Where Do We Stand?

 

(That sign needs refreshing and straightening up, doesn't it?)

Oh, where to begin? 

 

With the weather? Warmup and sunshine, then soaking rain, and now, coming up, back to snow. The sunny days were a pleasure, but it is March in Michigan, after all.

Omena Bay, Monday, March 3, 2025

With books? Recently I set aside, unfinished, yet another, this one a biography of a famous author, because after 180 pages read I could not stand to spend another minute in that man’s life. A biography of photographer Edward S. Curtis, by contrast, held me to the end, by which time I concluded that his life was as tragic as that of his subjects, except that he did manage to get his work done, and the tribes he photographed appreciated his work, and he had not succumbed to despair at the end but had in mind yet another project, though that late-life idea was destined not to be realized. Amazing perseverance! An interesting side note in Curtis’s was his correspondence with Belle da Costa Greene, the subject of a book of historical fiction I read very recently (The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray) and whose biography (An Illuminated Life, by Heidi Ardizzone), I now have in my to-read stack. Curtis and Greene were connected through J. P. Morgan, who employed Greene as his personal librarian and who finally underwrote Curtis’s expenses for his 20-volume work, although Curtis himself received no pay for all the years he put in.

 

With the dog? I can hardly “begin” with her now, my paragraph above on books having gone on as long as it did, but I know my readers enjoy having dog notes squeezed in among the books, so, first, here she is in black and white, looking more like our old Sarah than she generally appears to me. One morning I told her, “You are all my dogs,” meaning that she has inherited my love for them and that I see them all now in her. Isn’t that the way it is with dogs, when you come right down to it?

Sunny looking like Sarah --

We got to the dog park two days in a row, too, first with hard-packed ice underfoot and then with melting snow and the reappearance of mud. The dogs, of course, don’t care. They could not care less! (And isn’t it strange how easily Americans in general—I have to watch myself!—have slipped into saying, “I could care less,” when they mean exactly the opposite?) At home, we had not only morning Frisbee time but even the return of tennis ball play one sunny afternoon!

 

Meeting friends!

So there you have weather, books, and dogs, and now I’m going to dip into politics, so if you can’t stand the heat, you can exit the kitchen now. Fair warning!

Late winter thaw

The nation-wide economic boycott of online and big box giants set for Friday, February 28, was largely overshadowed by the shameful spectacle that took place at the White House. There was a pretty strong view, anyway, that a one-day boycott would have no effect whatsoever, either economically or politically, and yet, in solidarity with the idea, I finally made a plan to support it in my own way, because it felt good to be doing something at last. And then I realized, from all the feedback I received to my announcement, that other people felt the same way, that there is a great hunger for ways to take action, other than making repeated calls to our so-called Congressional “representatives” who could not care less than they do about our opinions or what we would like to see happening in Congress. (What we would like to see: evidence of backbone!)

 

So that felt good, but what next? The answer came when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with her to a public protest in Traverse City on March 4. We would be protesting not only the administration’s shameful treatment of the president of Ukraine but every other destructive and hateful thing he has done in the last – is it possible that it’s only been six weeks???!!!

 

The thing is, I have never before taken part in a public demonstration. Mind you, I was paying attention in the Sixties and arguing against the war in Vietnam, and I certainly supported civil rights in principle, but I never marched once. And I was young back then. Now? Well, I can do it for my great-grandchildren!

 

My friend and I were nervous before we went. We didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the only thing that would have made the experience more positive than it was would have been a larger crowd, but there had been at least two other protest gatherings earlier in the day, and some of the people standing with us on Bayshore Drive at the intersection with Union Street in Traverse City had been to all three demonstrations, and while the rain held off (thank heaven!) it was a gloomy, grey day, not to mention cold for a couple of aging “protest virgins” who had forgotten their gloves.

 

But what a wonderful experience it was! 

Wearing my knitted cap from 2016--do you remember?

The vast majority of motorists who passed our intersection honked car horns in solidarity, waved, gave us thumbs up, and even cheered. (In the half-hour we stood there with our signs, only half a dozen people at most were negative.) It felt good to be standing in public for our principles, and to be affirmed by people passing by was icing on the cake. At one point, I was near tears, I felt such love for my country and for my fellow brave Americans out there in the cold wind! It was a happy, joyful feeling!

 

Will public demonstrations make any difference at all? 

 

We know protests will not change the positions or alter the plans of the divider-in-chief in the Oval Office, but he is not our target audience. We want to motivate Democrats in office to unify and raise their voices, to motivate Republicans with eyes open to join in bilateral resistance, and to show any Americans still on the fence—or wavering in their support of the administration as they see the gutting of programs necessary to their livelihood or even to their lives—that they are welcome and that we can prevail if we join together. 

 

I did not (how could anyone think I would?) watch or even listen to Tuesday evening’s hour and a half rant. And on Wednesday morning, why would I “read the full transcript” or “watch highlights”? I know all too well the “state of the union”: It is in a perilous state, brought low by the divider-in-chief whose bloviating fantasies illuminate nothing, ever. What would that 90 minutes provide? Boasting and blaming, threats and lies and name-calling. Why would I subject myself to that yet again, even after the fact? 

 

First thing Wednesday morning, though, I did watch Senator Elissa Slotkin’s entire rebuttal (link in list below), and I was so proud that she is a Michigan senator! I am looking toward not the haters but the helpers, not the dividers but to those who would reunite us, those with a positive vision of an American future that is sometimes these days all too hard to see. 

 

As for those who disagree with me, I am through playing Whack-a-Mole. Put the pieces together—or don’t. Here are some places to start, if you care to see what I see. I have chosen a variety of sources and have made each choice for clarity and basis in fact.

 

Fact-checking the State of the Union address.

Senator Elissa Slotkin rebuts president.

War in Ukraine.

 

Full meeting with Zelensky in the White House.

 

Lech Walesa weighs in.

U.S.-Russia-Ukraine recent history

 

Current administration’s ties with Russia.

Russia and U.S. cybersecurity.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

 

What does Musk’s own chatbot say?

DOGE savings?

 

Cost of president’s trip to the Superbowl.

What tariffs could cost Americans (from Fox).

Ontario’s response to tariffs against Canada.

What constitutes an “illegal protest” in the U.S.?

 

Voter fraud, facts and myths.

Beautiful Michigan!

Beautiful Northport!

Not Just Waiting Around For It

Enough of dark and cold!

Oh, where to begin? A random plunge? 

 

Above is the title (perhaps no longer appropriate?) that I used for a first draft, now discarded—lengthy paragraphs that wound on and on, giving excessive background on my experience with unsought joy, revisiting at length past days of happiness (back in “the old Vienna,” as the Artist loved to say) before arriving, at last, to the place where I find myself now, where being open to the possibility of joy and ready to welcome it when it comes is not enough. In the present place intention is required. I need to seek joy out with the expectation of finding it.

Sunrise again -- that's better!

That, briefly, was the theme I had in mind, but my intention took a beating, even after having been written down and gone over repeatedly, pen retracing the words over and over, the words spoken aloud, visualization effected—the whole nine yards. All that, and yet joy eluded me. Irritability, not joy, was my companion. Rats!

 

Have you ever had meditation go sour on you? My intention session itself was fine, but joy did not (shall we say) manifest. And irritability is not much of a muse! No one wants to hear about it! We don’t need that from each other, do we? So I held off posting anything new here—especially after a comment from one reader about how he came to Books in Northport for “positivity”!

 

What brought on the bad mood? A combination of factors. For me personally, this is a difficult month, with a string of three-year-old milestones lying in wait on the calendar, but there is also the dark, dark cloud hanging over our country and the world, a cloud impossible to dispel and very difficult to put out of mind for long. 

 

Then, too, I was in the midst of a reading slump! Whether that was cause or effect of the mood, I cannot tell. I only know that Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, after an evening spent with it, struck me as silly and pointless and that I subsequently abandoned Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall halfway through, after the introduction had filled me with eagerness for the story. Eschewing literature after two or three impatient nights, I spent a couple of evenings with one of Lillian Braun Jackson’s Cat-Who mysteries and a big bag of potato chips, wallowing in escape reading and junk food.

 

(It really wasn't much of a party.)

My next reading choice, The Personal Librarian, was a relief and a step up. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray kept me turning pages in their engrossing work of historical fiction, and I have now ordered a biography of Belle da Costa Greene to see how known facts of her life stack up against the fiction. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Greene occupied a unique position in the world of art and book auctions of the period, her uniqueness taking on added poignancy 49 years after her death, when it was discovered that her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” It’s that secret identity that drives The Personal Librarian, certainly a fascinating aspect of the woman’s life, but I would like to know much more about how she learned about rare books and am hoping the biography will tell me that.

 

What really turned the tide of my mood, however, was the novel Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, a spellbinding story of a complicated family with complicated secrets, all connected by a recipe from “the island” that was their ancestral home. It was a book that carried me away and, finally, lifted me up. Awake half the night over its pages, only turning out the light after the book repeated fell from my hands as sleep overtook me, I had a happy reason to wake up in the morning: I had that book to finish! 

Have you ever had that feeling in the morning? Remembering as you came awake that an irresistible book was right there waiting for you? (So much better than only waking once again to the continuing nightmare of the current American political scene!) Now I see that Charmaine Wilkerson has published another novel, Good Dirt, and I am eager to get my hands on that, confident I will not be disappointed. 

Most highly recommended!

Switching gears for a moment: Meanwhile, when was the last time Sunny Juliet and I went to the dog park? When did poor Sunny last see anyone other than her dog mom? We’ve been alone too long!

This is her impatient face, between barks. Sigh!

What with bitter cold weather and then five days without our plow guy, it was a siege of togetherness, but I remedied that sorry situation for my girl on Sunday (though I rarely get photos at the dog park and didn’t on Sunday). On the way back through the village, I stopped at my bookshop only intending to snap one photo for my other blog, but then a family appeared, outside, gazing wistfully through the windows. I went to the door. “Would you like to come in?” They would! We visited, talked dogs, and they bought books—altogether a perfect encounter!

 

Back to reading: I’ll mention one more book here today. I’d ordered two copies of it, apparently, and then for the life of me could not remember why. The title, Faith, Hope and Carnage, seemed to threaten politics, but the content was actually a lengthy interview with an Australian musician whose work was entirely unknown to me, Nick Cave. (I know, I know—I’m totally out of it!) In an attempt to refresh my memory, I opened the book.

Not knowing what to expect, I am drawn in.

Even knowing nothing of songwriter-performer Cave’s work, I was taken by the way he talked about his creative process. Improvisation with collaborator Warren Ellis, he is quick to point out, is a lot more and something completely other than “winging it” (the interviewer’s suggestion).

 

No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. 

 

This theme of experienced, mindful improvisation comes up again. 

 

…[For] magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

 

Cave’s seriousness about his music came clearly through his articulate statements, and without knowing anything of his music I was fascinated, but that wasn’t all. In the interview, he also talks a lot about God, about faith and doubt.

 

…[O]ne way I try [to find deliverance from suffering] is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. … I guess what I am saying is—we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.

 

I thought of a friend of mine and a book she and her late husband worked on for years. She will recognize their work’s conclusions in Cave’s words, I know. 

 

And still there was more. This famous person completely outside my ken had, it seems, lost two of his four sons to death, losses that greatly informed both his music and his religious beliefs, and he has given a lot of consideration to grief and how it changes us—one of the major themes of my own life for the past three years, as you know. He speaks of the physicality of grief as “a kind of annihilation of the self—an interior screaming.” But he also speculates that “perhaps God is the trauma itself,” words that need a little more explanation: 

 

That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.

 

He speaks of grief as “transformative,” in which we may be “essentially altered or remade.” Another friend will perhaps be reminded by these words of our conversation on Sunday evening.

 

More of the book remains for me to read than what I have read so far, but I will definitely continue with it, as the themes resonate perfectly with this month of milestone days in my life—my husband’s hospitalizations, surgeries, his birthday, our last days together, and his death. 

 

Perhaps searing memories and my current reading of creativity and God and faith and grief in words from a musician who has had no part whatsoever in my listening life will not strike any of you as the joy my carefully worded intention sought to manifest, but it is what has come, and I am welcoming it. Taking it in. Seeing where it will take me in my improvised life during this last week of February as temperatures rise into the 30s, bringing rain to erode our mountains of plowed-up snow.

How long will this mountain last?

Where will the next weeks take me?

Seek Comfort and Welcome Joy

Pure joy!!!

Some of you have no doubt realized already that many of my recent topics up to and including this one—courage, loving care, strength, comfort and joy—are not really separate or separable. True it is! Just as our desires are multifaceted and complex, not singular and “pure,” so it is with our emotions. Still, focusing on one aspect at a time can be helpful, and while comfort and joy are important parts of loving care and strength and courage, I want to focus in on the former pair today, because it’s all too easy, when we’re trying to be strong and brave and take care of ourselves and others, to narrow our gaze to difficulty, to all the challenges we face, and lose track of the importance of experiencing—letting in—ongoing comfort and joy. 

 

Joy helps reduce stress in your everyday life, and that’s a good thing, but if stress reduction is all we consider about it, we are selling joy short, judging it good because it’s useful to us, good for us, rather than inviting joy into our lives because we’re alive and because the world is basically beautiful and we are made, I truly believe, for beauty and for joy. 

 

Many people I know are grandparents, the fortunate ones able to interact with grandchildren on a daily basis. “The light of my life,” one grandfather told me of a young grandson, while another friend describes her new granddaughter (quite rightly! I’ve seen pictures!) as irresistible. Others of us, living miles from family, find comfort and joy in friendship, our companion animals, and in the beauty of nature. 

She gets me outdoors!

Spring and summer WILL return!

Music, whether playing it or simply listening to it, is important—and not only Beethoven. Klezmer music, despite the minor key, is joyful, and country music can be. Do you hear the blues as music of a sad sad, downtrodden people? Not if you are playing or singing it yourself or if you read the interpretation of Albert Murray. When the spirit lifts and lungs take in larger breaths, smiles wreath our faces, and laughter bubbles over—joyful responses!

 

Here is a site I found with “joyful literature for dark times.” I’ve read a few of the books listed on that site but have my own favorites, as I’m sure you must, as well. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is a series I find both comforting and joyful. Mma Ramotswe is such a kind, thoughtful person, and she loves her country of Botswana so much! 

I love these books.

Do you have a favorite book that you consider joyful and that gives you joy to re-read? Or simply comforting? Have you discovered a new book lately that fits the description? 

 

You might not think a presidential memoir would figure into this discussion, but I am taking a lot of comfort from Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, even when the topics are grim. Reading of such an intelligent, capable, principled man in the White House, who never thought he knew everything but was always eager to learn more, and who did a lot more “politicking” than most Americans realize, makes me glad for the time I’ve had on earth.

 

In the middle of the night, though, when I wake to frightening reality, I turn to a different kind of book, and at present my middle-of-the-night reading is Breckland, by Olive Cook, an early volume in the series of “Regional Books” from Robert Hale, Ltd., of London. These postwar books on various regions of the United Kingdom describe landscape, agriculture, architecture, and so on in close and loving detail. They are not fiction: In these books nothing happens. What a relief! It’s as if you are on a walk, a stroll, a ramble with someone who knows the area intimately and points out what you might otherwise miss. After a day in the “real world” where all too much is happening, it is a great comfort to travel back in time to rural England when and where the horrors of the Second World War were finally over.

 

Online, Dana Frost with her “Forced Joy” project, an idea she had when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and one she had to work hard after he died, looks at how to find joy in grief and loss, and Valerie Kaur, a warrior for revolutionary love, writes and talks about how we can focus on love and joy in the midst of hatred and violence. 

Big pot of soup!

Batch of homemade flatbread --

I also watch a few short videos online, including Sean the Sheepman and chef Jacques Pépin. Dogs and cooking are important sources of joy for me, so watching Sean and Jacques at work is a quiet, comforting pleasure. Border collies are still working sheep, and Jacques is still glazing carrots. Ah, how lovely!

 

Painted rock, gift from a dear friend

When you do an online search for “joy” topics, one of the suggestions that comes up over and over is to look for joy in small, ordinary moments, something I’ve done for years. It was crucial back when the Artist and I were so “poor” (in financial terms) that going out for coffee was a splurge, and now cultivating gratitude for small pleasures in my life alone is just as crucial. 

Pleasure and happiness and comfort and joy are hardly interchangeable terms, but joy can be quiet and blend into comfort, don’t you think? Can’t we experience joy in silent contentment, as well as in glad shouts? More than gratitude, I see quiet joy as the realization of all we have for which to be grateful, a kind of overflowing fullness in the moment. 

 

Where do you find yours? Where do you look for it? Are you giving it a big welcome?

The sun was shining!

We played!

Valentine's Day, Then and Now

Here is a partial post I wrote sometime during the first week of February 2022 and never before posted:

*** 

[February 2022] …COVID. No kidding! Despite being triply vaccinated (both of us were), the Artist came down with one of the new strains. It was very early in the wee, dark hours of Wednesday morning, and he could not get a good, deep breath, no matter he tried. We were both scared, but COVID did not occur to either of us. He thought he must be having a panic attack. We waited, watched, tried different things. Finally I got dressed, and when he said he “felt better” having me dressed to leave the house, I knew it was time to call an ambulance. 

 

(This was four weeks after our farewell to Peasy, three weeks after the stroke that had previously sent sent David to the ER. I may need something good to happen on a Wednesday soon, or I might start getting superstitious.)

 

Tests were done, vital signs monitored, fluids given, oxygen administered, and by 3 p.m. my husband had been admitted to the hospital and installed in the COVID wing. Where I could not be with him! 

 

He was doing well the next day, however, and with hospital beds at a premium the doctor thought he could go home by Friday morning with supplemental oxygen. Good news! The hitch with morning discharge turned out to be that the oxygen supply people are in such high demand that they couldn’t get to the hospital until 8 p.m., so we had a long day of waiting and anxiety, all of which I could make into a very long story, except that I have other fish to fry here today. Bottom line: The Artist is home now, we are together again, he is doing well, feeling good, and we are looking to the future once more.

 

One of our top current obsessions and by far the most cheerful and pleasant, though I have good reason for calling it unbelievable, continued to be: “Will we ever love another dog as much as we loved Peasy?” The Artist thinks that won’t be a problem. I’m not so sure. But he and I are nothing if not fools for love, and who in the world can resist a puppy? -- And is there any other word in the English language as adorable and appealing as the word puppy?

 

We are not gods, but we must surely be crazy! I’m certain you think so! Or maybe you think that our love for Sarah and for Peasy could not have been all that deep, after all. Think what you will. I don’t care. We don’t care. We have welcomed into our life and our hearts a little Aussie girl from Tucson. She was named Juliet by the breeder, and I won’t drop that name but have added to it, so that she will be our Sunny Juliet, and we will call her – of course! – Sunny.

 

What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

 

 

Unbelievably, it was only the day before the most recent medical emergency developed that I drove to Tucson to meet Juliet and her parents and her brothers and sisters and cousins and their owner, so the day after the emergency I was afraid to breathe the word puppy on the phone when the Artist and I talked on our phones, looking at each other through his hospital window as I stood outside in the cold shade, afraid he would say a puppy was the last thing he needed at this juncture. Not so! He brought it up himself! “I’ve been looking at pictures of the puppy,” he said, unprompted by me (I had texted him the photos on Tuesday), “and she’s very cute!”

I loved her looks when I first saw a picture but needed to meet her to assess her personality. She was not timid or fearful, but neither did she jump all over me, nipping and pulling at my clothes like some of the others. Instead she stood back from the fray and waited as the other puppies competed for attention. Then, after I had picked her up a couple of times, she was happy to come to me on her own. Calm and confident, she was also ready to engage in tumbling puppy play with the others, until they wore themselves out and collapsed into a puppy pile.  

 

Sarah was already four months old when we had the great good fortune to find her after she spent only a single night in the Cherryland Humane Society shelter. It was obvious that her previous owners, who couldn’t keep her for whatever reasons, had given her a good start in life. She already knew basic commands and not to make messes in the house. She was confident and unafraid. And her life continued rich and full and happy with us. She was truly a lucky dog! Nothing terrible ever happened to her in her entire life! 

 

Peasy, as you all know, was not as fortunate as Sarah. We have no idea how long little Pea was homeless and had to survive by his wits before those long, bleak months in the pound. That poor boy had hard knocks aplenty. 

 

We want to give Sunny the kind of life Sarah had, the life we would have given Peasy if only it had been possible … a life where nothing bad ever happens to her … a life in which she is sheltered and feels secure and knows herself to be loved … a life in which she meets and makes new friends every day … a life of play and adventure but never want or fear … the kind of life every dog deserves to have … the life our Peasy should have had, right from the beginning.

 

When I asked the Artist that question about whether we would ever love another dog as much as Peasy, my next question to him was what Peasy would think of our having another dog. His response was that Sunny will be our “dog of atonement.” My sister (bless her heart!) didn’t like the sound of that. She feels we have nothing to atone for. Maybe not rationally. I’m pretty sure most people would say we made the right decision about Pea and have “nothing to regret.” But emotionally? It’s just not that easy. 

 

I heard on the radio today that Daniel Pink has a new book called The Power of Regret. Rather than chiding human beings for feeling regret, Pink looks at the emotion in terms of its positive value. His subtitle is How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And that’s our idea with Sunny, our dog of atonement: going forward together into the happiest tomorrow we can create together.

 

A short while later, despite subsequent events (all very complicated), we were still moving ahead, negotiating the potholes in life’s road and looking to the future – for the Artist, making beautiful paintings and sculpture; for me, looking forward to my 29^th summer of bookselling and working on my small writing projects; for the two of us, integrating little Sunny Juliet into our household and social and public life. 

The two of us have had a lot of emotional and medical “rain” at the beginning of this new year – another siege since I drafted this post -- but our personal future is once again looking bright, and we look forward to seeing you in Northport sometime before Memorial Day!

***

 

That’s it. You know the sequel. On Valentine’s Day 2022 I gave my husband a book of Billy Collins poems, and he gave me (he was already hospitalized again, awaiting further surgery) his paperback copy of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Storm clouds soon moved in again with a vengeance, and Sunny Juliet and I had to return to Michigan that spring without her “daddy.” It’s been almost three years now since he died, but “Love returns always.” 

The Subject Is Strength

Keep Yourself Strong

 

My previous post on loving care was a reminder to myself as well as to my readers that we need to take care of ourselves, and a couple images of meals I made with spinach pointed directly (with an indirect nod to Popeye the Sailor that younger readers, if any, might have missed) to the importance of building strength. Iron and vitamin D really do improve muscular strength, mass, and function in older adults as well as young people. These days, with every good meal I prepare, I tell myself I am building reserves of strength for an uncertain future. After all, outside of the certainty of eventual death for each and every one of us, the truth is that our futures have always been and always will be uncertain, so don’t wait for tomorrow to start taking care of yourself.

 

Physical activity, mental stimulation, and contact with others is nourishing and important, too. Sometimes when I’m feeling discouraged, it’s hard for me to call a friend, because I don’t want to spread my discouragement to anyone else. If I make the call, though (and sometimes it isn’t until the next day, I admit), before we’ve been talking long, my friend and I transition from commiseration to laughter, and laughing together renews our strength. 

Our playing field

Sunny Juliet and I had some physical activity on a cold Monday, the outdoors made more inviting by the presence of blue sky and sunshine. Frisbee is mental stimulation as well as physical activity for my girl, and often her dear little face makes me laugh with joy.

 

 

A Fable From Aesop

 

Book nerd that I have always been, now that I live alone there is always a book on the dining table, and these days I've been turning to Aesop with my meals. 

As you can see, the cover is attractive, page illustrations charming, but the book itself is falling apart, literally, so I felt no guilt for liberating this shabby treasure from a box of bookstore donations and calling it my own. My 1846 edition is also safely out of copyright, so I’ll be sharing a few more of the 300 fables and illustrations in weeks to come. 

For today, here is “The Lion and the Three Bulls.”

You might wonder where in the world lions and bulls both occur. Facts about Aesop are elusive, and many believe he was not a real person at all. Other scholars place him in the 6^th century BCE and identify him as born enslaved and eventually freed. While his birthplace (if he was, in fact, born) remains an open question, one possibility proposed is Ethiopia, and surely cattle and lions both are part of the fauna of many African countries. I’m content with that speculation. What is most important about Aesop, anyway, are the stories and their lessons.

 

“The Lion and the Three Bulls” is a very brief fable with an obvious and simple lesson. Three bulls graze together in a pasture and are safe as long as they remain together. The lion dares not attack one bull with two other formidable defenders on the scene. When the bulls separate, however, the lion easily takes them on one at a time, and all three lose their lives. 

 

“Union is strength,” is the way my old 19^th-century Routledge volume sums up the fable’s lesson. 

 

Running with that idea--

 

The phrase and general idea of “United we stand! Divided we fall!” has a long history, from the New Testament (Matthew 3:25, Matthew 12:25, Luke 11:17) to Abraham Lincoln (“a house divided against itself”) to the official motto of the state of Kentucky (since 1942) and the flag of the state of Missouri. Going back to pre-Revolutionary times, we find a song by John Dickinson, “The Liberty Song,” with the words “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall!” 

 

Never a sports fan, I learned something new when looking for the idea that we are “stronger together.” Those of you who do follow sports will be familiar with the name Walter Payton, running back for the Chicago Bears. Apparently, Payton’s most well-known words are these: “We are stronger together than we are alone.” This site includes many other wonderful Payton quotes. I'm glad to have learned about him!

 

Similar words were adopted in 2021 by the International Olympic Committee to honor teamwork and the unifying power of sports: “Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together.” Labor unions use such slogans for obvious reasons, pointing to the very reason for their, the unions’, existence. Team sports were not my forte, to put it mildly, and I've never belonged to a union (my paternal grandfather did), but I did play in orchestras for nine years, and an orchestra cannot make music except by making it together. Orchestral music is an ensemble production.

 

Maybe talk of strength in union makes you nervous? Irritates you? You say you’ve worked hard all your life and earned everything you have, with no help from anyone? The truth is that the most rugged individualist who clawed his way up the ladder of success did not spring full-blown out of nowhere but benefitted from a surrounding culture of knowledge and skill and law and examples built up over generations, in this country and others. We all inherit what others gathered and treasured for us before we were even born. Community is a much broader concept than communism, and you can have one without the other. The motto E pluribus unum dates back to 1776. Here's a case for returning to it.

 

Current Events

 

No, I am not going to get into details of the past week’s outrages. The observation I want to make is general. 

 

Most 21^st-century presidential candidates and presidents have vowed to be presidents “for all the people.” Tragically, the candidate who now sits in the Oval Office was not in tune with that popular promise and instead, while yet on the campaign trail, was already vowing vengeance. Retribution, not reconciliation, is his theme song. Now in office, he has wasted no time in making good on his threats.

 

(What is a threat? What is a promise? Do you see them as different? Why or why not?)

 

Calling journalists and Democrats and all Republicans who don’t fall in line with him “enemies,” today’s president encourages his loyalists to follow him in hating and demonizing, dividing rather than uniting. Why? Because keeping us divided distracts us from what everything else he and his henchmen are doing. Because keeping American citizens fighting among themselves lets the gangster billionaires take over. Because keeping us apart in information silos makes us weak. If Americans came together in defense of the rule of law, which "ultimately depends on the citizens" (go back and follow that link!), we would still have plenty of disagreements and plenty to debate and a lot on which to compromise, but surely we could stand united against the threat of autocracy. We would have strength in numbers. —And if our democracy fails to survive, none of the other disagreements will matter, anyway.

Right now, in this cold Michigan February, it's hard to see if and how Americans will ever come together again, isn’t it? But what a tragic waste of human thought and innovation and effort it would be if this country of ours were to slide into “absolute despotism” after being founded expressly to avoid such a fate!

 

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day, to cite the old cliché, and it didn’t fall in a single day, either. The current administration is less than a month old. The wrecking ball started swinging on Day 1, and there has been a lot of destruction already, but we don’t have to sit back and let it continue to happen. We need to remind our members of Congress, our elected representatives, that they took an oath to abide by and defend the Constitution of the United States, and they are not working for the people they supposedly represent if they are knuckling under to a president who would set it aside—or, worse yet, if they are actively aiding and abetting that set-aside.

 

So keep up your strength, lend your strength to others, and draw strength from others, too. I promise (or is it a threat?) more Aesop in the weeks ahead. Other books, too. And if you’re very, very good, more dog news and notes. That’s a promise.