Toasty Times Are Here

Beech leaves

First, fall color report: Red and orange and yellow are giving way to brown and gold. I’ve written here before, earlier this fall and in years past, that beech leaves in the fall make me think of buttered toast dripping with honey. Now that November is upon us, beech leaves are less yellow, more brown, and the oaks have turned a rich brown, also. Both oaks and beeches, especially the young ones, will hang onto some of their dark, papery leaves all winter.

 

Oak leaves in full sun do have a warm look, don't they?

The French have two words for brown: brun/brune (a hair color, for example) and marron/marrone,  used more often and also one of two names for chestnuts and the chestnut tree (which also goes by the name chataigner -- but see the blue box on this site if you want to increase your confusion), with marron also used as slang to refer to something strange or bizarre. C’est marron! If you want to refer to the color called 'maroon' in English, however, go for bordeaux in French. Like the wine. Oui, c'est marron!

-- Non, ce sont des chênes!

Lakeside oaks

Brown leaves, blue sky

With toasty colors outdoors, it’s time to reach for sweaters and comforters indoors, and I would willingly have sacrificed an hour of after-midnight dark on Sunday in order to have daylight seem to come earlier – I get confused by time changes -- but no! We were gaining an hour (of reading or sleep) to achieve the earlier morning light. (How we humans pretend! “It’s really 8 o’clock, but we’re pretending it’s 7 o’clock” is how I explain the time change to myself.) Earlier morning light is very welcome! Not so welcome is the increase in evening darkness, but next month we’ll turn the corner, I tell myself. It’s good that the equinox comes in December, so that each cold day in January and February we have a tiny bit more daylight.

There she is!

Meanwhile, only on Saturdays now is my bookstore open until 5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, if there’s no one browsing at 3 p.m., I turn out the shop lights, lock the door, and go home to my dog, staying until 5 only on Saturdays. My bookstore was so busy last Saturday! I was surprised and gratified by all the number of visitors, browsers, and book buyers. Most of first two groups were also members of the third group, I'm happy to say.

Last week we had sunshine three afternoons in a row, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – and then again for most of Saturday! Basswood and black walnut trees in my yard had dropped all their leaves and stood bare, letting the sun reach accumulated leaves on the ground as Sunny Juliet and I enjoyed light and fresh air along with exercise. Every sunny hour this time of year is a gift. Soon the silver maple leaves will fall, carpeting the ground, leaving bare branches holding up the sky. (Monday: I think today's bitter cold wind will achieve that result!)

Meanwhile, indoors next to my bed these books await my attention: History of the Rain, a novel by Niall Williams; Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America’s Legendary Racehorse, by Kim Wickens (this is a nonfiction account of the horse featured in the Geraldine Brooks novel); To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey From Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger; Meriwether: a novel of Meriwether Lewis and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, by David Nevin; and an ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, due to be released in January. 

I’m trying to save my reading of the Campbell book as a Christmas present to myself. Or maybe Thanksgiving weekend, if I can even wait that long.

The rest? I can’t say I’ll get through them all this month, what with the chance, as happens frequently, that something not in the stack will present itself and cut in line, so to speak -- an ever-present danger of owning a bookstore! After what seems like a lifetime of school and assigned reading, it still feels like a luxury to pick up whatever appeals to me at any given moment, and heaven knows we need little comforts and simple luxuries to keep us going, with winter’s dark and a strife-riven world pressing in upon us.

 

Previous post was my top fiction picks of 2023 from January through October, and next post will be top nonfiction. By the way, a handful of people left comments on my last post, but not a single one chimed in with a favorite novel read this year, and I know that some of you have read novels this year! One person left a new comment on a very old post, recommending a work of fiction from Scotland. Anyone else have recommendations? Anyone?

Another note, not about cold wind: If the only person who comes in the bookstore today was the one who wanted to tell me how much he loves Bonnie Jo Campbell's Q Road, my day was made!

 

Pointless Rambling Thoughts

How many leaves remain on this tree today?

We are slip-sliding into winter. Is that an excuse for my lack of focus? In my last post I used a French phrase, sous un ciel couvert, which means under a cloudy sky. Not actual rain but “menacing,” or (I would say) threatening rain. Here is another French word, one that moves easily and frequently from skies to moods: maussade, which means gloomy, dreary, dismal. 

A customer from France brought me this little souvenir!

I love French words the way so many of us also love music. It makes me happy to hear them, to speak the language (to the best of my abilities), to read and write the words. In an often cold, hard world, it is one of my little comforts, a small joy. Malheureusement (unhappily), we have been in greater-than-usual need of comforts if we’re paying attention to world news, but to imagine how comfortless their world must be for those in the midst of war is heartbreaking and goes far beyond first-world self-care.

 

I’m ditching most of what I had composed for today as a draft in the past week. The first frost in my garden feels like old as well as trivial news, along with that green tomato chutney project. Also, I’d written about a forecast for snow “in the coming week,” but now that forecast is only scant hours away. And other parts of the country have the same, so it’s hardly a headline story.

 

For no other reason than because it’s somewhat cheery, I’ll insert here a couple pictures of my latest kitchen production. It’s applesauce with pears cooked along with the apples and a homemade drizzle of black raspberry syrup added for color.…

I like it chunky.

And now I’ll use that food theme to segue to books and at the same circle back to the French. A friend tells me she doesn’t mind being alone but does mind eating alone. I told her I always have a dinner book nearby. The book that has seen me through many dinners lately, a few pages per meal, is Fernand Braudel’s L’Identité de la France. 

 

On our side of the Atlantic, in a country stretching from ocean to ocean, we tend to think of France as medium-sized and  unproblematically unified, but Braudel tells a different story. For reasons entirely different from those pertaining to the United States, as he sees it France is almost two different nations, north and south, with an intermediate buffer zone separating the two, and even that is an oversimplification. Histories, languages, soils, customs – la belle France is one nation politically in the larger world, but its peoples are diverse even from one village to the next.

 

But stop and think. Isn’t that the reality of human life everywhere? We may live under one law, but we inhabit multiple different and distinct smaller worlds. An Ethiopian friend of mine was astonished at how strong regional loyalties were in the United States, e.g., my ties to Michigan, she having expected we would all identify simply as Americans. My friend and I were in graduate school together for two years in Cincinnati (before I transferred to the University of Illinois), and in that unique river city – neither purely northern or southern, eastern or western -- each neighborhood had not only its own name (Clifton, Hyde Park, Over-the-Rhine, etc.) but also its own complete shopping district, so that the neighborhoods were like villages clustered to form the larger city but retaining their village identity. 

 

Similarly, in Leelanau County, still largely rural, every village (incorporated or not) and every informal lake community has, if not always its own grocery store or library, certainly its own history and traditions. Northport and Leland schools resist consolidation – that is, Northport resists being incorporated into Leland schools – because of Comet vs. Wildcat pride. Empire and Northport are worlds apart! I only get south to Empire maybe once a year and always feel, when I do, that I’m very far from home.

Now let me express my increasing crankiness about the term “community” that’s being thrown around so continuously and haphazardly in ways inappropriate to my ear and sensibilities. The word has become ubiquitous, with people (on the news, at least) now speaking of the “world community,” as in, “What has been the response of the ‘world community’ to the crisis in [fill in the blank]?” As if there could possibly ever be a unitary response across all the nations and peoples of the world unless we were invaded from outer space! A local union of musicians or plumbers or autoworkers or screenwriters may put out an official statement, but how long did it take to hammer out something on which all members could agree even in such a limited case?

 

Okay, back to my sheep. My Ethiopian friend was proud of the fact that her country had never been a European colony, but she acknowledged that it had been “colonized from within” by the Amhara group, who dominated politics under the country’s period of monarchy. One could say of France, also, I suppose, that it was “colonized from within” by the powers of the Île de France region, as it was their language that eventually became the official national tongue, edging out Latin (brought by the Romans), Basque, Provencal, Occitan, etc., etc. Free, mandatory, secular education instituted in 1882 prohibited regional languages in French public schools after, as I understand it, the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) convinced the government that in times of war, soldiers needed to understand each other and their commanders. A young generation growing up across the country with one language was also ripe for the subsequent age of empire – wars and annexations and conquests around the world – but that’s another story. Colonialism within preparing the way for colonies overseas? 

 

Years ago, when we lived in Leland and started our mornings with coffee at the Early Bird, the Artist and I sometimes had conversations with an older man who had been – or his father had been; I forget which – superintendent of county schools here. It was he who made the decision, finally, that all public instruction should be in English. Before that, various small country Leelanau schools conducted classes in the dominant language of that area’s immigrants. Note: As for Catholic schools in Leelanau County, St. Mary’s School in Lake Leelanau had classes in English, but Holy Rosary for a long time had Polish nuns teaching Polish-American farm children in the Polish language. Then there is the history, now well known, of Native American children in boarding schools being forbidden to use their native languages, which was the case for many Ojibwa and Odawa from Leelanau. 

And now, all over at least the Western world, the Odawa, the Irish, the Welsh, etc. are reclaiming the language lost by the generation before them.

 

Curious, I looked up sites discussing the Tower of Babel and found this one interesting, but the idea of verticality led me to think of homo sapiens beginning to walk upright, and then I questioned the writer’s conclusion that humans seek verticality to escape the earth’s surface. Did early bipedal humans want to escape the earth’s surface or simply be more at home on the ground than in the trees?

My friend Laura calls this the coming-home tree.

 

I have no conclusions today, only questions and sadness, because what more can we ask other than to feel at home on the earth, wherever we are? But being driven from home, cut off from the place of memories, or having that place invaded and stolen – sadly, this is a major theme in human history. Une idée maussade, vraiment. Truly a dismal idea – but accurate, isn’t it?

 

If only humans could see difference among our species as enriching rather than threatening -- 

Le monde est un souk énorme!

My plan for my next post is happier and more book-focused. Although the year is not yet at an end, I am too impatient to wait: I want to share with you a few novels I read this year for the first time (not necessarily newly published, in every case, but I’m not including those I re-read) and highly recommend without reservation. Maybe you will want to think about your top fiction picks for the year so far, too. I’d like that. 

 

Happy Halloween (if that's your thing)!

New Bohemian Cafe folks do holidays well. (They do everything well.)

Baudelaire for Breakfast

Having a new young dog that needs exercise and training is a little bit like having a new baby in the house, in that my mornings are not at all my own. Quiet writing time? Ha! I’m lucky to get a paragraph or two written in my journal, and as far as reading goes, many mornings it’s crazy to try to get very far in a book before Peasy has been outdoors for a good run. 

 

The other day the Artist and I (dog in backseat, of course) went over to visit the very nice, very clean and well-organized little FOL bookstore over in Sunsites, a.k.a., for postal purposes, Pearce. Pearce itself, like Dos Cabezas, is an old mining ghost town where only a few people live; a few miles to the north is the large subdivision of Sunsites, where the post office and library bearing the name Pearce are now located. I hoped maybe to find a good book in French, and in the poetry section, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a little bilingual paperback edition of Twenty Prose Poems, by Charles Baudelaire! 

 

So this morning, after Mr. P. and I had a good, rousing, morning outdoor adventure, when it was warm enough (with jacket) to sit out in the sun and read a little Baudelaire while Peasy gave his beautiful white puppy teeth a workout on an old cow bone, the short pieces in the Baudelaire book seemed like something I would be able to absorb despite distractions of dog and birds. (The Western bluebirds made another appearance at my birdbath ths morning!) I was more than a little shocked, however, to find a mistranslation in the very first prose poem in the book. The phrase was not at all tricky, either. An old woman, enchanted by a pretty child, approaches the little one with a smile: 

 

Et elle s’approcha de lui, voulant lui faire des risettes et des mines agréables.

 

That is the French. The English is given as:

 

And she approached the child, wishing to smile at it and make faces pleasantly. 

 

“Make faces pleasantly”? No, make pleasant faces. The French uses an adjective, not an adverb. Moreover, “making faces pleasantly” (in my opinion) hardly makes sense. Is it good English? What do you think? Anyway, that's as far as I got this morning. 

 

Later, toward midday, when the three of us were all settled down, the Artist and I in our reading chairs and Peasy fully engaged in tearing apart a new dog toy his Aunt Deborah had sent him, I was able to finish an entire short book, After the Fire, a book of poems and annotations consisting of background biographical information by the mystery writer I’m so hooked on these days, J. A. Jance. The author wrote the poems secretly, early in her first marriage, and hid them from her alcoholic husband, who had made it quite clear to her that there was to be “only one writer in the family.” (In the end, he remained a wannabe, she became the writer.) Only after his death, which occurred a year and a half after their divorce, did she rediscover the poems, hidden away in the box containing family birth, marriage, and divorce documents. 

My critical response is that Jance serves her readers better with her fiction than had she determined to continue writing poetry. Even so, the work is fascinating for its honest revelations. When writing the poems, Jance thought of herself as creating “art,” if only for herself, not engaging in self-analysis or exploration of issues in her married life. 

 

The artifice of “art” allowed me to maintain emotional distance. I could look at what was happening without ever having to come to terms with what was going on in my marriage. It spared me the harsh reality and hard work of actually doing something to change our disaster-bound direction. Looking at my poetry with the benefit of hindsight, I see how, even as early as 1968, a part of me understood that my marriage was doomed….

 

-      J. A. Jance, After the Fire

 

But her secret poems, not intend as anything else when she wrote them, later served her as a kind of journal of those earlier years, each one bringing back memories of the time of its creation and her surroundings on that day. To read more of Jance’s present life, see here.

 

Another book of poetry, Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems, by dedicated poet Thomas Lynch, I’m reading much more slowly and will tell you about at length, in a separate post, when I come to the last page and collect my thoughts on what I’ve read, and I’ll do the same with my current serious nonfiction book, Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility, by Alex Zamalin. 

 

My bedtime reading is not singular this week. The after-movie, read-aloud book is The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, by Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I try to stop each evening at a cliff-hanger point in the story, which isn’t hard, considering the kinds of roads Che and his friend, Alberto, are traveling on and the instability of their motorcycle, resulting at one point in nine crashes in a single day. Then I turn from the excitement of a motorcycle-buddy road trip, before turning out my bedside light, and read silently to myself a few pages from a YA novel, You May Already Be a Winner, by Ann Dee Ellis, and I’m already anticipating two more bedside books awaiting me. 

 

And I cannot close today’s post without noting the passing of poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlenghetti, whose poems I discovered back in East Lansing in 1967. (The book was A Coney Island of the Mind.) Ferlenghetti lived to the ripe old age of 101, and his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, also the home of City Lights Books, has been as well the home of the nonprofit City Lights Foundation since 1953. The bookstore received historic landmark status in 2001. Finally, let me note that the Baudelaire volume I had in hand several times today was published by City Lights Books. 

 

Thank you, Mr. Ferlenghetti, for getting your good work for literature done in the world for so long.

D’habitude je voyage en français

It was a while ago....

Most of my travel to foreign countries has taken me either to Canada or to France. I have lived in Paris for brief periods and could live quite happily in Montreal. Even on a road trip around Scotland once, I was with bilingual speakers of French and English, and we generally spoke French in the car. Is it any wonder, then, that I associate foreign travel with the French language?

Sometimes going places within the United States triggers my French response. During the two years I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, whenever I crossed the beautiful Roebling Bridge to Covington, Kentucky, I had the feeling I was leaving English behind and would be asked to show my passport on the far bank of the river. The Ohio River seemed that significant a border. And there are still occasions, driving around my home ground in Leelanau County, when I imagine my dear friend Helene, from Paris, with me in the car, and as we go down the roads I point out and explain to her various aspects of the Michigan landscape.

As the twig is bent, it is said, so the tree inclines. The high point of my father’s life was the time he spent in Paris after the city’s liberation at the end of World War II. 

His high school French got such a workout, he said, that it gave him a headache, but the experience was also heady in a positive sense. The young American lieutenant, sitting up all night in a bistro in Paris, discussing Corneille with Frenchmen! Is it any wonder he wanted his daughters (and I was the first-born) to learn as a second language the one that had brought him such excitement? Or any wonder that I caught the francophone fever at a very young age and never recovered?

“Je t’adore,” my father would murmur affectionately, and he would call me his “petit choux-fleur” (little cabbage or Brussels sprout, an untranslatable term of endearment), but when he barked an order it was always issued formally: “Fermez la porte!” Thus when my high school French teacher on the first day of class, bound to immerse us in the language, began by issuing the familiar command to shut the door (the hallway was very noisy in a school of 5,000 students), it was no mystery to me what he was saying. I felt, happily, right at home. 

The French-speaking parts of my father’s war experience were his best times, first billeted in a private home in the Netherlands, and later, as liquor control officer in the south of France, making trips up to Paris for troop “supplies.” Between those times, however, he was stationed for a while in the Tongan Islands, where his group of engineers constructed an airstrip for Allied landings in the Pacific. That place was a very different kettle of international fish. Outdoor showers! An enormous bunch of fresh bananas hung in a tree outside his tent every day!

In the 1940s, as I understand it, the Tongan language had yet to take written form. My father, therefore, ever the amateur linguist, took it upon himself to assemble the beginnings of a Tongan dictionary. Alors, besides French, my sisters and I learned to say a few simple phrases in Tongan. Imagine my surprise and delight, many years later, to encounter Tongan phrases in a book (by a young man who sailed solo around the world) and to understand those foreign phrases! The sounds really meant what my father had told us they meant! Real people spoke to each other in those words I was taught as a child! How satisfying!

In the wee dark hours of the night before departure for Mexico, where a friend and I would be conducted on a five-day, six-person tour of Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula, as I was casting about in the middle of the night for phrases in Spanish (a language I studied for only a single year in high school), more often French words and phrases, maddeningly, came to mind. After all, the total experience and history of my lifetime was deciding, in whatever unconscious part of the mind that sorts these things out, that I was going abroad; therefore, I should be speaking French. Descartes would have understood, I’m sure (I; therefore, I, if you see what I mean), but I felt the decider in my head was decidedly unhelpful in this instance. 

How to escape middle-of-the-night travel anxiety? An emergency scenario came into my mind, of course! There I was in Mexico, having to explain myself in a foreign country to medical personnel who spoke no English! Omigod! Mon dieu!

— Was it cheating on my part to introduce into the imaginary scene an intern from Haiti who spoke (thank you again, Descartes) clear and distinct French?

I cannot now reconstruct the train of thought that took me from that imaginary hospital back to the lobby of an imaginary hotel or how I managed to bring imaginary Tongan tourists to the hotel lobby, but you can guess how delighted I was to encounter them! “Malolalei!” I greeted them with joyful enthusiasm, and broad smiles and sparkling eyes on their part told me my greeting had succeeded. One of the women had a baby. “Tomasii? Taahini?” I asked. (My spellings of all these words are my own, the best I can do. Ask me to pronounce them, and I’ll do just fine.) The baby was a boy, the mother told me, and I gave my compliment on the child’s beauty immediately: “Faka ofa ofa opito opito!” and somehow I worked into the exchange my two remaining Tongan phrases, the How-are-you-I-am-fine component, before I was thrown back, once more, onto French — which one of their party spoke perfectly! 

Just my luck! Saved from the middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies!

Back when I was eighteen and for many years after, I had great language-learning hopes and plans. I wanted to learn Greek (to read Aristotle in the original), Hebrew (for reading the Bible and works of Jewish scholars), Russian (such great literature!), and Amharic (because an Ethiopian friend and I had concocted a scheme that called for me to spend a year with her family in Addis Ababa). I would also, of course, brush up on and extend my Spanish to a proficiency level and add a bit of Italian while I was at it. Ambitious program, but others have done it, made whole careers in languages.

One spring in Paris, I gave myself an assignment to learn Italian from a book written for French speakers, reasoning that building a bridge from French to Italian, rather than working from English to Italian, would strengthen rather than eclipse my working French, but the only phrase that sticks with me now is “I ate too well.” On a different project, another year, I learned to say “I’m sorry” and how to order “baked eels” in Dutch. More seriously, I took beginning American Sign Language over and over again, year after year, each time temporarily achieving a decent beginner’s level of proficiency, only to lose it for lack of practice.

But French, its rudiments drilled into me at a young age, has persisted. Over the years, occasional French tourists in my bookstore have provided me with an opportunity for conversation, and there are always French movies and books in French to keep those brain cells alive. I never did learn the Greek or Hebrew or Russian or Amharic alphabets but am pretty comfortable with French accents and vigorously oppose (for reasons of history and tradition and personal attachment) the abandonment of the accent circonflex. 

One of my two biggest complaints against the program I am using on my new laptop is that it has no way to insert symbols or accent marks! (I managed the heading for this post by finding the word in my Internet search bar and copying and pasting it.) They are not in my mail program, either, as they were on the old laptop. Curses! I must overcome this lack in the near future….

1/6/2018. I set myself this little composing task before sunrise on departure day, and it has served its purpose: That is, re-living my personal foreign language history has successfully taken my mind away from worries about a drifted-over driveway or icy roads or a delayed or cancelled flight. And everything will be all right, I’m sure. — In fact, by the time this post is published on Books in Northport, I will be back from Mexico, with worries all behind me, a great store of new memories, and many more recent stories, including whatever splendid successes or horrible failures I have with the Spanish language south of the border.

Friday, 1/12 - I am back home!!!

The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.

In My Dreams, I Have Always Been a Cowgirl. Was That a Singing Cowgirl?

Ready for ME?

Dream Scenes

It’s true. Ask my mother. My very earliest career aspiration was cowgirl. Later came veterinarian, poet, singer, actor, writer, philosopher, and, finally, bookseller. But girlhood cowgirl dreams are like creeks during drought times: they may go underground for years, but they never die.

Is there anything on earth that smells better than cows and hay and fresh cow manure? How about horses and hay and fresh horse manure! What about combining the horses and cows? HEAVEN!

When David read about a weekly livestock auction in Willcox, he knew that expedition had my name on it, and we drove over a couple days beforehand to make certain of the location. Cochise County leads the state of Arizona in cattle production, making Willcox (and not Bisbee, the county seat) the Cow Capitol, so I guess that makes the Willcox Livestock Auction (WLA) Arizona’s Cattle White House. 

Thursday finally came! Auction day! I wish I could include here the feel of the hot sun, the sound of calves bawling, and the smell of the dust and the cattle and the horses and the hay. I wanted to be everywhere at once – watching the riders and horses work the cows,

inside where the calves came in one side to be auctioned off and then scrambled out the other side when the gate was opened,

out by the pens where groups of calves awaited their turn in the auction house,

and especially in the outdoor stall shelters where the cowhorses, in turn, took breaks from their demanding work. 

I wanted to be on a horse, too, and also flicking a flyswatter at calves to move them from one side of the auction “ring” to the other, and I wouldn’t have said no to opening and closing an auction ring gate.

We sat indoors a while to watch the buying and selling and at first weren’t sure about the prices being knocked down. Per lot, or per animal? Because sometimes as many as eight would come through at once. Light dawned at last: the calves were being sold by the hundredweight. So if a 500-lb. calf brought in a $120 selling price, that calf would cost the buyer $600. It made sense.

We went outdoors again, into the sunlight, to watch the horses and riders work the cows (Midwesterner that I am, it’s hard for me not to put that word in “scare quotes,” when we’re talking calves and often steer calves) through a complicated system of pens and gates on their way to the auction ring. A man in a cowboy hat, walking by the pens with his little grandson at his side, asked, “You folks buyin’ today?” “Not today,” David answered. “Just lookin’ today.” David was wearing his cowboy hat, and his boots were appropriately scuffed and dusty. Two little boys looking for adventure caught their mother’s distant but vigilant eye. “You boys get outta that pen right now!”

As we were leaving, I was surprised to see one truck pulling out with an empty livestock trailer but quickly realized the driver must have been selling that day, not buying. We left in a Toyota sedan with a Michigan license plate. What did people conclude from that?

I could have stayed all day. I could go every day and stay all day! As we came back down Haskell Avenue into town, I noticed the new custom T-shirt shop open in an old gas station. “COWGIRL IN MY DREAMS,” I told David. “That’s what my t-shirt would say. And I bet a lot of other women would love it, too!”

Happy girl, living my dream

*  *  *

But the day was not over yet. After a lazy interlude of iced tea and corn nuts at Railroad Park, we went home to rest, have a light supper, change clothes, and then –

The Paris Opera

I’m not kidding. It was Les Noces de Figaro, i.e., “The Barber of Seville,” a videocast from the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, France, and we saw it at the Willcox Historic Theatre in Willcox, Arizona. 

The tickets were only $5 each! Never could we have seen such a show at that price in Northport or Traverse City, let alone in Paris! But yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true: for a mere $10, the artist and bookseller on winter sabbatical were transported to Paris for the evening. I couldn’t believe it was happening!

Intermission interview

There was the handsome, urbane but enthusiastic announcer (whose name has escaped me), introducing the production in French (with, as you see, English subtitles for export audiences), and indeed, after a magnificent orchestral overture, the curtain rose, and we were there, in the Opera de la Bastille, watching Damiano Micheletti’s electrifying 20^th-century staging of this well-known work.

I didn’t take any photographs during the opera itself. Even though the performers were not, in person, onstage in the theatre with us, it just didn’t seem right. Here, though, is the barber, a perfect Figaro!

And here is the chorus, taking their curtain call, a shot that shows you part of the two stories of the fantastic four-story revolving stage set. 

My heart had wings, there were stars in my eyes – and yet, on the way home, I kept an alert eye on the road ahead for javelinas and coyotes. We’d seen two dead javelinas on the side of the road the morning before, and they didn’t look like anything we’d want to run into ourselves.

Again – what a day! Quelle journée! Époustoufflante!