Anniversary, Reading, Loss, Gratitude, Dog

Quiet reflections

First, Nice things people say,

or,

Thirty years is a long time 

 

I’ve been having a quiet 30^th anniversary summer in my bookstore. Setting up an anniversary guest book, however, was a happy inspiration. Not that everyone writes in it. In fact, I usually have to urge people to leave their marks after they say something that touches me, but I know looking over these pages in the future will mean a lot to me.

On the bookstore counter --

One young man last week said my bookstore had changed his life! He said he’d been addicted to online gaming but found a book here that started him off as a reader and that I had really “made a difference.” That blew me away! Another thanked me for being a “significant part of [his] childhood.” I remember him coming in with his grandparents years ago. A young family visiting Northport for their fourth year in a row told me Dog Ears Books is now a vacation tradition for them -- and all the children wrote their names in the book. It feels strange to see myself as an “institution,” but that’s how people talk, and thirty years, I realize, is a long time.

 

On Wednesday a man wearing a t-shirt from the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan told me I had a “good bookstore.” Coming from a rare book connoisseur, that was a nice compliment – though, no, he did not buy books. (I knew you’d want to know.) Others, though, have bought a lot of books. 

 

If you come in soon, please take time to leave a written remembrance. (At least your name!) And if you feel inclined, here’s one more thing you can do for my 30^th anniversary: send your friends the link to Books in Northport -- or to a particular post you think will mean something to them. Thanks for that, too.

 

 

My reading, from recent past to near future

 

I finished Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, which took me longer than usual because I read it in the original French. I’m now ordering the English translation for my bookstore, because I highly recommend this book. 

 

Following the last page of the novel in the Gallimard paperback (1974) is a notebook put together by the author as she looked back over the years of its creation. Yourcenar began with an idea for the book’s form (conversations among different characters of Hadrian’s time) but discarded that idea when she decided it didn’t work. More than once, discouraged, she abandoned the project. Once she burned notes she had made for the writing; another time finding notes for the novel inspired her to return to it. Conceived and begun in 1924, Mémoires d’Hadrien was finally published by Librarie Plon in 1958. It is a masterpiece.

 

There is a lesson in this for all who write: not to force or rush a book into print until the author is satisfied that it fulfills the promise of its conception.

 

I’ve been postponing opening the first page of Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, because I knew that once I did there would be no putting it down until the last page. I have read Year of Wonders; March; Caleb’s Crossing; and People of the Book, so how could I resist a novel by Brooks with a horse at its center?

This morning (early, dark, rainy) I looked online to check Brooks titles and saw – did I know this and forget? – that she was married to Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz, who died “suddenly” (probable heart attack) at age 60. They had had a long, very happy marriage. I found and watched on my phone an interview with Horwitz about his book Spying on the South and then listened to another man talking about meeting Horwitz during the author’s research for what became Confederates in the Attic, and I vowed to read both books soon (though not before Horse). But what I really wanted to know was how Brooks was affected by her husband’s unexpected death and how she went on without him, so I kept searching until I found answers.

 

(Note I say ‘death’ rather than ‘passing’ and ‘died’ rather than ‘passed,’ because for me that’s part of facing what I see as reality, though I realize others see it differently.)

 

Brooks and Horwitz were married for 35 years. She told an interviewer, “We were so lucky until we weren’t,” and those words brought tears to my eyes. She spoke of how happy she always was when Tony came home from wherever he’d been and the “fun” could begin again. For a year following his death, her work on Horse interrupted by the tragic loss, she was unable to write, but she eventually returned to the project, believing that work, as Ruth Bader Ginsberg had advised someone else, would “see her through.” 

Brooks, who started riding only at age 59, now has a horse named Valentine. She has a dog. She has a son. And she has gratitude for the life she and Tony had together for all those years. 

 

I have written before on this blog that I not only feel gratitude for my life with the Artist but am grateful for it – yes, grateful for the gratitude, though that may sound strange – but take no credit for the feeling, because it is not an attitude I worked to achieve. Rather, it is a gift that my life with him has given me, on top of all the other gifts (including Sunny Juliet). And so, having lost my love but as a bookseller with a literary life, as the mother of a son (and stepmother to other lovely humans), with a dog companion, and loving (though not having) horses, I now feel a closeness to an Australian author I will probably never meet. Her writing life and work, like Yourcenar’s, along with gratitude and memories, help to light my way.

 

 

Dog stuff

 

Sunrise over Northport from New Bohemian Cafe

Waukazoo Street was quiet on the Tuesday after the Northport Dog Parade. The reason was not hard to find: New Bohemian Café was taking a well-deserved break. The crew was back at work on Wednesday, however, and I was a near-sunrise customer, treating myself to breakfast (and sharing with Sunny) before we went for our weekly early morning agility lesson. In the photos below, Sunny is just exploring and warming up before our teacher arrives. When the real lesson started, we worked too hard for photographs. 

Sunny is jumping the hurdles at 20 inches now and getting more comfortable with the teeter-totter (set lower for her than in this photo when she was only exploring it). We have even started the first exercises that will eventually lead to weaving, the hardest equipment for dogs to master, as it’s like nothing they would have to do in nature. Agility work, as I see it, is not an alternative to social skills but perhaps an adjunct, in that my dog and I have to work as a team, and she has to look to me for guidance. We need to work more directly on that social stuff, but we’ll get there. She is a good dog. And, as I sometimes tell her, “We’re stuck with each other.”