women characters, both in first-person stories and in third-person works with central female characters.

I have to admit that when Dalva first came out, it was hard for me to “hear” the female narrator’s voice, what with Jim’s own gravelly, very masculine speaking voice so familiar to my ear. Reading the book now is a very different experience. For one thing, Jim’s speaking voice has been gone for nine years, and he had been gone from Michigan longer than that, gone to live in Montana and Arizona. But also I am 37 years older than when I first read this novel. Thirty-seven years of varied life experience, shall we say, gives me a much richer perspective, and now Dalva’s voice comes through strong and clear to me, and I am loving this book, truly loving it, and have a much deeper appreciation for what the author accomplished, not only in writing from a woman’s point of view but in speaking so many truths.

 

It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized.

... 

 

Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.

... 

 

The tomatoes looked as if they were suffocating in the glass jars, livid red and suffering.

... 

 

…I had told him that I was without a specific talent, other than that of curiosity, and he saw that as a large item. It is terrible to assume life is one thing, only to discover it is another. A highly mobile curiosity gives you the option of looking into alternatives. 

 

There is also, I must admit (Another admission? Is this post becoming overly confessional?) my love for southeast Arizona (a love that took me by surprise), and the way the mountains and high desert haunt my northern Michigan winter finds solace in Harrison’s descriptions of places not far from my former winter stomping grounds in Cochise County. He was just a couple of mountain ranges west and south. Hackberry trees along dry streambeds, mesquite on overgrazed acreage, eroded gulches, alligator juniper at higher elevations—all that. I came to know such country intimately.

How much poorer my present life would be had I not come back to re-read this novel! How many hungers it satisfies!

 

I would defend my answer to my own original question by noting that I spend no time whatsoever watching television and none drinking in bars, although as a word-addicted, dream-addled, introverted widow I do not hold my priorities up as superior to anyone else’s. All I’m saying is that reading is a priority in my life, and this is where I look for comfort and strength and beauty and understanding.

Also, never fear, Sunny and I manage a lot of dog-and-mom time, indoors and out!