Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Thanksgiving and the Past-Soaked Earth of Home

Home, as the old words say, is where the heart is. But where, then, is the heart?

-  Willie Morris, “Coming On Back”

 

Two unrelated events came together one morning to set my thoughts in motion on the subject of home. First was the serendipitous reading (serendipitous because the book arrived unexpectedly in a box from a friend bringing books to my shop for trade credit) of Willie Morris’s Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home. Morris’s home was Yazoo, Mississippi. In the first essay, “Coming On Back,” he recounts a conversation shared with him by a fellow Ole Miss graduate who realized, in a brief conversation with a Harvard man, that “not all Americans are from somewhere.” Not all Americans, that is, locate their personal identity in their old high school or a cemetery that holds several generations of their ancestors. Willie Morris was definitely from Mississippi, as Albert Murray was just as definitely from Alabama. 

I have a harder time answering the question, “Where are you from?” My father was born in Columbus, Ohio, and stayed long enough to earn a degree in civil engineering at Ohio State University before going off to World War II, while my mother, born in Los Angeles, was given a strangely peripatetic childhood that ranged as far east as Connecticut before her mother and stepfather finally settled down on the semirural edge of Springfield, Ohio. My parents met after the war, there in Ohio, but their first home was in South Dakota, where I was born but lived less than three years, after which I grew up in Illinois, impatient to leave the prairie of my childhood and adolescence for something more exciting -- when very young, the setting sun beyond the farm fields and a cowgirl life; later, breaking into theatre in New York. Ah, the dreams of childhood and youth!

The first place that ever felt as if it could be a permanent home for me was Kalamazoo, Michigan. Although my family had no history in Kalamazoo, I made in that town what felt like a full life. But then, with the intention of being gone only two years -- long enough to earn a master’s degree and return qualified for a better job at Western Michigan University -- I left, and somehow, once launched into graduate school I absorbed from those around me (faculty and fellow graduate students) the expectation that I would go on for a Ph.D., with the result that, while visiting many times since that open-ended leaving, I have never since lived in Kalamazoo. 

 

Kalamazoo, for years, was home. Then it wasn’t. 

 

Years ago, when the Artist and I were still living in Leland, I wrote to a friend that we would probably have the same post office box there for the rest of our lives, but when we moved a few miles north to live in the country and established our business presences in Northport, it only made sense to change our mailing address to Northport, too. “How long have you lived in Northport?” people sometimes ask. I have never lived in Northport. I live in Leelanau Township, surrounded by hills and woods and orchards. I do, however, spend day after day in my bookshop in Northport, and after so many years the shop is my second home.

Original Dog Ears, the little shed on Waukazoo Street

Back on Waukazoo Street in a larger, warmer space

But that brings me back to the original question. Where is the heart at home? 

 

“Behold, thou poor Soul in thy Bath of Thorns, where is thy Home? Art thou at home in this World?”

-  Jacob Boehme, quoted by Ben Ehrenreich in Desert Notebooks

 

My truth is that I was at home with the Artist, wherever we were, and when we were apart I was homesick. 

 

We were at home in Room 11 of the Superior Hotel, a corner room across from the hotel’s two bathrooms (one with a shower whose trickling stream took forever to get hot or even warmish), a room from which we could look down on the main commercial street of Grand Marais and see townspeople coming and going to the bank, to the hardware store, to the post office. 

We were at home in our rented cabin in Cochise County, Arizona, where the front door looked out on the two-lane highway below and the ghost town straggled from one end to the other with very little traffic other than wandering cows and the occasional roadrunner, back door looking north up the Philadelphia Wash to the southern of the two peaks of the Dos Cabezas that gave their name to the little range that always seemed, to me, like the tail of the giant Chiricahua lizard down the road. That cabin was so small that the Artist used to tell people we were “living in each other’s pockets” during our months there.

It was easier even than that. We were at home in whatever car or van we might happen to be driving, whether on a simple “county cruise” or up into Canada or down to the Gulf Coast or up along the Mississippi River or west to Arizona, with whatever dog we had at the time as our mascot, sharing cups of gas station coffee along the miles. And we were at home in each motel room along the way, always looking around at the antiseptic walls with their sterile furniture store artwork and discussing the ways we would rearrange and furnish and decorate and cozy up the room if we had to live there for some undetermined length of time and call it home. Because we could have. Together, we could have.

And so the farmhouse, our dream come true, with all its quirks and imperfections, all its “issues” and many unmet needs, because (though not the home of our ancestors) it held our life together for two decades, continues now to be my home, one I never want to leave. Yet at the same time I am often homesick there because of his absence. Our years together were a long conversation to which the two of brought our loftiest dreams, our most childish silliness, our pettiest of irritations and most joyous exclamations and occasionally (more rarely, I’m happy to say) our deepest fears. The abrupt ending of that conversation has brought in its wake a reverberating stillness to the rooms I now inhabit without him. 

In one of the many books I read about grief there was a sentence that resonated so fully with me that it seemed to say everything in one line, but since I’m not sure where the sentence occurred I’ll have to paraphrase it, and I apologize in advance for delivering it to you without the perfection of the original. I can only personalize it in hopes that that will restore some of the power: The Artist and I shared a private language, and I am now its only living speaker.

 

Anyone in a long relationship understands what this means. You have certain words that encapsulate an entire shared thought exploration, and you only have to utter one of those words aloud to share all over again everything you once said to each other on the subject. Or someone else in your presence voices another word or mentions a name, and your eyes flick to each other’s faces in silent recognition. You read each other’s thoughts. You care about the most mundane details of one another’s childhoods. “Tell me again….” The person you know most deeply is, for all that, always and forever an endless mystery to explore. So when that language and memory partner is gone, no one understands the significance of those words or shares the memory a name evokes or has the slightest interest in what snacks your family shared on Sunday evenings. 

In The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, the author tells of a culture in which the death of an individual is expressed by saying “his library burned.” Like a library, a human being is – while alive and barring the ravages of dementia – a repository of memories. One of my friends, someone who also lost the love of his life (and we agree that “we are the lucky ones” to have had those loves), says he finds meaning now in being “her chief rememberer.” While the Artist is remembered and mourned by many, not only me, my own personal, nonphysical, admittedly ephemeral library, holding memories of our life together and all that he told me of his other lives before we met – that library is, as the pilot told the little prince of his rose, “unique au monde.” 

 

Many of our days in and around the farmhouse were pedestrian and repetitious. Life is like that. There was grass to be mowed, trailers to be lined up onto hitches, tarps to be tied down, all kinds of things to be moved in and out of barns. “I need a hand here,” the Artist would say, and I would drop whatever I might have been doing to lend my hand to his task, and I remember one particular day when I was called to give directions while he backed up a vehicle to a trailer, and it burst upon me that this was my life and that it was just fine! Every square foot of land around my farmhouse, like every mile of county road, is saturated with memories of conversation and shared seeing and working, so if I could have one more day with him, it wouldn’t have to be in Paris or New York or discovering together the Painted Desert. It could be any ordinary day, beginning with “Is there any coffee?” There always was. Why did he ask? But now, I miss that old question.

 

At Thanksgiving dinner, everyone around the table was asked to say something for which they were thankful. So much! So, so much! But I had to say, meaning no slight to those hosting the beautiful dinner or my family and friends miles away, I am thankful for my memories. Grateful for the life I had – and the memories that keep those years alive for me now.

 

Often, when he wanted to hold hands, he would say, “Give me your paw.” And that was everything.

But I see that I completely lost sight of my beginning as I made my way once again down memory lane! The second event that prompted my musings on home was the departure from this life of our old friend William Himebaugh. Willie and Sandy were another couple who made homes together far from their separate beginnings, wherever they happened to be -- home on the coast of Florida or the mountains of Panama or some little island or even just in a boat on the ocean. So Sandra, this post is especially for you, in memory of the love of your life. That’s really what I started out to say, before I got sidetracked by my own loss and my own reasons to be thankful.

Michael and Willie and David -- for many years!

Back at Last

 

…Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was filled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snowflake and cedar frond, every fox and goldfinch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. 

 

-      Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

 

It’s coming again, our Great Lakes winter. Or is it? Last winter we had a little snow in January and none to speak of (at least, none to plow) other than that. Then spring 2024 was early and wet, and after that summer descended into drought, a long, dry spell that, while it lasted into early autumn, did nothing to dull the fall colors, which were seemed to go on and on and on until November winds came to strip branches and topple trees, until now, here we are looking for snow. There was a bit on the ground Thursday morning, our first, but it didn’t last long, and our long-range forecast is for a “wet” winter, 40-50% chance of wetter-than-average weather, as in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, and hail. Does that mean the yo-yo continues to bounce back and forth, never a settled season? 

 

Whatever the weather, winter's increased darkness always brings an increase in indoor reading time. More on that in a minute, but for now I hope you noticed that Jerry Dennis's sentences are as savory and mouth-watering as the moments they describe.

One January day in 2024 -- real winter!

Where have I been?

 

Since September 13, 2007, my initial post on Books in Northport, this is the longest I’ve gone between postings, the most recent one before this dated October 29, 2024. The main reason for the long hiatus was the death of my laptop screen. I tried one day to work from my phone, posting directly to the Blogger platform, rather than working through a Word draft first, then uploading it, the result not quite an unmitigated disaster but when done at last I realized -- too late! -- that I’d uploaded to my photo blog rather than either this (primarily, or at least initially) book blog or even my dedicated bookstore blog. (Here is where that post ended up, for those of you who never happened on it.) With the laptop, I could have rectified the error easily. Of course, with the laptop I wouldn’t have been posting from my phone in the first place. 

 

Then one day last week a friend called and said, “I need your blog!” She clarified by adding, “I mean, I need you to write something new!” So now that I have a clean new screen and keyboard at my disposal (and all my old programs and files right where I want them, too), I’m jumping back in. Perhaps not a peak performance, but at least something to indicate that there still are books in Northport!

And bookmarks!

 

Still reading – and rereading

 

Away from my email for three weeks (that part, I have to admit, felt like kind of a vacation), I made a few feeble stabs at handwritten notes for a future blog post and kept my “Books Read” list up-to-date with handwritten additions but didn’t bother with long descriptions of or reflections on the books added to the list. I also wrote a few letters to distant friends, made notes about new books to order for the shop, and set aside Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi to reread Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, one of my favorites among his novels, which inspired me to pull RL’s Dream off the shelf next, a Mosley novel I read so long ago it was as if I were reading it for the first time. With the main character a musician originally from the South, and with Mosley’s brilliant sentences, I sensed many echoes of Albert Murray. There was also a historical novel squeezed in there, a 24-hour spell with The War Began in Paris, in which a former Mennonite woman from the American Midwest, working as a small-time journalist, becomes entangled with another American woman journalist with Fascist sympathies, glamor and excitement dulling her sense of danger. 

 

Oh, the world, the world! Even in fiction, there is no escaping it! Not that escape should be a relentless quest. Understanding, empathy, living other lives in other skins – that’s the magic offered us in fiction, don’t you think? I’m curious what my readers have to say on this topic, especially as not long ago I stumbled on a website where a writer proclaimed something like “Life is too short to read depressing books,” and her readers all agreed in their comments that they wanted nothing but escape from novels and therefore avoided any book that received a major prize and/or had been recommended by Oprah! Novels without conflict, characters without challenges? To me, this is a peculiar narrowing of the entire idea of reading, although I certainly understand the need at times for “happy endings.” But what do you think?

 

? ? ?

 

A little “playing tourist” –

My son and his wife came up for three nights, making for cheery alterations to my usual schedule. After their Monday of hiking Whaleback and tasting at Tandem Ciders while I took Sunny to the dog park and did a bit of housework, the three of us reconvened for dinner. Having company is inspiration to the cook in her tiny Paris kitchen: On Sunday evening there was a curried soup made from Hubbard squash and coconut milk; Monday’s vegetable dish of cauliflower and mushrooms with parsley exceeded my expectations, and the leftovers were even delicious cold. As for the rice pudding, while it was hardly a failure, next time I’ll let the rice steam much longer so that it disappears a bit more into the custard.

Tuesday the three of us went out together, visiting Samaritan’s Closet in Lake Leelanau and the Polish Art Center in Cedar before dinner at Dick’s Pour House in the evening. Shopping! Dinner out! Not things I usually do on my own, and it was even more fun to know that Ian and Kim were enjoying their little Up North vacation. Kathleen at the PAC in Cedar is delightful, too, as is her shop. 

Deer season and outdoor dog activity

 

Sunny and I are challenged in our outdoor time during firearm deer season, although she has no idea why mornings are different. When it isn’t raining, we still have tennis ball play in the yard or even in the two-track, but there is no off-leash running along the edge of the woods these days. All the more reason, then, to take Sunny to the dog park when I can. But the extra round trip to Northport is only worthwhile on days my bookshop is closed (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), as the morning’s first regulars don’t arrive early enough to provide Sunny with playmates if we get there at nine o’clock. By ten, though, we can usually count on another Aussie, a couple of Pyrenees, a Bernadoodle and a smooth-coated collie. A few times there was a little fierce barking (some from my Naughty Girl, some from others), but a tennis ball hurled through the air quickly distracts everyone from conflict. And it is so good to see dogs running off-leash!

  

New Books: Arriving Soon!

 

My new book order, usually sent in on Mondays, finally (after not happening at all for a couple of weeks) got done on Thursday this week, a bigger order than usual, making up for weeks missed. There will be an assortment of new board books for the pre-reading crowd of babies; a fun book of dog poems for “kids” of all ages; Robin Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, as well as a version of Braiding Sweetgrass for young adults; a couple editions of Wind in the Willows for those who need to re-immerse in it or discover it for the first time; and, as usual, a few surprises. The order should come in early next week, so I may be in the shop on days you’d expect me not to be there, because opening boxes of new books is a delight not to be postponed but indulged as soon as possible.

The run on jigsaw puzzles has already begun, though, so don't wait too long to make your selections for those long winter evenings ahead.

  

And the season rushes on!

 

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving already -- the best, I always think, of American holidays, being all about gratitude rather than hoopla. Hoopla fun will come two days later, though, never fear, with Saturday evening’s lighting of the Christmas tree in Northport and a visit from Santa – and then the race is on! Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25 this year and continues to January 2, with Kwanzaa from December 26 to January 1, so the end of one year and entry into the next will be rich with holidays. 

 

We need our holidays. We need to shift focus from competition to celebration, from conflict to love. We need festive lights during the shortest days and longest, darkest nights of the year. We also need to take time to remember those in less fortunate circumstances (far too many!) and do what we can with our end-of-year contributions. Writing those checks, like writing a holiday letter or addressing cards to friends, is a good December ritual.

A couple of longer bookstore days

 

My 11 a.m. -3 p.m. hours will be subject to some stretching for the days following Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how late I’ll be open on Friday, November 29, but I’d love to see local shoppers in my bookstore on that day, and if there are enough of them, I’ll be happy to stay open as late as 5 p.m. 

Indie Bookstore Day!

The next day, Saturday, will definitely be a later business day, as Northport's tree lighting doesn’t take place until 6 p.m., and I don't want to miss that!

Lights are strung, ornaments are on. All systems are GO for a week from Saturday!

The Way It Is, The Way It Was

Golden trees along M-115 on Monday 

The season --

 

Not every autumn is as colorful as this year’s fall in Leelanau County, which was, to me, surprisingly beautiful -- surprising, since I never remember what factors go into making fall color particularly vibrant and therefore had no idea what to expect. (For others like me who forget from one year to the next, here is the full explanation.) But the season was spectacular, as it turned out, and many of us could not stop trying to store the beauty. Now not much red and orange is left – mostly gold and brown -- and even the gold fades a little more every day, as more and more trees let the winds strip their branches bare.

Corner of woods near my home on Tuesday morning

Sunny Juliet and I had our last agility session for the year and are on our own now until late spring 2025. Also, because of live traps set in the yard for Mr. Porcupine, Sunny does not have her usual at-home freedom. So I take her on-leash beyond the yard, where we can have tennis ball play (off-leash) in the neighbor’s driveway through the orchard, and we go for our long walks at least once a day, sometimes twice. As for those porcupine traps, though, I’ve pretty much lost hope of any result. Mr. Porcupine seems to be finding enough to eat without being tempted by baited traps….

 

Two leashes joined give her much more than an extra inch!

Combining business and pleasure --

 

Monday took us to Cadillac, where I visited a photographer’s warehouse to stock up on jigsaw puzzles for holiday and winter bookstore visitors, afterward meeting a dear friend from Kalamazoo who brought me books I was purchasing from an estate down her way. The deal was arranged by others, my friend taking responsibility only for delivery, but our rendezvous gave us an opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives, which we enjoyed despite a very strong, cold wind across Lake Cadillac that day. 

The library in Cadillac was our rendezvous point.

Lunch was a picnic -- in the cold wind!

A beautiful beech tree nearby had a warm look.

Sadly for Ms. Sunny Juliet, finding the photographer’s warehouse and making my purchase took longer than expected, so we didn’t have time for the dog park. Laurie was willing to look for it with me after our picnic lunch (in the cold wind), but by that time I only wanted to get home again, where tennis ball play plus a good walk made up to Sunny for all her boring time in the car -- I hope!

 

Driving back from Cadillac on M-115, for several miles I noticed the brilliant red of Michigan holly berries, but with a car behind me I didn’t try to pull over and stop. In the morning, on my way southeast, driving into that bright rising sun, I hadn’t noticed those reds at all; then, going back, noticing, I thought there would be more down the road that I could stop and capture with my phone camera. But no -- most of it was right there close to Cadillac, and I didn’t spot any at all on M-37. However – surprise! When I picked up my mail at the post office in Northport and found a letter from a friend in the U.P., what did I find enclosed with the letter but a photograph of Michigan holly! 

Having friends, seeing friends, talking with friends, letters from friends -- what would we do without them?

 

 

Reading the past –

 

After reading, one after the other, all four of Albert Murray’s semi-autobiographical novels, taking him from boyhood and schoolboy through music tours to his vocation as a writer, I’ve now been reading Murray writing not of a fictional self but as himself in South to a Very Old Place, a book in which he visits -- not for the first time but this time as a writer preparing a book -- various scenes of his earlier life: New York, New Haven, Greensboro, Atlanta, Tuskegee, Mobile, New Orleans, Greenville, and Memphis. The stuff of racial conflict omitted from his fiction comes out strong in these memoir essays. He pulls no punches. Still, white as I am and can’t help being, I find comfort in the cadences of his language, even in the way he and his refer to their towns – Lana, Beel, Ham (that last, Birmingham, is not given its own essay title, but the name comes up often).

The book I find myself telling people about these days, though, was published in 1833. Three Years in North America, written by James Stuart, Esq. (1775-1849), and published in New York by J. and J. Harper from the second London edition, is an account of the English author’s time spent touring the North American continent, the second volume taking him by stage from New York through Washington, D.C., down the Eastern seaboard, through the slave-holding South (often on horseback), back north up the Mississippi and Ohio by steamboat, and to St. Louis, Cincinnati, Hoboken, etc. 

 

Stuart was horrified by slavery, noting that even those enslaved people who were treated “well,” such as hotel restaurant servers, did not have beds but slept in the hallways on the floor without blankets, and after an extensive tour of Southern states, he met with many white Americans in northern states who had fled north because of slavery’s evils, though the possibility of civil war did not seem on many minds.

More and more leaves are on the ground now.

A very fact-oriented writer, Stuart gives population numbers for every city and town he visits, the width of every river traveled or crossed, cost of transportation, lodging, meals and just about anything else that can be assigned a dollar amount. At the same time, his observations and descriptions keep the account lively, and he also elicits opinions of everyone with whom he has conversation and gives his own opinions of people and places and customs and manners.  

 

Very early in the book, he attended a meeting of Congress in Washington, D.C., and he contrasted the dignity of that assembly with his own country’s Parliament (where even today interruptions and jeers are common). What struck me more, however, was the content of legislative discussion he described that day, providing lengthy quotes. A bill had been put forward to propose that the U.S. post offices be closed on Sunday. (I don’t know if a postmaster worked Sundays then or if, as has been the case all my life, the window to purchase stamps and send packages was closed but the lobby was open so that post office boxes could be accessed by their holders and mail dropped off.) The arguments given against the bill were beautifully and impressively articulate. There were several “Because” paragraphs, but I will quote only one, and that only in part to give a flavor of the objections to the bill: 

 

“Because, The bill violates that equality which ought to be the basis of every law, and which is more indispensable in proportion as the validity or expediency of any law is more liable to be impeached. If ‘all men are by nature equally free and independent,’ all men are to be considered as entering into society on equal conditions,--as relinquishing no more, and therefore retaining no less one than another of their rights. Above all are they to be considered as retaining an ‘equal title to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.’ While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the religion which we believe to be of Divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to men, must an account of it be rendered. 

 

(I said I would quote the paragraph in part, but stopping halfway through seems wrong. It goes on.)

 

As the bill violates equality, by subjecting some to peculiar burdens, so it violates the same principle by granting to others peculiar exemptions. Are the Quakers and Mennonists the only sects who think a compulsive support of their religions unnecessary and unwarrantable? Can their piety alone be entrusted with the care of public worship? Ought their religions to be endowed, above all others, with extraordinary privileges, by which proselytes may be enticed from all others? We think too favourably of the justice and good sense of these denominations to believe that they either covet pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens, or that they will be seduced by them from the common opposition to the measure.” 

 

That gives a fair idea, I think, of the quality of argument in the legislature in the first half of the 19^th century. Basically, opposition to the bill rested on freedom of conscience and separation of church and state, and those arguing against it saw not only rights violated if religion were to be a part of government but religion also weakened if the separating wall were removed, because it would be then as if the law said that religious practice could only be ensured if churches were backed up by government, that faith alone would not compel adherence.

 

This was the United States in the 1830s, almost two centuries ago. Look around the world, these legislators said, and see what harm has been done by state religions, not only to individuals but to religion itself. 

 

“…It is perhaps fortunate for our country that the proposition should have been made at the early period, while the spirit of the revolution yet exists in full vigour. Religious zeal enlists the strongest prejudices of the human mind, and when misdirected, excites the worst passions of our nature under the delusive pretext of doing God service. Nothing so infuriates the heart to deeds of rapine and blood. Nothing is so incessant in its toils, so persevering in its determinations, so appalling in its course, or so dangerous in its consequences. The equality of rights secured by the constitution may bid defiance to mere political tyrants, but the robe of sanctity too often glitters to deceive. The constitution regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian, and gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual, than that of a whole community. The representative who would violate this principle would lose his delegated character, and forfeit the confidence of his constituents. If Congress shall declare the first day of the week holy, it will not convince the Jew nor the Sabbatarian. It will dissatisfy both, and, consequently, convert neither. Human power may extort vain sacrifices, but Deity alone can command the affections of the heart. It must be recollected that, in the earliest settlement of this country, the spirit of persecution, which drove the pilgrims from their native homes, was brought with them to their new habitations; and that some Christians were scourged, and others put to death, for no other crime than dissenting from the dogmas of their rulers.”

 

Surprisingly, I'm sure, to many Americans of today, the legislators of the 1830s did not even exclude atheists from the right to freedom of conscience. We were not a "Christian nation," they said. In other words, we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the Puritans, now that we have a constitution guaranteeing freedom of conscience to all. “Fortunate,” they said, that this question is before us now and can be settled so as not to plague us in the future. Little did they know! 

But I don't want to close on a note of despair. Tomorrow is another day. And as long as we care about the future, there is hope for the future.

Tuesday turned strangely warm again and closed with grey clouds.