Journey Into a Broken Heart

The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century, by David Laskin

NY: Penguin, 2013

Paper, $17

A strange, unlikely, and in the end a false family legend sends David Laskin back into his family’s past, the legend quickly abandoned for a true story – or rather, several true stories -- much more complicated and compelling. His great-great-grandfather, Shimon Dov HaKonen, a scribe in the village of Volozhin in the Pale, in the part now called Belarus, is the beginning of a dynastic trail that branches in three different directions. One leads to the United States, another to Israel, and the third ends there at the place of beginning, as the branch of the family that stayed in place is overcome by the Holocaust.

How can one review such a book? It is well written, with fully dimensional, engaging characters (i.e., real people), but with every page we turn, we know what is coming. It’s not like reading a novel or even the personal memoir of someone whose life is unfamiliar to us. We are told from the beginning that the family members in the Pale did not survive, and we have read and heard accounts of the atrocities committed in those places and those times. And yet there is a strange, irrational hope as one reads, as one turns pages, that maybe a miracle will --. But no, what’s past is past, and all of them died, perishing in ghastly, unspeakable circumstances. But it is precisely in speaking—and then writing--of the circumstances, of the lives and deaths, that the author reconstructs what happened to these lost relatives, in order that the stories of their lives and deaths will not be lost.

The American stories are of success, for the most part, most notably in the case of Itel, who became in America Ida Rosenthal, founder of the legendary Maidenform Bra company. At last count, the author tells us in his epilogue, the American branch of the family numbered 101. Stories from Israel tell of the founding of a pioneer family, which numbered 32 at the time the book was written.

The further I read in The Family, however, the more I found myself becoming still, willfully contained, trying physically I suppose to barricade myself, so to speak, against the shocking reality both of the historical past and so much of the world’s present. The maps in the book of Eastern Europe and the Middle East focus on places once again torn by hatred and cruel strife.

Is it the privilege of having grown up in the United States that allows David Laskin to cast the stories of his family in universal terms? For me, this “journey into the heart of the twentieth century" reveals a heart broken time and time again. As Stephen Daedalus said to the dreadful Mr. Deasy, the pompous, self-confident, anti-Semitic headmaster in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It was the more astonishing to read Laskin’s even-handed last pages since I was going back and forth between the book and, drawing deep breaths and trying to sort out current events, an article called “The Liberal Zionists,” by Jonathan Freedland in the August 14 issue of the New York Review of Books. What Laskin writes in his epilogue is undeniably true but can be difficult to acknowledge when one’s relatives have suffered horribly for religion or ethnic background, and as I read the following paragraph again, I am once more astonished by it.

The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.

Now, will I have the courage to read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel?

Laskin is right. We are all touched by both love and death, we have all gained and lost, and no one in today's world has been untouched by war. Broken hearts are never made new, unbroken, but with enough love and good fortune they can mend time and time again, and so families and countries go on. We go on as individuals, too, for whatever span is given us. 

It's a soft, rainy, late summer morning. I'm here now. Wherever you are, you're there now.

You Know It's August When the Days Fly By

Audience assembles in David Grath's art gallery

This summer I haven't scheduled as many bookstore events as in previous years. It was getting too exhausting. One a month seemed like a manageable pace, and then somehow I didn't get anything special on the calendar in August, so I had plenty of energy for Mary Beth Pope, who came from Boston to summer here with her parents and read for us from her book of short stories, Divining Venus. 

Inquiring minds want to know!

We had an attentive, appreciative audience. The author read one of her short stories and then graciously answered questions.

Mary Elizabeth Pope

Afterward there were refreshments, and there was informal socializing, and I sold books to people who took them to Mary Beth to sign, and it was after 9 o'clock before the crowd cleared away, all of us feeling very good about an enjoyable and successful evening.

That was Thursday. Perfect weather. Friday was farm market, of course, which I toured expeditiously sans camera, simply making my purchases and visiting with friends -- perfect weather again, for vacationers and for ongoing cherry harvest -- and then came Saturday, a beautiful blue-sky day, with the 2014 Dog Parade, "Hairy Pawter and the Wizard of Woof"!

When you see the fire truck, you know the dogs are coming!

This is it! Dogs on parade!

Dog with golden wings!

Wizards!

The dog parade is a real challenge to an amateur photographer.

Sometimes I only got a head

Sometimes I got only feet!

Big group shots are the easiest

Leelanau UnCaged is gearing up for the end of September

They're already letting loose their creativity!

Our township is big on clean energy

But dogs reign supreme on Dog Parade Day

Friends of Leelanau Township Library

Black Sheep Crossing

Omena always elects a dog to its highest public office

Yea, Kal! They plowed us out all winter!!!

(It's a costume!)

And where was Sarah, you may be wondering? She, along with many other humans and canines, was a very keen observer of the passing scene!

It Can't Be August Already, Can It?

This busy past week, as time came to turn the calendar page from July to August, I did the following (a partial, not an inclusive list):

Observed Cherry Harvest in Progress

You can’t help observing it if you’re out on the roads this time of year. Cherry shakers and haulers, crew and tractors, are on the move throughout the county, and orchards enclose our home on all sides. My own farm dreams don’t involve fruit trees (a few chickens, a couple beef cattle, a field of alfalfa, and I’d settle for half a dozen chickens and time for a productive, well-tended garden), but I like living in a region of working agriculture and having farmers for neighbors.

Got in a Bunch of New Books for Young People

Some of them, for young adult readers, were recommended to me. Others, like the Beezus and Ramona books (and others) by Beverly Cleary, were my own personal brain wave. Oh, the bright, happy colors!

Started Reading a New Book

World War I began a hundred years ago this past week. (Not such a happy thought.) It isn't a war that gets a lot of play in bookstores, where customers much more often look to the Civil War or World War II than to the “Great War” (WWI) or even the Revolutionary War. Why is that? Too long ago? But not as long ago as the Civil war. It's a mystery to me.

My own horrified fascination, beginning with Elliott Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, focused for years on the interval between World War I and II. More recently I have found myself reading further back in history, back into the 18th and 19th centuries, but having received a review copy a few days ago of David Laskin’s The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century (now out in paperback), I plunged right in and on Thursday morning reached Chapter Eight, “First World War,” coincidentally with the historic anniversary. A review will have to wait until I’ve read the entire book, but the story is gripping, especially with the Eastern Front bisecting the Pale....

Had a Beautiful Friday in Northport

Last Friday morning, after home chores and country dog walk, began in town with the farm market, where I bought bread, croissants, lovely red onions, little striped purple-and-white eggplant, fresh fennel, two kinds of goat cheese, and some irresistible organic beef. It continued in the bookstore, selling out of the second printing of The Ice Caves of Leelanau, and wrapped up with Music in the Park, for which I was a co-sponsor, this time around, of the Claudia Schmidt Funtet. It was a “good day from morning ‘til night,” but I was too busy and relaxed—yes, sometimes both at once!—to photograph the passing hours.

Thought a Lot More About Writing

William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction is so lively, as well as helpful, that once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop, so I was glad to find it’s still available in paperback. Much of what he writes is applicable for fiction as well as nonfiction. After all, good writing is good writing (as bad is bad), so any writer can learn from good advice about the craft, whatever its genre focus. I’m ordering this for my bookstore, along with books on writing by Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and Anne Lamott. Any other suggestions for books on writing that have been important to you?

Started Reading Another Book

The Family is my morning book. At night, before sleep, I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things. Fiction, history, botany – all in one book. Only thing is, the edition I’m reading is LARGE PRINT, and I’m finding the LARGE PRINT makes me read differently. It’s very strange and more distracting than I’d thought it would be, but I’m persevering.

Took Note of Spotted Knapweed in Bloom

I know, I know! It’s a horrible, nonnative, invasive species, and it doesn’t do our fields and meadows any favors at all. The feeling I most associate with the blooming of this plant, however, is a sense of poignant urgency, coming from my knowledge that we have now reached late summer. After that, of course, comes summer’s end. But before the end come waves of lavender and gold, soft living colors threaded through the green, and my breath catches in my throat. Is this a response to beauty or to the passing of a season that is never long enough?

Invited Four Friends for a Dinner, al Fresco

It can be hard to find time and energy for entertaining during the summer, but in other ways summer is the best time for inviting people, since we don’t have to be crowded into the tiny rooms of our old farmhouse but can stretch and spread out under the black walnut and basswood trees. But the weather was unsettled on Sunday, and as I was driving home dark clouds loomed. I found David in the yard, scanning the sky and making dubious noises about the dinner plan. Those clouds were going to clear off, I told him confidently. The sky cleared for a while, then more dark clouds came; in the end, however, we were able to have our dinner outside under the trees, with just a little breeze and a question of rain in the air but no falling drops.

Baked a Lemon Polenta Pound Cake

This recipe was from The Cake Chronicles, and I think the author said there that she’d gotten it from some other book, but I’m at the bookstore now, and the copies I ordered to sell are still on back-order. Anyway, heavenly smell! Heavenly taste! A bit overdone on top, but the nice lady who brought me a whole quart of fresh-picked black raspberries, after I mentioned that I’d only been able to harvest a handful from my yard – she’s the one who made this dessert a real glory! Now, the next time she comes in, I’ll have to get her name! Nothing like the excitement of raspberries distracting me while bookselling to make me forget the basics. Well, I did say “Thank you,” but that hardly covers it, do you think?

Felt Deep Gratitude

I love our old farmhouse and the surrounding farm neighborhood. I love all of Leelanau Township. I feel so very fortunate to live here, so blessed, so thankful for my life. I’m also feeling grateful for friends old and new, present and distant, young and old. And I can feel that our dog, Sarah, shares all these feelings. Sarah loves her home! She loves company! She loves the yard! She loves her life!

Let Us, One and All, Eat Cake!

The Cake Chronicles: Finding Sweet Hope in this Crazy World, by Jayne B. Robinson

Paper, $21.95

Let’s admit up front that doctors, dietitians, and health food gurus are all against cake. Wheat bad, sugar bad, carbs bad! I’m all for fresh salads and vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds myself, but I love this book and can hardly wait to try the recipe for fresh tomato cake with cream cheese frosting! Can you believe it? Carrot cake, move over! I also want to make the almond semolina cake, “dense and not too sweet and good for brunch or dinner.” And Irish buttermilk bannock for the Feast of St. Michael. Mind you, I have very seldom in my life made cakes at all (pies are more my thing, in general), but this book inspires and excites even a hesitant cake baker like me.

Here’s how it starts: When her younger daughter asks if the family can’t have a home-baked cake every week, the busy working mom agrees. Cake night, she thinks, will be good for everyone. Inspiration also comes from another, more surprising source, a novel by Dean Koontz called Life Expectancy, in which a family of bakers take as their motto, “Where there is cake there is hope, and there is always cake.” The Robinson family adopts the motto, also, as every Saturday night that year becomes Cake Night! A year of 52 cakes!

(I was relieved that Robinson did not agree to bake a cake every night of the week for a whole year. Just reading about that would exhaust me.)

Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, and back to Summer is the way Robinson’s year is laid out in the book, with each “chapter,” as it were, beginning with two or three pages setting the scene. One summer entry begins as follows:

This morning there were over 100 Heavenly Blue morning glory blooms on the arbor in my backyard. I paused before heading to work to take a photo just as the morning sun began to light them up on the edges.

Along with morning glories, though, the morning also brings radio news full of rising death toll numbers from Hurricane Katrina, making it a day that “wasn’t Monday” but “felt like it.” I’m not going to recount Jayne’s whole story of that day but simply tell you that she made “New Orleans Blues Chocolate Layer Cake” in the evening (after contributing to relief victims), in honor of the culture and cuisine of the Big Easy.

Disaster in Louisiana, war in the Middle East, World War I, WWII, Colony Collapse Disorder, a diagnosis of MS in the family – in a book of recipes? Yes, because The Cake Chronicles is much more than a cookbook. There is also Girl Scout camp, a grade school science fair, an academic conference or two, and vacations in Ontario and Leelanau County. (Omena rates a mention, I was happy to note.) That's because the author, a Ph.D. biologist, professor and researcher, is also a refreshing and entertaining writer. Renaissance woman! Her personal essays, you begin to realize as you turn the pages (and begin to recognize and think of them as essays), could stand alone without the recipes, at least as easily as the recipes could stand on their own, unaccompanied by stories, but having both together makes this book a very special treat. It’s a window into one woman’s life that takes note of academic work and family, world headlines and intimate, personal, daily details. It is a happy place for the most part -- you'll love visiting -- but has its share of challenge and sorrow, too.

I wanted to cheer when I reached the fall entry telling of Robinson's promotion to full professor, but what she writes about the celebratory cake her daughter baked for the occasion is surprisingly down-to-earth and heart-warming:

Katie’s cake this week is also the first cake I ever made by myself. I found the recipe on the side of the Bisquick box when I was eleven. It’s still there in the same place, a fact that is immensely comforting. It’s the same great comfort I feel knowing that books I haven’t read for decades, as well as books I might never read but hope to read someday, are waiting for me on the shelf at the library.

You see? She’s cake, I’m pie; she’s biology, I’m philosophy – and yet, in so many ways, we’re on the same page. Again, I just love this book! I hope Jayne accepts my loving it and, for that reason, forgives me for quoting from at such length.

Here’s another bit that tugs at my heart, the author reflecting on traditions lost or left behind:

All of the houses built of sand in July and the castles built of gingerbread in December may be gone, but they live on n my memories and those of my daughters. And besides, we can always start new traditions to take the place of old ones.

Ever wish that you could go back to Girl Scout (or Boy Scout) sleepover camp as an adult and enjoy a glass of wine with the evening campfire? What cake would go with that? Homecoming cakes, wedding cakes, cakes for birthdays and for vegan houseguests – all are in this book, along with memorable stories and stories of memories. There are even Michigan cherries and  sandcastles on a Lake Michigan beach, so really now, what more could you ask?

With some of my bookmarks

Note #1: This is the fourteen-hundred-and-first post on Books in Northport! On Sunday I noticed I was at 1400 and could hardly believe it. Time has flown since 2007, and a lot has changed in our little town, but I’m still here, still selling books, and still excited to discover new books and new friends.

Note #2: The Cake Chronicles and today's heading would have been perfect for Bastille Day, but, having missed this year, no way was I going to wait for July 14, 2015!

Turning the Question Back on Myself

I’ll try this idea out again, putting it in the first person this time. Maybe it will spark agreement or disagreement – anyway, perhaps (I can only hope) it will birth a discussion. In my previous post (here, in case you missed it) I wrote about the books colonists brought from England to America when they left the Old World behind, and I wondered what choices Americans of today might make if they were leaving for new homes, never again to see the old. I asked readers to “think of this question not only in terms of your own survival, well-being, recreation and interests but also in terms of what would benefit future generations in what would be their native land.” But I didn’t say what books I would take. Now I’ve done some soul- and shelf-searching, and here’s what I come up with:

First, my French bible, La Bible de Jerusalem. The Bible is many books in one, so that’s a good deal, and taking the French translation would help me keep that language in my head. Next, the complete works of Shakespeare – in some edition with small type, of course, but if I couldn’t take everything, I’d take the sonnets and leave the plays behind. One woman I said this to said her choice would be exactly the opposite – take the plays, leave the poetry – and that’s just the kind of difference that interests me: what would I take; what would you take?

Following Dawn’s very good general suggestion, I’d take along Bradford Angier’s Handbook of Woodcraft Wisdom, with its indispensable, life-saving information for finding safe drinking water, making shelters, tying knots, marking trails, etc. A heavy book from my home library that would have to accompany me to my new home tells how to do pretty much anything that needs doing in the country, from digging a septic pit and mixing concrete to raising livestock and poultry, with first aid and food preservation thrown in, so I couldn’t leave behind The Rural Efficiency Guide, published in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1918. But I still might that great old standby, Putting Food By and/or an old personal favorite, Going Wild in the Kitchen.

After those necessities, the choosing gets harder, but there are certain books of fiction I wouldn’t want to my life to be without. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion would have to accompany me to my new home. I’d also have to be able to re-read Mary Norton’s The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield; St.-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows; and Palmer Brown’s The Silver Nutmeg.

If I had to leave Michigan forever, I’d be leaving a large part of my heart behind and would want to revisit home via the poetry of Jim Harrison; Michigan: A History and Waiting for the Morning Train by Bruce Catton; and Altrocchi’s Wolves Against the Moon; Airgood’s South of Superior; and Campbell’s Once Upon a River (those last three all fiction), as well as (how could I almost forget this?) Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey to America, with his wondrous evocation of the southeast Michigan wilderness, on the verge of its extinction!

I’d want to be able to revisit France, too, from my new world, so I’d need Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris and Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love -- or, maybe just the first and last volumes of Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, certainly an appropriate theme for my long future of exile.

A good poetry anthology or two would have to find room in my trunk. Maybe The College Anthology of British and American Verse (1964) and then Poetry in Michigan, Michigan in Poetry (2013), the latter including all that beautiful visual art, as well. Of the philosophers, I would take Aristotle (certainly De Anima) and Bergson (Les donneés immédiates de la conscience) and something by William James.

If I had room for drawing books, I couldn’t do better than to take along Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing – or any of his books or any of Clare Walker Leslie’s. Essays? Jerry Dennis and Anne-Marie Oomen, Primo Levi and Tony Judt, Wendell Berry and Adam Gopnik. Would I have left behind a world in which I needed the piercingly intelligent humor of Barbara Ehrenreich? Charles Lamb’s letters?

One thing I would definitely need to take would be plenty of paper – loose paper for writing letters, books of lined but blank pages to keep journals in, and books with unlined blank pages for drawing. Also pencils and pens and erasers. Lots of paper, lots of pencils and pens and erasers.

Is it surprising that in the “brave new world” of my imagination there is wilderness (hence the need for Angier) but not modern technology (hence the need for The Rural Efficiency Guide and all that blank paper)? Perhaps you imagine your brave new world on another planet entirely! Or a space station! I am so curious!

What Books Would You Take to a Brave New World?

When prospective colonists, preparing to embark for North America in the seventeenth century, came to pack their belongings for the long voyage in crowded little ships, the decision as to what to take and what to eliminate was a matter of such vital importance that it might mean success or failure, life or death. Since freight was high and even the most elementary essentials of life had to be transported, the wonder is that the emigrants found room for such luxuries as books. But the fact is that they did. 

 -       Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, 1607-1763, Chapter 6, “Books, Libraries and Learning”

What books did the early American colonists bring to the New World? The Bible, of course, and works of theology considered important in their time; lots of history (“the sweetest recreation of the mind,” according to Richard Braithwaite, author of The English Gentleman, published in 1630), both ancient and contemporary; and practical books on farming and what passed in that day for medicine. For the “gentleman,” as well as the educated theologian, works by classical Greek or Latin authors were de rigueur, either in the original language (often) or in translation. The colonists also loved encyclopedic books of knowledge, a foundation in their time for adult, or continuing, education. For example, Pierre de La Primaudaye’s The French Academy (not to be confused with the Académie Française) is identified by Wright as “an outline of knowledge with a strong emphasis on the natural sciences, heavily moralized to take away any taint of damnation which meddling with God’s mysteries might have suggested.” They also held onto their grammar school books long after leaving the classroom and referred in later life to their old textbooks on rhetoric and logic.

Previous chapters of Wright’s book, on “Diversity of Religions” and “Zeal for Education,” give striking evidence of the forest of fear and suspicion with which members of various religious sects regarded one another in the colonial period (such sentiments and opinions in our own time are nothing new to the New World), and yet, despite these conflicts, the author insists that similarities between 17^th-century colonists’ private libraries are as striking as their differences and claims that “the intellectual differences between New Englanders and Virginians were not as great as some of their descendants would have us believe.” It is a sobering thought, to think that, for all the animosity and conflict between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, everyone else and Quakers, perhaps Americans over 300 years ago shared more common values than Americans today.*

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been wondering -- about myself and my fellow Americans, but I’ll pose the question in the second person: If you were leaving home, ancestors and family history forever behind and heading into the Great Unknown, to start a new life in a New World, what books – if any – would you take with you? If no books, why not, and what else would you take in their place? Think of this question not only in terms of your own survival, well-being, recreation and interests but also in terms of what would benefit future generations in what would be their native land.

*Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference. The marvel of postmodern communications—five hundred television channels, CD-ROMs, the Internet—invites each of us to construct a preferred reality, furnished ... with the objects of wish and dream. The commonwealth of shared meaning divides into remote worlds of our own invention, receding from one another literally at the speed of light.  

- Lewis Lapham, “Bomb-o’Gram,” July 1995, included in his collection entitled Waiting for the Barbarians, published by Verso in 1997
 

Summer: Living and Working in a Tourist Economy

Sarah knows how to relax

Only the briefest pause for me

“How’s your summer going?” Friends and strangers ask each other this question all the time. I get it at the bank, at the post office, on the street, and in my bookstore. So here’s a very unpoetic synopsis of summer-so-far.

Corn along our driveway

Further in, cherries

It’s been a gloriously beautiful season -- not too hot, not too cold, plenty of both sunshine and rain. First cuttings of hay look good, cherries are ripening in the orchards, leaves of field corn are lush and glossy green. In our farmyard, a huge change has been wrought by the removal of what was a large, spreading colony (perhaps all clones from a single root system) of popples, a.k.a. quaking aspen. Popples would take over the north, if they had their way. You see them venturing out from the edges of woodland and forming new communities around old farm buildings and in fallow fields. Our “grove,” as we called it, pretty much surrounded the old chicken house.

New view to south

New view to southeast

Now that our view of meadows, orchards and woods is greatly enlarged, a long-neglected garden is receiving enough sunshine that I’ve been inspired to begin cleaning out grass and weeds to encourage what flowers have survived, and we’re even talking about bringing the poor old chicken house back to life. Not for chickens, though. No, I want a mobile “chicken tractor” for my poultry when I get them. The old chicken house would be -- will be -- my writing studio. At least, that’s the dream. Chickens and writing: my next career....

Old chicken house

Volunteer tulip tree saved from woodsman's saw

Former entrance/exit for chickens

In Northport, at the bookstore – and on the streets and everywhere I go -- everyone is still clamoring for Ice Caves of Leelanau: A Visual Exploration by Ken Scott, with an essay by Jerry Dennis, published by Barbara Siepker’s Leelanau Press. Two boxes originally ordered for Ken Scott’s signing in May were pre-sold before the event, before the books had even arrived – and then only one box came in time for his appearance, and he had to (well, he graciously agreed to) come back again to sign books from the second box. And now we await a second printing, promised for sometime this month. And that’s all I know about a date: “sometime in July.”

Important: I am not taking any more names for reserved copies and have not since May; people on the list from May get first dibs on second printing, and after that it’s going to be first-come, first-served, with a limit of one to a customer. Please! This is the only way I can deal with the phenomenon that is the ice caves book! But never fear – there will be a third printing, and we are supposed to have books from that printing before Labor Day, in plenty of time for your holiday gift shopping!

The next scheduled bookstore event is not until August 7, when Mary Elizabeth Pope will be reading from her book of short stories, Divining Venus. The reading will be at 7 p.m. that Thursday evening. Please put this on your calendar and plan to be with us for Mary Elizabeth’s reading. It’s not only the next event scheduled – it’s the only event scheduled for the bookstore for the remainder of the summer!

In previous summers, I have sometimes put myself under enormous stress by scheduling as many as three events in a 2-week period. This year I’m throttling back. All of northern Michigan is filled with summer events! Also, in June I crowded an entire summer’s stress -- and excitement! -- into a single event, with 13 guest poets reading their work during a bookstore birthday celebration, and in a way I’m still reeling from that enormous, wonderful, crowd-filled, dream-come-true evening.

Don Lystra will be guest author at the Leelanau Township Library series on Tuesday, July 29, though, and I’ll be there to sell some books for him, relying on the Friends of the Library for organization and refreshments. Ah! Volunteers!

What else?

I promised three or four people that I would host a participatory poetry reading at Dog Ears Books and originally thought that might happen in July, but now I’m leaning toward September, thinking it might be something to tie into Leelanau UnCaged on Saturday, September 27. It makes more sense to do it then, I think, since UnCaged is all about a whole community releasing its creative spirit. So that makes my line-up Don at the library this month, Mary Beth in August, poets in September.

-- But there! I leaped ahead to September, the first month of fall, and here we are only in the second month of summer -- if you consider June, July and August, rather than simply July and August, which is more realistic as far as the northern Michigan tourist economy is concerned. And how is the summer going?

Does gauzy curtain obscure or soften summer view?

Sometimes, in the midst of it, I feel as if I’m on a treadmill. Wake up, work, fall asleep; repeat and repeat and repeat. Then, when Labor Day has escorted summer people back to their hometowns and locals ask one another, “How was your summer?” my response to the question posed in past tense is usually, “It was a blur.” It’s easy for someone who’s never had a summer-dependent business to advise taking days off, but the reality is that a retail business cannot make sales when it’s closed, and it doesn’t make sense to be closed during a short, high-traffic season that makes or breaks the business. I’m very lucky to have Bruce come in one day a week. On “Bruce days” I can stay home and catch up on laundry and housework and spend a little time out in the yard with Sarah doing something other than mowing grass. But really, doesn’t summer pass too quickly for everyone? Doesn't it for you?

Problems with transferring images from camera to laptop got in the way of keeping my photo blog updated recently, and as for drawing – well, how long has it been since I did any of that? I don’t feel very creative these days, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, while I haven’t been writing fiction or gotten very far with beginnings (?) of poems on little scraps of paper,  I spent considerable time recently drafting material for a workshop I want to offer sometimes in the the months ahead: “Should You Self-Publish Your Book? A Bookseller’s Perspective." I’ve incorporated five interactive exercises in the lesson plan, and when I find time (always summer's greatest challenge) I’ll do a little practice run-through by myself to get an idea of how much time the different sections take. My initial thinking is that 2-1/2 hours is long enough to have people sitting around a table. The next question will be, when to do it? Floating the idea out on Facebook the other day generated a little interest already, but whether summer or fall is better I'm not yet sure. Maybe two different times?

Strawberry jam with berries from my garden

Also last Wednesday I made my first batch of 2014 jam from our own backyard strawberries. That's cooked jam, not freezer jam, but in the freezer is enough mashed pulp for a second batch, and the strawberries are still coming on strong. Wild bramble fruits are blossoming, their simple rose blooms telling of more fruit to come and more jam to make. Summer is flowing along nonstop, wherever you look. Carpe diem!