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!

 

Direct From Paris!

Somewhere along life's road, we paused.

Do you need a vacation from the tense present? Come with me to the past nearly perfect, and from there we will circle back to a recent day of happiness for me in Northport. 

 

Most Americans, whether they have been able to make the dream come true or not, have a dream city. For some it is Manhattan or San Francisco, for others London or Rome. For me, all my life, it was always Paris. It had certainly been that for my father, who was there in the intoxicating days following the Liberation and who had a chance to see and hear Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow,” in person one evening. And for the Artist—well, how many artists from all over the world, through the years, have sought refuge and validation in Paris? 

 

So Paris was a dream we shared from the beginning. As it turned out, however, each of us made our first trip solo, which was as important for me as it was for him. When I went for the month of May in 1987, it was because so much else in my life had fallen apart that I needed to save at least one important dream. I didn’t want to speak English at all during my weeks in Paris and avoided situations to do so. For me, it was a personal test. When the Artist went for three weeks in April of 1992, it was a different kind of test for him. He needed to make his way around independently with only smatterings of the language. 

My beautiful room!

Complete with a cat named Sirius!

Both of us succeeded, and we made important friends, as well, during our solo times in Paris. The older Frenchwoman from whom I rented a room on the rue de Vaugirard became one of the best friends of my life, and the young Englishman he met became an important friend to the Artist. We dreamed of having these two visit us in the U.S. so we could show them our country. That dream was never realized, but in September of 2000, when the Artist and I finally went to Paris together, it was natural that we would introduce our two dear friends to each other. 

Justin and Hélène as she shows some of the art on her walls

What an enchanted, unforgettable evening that was! Drinks and hors d’oevres at Hélène’s apartment, followed by dinner at a little Auvergnat restaurant in the neighborhood! “We are making beautiful memories!” Hélène said to me, resting her head on my shoulder. She did not speak English any more than the Artist spoke French, but to my great delight they “got” each other without a common language. Of course! 

 

I had chosen our hotel, le Recamier, in part because of its proximity to Hélène’s apartment, my first “home” in Paris, but the peacefulness of the Place with its fountain of the Four Cardinals (and the four cardinal directions), the church of St.-Sulpice with its grand organ, and the bookshops nearby all added their own charms. 

After an exciting but somehow leisurely Paris sojourn, we took the train of grande vitesse south to Avignon, picked up a rental car, and wandered north. We had maps but no reservations, simply exploring as the spirit moved us—and by great good fortune happening upon the village of Blesle, which I will never, never forget. 

We always talked of a return. We wanted to go back to Paris, to see Justin and Hélène again, to visit places we hadn’t had time to see, and maybe spend an entire week in Blesle, seeking out the treasures of the Auvergne. But it was not to be. We never gave up the idea, but time ran out on us. 

 

So imagine the thrill I felt when an email came from the publishing house of Gallimard in Paris, saying they were putting together a new volume of some of Jim Harrison’s work in French translation and that the translator had discovered a couple of screenplay treatments, never sold, that the Artist and the Writer had cowritten back in the 1970s—and would I give permission for translations of those two pieces, with credit given to David Grath, to be included in the volume?!

 

But of course!!!

 

There followed months of emails back and forth between Paris, France, and Northport, Michigan. The flood of forms seemed to multiply overnight like wire coat hangers in the closet of an old farmhouse. (Do I know about that, or do I know about that?) It was international business, there was an advance on royalties involved, etc., etc. About the time I was ready to give up and tell them “Forget the royalties! Just make sure the pieces get into the book!” I was assured that the last form requested would be the final one required and that when the book was published in November 2024 a copy would be sent to me. 

 

Publication timelines are often subject to alteration, so I was not surprised to learn that Métamorphoses would not be released until January 2025. It had been so long since the initial email that for days, even weeks at a time, I would forget about the book completely. Last week, then, when I had a yellow slip to pick up a package at the post office, the contents took me completely by surprise.

Identifying name on package

 

Contents of package

The two screenplay treatments are near the end of the book in a section called “Unedited texts,” and the Artist’s name is in small type in a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the first screenplay (this is, after all, a work of the revered Jim Harrison), but I remember how absolutely thrilled David had been, on his first visit to France, to see the Bob James album, “Grand Piano Canyon,” in a shop in Paris with the image of his painting of the same name on the album cover, so I can easily imagine how pleased he would be to have the collaborative work he did with his friend Jim in a book issued by the one of France’s leading publishers, which is the reason I jumped through that seemingly endless series of bureaucratic hoops—not for money but for love. And there you have it. That's my story.

 

Which brings us back to northern Michigan, on a cold January day, in a turbulent and disturbing moment in American history, but I promised myself and my readers a vacation in today’s post and am not about to renege on my promise. So, some more happy news? There was practically no wind this morning! What joy for the momma and her girl when they went out for their first walk of the day! A perfect morning for chasing chunks of icy snow and slipping and sliding in the process! What fun!

Small readings from small writings bring large thoughts.

"Books are my rivals for her attention!"

When I take on the reading of a very big book, one that will require a long stretch of days and nights to get through, I always have on hand a few volumes of lighter literary weight, fiction or nonfiction or a mixed stack of the two. The past few days, when I finish a chapter from Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, I’ve turned to a modest book from the category of “books on books,” William Dana Orcutt’s From My Library Walls: A Kaleidoscope of Memories. Published in 1945 under wartime conservation restrictions, the book’s author refers several times to aspects of World War II, but his main topic in each short chapter, or essay, is a memory evoked by a photograph or drawing or framed autograph letter on the walls of his private home library.

Playtime in the single digits!

Lovers and collectors of both art and books will understand my astonishment at the number of framed items Mr. Orcutt found room to hang on his library walls. Though the Artist and I managed to find room for both in our old farmhouse, visual art and bookshelves are always competing for wall space—and the items that prompt Mr. Orcutt’s memories are not, for the most part, pieces of art but framed ephemera he collected along with his books. The memorabilia even includes (he admits in both cases) a couple of items given as gifts not to him but to his wife, though he calls them “my,” not “our” library walls. His home library, I muse in wonder, must have been a very large room! Unfortunately, the book’s only photograph is a portrait of the author. We are not given a look at his library.

Sunny thinks she's cuter than WDO, and she's right!

William Dana Orcutt was born in 1870 in New Hampshire and lived into the 1950s. Entering young into the business of printing set his life’s course: In addition to writing books, he made a career of book and type design, with a reputation as a historian, as well. See this entry on the Dorcester Atheneum if you are interested in the history of American books, because Orcutt is an important figure in that story. His long, rich life, as the book I'm reading makes clear, intersected with many other important literary figures of his day. 

 

But my intention today is not to dwell on Orcutt’s life but to give you an idea of this one little book. He wrote many, most of them larger and more “important,” but anyone interested in American history and literature will find fascinating gems in this small volume. 

A small package reveals gems of history.

Each—let me call them essays--. Each essay in the book is no more than three to six pages in length, reminiscences that are grouped geographically, with the last two parts, “The Literary Hub of the Universe” [Boston] and “Star-Spangled Banner,” devoted to American topics. This Sunday morning I reached those final sections of the book, which were perhaps the most fascinating to me of all, particularly Orcutt’s memories of his relationship to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. 

 

As a schoolboy assigned to memorize Lincoln’s famous speech, young Orcutt pictured in his mind a great auditorium filled with people who received the president’s words with thunderous applause. Years later, when a “charming” volume was issued, reprinting and glorifying the address for a worshipful public, Orcutt happened to meet a “picturesque, elderly military gentleman” who had been a member of the Gettysburg Commission and who was the last living person to have been on the platform at Gettysburg that day! The elderly gentleman sputtered and scoffed at the glorified picture that day given in the new book. He told Orcutt:

 

“…Instead of being greeted as a masterpiece at the time of its delivery, most of those who heard the Address, and practically all the critics, considered it a colossal failure. Lincoln himself was mortified and chagrinned.” 

 

This, we must understand, was after a crowd of 100,000 people had been standing for two solid hours while the speaker of the day, famous orator Edward Everett, the main speaker of the day, read his two-hour-long speech. When Lincoln's turn came, the weary crowd met his brief words with silence, and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, remarked to the man sitting next to him that the president had “made a failure.” With his mind on the war and its human cost, not on polishing his personal legacy for the ages, Lincoln probably did not declaim in strong, ringing tones. And after all, he had been asked to say only a few dedicatory words. 

 

Across the country, newspapers (except for five who reviewed it positively) reported the Address as a flop.

 

…[S]ome even went so far as to criticize its political philosophy. It remained for the Edinburgh Review to discover its greatness. Here the statement was unequivocally made that the Eulogy delivered by Pericles in memory of the heroes of the Peloponnesian War could alone be compared with President Lincoln’s classic words. 

 

Abashed, American editors took another look and changed their tune. All these years later, who in the world ever quotes from Everett’s two-hour speech?

 

I am not—please do not mistake me!—comparing President Biden’s farewell address in stature to Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, but there are a few similarities: Both men were exhausted by the burdens of office when they spoke. Biden, like Lincoln, spoke briefly. Both spoke from the heart of the test the nation was undergoing. 

 

President Biden’s short address to the American people did not receive a failing mark from the country as a whole, but his critics on the Republican side of the aisle (see Fox News if you care to) spared no insult. It’s true that the elderly president, aged by the office (as it ages all who pass through it), as well as struggling against the stutter that he has worked so hard in his political career to overcome, sometimes fumbled his words. “He can’t even read!” jeered his detractors. They called his message the “worst” in history and “dark,” refusing to acknowledge that we are living in dark times, much of that darkness their own intentional creation. 

 

If history survives into the future, which seems rather an open question as this brave new world grows more and more shameless in mendacity and subject to more and more manipulation of fact, perhaps all this will get sorted out. For now, I can only make my own judgment. Without television, I watched President Biden’s entire speech on my little phone screen, and I give him high marks not only for honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness but also for seeing and facing the world as it is and asking us to do the same. I wish I shared his optimism, but certainly I agree that not giving up hope is essential to the future of our country. 

 

On Monday, in honor of the national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., I will be reading from a book on King's life. My radio will be silent. I’ll only look at my phone for texts from family and/or friends. When I come back to this blog with a new post, perhaps by the end of the week, perhaps not until the following week, I'll have a lovely surprise to share. Meanwhile, let's pray for peace in Gaza, freedom for Ukraine, and relief for those made homeless by fires or other blows of fate.

Honor him on January 20.

Winter has arrived! Are you prepared?

Winter is all around us.

A friend of mine goes places in her car in winter in her indoor clothes, adding only a down vest. No gloves or mittens. No knitted cap. No heavy jacket. “I’m in the car!” she tells me. I ask her, “What if you had car trouble?” and she replies, “I would use my cell phone!” 

So wiper blades don't freeze to windshield overnight....

By contrast, I am not only layered up for driving but have an extra pair of work gloves with me in case I need to, say, open the hood—or get that shovel out of the back of the car to dig myself out of a snowbank—or whatever! Yes, I have a shovel with me. (No sandbags, but I figure I could use the car’s floormats, if necessary. Sandbags are very heavy.) Also engine oil, windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, flashlight, and jumper cables. The bottle of drinking water, for myself and my dog, if she happens to be with me, has to come in the house overnight, or it would be just a bottle of ice, and who needs that in an emergency? (Note to self: Put blanket in car!) I take my clue from the old Tom Lehr song, “Be Prepared!”

 

On the evening of the day of his state funeral, I began reading Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Keeping Faith, about his years in the White House. I have had the book for several years but hadn’t read it because, while I have always loved Jimmy, I am usually bored by political memoirs. Too many big names, too many dates, generally not much that is personal, not much to give me insight into the writer’s personality and character. 

 

I’m happy to say that Carter’s book is very different. For one thing, he wrote it himself. It isn’t the work of a ghost writer. For another, he begins at the end, leading off with the most painful episode of his presidency, the hostage crisis. How many presidents would ever have done that? In the first pages of his memoir, he shows himself at his most vulnerable. And, of course, by then he has already lost his bid for re-election, so as the hostages are being released, he is onstage at the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Hardly a moment of glory for Carter. But he had done the work, and the hostages were freed and came home alive.

 

He was never one to take shortcuts or “fake it,” in any of his life roles. He took the job of president of the United States seriously, writing of his preparation:  

 

From the beginning, I realized that my ability to govern well would depend upon my mastery of the extremely important issues I faced. I wanted to learn as much as possible…. (p. 57 of the Easton Press edition)

 

In his first campaign for the presidency, coming to national politics from the governorship of Georgia, Carter was so confident that he would win the White House that many called him overconfident. Yet he wrote that his “freedom to act and speak during the campaign was severely restrained by the same confidence.” What could that mean? How and why would confidence of victory restrain his freedom to act and speak? Precisely, again, because he took so seriously the job of president.

 

I ran as though I would have to govern—always careful about what I promised and determined not to betray those who gave me their support. Sometimes I irritated my opponents and the news reports by firmly refusing to answer to questions to which I did not know the answers. And repeatedly I told reporters, ‘If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president.’ Even during the earliest days I was always thinking about what would have to be done in the Oval Office after the inauguration ceremonies were over. (p. 65)

 

It drove reporters crazy that he would occasionally “I don’t know” to a question. What he needed to know, he worked to find out. What he couldn’t know ahead of time, he admitted. But always, as he campaigned for the highest office in the land, he prepared himself not only to win but to govern.

 

My life is ever so much simpler. I prepared for winter with snow tires, a new furnace, and a refill of my propane tank. Good thing, because in keeping with yo-yo weather patterns of recent months, our temperate winter weather over the holidays in northern Michigan has now given way to January temperatures in the ’teens, with single-digit wind chill (or “feels like”) readings. 

We have wind chill!

("When I was a kid," I used to tell my son, "we didn’t have wind chill!" That is, of course, we didn’t have a name for it. What would the word ‘rose’ name if there were no more roses?)

She doesn't mind snow or cold.

Dogs, though. A dog is like the legendary postman: Whatever the weather, out we go, and little does Sunny Juliet suspect how slight is her dog mom’s inclination for outdoor adventures in a punishing, sub-freezing northwest wind, sun perpetually hidden above low-hanging clouds of depressing gunmetal grey! I make my voice enthusiastic and let her watch me load my pocket with treats.... 

 

She doesn't mind at all.

Every day of our human lives, in one way or another, we are preparing for days to come, aren’t we? For me, Sunday was housework (an attempt to keep entropy at bay), Monday paperwork (getting ready for tax time), and Tuesday an early morning expedition, sans dog, to Leland to have a new (working) headlight installed, which gave me an opportunity while my car was at Van’s Garage to have coffee and breakfast in what was formerly the Early Bird (now Great Lakes Chocolate & Café) and to sit in the very corner where the Artist and I sat so many, many mornings in past years. 

View from the "bus driver's seat" --

The restaurant has not been the Early Bird for a long time, but after we moved from the village of Leland out to Leelanau Township in 2021, the Early Bird routine was no longer part of our lives, and more recent incarnations of the place never really registered on my radar. Anyway, the building has the same configuration, and the view from what the Artist used to call the “bus driver’s seat” (no booths now, but I hitched my chair around to face north) is pretty much the same. I should have been prepared for the flood of memories, but the emotions caught me off-guard. 

Then, home to books and dog! I am so lucky to have a warm, sheltering home and a lively, affectionate little companion! I still inhabit the life the Artist and I made together, and Wednesday will find me back in Northport, on Waukazoo Street, in my other little world, surrounded by books. 

Be prepared!