My Little Life

One little begonia bloom

Does it ever strike you (my sister will forgive me for repeating here something I wrote to her in a letter) how focused each of us is on our own personal lives, even as we recognize how small they are on the global scale? The other day I noticed a woolly bear caterpillar on my boardwalk and wondered what concerns were occupying that small creature in its own brief little life and if it had the slightest clue of the big changes it would undergo if it survived! I know the diminishment ahead for me as I grow older, but let’s not get into that. 

 

 

Let’s Begin Instead with Beauty

 

We have had some gorgeous fall mornings lately. I’ll start with that and will try to end on a high note, too, wedging my gripes somewhere in the middle, where you can jump over them if you like. Sometimes we have what my grandmother called “red sails” both at sunrise and sunset—and what does that tell sailors? I guess “Red sails at morning/sailors take warning” is about the day to come, and “Red sails at night/sailors’ delight” predicts overnight calm, so there is no contradiction, but I am not a sailor, so don’t take my word for it.

What is prettier than sumac in autumn?

As fall color begins to paint Leelanau, Sunny and I continue to take long walks or mini-vacations in the morning. You can see one of our mini-vacations down into Leland Township here. It’s all still Leelanau County, after all, beautiful in the big picture and in the details, as well.

 

Griping About Grammar

 

Call me petty, but I will never get over incorrect pronoun usage. As one of my sisters remarked when I quoted an example to her, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to hear or read these errors. Consider, please:

 

They gave it to Jim. They gave it to me.

 

There you have two statements. Now conjoin them, and you have:

 

They gave it to 

Jim and me.

 

You would never (I hope!) say, “They gave it to I,” would you? 

 

An or conjunction works the same way: 

 

Call Mary.

Or you can call me.

Call Mary or me.

 

 

If there is a question about which pronoun to use when a sentence involves a proper name and a pronoun, just drop the proper name, and the correct pronoun will be obvious. 

 

Sunny and I had a glorious morning!

The morning was good to Sunny and me.

 

Here’s a factoid that I find interesting. In logic, the conjunctions and and or are equivalent. There is no logical difference between them. 

 

Sun was shining. The air was chilly.

Sun was shining, and the air was chilly.

Sun was shining, but the air was chilly.

 

Do we hear the second and third compound sentences the same way, though? I think we hear them differently, that in sentence #3 we hear “chilly air” as somehow detracting from the “shining sun.” It’s the old “Yeah, but” phenomenon. What do you think? We would never say “Everything worked out perfectly, but I was happy.” The oddness of that sentence sends a mixed message beyond grammar or logic.

 

 

I spent much of last night in Algiers.

 

“I don’t expect to sleep the night,” as the Paul Simon song says. Almost every night, I wake up at least once and often as many as three times, reading myself back to sleep each time rather than lie awake staring into the dark. My current read-myself-to-sleep book is an unfinished autobiographical novel by Albert Camus titled Le premier homme (The First Man), which I’m reading in French, though not rapidly. I run into unfamiliar words and would be hard pressed to give any kind of smooth translation of the text, but I just keep going most of the time, only rarely stopping to look up a word, figuring things out from the context, and it's quite astonishing to me how vivid the scenes are in my mind as I read. Page after page, I am seeing what the author describes. As when reading the novels of Niall Williams, I am elsewhere. 

The First Man (to use the English title) is as different as can be from The Stranger. Typical sentences in The First Man are not short, staccato, Hemingway-like statements but long, voluptuous, descriptive meanders, with many phrases separated by commas between the subject at the beginning and the verb near the end. A sentence may begin two-thirds of the way down one page and go on until halfway down the next page. It comes across (to me, at least) as generosity in the writing. Here is an article I found online that seems to capture very well the soul of the work. 

 

Besides sentence structure, another enormous difference I notice between The Stranger and The First Man (Eve Webster, in the article linked above, notes many important reversals from one story to the other) is the absence of emotion in the narrator of the first contrasted with its overflowing presence in the narrator of the second. Jacques Cormery, thinly disguised alter ego of Albert Camus, is full of both joy and anguish. Rather than accepting each day without question or reaction, like Meursault, Camus/Cormery’s life is a quest for meaning from boyhood through to adulthood. 

 

I recommend The First Man (David Hapgood translated the English version published by Penguin Random House, paperback $16) for anyone who wants to know le vrai homme Camus, as well as he can be known at this distance in time. 

 

On hot days the thick blue sky lay over the street like a steaming lid, and the shade was cool under the arcades. On rainy days the whole street was nothing but a deep trench of wet shiny stone. Under the arcades were rows of shops; wholesale textile dealers, their façades painted in dark colors, piles of light-colored cloth glowing softly in the shade; groceries that smelled of clove and coffee; small shops where Arab tradesmen sold pastries dripping with oil and honey….

 

The passage above is from Hapgood’s translation, a copy of which I have in my shop, handy for this post. 

Did it set you dreaming?

Moonrise, moonset, swiftly go the years.

Moonrise on Monday evening

 

I see the moon, and the moon sees me.

 

You’ve been plenty of sunrises and sunsets on both this blog and the one dedicated to photographs, and I’m sorry to say that once again I failed to get outdoors to photograph the Northern Lights on Monday night, which apparently were spectacular. I did, however, go out one earlier time in hopes of seeing them (vain hopes) and was rewarded by a beautiful waxing moon, orange-red in the smoke from distant fires as it moved toward setting in the western sky. 

Red moon going down in the west one dark morning last week

 

Sunny and I see each other, and my friends and I find time to see each other, too.

 

My sybaritic enjoyment of locals’ summer (September) continued with another Sunday and Monday off work. I did work almost two hours Sunday morning digging up autumn olive – real work! – but then took the rest of the day off to lounge around with a book and later to meet a friend in Suttons Bay for a movie and a bite to eat. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, so it was good to catch up.

 

Monday morning Sunny and I had another agility session (so sorry I can’t photograph while we’re working), and as I told my sister, I am learning a lot. Is Sunny learning a lot, too? Truthfully, I think my learning curve is much steeper than hers, as all she has to do is follow my commands and gestures, while I’m the one who has to get everything right, which gets more complicated every week. It’s more than having my dog comfortable on the equipment — jumping hurdles, going through tunnels, etc. She has no problem with any of that. But I have to guide her from one station to the next, and the course changes from one time to the next (as it does in competition), so it matters a lot which side of a piece of equipment I’m on, how and when I get there, how and when I signal to her which one comes next, and how well I do getting into position myself so I’m not in her way or misleading her unintentionally, and every week Coach Mike adds a new twist to what I do, so this sport is exercising my mind as much as Sunny’s, if not more. 

"Mom, are you as smart as I am?"

When I made an appointment to have the garage in Leland replace a burned-out headlight, I texted a friend to see if she might be free for lunch or a walk. She voted for lunch, and we spent two leisurely hours at the Cove, leisurely time made possible by the fact that everyone else wanted to sit outside by the dam, while we chose to be indoors where we didn’t have to shout over the roar of falling water to make ourselves heard. 

 

Glad to see the pay phone still in Leland, carrying its freight of memories -- 

 

Before sleep and between first and second sleep, I read. 

I read and fall asleep, then wake again sometime in what my mother called “the wee hours,” turn the light back on, and read for a while more before “second sleep,” waking for good between 5 and 6 o’clock. My current bedtime reading is a novel set (at least Book I is set) in pre-Revolutionary America, the main character a boy ready, in his own eyes, to become a man but not keen on being sent away from home to a big city in the East to study Latin and “cyphering” with a man of the cloth. After yearning for home and parents, however, he finds on his first holiday that the folks of the pine woods are painfully dull and unsophisticated compared to the “quality” he has met in the city. I stopped at the end of Book I on Tuesday morning, leaving young Johnny to his ambivalence. 

 

So far, my strong impression from this novel is of a country – our own – born divided. As Johnny travels from inland pine forest to coastal city for his education, we see various faces of 1770s America: pious Methodists suspicious of “papists”; gamesters, drinkers, and teetotalers; hoi polloi and those who take themselves to be gentry; rich and poor whites; black slaves imported from Africa; Cherokee families pushed beyond the mountains by white trappers; loyalists to the crown, trigger-happy rebels, and thoughtful folks on both sides. The Revolution had not come by the end of Book I (Johnny’s father was convinced there would be no war), and yet many divisions among Americans already existed on the bases of family background, country of origin, religion, skin color, education level, and political allegiance. E pluribus unum seems an impossible dream. Some of us still hold onto that dream.

 

The quiet morning before dawn --

 

Summer stretches out for visitors, too.

 

Northport, Michigan

People are still discovering Northport for the very first time as we drift on a summery breeze into the second half of September. “What’s it like here in the winter?” is the perennial question, to which my tried-and-true answer is, “That depends on the year.” Whatever we get for winter this time around, though, apple season is here now. 

The new look of Leelanau apple orchards --

Apples and goldenrod, anemones and the eagerly seed-making marigolds and staghorn sumac, every growing thing making the most of these days that grow shorter week by week. We need rain, but it’s hard to argue with summer – even in September, when it comes.