Goodbye, November. Hello, Winter!

Holiday greenery at home

The Sunday after Thanksgiving came with more snow than I had expected. We’d had so little with the predicted big storm on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by continued clear roads on Friday and Saturday, that I had grown complacent, and even when snow began falling and blowing on Saturday evening, I didn’t expect enough accumulation to to get in the way of a visit to the dog park. 

 

I was wrong. 

That’s okay. Sunny and I walked in deep snow close to home, which she found exciting, and then came indoors where I began a project for the day: turkey soup. We live a revisable life, my dog and I, with much improvisation amid the constants.

 

Soup begins here.

It was the last day of November. Hanukkah will begin at sundown on December 14. The official beginning of winter is December 21. Christmas comes on the 25^th, Kwanzaa on the 26^th, and then, the following week, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, on the last day of November, as I neared the last page of Wieseltier’s book on Kaddish (mentioned and quoted in my previous post), I came upon the author’s remarks on closure, an idea he finds a “ludicrous notion of emotional efficiency” and a very American delusion.

 

Americans really believe that the past is past. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

This accords with my own life experience, with what I love in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and with what I see across my country and around the world today. What do you make of these words?

 

The soul does not heal as the body heals, because the soul is improved, and even enchanted, by its wounds.

 

Improved? I need to think about that. I remember being surprised by a French mother’s concern that her young child’s fall would result in a small scar. Life, I thought then, as I still think today, is the accumulation of scars visible and invisible. As a child, I remember being very proud of the slightest scar, happy to have been visibly marked by life, with my own personal, unique history inscribed on my skin.

 

Another:

 

…Nothing happens once and for all. It all visits, it all returns. But ‘closure’ says once and for all. This is a misunderstanding of subjectivity, which is essentially haunted.

 

Enchanted. Haunted. It all returns.

"Love returns always"

A friend asked me to recommend writers who have addressed the question of the meaning of life, and her request alarmed me. Countless people through the ages have written books on the subject, from the simplistic and maudlin to the impossibly sublime, but why would anyone take a writer’s word for the answer? Why would anyone take anyone else’s answer? How could they? 

 

I can see, of course, the value of considering what other people have said, but I replied that I don’t think there is a singular correct answer to the “Why?” question (“Why are we here?”) or some unique hidden meaning already given for all to find by diligent searching. This is not intended to be an answer, mind you: I am only stating my personal belief, which is that we find our own life’s meaning by making it, find something to live for by giving our life to it. We can live for God or for love, for art or literature or history, for birds or dogs or elephants — the list is endless. We may attempt to grow a perfect apple or ear of corn or write a perfect sentence or build a perfect bridge or simply do our best in whatever small corner we find ourselves. Why not multiple meanings? And maybe, even probably, what is most meaningful in one phase of life will be replaced or enlarged by something else later on. 

 

My friend asked another question: How should we live in the world? I feel on more solid footing with that query and hesitate only to put my answer clearly and briefly: 

 

Toward others (and oneself), practice compassion. Toward the natural world, practice curiosity and gentleness. Pay attention to all around you and be grateful.

 

But then, maybe this answer too is an answer for me and not for everyone? I don’t know. I only know that it has been many years since I first felt that paying attention was my #1 job in life. It is such a miracle, after all, to be alive. And surely part of the gratitude we owe for that miracle is awareness of it in as much detail as we can take in. 

 

(Not that we can ever be fully aware of everything every moment. As I sit tapping out these words, it is all too easy to forget the patient dog girl waiting for my attention. And do I even notice the tiny spider in the corner of a picture frame? But what is not the central focus of my awareness is still there, nearby and all around. I smell turkey broth simmering and dried apples rehydrating in cider, see lamplight falling on a bowl of fruit, hear the wind driving snow across the meadow, and I remember noticing, only an hour or two before, that the tall dry giant bluestem grass in the meadow is the same toasted gold color of the highest branches of the black willow trees along the no-name creek.)

Not only is life a gift, but it goes by quickly. Friends who married each other in their 70s, a new start late in life for both, acknowledged that they were entering the game in the fourth quarter but realized that the game wasn't over. A widowed friend recently took the plunge and brought a new puppy into her home. I cut small cedar branches for the house for Thanksgiving and on Friday got out my little Santa band. Where there's life, there's life!

 

Winter beginning on December 21? For me, this year, it began November 29. It is here now. 

Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

Deer Season, Among Books

Another morning through the windshield

 

Oh, baby, it’s cold out there!

 

Donuts are disappearing earlier in the morning, and you are apt to hear gunshots as soon as the sun is up. It’s firearm deer season! Time to keep your dog leashed and to wear some blaze orange yourself. Question: Why is it called blaze orange? Why not just orange? Anyone know?

Field corn harvest is underway in Leelanau Township. Many trees have been wind-stripped of their leaves by now, but you can go over to Karen Casebeer’s blog to see the remaining rich browns of oak leaves, and I’ll give my own pitch here for beech leaves, which also hang on after maples and other trees are bare. Sometimes leaves on very young beeches stay attached all winter long, thinning as the season wears on.

 

This is not a podcast.

 

This is not my bookstore.
It's a photo (of my bookstore).

Someone who still reads bound books printed on paper, still handwrites letters to friends and family, does not have TV, has never had a dishwasher (and feels no need for one) – it should not surprise you that such a person is not sufficiently up-to-date to produce a podcast, but you don’t need to see me, anyway. Or, should you want to see me, you are welcome to visit my bookstore. I’m presently here five days a week and plan to be here four days a week through the long, cold northern Michigan winter. Otherwise, what I have to share in a public forum I will share on this old-fashioned platform.

 

Isn’t it frightening how quickly our innovative, cutting-edge modes of communication become old-fashioned? Blogs are not yet completely obsolete, however, and I’m comfortable here. Web + log = blog, a kind of ship’s log that has no need of an ocean, a diary of sorts that anyone may read. Quite public enough for me.

 

 

This is not a Substack.

 

That’s where the action is these days: Substack. Professional writers, professional journalists, counselors, historians, and other professionals of every stripe can all be found on Substack. Friends have suggested I jump on board, but I am content to keep my amateur status. Should I ever write a book, I’ll do what I can to see that it sells, but in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere I don’t ask anyone to subscribe and pay. My paid gig is that of bookseller.

 

 

Writing Letters: Not a Paid Gig, Either

 

My family has always been a family of letter-writers. Back in the days when telephone calls were divided into “local” and “long distance,” frugality dictated written correspondence, except for holidays and birth and death announcements. “Getting the mail” is still, for me, an errand brimming with possibility, and I take pleasure also in popping a stamped envelope into the mail slot, addressed to a friend or a sister, anticipating the recipient’s surprise and delight. 

Love this postmark! Love USPS!

[Note to self: Write more notes and letters soon! You are falling behind!] 

 

My posts here on this blog are a form of letters, too, stuffed into metaphorical bottles and thrown out onto a metaphorical sea, not addressed to any one particular person but intended for anyone who finds them interesting enough to read.

 

 

Old Friends and New

 

More than once here, I have mourned the passing of old friends, and today I want to make clear that my sadness over those losses is no reflection on newer friends! “No one replaces anyone else,” a dear old friend remarked years ago, and I have never forgotten her words. No one can ever take the place she filled in my life and still holds in my heart, but my new friends have found their own places. The silver and the gold....

 

Not the morning I expected

 

On Monday, my day to accomplish tasks and errands that don’t fit in with days I’m at my bookshop, the weather was cold, the sky grey. On Sunday, the strong, bitter wind had made it difficult for me to stay as long at the dog park as Sunny wanted to stay, but she deserved some fun, so I stuck it out. Now on Monday morning my first task of the day was to load snow tires into the back of my car so I could take them to the garage and have them mounted for the season ahead. Then, what would I do with myself while the car was up on the hoist? Van’s Garage opens at 8 a.m., but the library in Leland doesn’t open until 10. Trish’s Dishes was the answer to my dilemma, and I was the first customer in the day, six minutes after they opened at 8:30.

Good coffee. Warm, quiet atmosphere. Delicious breakfast burrito filled with vegetables and melting cheese, with a couple slices of melon on the side. My own little table up in the front corner, where I could look out and remember when my friend Ellen had her garden business and she and I planted daylilies in front of what was then her husband Bob Pisor’s Stone House Bread. Book to read, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, not a book that would be everyone’s cup of tea but one I was finding delightful. A morning I had been dreading unexpectedly delivered bliss!

 

The Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was one of the youngest members, invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to join them, but he kept his distance. Probably just as well. Members of the circle never grasped the significance in incompleteness that Gödel himself saw there, and Wittgenstein was similarly misunderstood. In question for both were the limits of language and whether or not those limits are also the limits of human knowledge. Goldstein contrasts the two misunderstood geniuses, Wittgenstein the dramatically tormented and Gödel the silent, reticent sufferer, and the two men live in her pages. 

 

Bliss! Except for the empty tables, I might have been back in the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, but besides the lack of other intently studious customers there was also the happy circumstance that I didn’t have to take notes and could simply enjoy my reading. I almost laughed out loud over Goldstein’s description of the way the Vienna Circle members, “sworn enemies of cognitive bewitchment,” worshipped Wittgenstein. I had a little taste of that in graduate school. A Wittgenstein study group (at the home of one of the professors) was practically a cult gathering, where LW’s texts were the sacred scripture, never challenged, although at times a member of the congregation would admit to being “puzzled” by a particular passage. ("Puzzlement" was permitted.) Following discussion, an acolyte served tea. All very formal and esoteric and refined and oh, so English! No, I was much more comfortable and much happier with my book and breakfast burrito and coffee, all by myself, a philosophe fauve, as my friend Annie once termed the two of us, both by that time far from the halls of academe....

 

After a heavenly two hours with my book, walking back to retrieve my car I encountered the only fly in the morning’s ointment, because what is more maddening than the roar of a leaf-blower? The roar of three leaf-blowers!!! Soon back in my car, however, armed against the future with snow tires, with beautiful guitar music playing as I drove toward home, I was eager to share a joyful time with Sunny Juliet by taking her to the dog park for the second day in a row, where I was glad to find the wind not quite as horrifically strong and cold as it had been the day before. 

"Wanna play?"

"Yes!"

 

More of the blaze orange story.

 

Its other name is “safety orange,” and the point is to make oneself (or one’s dog) highly visible against a brown leaf background or snow or blue sky, which we had pretty much already figured out, right? The other advantage of orange for hunters is that it’s not a color deer can see. They see blue and green, but orange to them just looks brown or grey. Okay, that makes sense, too. 

 

Here's another factoid new to me: “Caltrans orange” (no apostrophe, for some reason) is the name for the color as given by the California Department of Transportation for their construction zones and equipment. It’s easier to see in rain or fog than other colors, apparently. 

 

An article in the Paris Review, sharing from a book by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color, gives more background, not on the blaze designation but on orange itself as a color term. Before the fruit came to Europe in the 17^th century, Europeans used yellow-red as the color term. In the 1960s people started calling it hunter orange, thanks to an article in Field & Stream. 

What color would you call this?

Safety orange, hunter orange, Caltrans orange, OSHA orange, the color is government regulated, but nothing I’ve turned up explains why we so often call it blaze orange. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Safety first!

Time’s Wingèd Chariot

 

She might like to speed me up sometimes.

Excitement in Northport

 

“Have things pretty much slowed down now?” people frequently ask in my shop. Good question. There are slow hours now, even the occasional slow day, but time’s general pace continues inexorable for the busy small town bookseller, homeowner, and dog mom. One day there were leaves to rake, the next day snow to shovel! One day it was Halloween, and then—it seemed suddenly—the long-anticipated author event of November, Chuck Collins with his latest book, right there in little Northport!

Author and bookseller

There’s no way to make a room larger than it is, try as one might, so with thirty chairs set up and more than forty people eager to hear the speaker, a group of us crowded around the doorway between bookshop and gallery. Author Chuck Collins had a lot of bad news to deliver, but he delivered it calmly, as a friend, and he is not at all a gloom-and-doom kind of guy. He does not counsel despair. He gave examples of “fixes” that can begin—and in some cases, are already underway—at the grassroots level to return power to the people. The audience was fully engaged.

Author and SRO crowd

One of his more obvious illustrations of bad news was how, after a couple of decades in which wages rose in concert with productivity, the economy continued to grow while wages stagnated, this wealth gap fueling a social divide. But in the midst of this discouraging talk, almost as a throwaway line, when citing some positive examples of what can be done, he used a phrase that sang out to me: “reweaving the social fabric,” words seemed to sum up the import of how the gap, having been widened, can be narrowed again. 

We in this country need the feeling again that we are all in it together, that we are all one another’s neighbors, so I am taking my inspiration from Collins’s phrase: Reweaving the social fabric. That is our task. 

Again, Chuck Collins’s new book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, and though my stock is currently sold out, I have additional copies back-ordered and will be happy to put names on a waiting list.

For now, I extend many, many thanks to Chuck Collins for graciously coming to Northport to speak at Dog Ears Books! And many, many, many thanks to Northporters who turned out to hear him and to purchase his book and to do me proud! It was certainly an event to remember. I'll add (blowing my own horn as well as the author's) that Chuck’s book tour takes him from little Dog Ears Books in Northport to Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., today! Now what do you think of that?

 

 

The chariot speeds along!

We had our first snow of the season on Sunday, November 9. Glad it was a Sunday (day off), I stayed home all day (no trip to the dog park), alternating work and play outdoors with food preserving tasks indoors. Scenes of snow, however, like those warm-toned autumn leaves, demanded attention, too, and I clicked away on my phone, storing up images as eagerly as I was storing up food. I won’t say I have a million photographs of autumn scenes—let alone a ton (have you noticed how everything seems to be described in tons these days? except when quantities come in bunches?) —but I have so many that it’s difficult to choose from among them. Maybe a couple of contrasting pairs will best give a picture of our Up North world. 

Leaves on my boardwalk

Second clearing of snow from boardwalk in one day

New life from old at a corner of the woods

The same woods corner after first snowfall

There are more (though never enough) over on my photo blog, A Shot in the Light, but maybe I just need to do what is inelegantly called a photo dump over there, eh? Yeah, that’s the idea….

 

 

Jim Harrison, A Life

 

I devoured the biography of Jim Harrison, Devouring Time, by Todd Goddard, and it was a strange, moving experience. Although the Artist and I were not in the inner circle of Jim’s friends in poetry and publishing or hunting and fishing (overlapping groups), much less part of the high-profile Hollywood personality crowd, we spent a fair amount of time with Jim and Linda in Leelanau County in the 1970s and ‘80s. When I first met the Artist, in fact, he had just returned from Key West, from the shooting of “Ninety-Two in the Shade” and from having been in Jimmy Buffett’s apartment when the first pressing of “A Pirate Looks at 40” arrived (40? Wow! That seems so young to me now!), and he had many stories to tell of Buffett and Harrison and McGuane and Kidder and all. Then I began reading Jim’s books. 

 

Eventually the Artist took me to the Writer’s home for our first meeting, and there was a time when I did a spate of manuscript typing for Jim (a poetry collection, a novel, a couple of screenplays), but then the Harrisons moved west, and the last time the four of us were together was in Patagonia, Arizona, in the spring of 2015.

 

As it was, all through the book, as each chapter announces the years covered, I relived my own life, remembering where I was in those years and picking up all the successive threads of love and friendship and acquaintance as time went by, braiding them together and feeling them tug at my heart. I wasn’t even sure I could manage the very last pages of the book. I miss the love of my life, my dear friends, the way we all were! That last spring evening in Patagonia, the Artist asked the Writer's wife, “Do you miss Leelanau County?” She answered, “I miss the way it used to be.” I do, too.

 

Lucky woman!

 

When the Artist and I lived in Kalamazoo, we sometimes fantasized about having a bookstore in Paw Paw. We were always drawn to small towns and country life and always discovering and bringing home used books wherever they found us. It was a long and winding road that brought the two of us together again in Leland, with more books than our little house could hold when, without the benefit of long-term planning, rather as a summer lark, I first fell into bookselling, having no idea that I would be selling books 32 years later, no idea at all of the many adventures and friendships that would enrich those years.

 

When Chuck Collins arrived for his event on Wednesday, one of the first things he wanted to do was to buy the Goddard biography of Harrison. He gave his talk in what is still David Grath's gallery. Later, over dinner, Bobbie Collins reminded me of the images of Grath paintings that grace a series of music CDs her husband Edward J. Collins commissioned, music written by his own father, Edward Joseph Collins, who was born in Joliet, Illinois, the town where I grew up (after my parents moved there from my birth state, South Dakota). 

We had dinner after Chuck’s bookstore talk at the new Bluebird in Leland, only opened recently, where I was touched to see the Dreadnaught on the menu. It was the Artist who “invented” that burger, “the Dreadnaught of our cheeseburger line,” he liked to say—although he always insisted it really should be served on an English muffin, but that’s another matter entirely. My point is that, in the old days, in addition to the Bluebird’s printed menu, there was an unwritten menu of things that could be ordered only if one knew about them, and always, before ordering one of those items, you would ask, “Who’s cooking tonight?” The Dreadnaught was one of those items. Now it's on the printed menu. 

“My husband invented the Dreadnaught,” I told the waiter on Wednesday evening. I didn’t think he had registered my statement (why would he?), but later he came back to ask my husband’s name, and Bobbie Collins said, “He was an artist,” and I said, “You can Google him,” and he, the waiter, said, “I will.”

 

Is that a pointless story? Not to me. To me, it all ties together, because it's all part of my life, and when an old friend of the Collins family who had joined us for dinner told a story about Fred and Molly Petroskey, that tied in, too. All those nights around a big table at the old Bluebird, all those old “regulars” now dispersed or even gone from earth—they all still live in my memory, and Chuck and Mary are now woven permanently into the fabric of my life, too, along with Bobbie, who was already there.

 

Many years ago, my son once complained that he was “tired of being poor,” and the Artist corrected him. “We’re not poor, we’re just broke. We have a very rich life.” Our life together grew richer and richer in later years, in ways so much more meaningful than money! My memories are “savings” that I live on each and every day, and yet the wealth does not diminish. 

Of course there is Sunny Juliet, too.

Sometimes an apple is a plaything.

Sometimes it's a snack.

Friday was a blue sky day, and after closing shop at 3 o’clock I hurried home to my girl. “Go for a walk?” I asked her. “It’s a beautiful day, and we’re alive!” How many times did the Artist say that to me? We had so many beautiful days!

The world is still beautiful.

It is rich in color and memory.

And it keeps on turning....

Postscript: Friday sunset