Another August Winding Down

I have had a new idea (which in itself is refreshing, so many old ones emerging for another go at me most of the time): instead of a traditional book review format, I will try addressing the author of a book directly. My first trial balloon will begin today's post.

Dear Author #1: Jack Myette

 

Dear Mr. Myette,

 

Let me begin by thanking you for your 25 years of service in the Michigan prison system and for holding onto your values during that quarter of a century. There are easier ways to have a regular paycheck, but you did it the hard way.

 

For a while I found the going rough in your book, Prison: The Inside Story. The stories were so bleak! You don’t sugarcoat your experiences or those of the prison inmates, that’s for sure. I was eager to get to the Transforming Lives [as an Officer and Educator] part but didn’t want to skip ahead, so I set the book aside for a few days and then returned to finish it.

 

What I have been thinking about most since reading your book—the question that plague many of us—is why there isn’t more education in prisons, given the clear results shown in lowered rates of recidivism. Let me put the question another way: Why don’t statistics on education and recividism persuade more people that changing lives in prison is a good thing?

 

(Here are some overall statistics on prisons for my other readers, numbers that should give all Americans pause. The graphs are easy to read. Take a look, friends.)

 

Jack, you gave one part of the answer to my question in your book: “the old ‘They ain’t got nothin comin’” attitude that you found among some (many?) prison employees, but I know it is widespread among the general nonincarcerated population, as well. I had community college students who thought that whatever horrible thing happened to prisoners behind bars was in some way “deserved” and part of their punishment; that prisoners should have no rights; that they certainly should have no “privileges,” including education. Of the three aims of incarceration—deterrence, reformation, and retribution—far too many Americans focus solely on retribution. (Not as in a simple “eye for an eye” fashion, either. Is the idea of proportion too subtle to be grasped?)

 

So retribution (however disproportional) is one part of the answer, and saving taxpayer dollars seems a minor concern, as the people intent on causing maximum suffering to criminals don’t care if retribution costs more than reform. They probably don’t care about recidivism, either, since the former inmate who returns to a life of crime only proves to these folks that he was worthless all along. Those who change prisoners’ lives, on the other hand, are a challenge to stubbornly closed minds.

 

But I think there is another, less obvious reason for not addressing recividism in any meaningful way, and that has to do with money. It has to do with capitalism. 

 

I grew up in a town that boasted a maximum security prison. Back in the postwar 1950s, that prison had its own farm and raised its own food. You note that the Traverse City State Hospital also had its own farm, and your solution to overcrowded prisons and also homelessness and mental illness is to “turn back the hands of time,” to make prisons and mental hospitals once again “self-sufficient,” with “strong educational and vocational programs….”

 

The problem I see with the solution you propose is that prisons are a huge market just begging to be captured—a  captive market audience, if you will, that business loves tapping. It’s a little like your prison school principal who didn’t want student inmates graduating, because he “received kudos for the number of students in school,” and every student who graduated was one fewer student in school, so a successful student prisoner took away from his numbers! 

 

How, how sad that music was taken away from your students! Not only did your graduation rate subsequently fall, but the whole calming and basically human aspect of music was lost to the classroom and the students. 

 

Back to my point about numbers, however—. As more and more prison services are privatized, as whole prisons are privatized, why would the businesses making money from incarceration want to see fewer people in the system? A successful prison, a prison that was not a revolving door but that returned reformed criminals to society—that prison, while certainly cutting costs, would also be cutting away its own future profits. 

 

As long as prison populations are seen by for-profit business as fertile ground for investment, and as long as government is willing to relinquish responsibility for those it imprisons and to pay private business to take on the job, I see limited motivation for prisons to reduce recidivism. So step #1 has to be reversing and eliminating privatization of prisons and prison services. 

 

Step #2, then, would be tackling that extremely knotty problem of retribution-only points of view, both among prison employees and among the American public at large. 

 

When my Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas class discussed capital punishment, a number of students voiced the opinion that they would want death for anyone who murdered someone they loved. They imagined themselves as parents of a murder victim. None of them, until prompted by a written assignment, ever imagined themselves as the parent of a murderer. And yet, every murdered had parents and was once a child.

 

There are a lot of shoes we are reluctant to walk a mile in, but you have come closer to doing that than most of us, so thank you for sharing your memories and insights.

 

 

News From the Near Neighborhood

Tiny asters are left of cattail.

 

On Sunday I noticed the season’s first blooming asters (keystone pollinator flowers), tiny pale lavender flowers upstaged by yellow goldenrod (also a keystone pollinator flower), pink Joe Pye-weed, and the startling blue of chicory flowers in the morning sun. Clouds have been spectacular in recent mornings, too.

It's fresh corn and tomato season, back-to-school time, dark coming earlier and daylight coming later. Still, I am not eager to “fall back.” Too much remains to do, indoors and outdoors—more jam to make and get into jars, hummingbirds and bees and goldfinches to watch as they buzz and weave and swoop among the thistles, still grass to mow, dinners with friends on the porch to arrange, always books to read, fun to have with dogs, and on and on and on. 

 

Looking Across the Miles

 

Retributive and preemptive punitive actions continue to be taken by the current administration in Washington, D.C., against Americans who have dared to voice disagreement with the president. Friday it was an FBI raid on John Bolton’s home that the Wall Street Journal (hardly a “pinko” news source) called part of a “vendetta campaign” and “revenge” on the part of the president. It is completely mystifying and outright heartbreaking to see the people who worried so vocally for years and years about “creeping socialism” seemingly unconcerned about galloping fascism, a term I do not throw around lightly. Are these complacent folks just looking the other way? Will they claim later that they were in Iceland and didn’t see it happening?

 

The latest executive order from the White House (as I type these lines on Monday), going against the Supreme Court majority that included conservative Anthony Scalia, calls for a one-year jail sentence for anyone burning an American flag. The president holds the flag sacred as a symbol at the same time that he desecrates and denies American history and values. What, one wonders, does the flag symbolize to him, if not our history and values, freedom and the rule of law? Poor flag! Poor stars and stripes, to be so used! But it is hardly the first time and will not be the last that a scoundrel has wrapped himself in his country's flag.

 

No, I cannot imagine burning the flag myself. I don’t even like to see those little ones on sticks in rows in the ground, because all too frequently they fall over or the wind blows them down, and the flag is never supposed to touch the ground. (If you’re going to display it, do it right.) Do not mistake me! I am not in favor of flag-burning! But I am even less in favor of a lawless executive persecuting those whose views differ from his own. ¿Claro?

 

 

Perspective 

 

Early in the morning, before what can be called “first light” but when dark isn’t quite as deep as it was 30 minutes earlier, I think about the long sweep of history, about nights and days hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and how the coming morning, now almost here, is not so much as the blink of an eye in that vast time canvas. There have been upheavals—movements of land and sea, advancing and retreating glaciers, extinctions and evolutions—that have left their mark in the rocky bones of the earth, but my life will not be such, and neither will the lives of any single person alive today. 

 

At this point, Pompeii comes to mind, and that feels like a lit candle, because it wasn’t the views of those doomed people on law or religion or ethics that survived them but only random mundane moments of their lives, frozen by a tsunami of ash. And so, here I am, in a moment of my life: coffee mug on a table surface next to me, dog in her typical resting croissant shape on my other side, book in my hands. We see the Pompeiians caught in one frozen moment but not in their preceding moments. We don’t hear their conversations or see the daylight or darkening sky they may have seen. Their thoughts, whatever they were thinking before time came to an end for them, were completely erased. 

 

We don’t feel like Pompeiians, though, do we? We write our journals, publish our books, make our movies and podcasts, and hope we can somehow, in some small way, influence the direction of the future, though the unintentional and unthinking ways we daily contribute to that future are much more likely to be effective. But whatever course the future takes, we will all one day be gone.

 

Do you find that long view depressing? Does it seem to illustrate meaninglessness? 

I don’t see it that way. I find the long perspective calming. For me, it makes the present brighter and clearer and more precious—lamplight a pool of miraculous presence against the dark masses of trees outside the window, my dog’s warm, aromatic presence the gift of now, this moment in which we are both alive. The memory of another moment, from only the evening before, comes to mind: a viceroy butterfly motionless on a blackberry vine. And for that moment and this, for the miracle of life, my heart swells in gratitude.

Stop-Action Moments

Sunny Juliet takes a play break.

I always say in the fall, when people ask, “How was your summer?” that it was a blur—and so it seems as it races by. There are, however, moments to stop and take a deep breath and look around in gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve had a lot of those already.

 

We had launch!

 

My dear friend Marilyn Zimmerman’s book launch was one such stop-action moment for me. All who could attend (and in the summer it is impossible to avoid every schedule conflict) were delighted to be together to celebrate the release of Marilyn’s novel. After the author described the setting and background of her story and read a passage from the book, questions and observations from the audience and further conversation while she signed copies kept our guest author too busy to have a piece of her own congratulatory cake until it was almost time to leave. Verdict: Success!

 

Author Karen Mulvahill was in the audience and had to leave early, but what a joy for me to hear from Marilyn and Karen the next day that they were avidly reading each other’s books! Northern Michigan writers I know are such generous souls, celebrating each other’s successes joyfully. That’s yet another lovely aspect of my wonderful world of books, and I am especially proud of the achievements of these two Northport writers.

 

Of course, Zimmerman and Mulvahill’s novels are available at Dog Ears Books. In Defense of Good Women is being marketed as a legal thriller, The Lost Woman as historical fiction, but I will tell you that both are much more than a single genre tag can capture. They have in common page-turning suspense; beyond that, however, Mulvahill’s novel lays bare the ways in which cruel authoritarianism divides a society, while Zimmerman’s explores hidden and complicated motivations and relationships.

 

In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman. Paper, 302pp, $17.99

 

The Lost Woman, by Karen Mulvahill. Paper, 280pp, 18.95

 

 

We had a summer reunion!

 

Omigod, is it really 18 years since our first lunch? The number has fluctuated from year to year, depending on who-all is available when Dorene makes her annual pilgrimage to northern Michigan, but here is our original tiny core from all those years ago. Back then Marilyn Zimmerman and Trudy Carpenter were taking writing classes together and writing short stories, so when writer Dorene O’Brien came up from the Detroit area the four of us got together for lunch to talk about the writing life. And here we four are all those years later! 

Left to right: Marilyn Zimmerman, Trudy Carpenter, Dorene O'Brien, et moi

A prior year with Elizabeth Buzzelli, Barbara Stark-Nemon, and Sarah Shoemaker

I had company!

 

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit for three days and nights last week. Breakfasts and dinners on the porch, one restaurant excursion, much relaxing outdoors—and Sunny got a lot of attention from my dog-indulgent sister! Somehow I guess we were too intent on conversation and food and relaxation to take photographs of each other. Even on Sunday morning when Sunny triggered a temporary crisis mode by encountering a porcupine at close quarters, there was no pause for camera work. Those quills had to be pulled out right away! After her ordeal, Sunny retreated to the other end of the porch to recover in solitude, not sitting next to the table as usual while we humans had our breakfast. She had completely gotten over the shock to her dignity and independence by afternoon, however, and meanwhile her momma had squeezed in a nap following the departure of beloved company.

I found a photo! This one of Deboran and Bob is at Nittolo's in Lake Leelanau.

 

We all had sun and rain.

Soft, gentle rain from the sky always seems better for young growing things than cold water from a hose. My gardens have had some of both so far this season. Little seedlings are emerging in the vegetable beds, and flowering plants are flourishing in the borders and fields. 

My apple trees, I report sadly, look as if they are not going to bear at all this year. Just when I thought I was on top of my game! I got the pruning done, and I was ready with my homemade codling moth traps after last year’s maddening discovery of a worm hole at the blossom end and core rot inside almost every piece of fruit! So what could go wrong? How about a failure to blossom and set fruit? Very disappointing! It seems my trees have definitely slipped into a biennial fruiting pattern, and all I can do now is to be ready again next year and hope for a good harvest in 2026.

 

Pretty tree, no fruit

We have plans --

 

Sunny Juliet and I will be having more company soon, and we will getting back to our agility work with Coach Mike next week if the weather permits. 

 

On June 24, Dog Ears Books will host another poetry reading, this time with Jennifer Clark from Kalamazoo. She will be our featured guest for the third time with her third collection of poetry, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, which is not, she says, your grandmother’s book of saints.

So if you can’t relate to sanitized, stained glass perfection, come and meet Jennifer Clark’s cast of helpers—cranky, insecure, doubting, and hilarious—saints maybe “for the rest of us”? Because we who don’t fully have our spiritual acts together certainly need guides who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty by interceding in our screwy, complicated lives!

 

That reading will be Tuesday, June 24, beginning at 4 p.m.

Poet Jennifer Clark

 

And then, the ongoing—what to call it?

 

I cannot see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil like those three little monkeys. Sorry! I cannot pretend that all is well in our society and our world these days. 

 

We have in the White House a president who “promised” he would be a dictator on “Day One,” seeming to imply that his dictatorship would only “need” to last a single day—and excuse me for all the scare quotes, but this is scary stuff, and whoever thought that any dictator would step down after 24 hours? This one sure hasn’t. And the most frightening part of it all is that his supporters, military and laypeople, continue to cheer his overturning of the Constitution and the rule of law that Americans have always considered guarantees of our country’s bedrock freedoms. 

 

Why all the arrests and deportations? It isn't about protecting us from crime. Undocumented workers doing their jobs, paying taxes, and taking care of their families are no threat to the rest of us. 

Think about it. 

He promised to bring down consumer prices “on Day One” and was unable to do so. Prices have not come down. He promised to end wars in Gaza and Ukraine “on Day One” and was unable to do so. The wars go on, as do the deaths. But deportations? That’s one area he’s been able to get some results, so by God he’s going to keep deporting! 

 

And never mind that he’s not singling out criminals but terrorizing and tearing apart families who have lived in and contributed to their communities for years! He’s a “tough guy,” right? Don’t you see it? Having gotten rid of many people in authority who took seriously their oaths of office, he is now able to command troops and appoint program "czars" to terrorize and also, often, try to quell protests against his bullying tactics. 

 

The man himself is a pitiful figure. He and his minions steal from the poor and give to the wealthiest, while they dismantle protections for civil rights, health, and our natural environment because it is much faster to destroy than to build. Destroyers make themselves feel big and powerful by tearing down or blasting apart, and that’s the name of the game.

 

This weak, whining blamer-in-chief would be less than nothing if there weren’t still many Americans who either look past his rhetoric of hate and blame and buy his pie-in-the-sky lies or actually feel their own impoverished spirits fueled by hate and blame. You hurt? Must be someone else's fault. Find a scapegoat to punish.

 

For a long time I wanted to believe that the people I know who support him must have, somehow, good intentions in their hearts, that they simply were not aware of what he was actually saying and doing. They couldn’t know what he really was and be okay with him, I told myself. They were good people, right? I wanted to believe they must be living in information silos, hearing only partisan propaganda and seeing only happy, smiling photos of him. 

 

But such total ignorance of reality is impossible, and I have to face reality. He has his own social media platform and spews his blame and hatred there daily, so his supporters cannot be ignorant of what he is. I have to face the fact that they themselves, apparently, have no loyalty to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law. I have to face the fact that “liberty and justice for all” is to them a meaningless phrase. “Justice” to them means “We win!” and everyone else loses. 

 

What does what's happening mean to you? To put party above country, loyalty above principle, might above right? Is this the United States of America your parents and grandparents fought to preserve? Is it the one you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?

 

Well, for now we go on with our lives. Those of us who write, write; those who join public protest demonstrations, demonstrate; those who lie awake night after night try to get enough sleep to face another day. We go to work, we care for our families and homes, and we treasure our friends—because life is essentially a beautiful gift, and it would be wrong not to be grateful and to appreciate what we still have. 

When my husband died, I learned that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the most meaningful experiences of our lives. And so I continue to be deeply grateful for all this country of mine has given me, even as I grieve these nightmare times and hope that we can still come out the other side into the sunshine of lawful liberty again. 

 

Hope. Community. Justice for our neighbors as well as for ourselves. Because there is no true justice that is not justice for all.

 

“We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.” 

 

That was the simple funeral speech actor Robert Duvall gave in “Broken Trail,” and I think of it often. We are here on earth for such a short time. We have such a short time in which to be worthy of our lives!

Lives were given for our freedom.

Where Is Your Head Today?

Sumac at the height of its glory

“Where’s your head at?” was once a sort of jeer, not a real question, a variation on “What were you thinking?” which, of course, implies that you were not thinking at all. What I intend here is a real question, translatable as: What’s occupying your thoughts? What perhaps are you obsessing over (and wish you weren’t)? Are you focused or feeling dreamy, or is your mind jumping from one thing to another like a grasshopper being chased by summer’s approaching end? Or maybe you’re fortunate enough to be taking in the natural world moment by moment, like a dog miraculously blessed with full color vision. How wonderful that would be, wouldn't it? To have the full range of color added to the marvelous range of olfactory sensations we humans can only dimly imagine!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post. Well, for this blog, anyway. I’ve done three new posts for my photo blog, “A Shot in the Light,” and one for my catchall blog, “Lacking a Clear Focus.” I’ve also read half a dozen books (see sidebar for titles) and hosted another signing in my bookstore. My sister and her husband visited from Illinois, and our grandson and his best buddy traveled up from Kalamazoo. (Those were good visits.) And I went on active duty for a friend for three weeks while she was in hospital and then rehab, feeding her cats and declumping their litter boxes daily. 

Historian Larry Massie from the Allegan Forest

Larry's appropriately book-themed tie

Grandson Dave! Sarah's human nephew! Sarah loves company!

And all along there has been the glory of fall color, starting with the staghorn sumac (top of post) and now encompassing maples and beeches and popples and even early-turning tamarack. This past Sunday was simply glorious, but it's recorded only in my brain's fallible memory, not on my camera's digital storage card. Camera in action again today, under grey, rainy skies.

On Monday I stirred my stumps (isn't that a hideous expression?) and got busy with long-delayed kitchen and food-related projects -- retrieved rhubarb from the freezer to turn into rhubarb chutney; picked apples from an overloaded tree (only recently I learned that apple trees can be "overpollinated"); defrosted strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries destined for jam before another day escapes. 

Home harvest

Things keep happening, though. The world doesn't hold still for a moment. So I paused to remember Bill Milliken and to say a prayer of thanksgiving and hope for full recovery for Jimmy Carter. I read newspapers, rationing each day's intake (in the interest of sanity) and wondering where the hell we are going as a nation and a world. My head was here, my head was there. Sometimes it just wanted to be under the covers, fast asleep.

Fleeing deer!

Thank heaven for books! Books on geology and history put current events in perspective, and old volumes that have survived from a century or more ago reassure me that bound, printed material has staying power and that what I do for a living is worth doing and may last beyond the current insanity. In more optimistic hours, I like to think so. But then, my head is not staying in one place very long these days. 

Dark Thoughts

"It was a dark and stormy night...."

Dark Thoughts: what a dreadful title! Who among you would choose to read about dark thoughts? I can hear the sounds of rapidly clicking mice as readers flee in droves without pausing to investigate, since even someone in the grip of “dark thoughts” would hardly need more, would — if thinking clearly — seek out instead bright thoughts, light, messages of hope and optimism, no?

Darkness, though, comes with varying intensity and in different moods. The dark of a star-pricked sky is nothing like that of a cave or the bottom of an old well, and the quiet of natural darkness can bring reassuring comfort when its welcome, repetitious coming follows the relentless clamor of days filled with loud, angry voices of a world too much with us. My usage of the phrase today, however, is neither a metaphorical reference to despair nor literally intended to evoke nighttime darkness enveloping a country farmhouse. My first thought for today’s title would have named its subject directly: Going Dark. 

Let me start somewhere else, though. Please keep in mind that where I begin is not my subject but only the background for my subject.

Let me begin with the “darkness of the soul” that comes often in the dark of night but can linger through a series of days, especially rainy days when the very heavens seem to cry unceasingly. A parent’s death, followed closely by that of a friend. Most awful, painful revelations  of personal experiences from dear ones. Political horrors invading the privacy of sleep. When a household crisis as mundane as the breakdown of a clothes dryer strikes, it only seems fitting. “What next?” one asks, and there is always a next, it seems, in a season when no one we know and no corner of the globe seems at peace. Oh, there are small bright spots, and there are the brave, sweet souls who share joy and encourage others to hope, but is there anything approaching balance in the world’s moods encroaching on our personal lives from one day to the next?

Okay, that's the background. And then, one gloomy, wet morning “What next?” is answered by another unexpected breakdown. A voice announcing “malicious malware,” followed by a dark and unresponsive screen. As we all were reminded by Monty Python, no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, and yet sometimes it arrives!

The Artist and I were at a coffee shop not too many miles from home, taking a morning errand break, and I was still dressed for floor scrubbing, not having planned to go very far in my home county that morning, much less to “town” for anything, but now a visit to the gurus suddenly becomes Priority #1. On our way into town, more and more worries crowd in. Losing stored files would not be the end of the world, but what of business transactions? Thankful for the many online possibilities I had always eschewed with stubborn determination, I nevertheless thought of half a dozen causes for concern. Not the end of the world, by a long shot, but a big mess. 

“Here’s my prediction,” announced the Artist, doing all he could by driving me to the gurus’ lair and entertaining me along the way. “Someday the invention of the Internet will be seen as the apple in the Garden of Eden, and no one will want to do anything online any more. They'll look back on the Digital Age with horror.” (We love to concoct believable futures we will never live to see tested. One of my own favorite predictions -- "You heard it here first!" we tell one another -- is the eventual future merging of the historical persons of Jesus and Elvis.) The Artist elaborated, we discussed, and then we imagined a “disconnected” world of the future — which is to say, a world similar to the one we had known in years past, a world where “long distance” calls were rare and used only on special occasions, with ordinary correspondence conducted on paper and sent through the postal service. A world of manuscripts literally that, pages covered with handwriting — or, for those with racing minds, sheets of individual paper impressed with typed letters. A world with fifteen minutes of evening television news.

I was reminded of a long-ago evening on our porch with friends who had lived very adventurous lives before settling down to raise their children. Over dinner the wife recounted their return one year from a family vacation. Nearing home at the end of a long journey, they had heard sirens and seen smoke, and her first reaction was one of panic: What if it were their house on fire? But she and her husband and their children were all together, safe in their car, she realized instantly, and so her next surprising response — it surprised her at the time and sent us all into gales of laughter there on the porch as she told the tale — was one of relief, thinking of all their accumulated stuff gone up in smoke, no longer weighing them down. “We could start all over with nothing!” she realized happily, and the thought of having nothing again thrilled her!

Without e-mail, without my blogs, without Facebook, without an electronic keyboard, I thought, I could go dark, and it would not be the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I could disappear from the world online. Perhaps no one would even notice. I could liberate myself!

I'm still here

In former times, disappearance had to be physical. One left one’s country or hid out in the countryside or simply stopped answering one’s telephone and door. I would need to do nothing that drastic. I could continue to open my bookstore for business hours, continue to shop locally for groceries and write letters to friends. I would still have conversations with friends and customers in my bookstore. The Artist and I would not need to alter our winter travel plans. The stack of yellow legal pads we bought last winter and then never filled, perfect for quiet mornings and evenings in the high desert (exactly what we had in mind when buying them), would accompany us again to the West, this time to be filled. And we would still have our books … books on paper, a book tucked into a bag, books beside us on tables … books whose text was fixed when printed, not to be subsequently altered by some evil genius at a distance. 

Going dark, I realized, if that were what lay ahead in my future, might be returning into light, into a slower, saner, more personal way of existence, one to which I am much more suited, anyway. 

Well, the crisis was quickly resolved by the first guru approached. They are amazing, those young techies! So competent, so confident and reassuring. And so now, for the foreseeable future (which, in truth, is always moment-to-moment for any of us, though we so easily forget the contingent nature of our technological reality), my screen and online life continue. Also, we had a sunny afternoon yesterday and are having a sunny morning today, a reminder that even days with 50% chance of precipitation can bring brightly colored hours. 

One value of envisioning a worst-case scenario is seeing how one might cope with it, but another value in yesterday's imagined scenario of darkness was equally important to me. In recent weeks, you see, I had allowed myself to be wound tighter and tighter, “keeping up” with events I could little hope to influence and with many “friends” who find no time to drop by in person or put a note in the mail. Way too much ineffectual “reaching out”! If my blog were to go dark, I realized, there would be few to mourn its passing, so what have I been trying to do with all these years of online “self-expression”? And why do we all fondly imagine we might change each other's opinions by broadcasting our own on a daily basis?

Better -- for me, anyway -- to concentrate here on books, and, as for Facebook, to return to checking in there no oftener than once a day, with frequent holidays from checking in at all. To reading a newspaper maybe three times a week and listening to evening radio news but keeping the radio silent in my car. Because when Sarah and I leave the house in the morning and again when we return home at the end of the day (as well as the time at the bookstore in between), I need to be where I am -- and with her -- and to see the beauty and complexity of the world in front of my eyes. And when our little family threesome is together, we need to focus on each other.

In closing, in the spirit of refocusing on books, here are some sketchy thoughts (no more) about a novel I read this past weekend, Rumer Godden’s Kingfishers Catch Fire, set in Kashmir, where the author lived for three years, and published by Viking in 1953, and since I hardly expect to set off a stampede of readers eager for this book from over half a century ago, what I say will be in essence, though not in detail, in the nature of a “spoiler.” As a reader, you think you know early on the outlines of what will happen as a result of Sophia’s many blundering cultural faux pas. She does not belong. She is in the wrong place. She does not and never will fit in, and it was a mistake for her to have come. You foresee devastation ahead for many. You foresee her return to conventional English life, settling down to a safe, conventional marriage. All this seems obvious for most of the novel, the course of the story accelerating in later chapters until the metaphorical train wreck and Sophia’s chastening and repentance seem all but inevitable in the pages remaining. And yet — your expectations are overturned! No one dies! The main character leaves Kashmir, but the dénouement is hardly conventional. What relief! What delight! To reach the last page and be given such a gift, to see that even in the 1950s America a writer of fiction published by a major house could imagine something more for a female character than to have her “saved” by a retreat from adventure!

Old books! I find new books to love, as well, but I could never give up the world of old books. Bill Mauldin’s A Sort of Saga — how my late friend Chris would have delighted in that book! How many happy, book-filled hours we shared in Northport! And I am still here for my loyal customer-friends, as well as for anyone wandering up to Leelanau Township for a first visit. "I'm a lucky man," the Artist said to me not long ago. "Sarah's a lucky dog!" And I'm a lucky woman!