Second Thoughts

Leelanau Twp., 4/15/25

Is spring having second thoughts about getting underway?

 

You would have thought so if you were in Leelanau on tax day, Tuesday, April 15. We got out of bed in the morning to fresh snow on the ground and a biting wind! But besides being tax day, it was also “Alyssa’s Day of Kindness,” a day to put a smile on the faces of friends and/or strangers by treating them to ice cream or coffee (two of Alyssa’s favorite things) or flowers or anything else—or simply doing a kind deed for another person—in memory of a 21-year-old who died by suicide. Alyssa’s family came up with this wonderful memorial idea, which was kicked off three years ago. Those of us who participate take photos to share, and it is a lovely way to remember this beautiful girl I’m sorry I never met—though I can’t help wishing we didn’t need this memorial and that Alyssa were still here to enjoy another spring in her young life….

 

Beautiful Alyssa!

Note: Please see the number in the flier above. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 for help!

 

Biting My Tongue

 

Some people think we should always blurt out whatever comes into our minds, right there on the spot, and they call anything else “self-censorship,” meaning something bad. I disagree. Why say something I’ll be sorry I said, when there’s usually no reason not to pause and reconsider? By taking time, I may revise my expression, tempering or strengthening it, as the situation seems to require. Sometimes I’ll decide to say nothing. Not speaking right then doesn’t mean I won’t say something later.

 

And yes, once in a while I do blurt out my first reaction! Am I always sorry? Not always! You would love to have an example of that, too, I know, but those unscripted moments are not for a public showcase! Mine is not a blurting blog.

 

Life happens moment by moment, though, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum but always at a specific time, in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and it’s a harsh rule that admits of no exceptions.

 

 

Changing My Mind

 

Related to the idea of exceptional blurting is another notion of second thoughts. One recent day I had stopped by my bookshop to drop off a few books and pick up others to take home on loan. I sat down at my desk for a minute, and a woman walked in the door I hadn’t locked. “I’m not really open,” I told her. She looked disappointed but then admitted she was only looking for a restroom. I suggested the gas station next door, but then, as she was getting back in the passenger seat of a car out front, I had second thoughts and went out to invite her back in. Why not? She was very appreciative and thanked me repeatedly.

 

When I locked up shop a few minutes later and went over to the gas station myself to pick up a few items, I met a woman I’d known in Kalamazoo decades ago. She had gone out to her car and found her sister missing and been alarmed. “She has dementia!” I told her I’d let her sister use the restroom in my place and that she was now safely back in the passenger seat of the car. Everything had worked out fine.

 

Even if I hadn’t met the driving sister, though, I had already felt better about my second thought and decision. The woman’s dementia was not obvious to me, but that she had some sort of illness was, and each and every single one of us knows how much it can mean to find a restroom when we need it! As characters in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, said more than once in that book, it was only a little onion. Such a little onion I gave!

Throwing Out the Script

 

The foregoing is introduction to my telling you that this post on having second thoughts is not the post I planned to publish on my blog today. The discarded post began with the statement “I can’t do it” and went on to detail my heartbreak over the ongoing events in our nation over the past—how many days and weeks has it been?? It isn’t that I would have wanted to “take back” anything from that post, had I put it up. No, but I had two reasons for starting over: first, I have no hope of changing a single mind (you can't make people care if they don't); and besides that, I know that at least a couple of my regular readers come here for something other than politics and current events. News they can get elsewhere. News is hard to avoid! What they want from me is strength and courage and dog and landscape photos, a smile, news from my little corner of the world, and (some of them) gentle meanderings about books. 

 

And why not?

 

 

Back to My Little Corner

 

Well, today was a sunny day in my one and only precious life. Song sparrows sing again in the mornings now, and redwing blackbirds make their creaking calls from the top of the barn, sounding like the old swings of my childhood school playground, swings with heavy wooden seats hung by heavy steel chains. (At least, I presume that metal was steel. Joliet, Illinois, was a steel-making town, after all, our township high school team known as the Steelmen—though also, confusingly, as the Iron Avalanche, unbeaten until they were beaten.) Robins cry out in self-admiration, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" 

Barefoot child with grandfather c.1951

Canada geese fly overhead these days in honking Vs, and every once in a while I hear the clatter of a sandhill crane’s voice and stop whatever I’m doing outdoors to search the sky, hoping for a sight, while mallards and herring gulls find refuge in temporary ponds that have formed in fields of corn stubble. It's good to see them, too.

All of which is to say that life goes on. (Or as I have come to say in recent years, “Life goes on ... until it doesn’t.” None of us is going to live forever.) The earth rotates and orbits the sun, day alternates with night, and the cycle of seasons repeats and repeats. Our blue-and-green planet, brimming with life, has not always been in existence and will probably not exist forever, but here we are, right now, and here it is, and there is comfort in knowing and seeing that we haven’t yet killed our home.

Toe of my boot illustrates how tiny these daffodils are.

Now that the yard is free from snow (again!), Sunny and I have resumed her work on the weave poles, which she finds the most challenging of all the agility equipment. She loves jumping the hurdles so much that it’s hard for her to understanding that weaving does not require that she jump. Do we all need a challenge? “Weave!” will be Sunny Juliet’s challenge this spring and summer.  

Sunny with challenges!

Also, let’s not forget that April is National Poetry Month! Poetry! There’s a reason to celebrate! 

 

My poet of the year 2025 is Fleda Brown, and Fleda will be here on the Friday before Memorial Day, May 23, to read from her new chapbook of prose poems, Doctor to the World. There will be chairs in a circle in the Artist’s gallery next to the bookstore (I’ll have it cleaned up before the event, I promise), and we will convene at noon, so I’m inviting attendees to bring sack lunches for an informal and intimate gathering. 

Poet Fleda Brown on a previous visit to Northport

 

Finally, in closing –

 

Life! It’s what we’ve got, so take it easy, my friends, or take it hard, but take it, and don’t take it lying down! Also, don’t forget, if you can manage it, to brighten the corner where you are.

 

¡Nunca te rindas!

 

Also,

 

HOORAY FOR HARVARD!!!

Falling Behind and, In Doing So, Making an Accidental Discovery

 

Snow-covered mountain

With so few demands on my time, I am still falling behind, because -- well, so few demands, yes, but those so very demanding! You know the name of one of them without my mentioning it!

Mountain, raven, dog

What I’m falling behind on, besides my Silas project, is writing on this blog about books I’m reading. It’s all been dogs, dogs, dogs and mountains, desert, snow on the blog for quite a while now. Not that I’ve heard any complaints, of course. After all, so many of you are stuck indoors with your own reading and movies and baking and knitting and whatnot that I realize the allure of vicarious outdoor adventures.

 

Be assured, however, that today’s indoor bookish adventure will not be a long, dry discourse on economics or history. In fact, the book I want to write about is one I picked up to “take a break” from more serious reading, a book that aided me in falling behind with book reviews I have in mind to write and post. A beat-up paperback (I taped it back together) from the outdoor 10-cent table at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox. A murder mystery. By an author whose name faintly rang a bell in memory but whose work I did not recall ever reading before. 

 

Here it is,

and how could I resist the title, after our little reading circle back in Michigan initially came together years ago precisely in order to read together Ulysses, by James Joyce? The tempting volume, small in size, light in import, also seemed a perfect car book. Do you have those? The Artist and I always have one or two books apiece in the car, so one of us can read while the other is running an errand or so we’ll both have something to read on the porch at Source of Coffee -- although we generally end up in conversation on that porch instead, at least with each other when not also with a friend or two.

 

But I digress (digression being the prerogative of a blogger without an editor). 

 

In The James Joyce Murder, by Amanda Cross, protagonist Kate Fansler, professor of Victorian literature, is ensconsed in a country house in western Massachusetts, working (at the request of the heir, a cloistered nun) to determine the contents and bring order to a collection of literary letters and papers left behind by a late friend of her family. She also has the care of a young nephew for the summer. Two graduate students complete the household, one working on the collection, the other tutor and companion to the boy, and rural neighbors and academic friends fill out the cast of characters, with cameo appearances by various policemen, a car mechanic, and a publisher in New York.

 

Confession: I did not find the story completely engrossing. The language put me off, for one thing. “The conversation is like something in an English drawing room comedy,” I complained to the Artist. A paragraph from the protagonist’s mouth in the first chapter will serve. 

 

“Familial connections are always difficult to explain, and impossible to sever. Not that one really wants to, I suppose. However trying one’s family, there is some call of blood to blood which one is somehow impelled to answer. I have nothing in common with any member of my family, and yet in crisis, personal or national, one always rallies round.”

-Amanda Cross, The James Joyce Murder 

 

In the paragraph above, Kate is talking to a close friend, but doesn’t it sound as if she’s speaking lines in a stage play? And everyone talks that way in the novel, page after page. Too witty for belief! My credulity was strained. But the reading required no great effort, dialogue makes a story go faster, and the whole book wasn’t that long, so I kept at it, a few pages at a time. 

 

It took a long time before anyone turned up dead. When the corpse was discovered, it was hardly a surprise, as it was someone whose death no one seemed to mourn. Certainly her husband did not, nor any of her neighbors. (The children did not appear and so were not asked in the pages of the book.) From the first introduction of the poor, doomed character, obviously marked for an early grave, I felt the author and everyone else judged her far too harshly. She was annoying, but is that a sin, and shouldn’t people with serious, rewarding careers and the good fortune to pass their summer in idyllic surroundings have better things to obsess about than a neighbor they don’t find congenial? Still I persevered and discovered, at last, who done it.

 

A far more interesting story came to light when I read a brief biographical sketch of the author at the end of the book and found that Amanda Cross (some of you undoubtedly know this already) was a pseudonym for Carolyn G. Heilbrun, author of fourteen nonfiction books under her own name, the first woman to earn tenure in the English Department at Columbia (her specialty was British modern literature), Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, MLA president in 1984, and outspoken feminist. When she “discovered” feminism in 1968, she felt she had been “born a feminist.” Married to economist James Heilbrun after they met in college, she was the mother of three children when she went on to graduate school herself. A “nontraditional” student: I could relate to that. Her strong views on feminism were matched by strong views on other subjects, as well, particularly her desire not to live beyond her usefulness, and she planned initially to commit suicide at age 70 but lived until age 77, when she took her own life without any preceding fanfare or crisis.

 

Heilbrun frequently skewered academics under her pen name, but The James Joyce Murder was published almost two decades before the biggest controversy in her own life, a tempest that arose when she accused (in an interview) her own English Department at Columbia of discrimination against women. To my ear, the charge hardly seems controversial by now. How, I wonder, could anyone doubt discrimination in 20^th century academia? Was there any college or university department in the country that had not discriminated against women, as well as against candidates and department members of color?

 

Kate Fansler may have been the pseudonymous author’s alter ego, but when reading of Heilbrun’s life I saw her retrospectively in a minor character, also, that of Grace Knole, retired professor of medieval literature, and my retrospective look back at a book I just finished reading is also a look ahead to the older age of an author who published the book when she was only 41 years old. Here, anyway, is Grace Knole speaking to Kate Fansler, urging her to accept the presidency of her college. Kate has suggested that Grace should be president instead.

 

“I agree with you, actually. …But people these days want their college presidents young. To be frank, I can’t imagine why. It seems to me that college presidents, like popes, out to be old when appointed: they can then afford to take risks, and they can’t live on too long and get set in their ways. That, however, is not the American way.”

 

For 26 years prior to her suicide, Carolyn Heilbrun had gone for a daily walk with her friend, art historian Mary Ann Caws. During their last walk and conversation, amidst talk ranging from Darwin and Manet to women’s poetry and the state of the world, Heilbrun commented that she “felt sad.” “About what?” her friend asked. “The universe.” Apparently Caws did not attach particular significance to that brief exchange and confidently anticipated their regular walk the following day.

 

Carolyn Heilbrun had a good life – happy marriage (her husband “read every word she wrote”) and children combined with independence, friends, and a successful career – but it sounds as if she had grown tired. 

Mountain sunset

Soon I want to read one of Heilbrun’s nonfiction books, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. The title sounds so familiar that I wonder if I may have read it already, but it would have an added dimension now that I know more about the author’s life – and as I move on beyond 70 myself, kept lively by a most lively-minded human partner and, for now, a more-than-lively young border collie.

 

Peasy!

Book Review: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

A Tale For the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

NY: Viking, 2013

$28.95

Do you love wordplay? Are you fascinated by the mysteries of time? Have you ever felt all alone in the world? Hopeless? Do you think the direction of a life can be changed? Have you ever tried meditation, or do you practice it regularly or maybe just thought about it? What about walks on the beach and finding surprising objects washed up by the waves? Do you believe in magic of fiction? Answering ‘yes’ to even one of these questions tells me that you will find this book as absorbing as I did.

For the time being,
 Words scatter . . .
 Are they fallen leaves?

In Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, one of the two protagonists is named Ruth and has much in common with the author. Ozeki says of Ruth the character that she is “semi-fictional,” adding that “if pressed, I would have to call myself semi-fictional, too.” One difference is that Ruth Ozeki the author is a Zen Buddhist priest, as well as an author and filmmaker, while Ruth the character only learns about meditation from Nao.

Nao. Now. Can we ever grasp ‘now’? This is one of the questions that the character Nao brings to the story and brings to Ruth the character (hereafter called simply ‘Ruth’), who finds Nao’s diary washed up on the beach inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox protected by a series of plastic bags, the outermost covered with barnacles. There are letters in the package, too, and a Japanese military watch from World War II. Did the plastic bag ride the tides all the way from tsunami-struck Japan to Ruth’s island off the coast of British Columbia?

Ruth is a novelist and has been working on a memoir ever since her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and is now deceased, came to live with Ruth and Oliver on the island. The memoir isn’t going well, and Ruth worries at times that she herself may be developing Alzheimer’s.

The spring had dried up, the pool was clogged and stagnant. She blamed the Internet. She blamed her hormones. She blamed her DNA. She pored over websites, collecting information on ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, parasites, and even sleeping sickness, but her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. ... Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

And now comes the distraction of a diary washed up on the beach, the diary of a Japanese teenager who writes as if addressing an unknown friend, as if she is writing to Ruth.

Nao’s voice begins the novel. She is writing because she has decided to commit suicide and before dying wants to record the life story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, still living, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun. Nao writes with a purple gel pen in a repurposed book—that is, a book in which the original pages have been removed (“hacked,” she says) and replaced with blank pages. She writes in English, having spent most of her girlhood in California before her father lost his job and the family returned to Tokyo. The title on the cover of the diary, the title of the book it used to be, is À la recherche du temps perdu.

The girl’s life has become a nightmare. Her father is unemployed and depressed, suicidal. The family’s savings was lost when the dot-com bubble burst and his American stock options went belly-up. Now back in Tokyo, they live in cramped, miserable housing with the sounds of their neighbors’ sex-for-hire activities coming through the thin walls. Her years in America schools have put Nao behind her classmates in Japanese language and thus in every other subject, and they bully her unmercifully, so severely that it amounts to torture, and her clueless mother (Nao hides her victimhood from her parents), working to support the family, can only suggest that Nao spend more time with her “friends,” maybe participate in some after-school activities. All this Ruth learns gradually as she reads the diary, pacing herself to try to read at the same speed that Nao was living when she wrote the pages.

At first the reader may suspect a deus ex machina when Nao is packed off, against her will, to spend the summer with her great-grandmother in a remote mountainside temple. Will the girl solve all her problems through learning meditation? Her father accompanies her to the temple, and when she sees how happy he is there, it begins to seem like an answer for his unhappiness, too. Nao decides will persuade him to spend the summer there with her. Perfect! But no, when she wakes in the morning he is gone. And while Nao learns much from old Jiko and passes the summer contentedly learning the temple ways, when summer is over she must return to a father still depressed and suicidal and classmates intent on finding ever more ingenious ways to torture Transfer Student Yasutani.

Jiko is an important character in the book, perhaps the central character in a way, although she says less than anyone else, but also important, in their different ways, are Nao’s father, Haruki Yasutani, and Ruth’s husband, Oliver. Oliver is an eccentric botanical artist with visions of enormous, time-dependent, living works that few can understand or appreciate, a fascinating character in his own right. Then there is the cast of the scattered isolated Canadian island community, people such as Muriel, a retired anthropologist who worked on middens and who loves nothing better than sorting through garbage, and Benoit, the  Québécois who runs the local dump. Here is a description of Oliver and Muriel at the kitchen table:

Oliver and Muriel talked on, although it was not quite a conversation they were having, Ruth noticed. Rather, their exchange sounded more like a session at an academic conference, two professors taking turns at the podium presenting information that they both knew, and more or less already agreed with.

Although facts are being presented, the talk is more mutual grooming behavior than any delivery of information. Haven’t we all heard and even been part of such sessions? Ozeki does not write about "social glue" but catches the gluing in process.

Nao’s troubled relationship with her father finds quieter echoes in Ruth and Oliver’s marriage. Ruth shares the diary with her husband, reading aloud to him at bedtime, but is offended and upset when he does not respond in the same way she does to the unfolding story. Does Oliver think Ruth is crazy? Does Ruth see Oliver as a loser?

The dead in this story have a great influence on those who remember or rediscover them, adding their complications to developing plot. Ruth’s mother lives on in island memory and in her daughter’s love and fear, while across the Pacific Nao discovers her great-uncle, Haruki #1, through her great-grandmother, and elevates him to hero status for his suicide death as a patriot kamikaze pilot. When she compares her father to him, she is ashamed of Haruki #2, who cannot even commit suicide successfully.

The living and the dead, the spoken and the written reveal themselves only in and through time. There is no all-at-once but a gradual unfolding. Oliver’s cat, the cat at the temple, the crow that calls to Ruth from a tree in the yard and in her dreams—all these, too, are time beings.

Because you see, on the first page of this novel we are jolted out of an ordinary, unreflective and passive reception of words. “Oh, it’s all right for the time being,” we say casually. For now. Until something better comes along. We put the accent on the first syllable of the word ‘being,’ having given the first three words equal, unstressed status. We are accustomed to the phrase and give it little thought, and so the title does not jar us. Then Nao introduces herself: “My name is Nao, and I am a time being,” and to make sense of this statement we must put the stress on the word ‘time’ and rethink the phrase. And so it continues through the novel, the gentle pressure to rethink what we think we know.

“Together we’ll make magic,” writes Nao to a reader she imagines in the future. Ruth Ozeki has made magic with this novel. I finished it one afternoon and began rereading the same evening.