Incidents and Intervals from My Summer Life

Country morning scene

Dog and Gardens and Local Happenings

It’s been a beautiful summer so far and a busy one, too, but Sunny and I got to our agility session on Monday with Coach Mike and did better than we had done the week before. Mike says a lot of people don’t want to believe that when the dog makes a mistake, it’s almost always the handler who is at fault. I believe it! I know "our" mistakes are almost always mine!

The flying puppy!

Sunny doesn’t make mistakes when I give her the right cues. The problem is that every little move I make is a “cue” for her. But it’s a good workout for us both.

 

It's time for phlox and daisies in my front yard, while the backyard garden peas are finishing up and purple-podded beans coming on strong. I like the purple beans because the flowers are pretty and the beans easier to see when it’s time to pick but turn green when cooked.

Color contrast is helpful sometimes.

Tuesday evening was the last of four events in the Summer Writers Series sponsored by the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library, all held at the beautiful Willowbrook Mill in Northport. Featured author this week was Stephen Lewis, his latest book a historical novel set in 17th-century New England, From Infamy to Hope. 

Once more at the lovely
Willowbrook Mill - before the event

Stephen Lewis and sound guy Al Noftz - great silent exchange!

Author-interviewer Greg Nobles and guest author Stephen Lewis

Stephen Lewis pointed out that many of the issues of pre-Revolutionary America face us again today, the large, overarching one that of the separation of church and state. Anne Hutchison was found guilty of heresy, excommunicated, and banished from Massachusetts for daring to argue (intelligently) with Governor John Winthrop. Our Founding Fathers thought they had protected us from a return to religious autocracy, but time and the November ballot box will tell if their plan for our freedom will endure.

Meanwhile, Bookstore Daze

 

One day last week a little boy seemed entranced when given a bookmark to go in his newly purchased book. He told me solemnly, “I never had a bookmark before” and thanked me profusely. On his way out the door, he called back another hearty “Thank you!” Who would have thought such a little thing could make such an impression? His first bookmark!

On Saturday, when a woman asked me for a book of poetry with woodcut engravings, I pulled something right off the shelf that suited her to a T. “You made my day,” she told me, adding, “and I hope I made yours.” I replied, “Your saying that made my day!”

 

Then there was the man whose wife looked dubiously at the book he had selected and asked him, “Couldn’t you find it online?” Did she think it would be cheaper online? I kept my mouth shut. He bought the book.

 

When was it that I started reading Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? My reading was done in stolen moments between bookstore customers, so it took me quite a while, but it was a most satisfying experience! I was also quite satisfied to find for myself the exact quote from Henri Bergson that Taleb could not give word-for-word on page 308 of Antifragile. Taleb says he often “follows” what he calls “Bergson’s razor,” as if it is a rule, when actually it is a description of a lifetime search for clarity of an idea. What would these two have made of each other, Bergson and Taleb, had they been able to sit down over dinner for conversation? Thoughts like this, along with literary quests, keep my mind active – as does figuring sales tax in my head, which would be harder except that it's been 6% ever since 1993 when I started in business.

 

The very day after the foregoing thoughts, I discovered a copy of The Black Swan and dove into it, finding in the prologue another Bergsonian idea: namely, in Taleb’s words, 

 

What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect…. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals….

 

Bergson had this insight over a century ago. As active creatures, we did not evolve brains for metaphysics but for survival. Alas! Again I find no entry for ‘Bergson’ in the index to The Black Swan, which is a minor quibble but only goes to illustrate Taleb’s point that individuals who “got it right” are often not remembered for their prescient contributions when labels of “greatness” are being distributed ex post facto.

 

And as a matter of randomness, a random thought occurs to me about a woman who was just here looking for one specific title she hoped to find (always a long shot). She asked about it, and when told I had never seen that book, she left without so much as a glance at the books all around her – depriving herself of the opportunity to meet with the unexpected and wonderful. Some people are on such narrow missions (while on vacation!) that they deny themselves the possibility of serendipity.

 

But then there was the young woman who told her father, as he was paying for her book along with his own, “Libraries and used bookstores are the backbone of our country.” At my urging, she wrote her spoken words in my guestbook. When I sometimes feel discouraged, it’s good to read comments left behind by real book people. And really, I've had more words of appreciation this summer that ever before. "This is the highlight of my vacation," another customer told me, and that kind of mutual satisfaction makes my life's work worthwhile.

 

But now, without further ado, my Books Read list for July 2024. July is busy in the shop in Northport and busy at home in the yard, and while the days are long, there are never enough hours in them for reading, so these books are only #110 through #116 on my list for the year. 

Books Read, July 2024

 

Woolley, Edward Mott. Roland of Altenburg (fiction). Heir to the throne of a small European principality comes to America disguised as a commoner and falls in love with a young woman who is already engaged to someone else. No one knows the prince’s true identity. He is loathe to return to his constrained and formal life but must when his uncle, the reigning monarch, dies. Fast forward: The young engaged woman comes to visit Altenburg. Any reader can see that she and the prince will end up together, but who could have foreseen all the melodramatic cliff-hangers that precede the happy ending? Published inb 1904 by Herbert S. Stone & Co. in Chicago, my copy was printed by R. R. Donnelly & Sons, famous for their Lakeside Press editions. There are “classic” paperback reprints available online, but who would want one of those?

 

Patterson, Susan & Susan DiLallo with James Patterson. Things I Wish I Told My Mother (fiction). When I am buried alive in old books in Northport and have (beloved) weekend company and have, besides, a couple of editing jobs at home for understandably eager (not to say impatient) clients, I look for easy bedtime reading, and this novel filled the bill, although when I started reading it, I had been expected a memoir and was surprised by the style. Oh, well, it was very entertaining. Good way to end a summer day after an afternoon at the beach with my sisters. Can you say "minivacation"?

 

Hannah, Kristin. The Women (fiction). Hannah knows how to tell a gripping story and does so in this novel. The central character is a young woman who enlists in the Army to follow her brother to Vietnam, having not a clue what awaits her there. American re-entry after two tours of duty as a nurse is almost as traumatic as was her time “in-country,” but when she looks for help she is told over and over that “There were no women there”! This story could hardly have been told better if the writer had been through it all herself. It reads as though she had been.

 

Yourcenar, Marguerite. A Coin in Nine Hands (fiction). Is this a novel or a collection of interlocking short stories? The semirealistic setting is Rome in the eleventh year of Mussolini’s dictatorship. There is an assassination attempt. A ten-lira coin passes from hand to hand and links one character to another, sometimes tangentially, other times in more essential ways. Yourcenar, first woman admitted to the French Academy, also wrote Memoirs of Hadrian, an amazing fictional tour de force that no serious reader should miss.

 

Perelman, S.J. The Last Laugh (nonfiction). Ah, yes, the humor books of yesteryear! What wonderful comfort reading they make, especially when the writer is as witty as Perelman!

 

Adams, Katharine. Red Caps and Lilies (fiction). Historical fiction ‘romance’ (in the broad sense) was good bedtime reading during a busy, busy week. Remarkably light reading, considering the time period – the French Revolution! Also remarkable was the author’s ability to sympathize with both aristocrats and revolutionaries, though not with the Terror.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (nonfiction). Although my beloved Henri Bergson rates only the briefest of mention in Taleb’s book, I cannot overemphasize my fascination with and appreciation for the ideas expressed in Antifragile. It would have helped me in the early pages had I realized there was a glossary at the end of the book (I have not yet read Taleb’s bestselling earlier work, The Black Swan, and so was unfamiliar with much of his terminology), but I persevered and feel enriched and -- in a sense, in some aspects of my life – even vindicated by not only his insights into risk management, but also his expressions concerning the choices all of us make in our lives. Despite his analytic approach, this author does not believe that if something is legal (read, “not illegal”), nothing can be said against doing it. He believes in courage, and he believes in shame. What a breath of fresh air in these times of so many shameless cowards in public life! But read the book! Please! And/or any of his others, which I will be reading, also. 

For now, remember the idea of antifragility. (I wrote about books as antifragile in a previous post.) That idea pervades Taleb’s work, as duration pervaded the work of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who wrote, 

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact: this contact has furnished an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is as it were a kind of swirling of dust taking a particular form, becomes visible to our eyes only through what it has collected along its way, it is no less true that other bits of dust might as well have been raised and that it would still have been the same whirlwind. Thus a thought which brings something new into the world is of course obliged to manifest itself through the ready-made ideas it comes across and draws into its movement; it seems thus, as it were, relative to the epoch in which the philosopher lived; but that is frequently merely an appearance. The philosopher might have come several centuries earlier; he would have had to deal with another philosophy and another science; he would have given himself other problems; he would have expressed himself by other formulas; not one chapter perhaps of the books he wrote would have been what it is; and nevertheless he would have said the same thing. 

― Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

Sunrise,

Sunset....

Evenings Out, Mornings Outdoors, and Books as AntifragileTechnology

Evenings Out

It is rare for me to go out in the evening, other than outdoors in my own yard, but July is the month when the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library hold their Summer Writers Series, featuring one Michigan author a week for four weeks. The third week of the series this year was author and farmer and chef Abra Berens, and not only was she FOLTL guest author on Tuesday but the following Thursday she prepared a special chef’s dinner, also at the Willowbrook Inn. Two nights out in one week!

Abra Berens at the Willowbrook Inn

Sommelier du soir

The Willowbrook is a magical event venue, elegant and at the same time simple and old-fashioned. Mimi DiFrancesca and Joel Heberlein, in transforming the 140-year-old building, have only added to its charm, such that it is always a joy to be there. The windows invite the outdoors in, giving the feeling that one is in a very grand and spacious treehouse. And this time, of course, there was Abra’s wonderful menu, served by friendly faces, many of them familiar. Quite the evening out!

Also noteworthy is that a portion of ticket sales from Thursday’s dinner went to Food Rescue, people doing much-needed and important work in northern Michigan.

My role in the program came following dessert and was – no surprise! – selling books that Abra happily signed for her satisfied diners. Sunny Juliet was ready for play when I got home, and I was ready for sleep, but we worked it out.

 

Books are my life.

Sunny amusing her dog momma at bedtime --

Mornings Outdoors

 

In my life, mornings mean outdoors, and while that’s usually in our own yard, sometimes Sunny Juliet and I go farther afield. Friday we did what I call “Go for a ride, go for a walk,” where we get in the car and have a leash walk (or two or three) somewhere other than our familiar home grounds, with stops also simply to give the dog momma a chance to photograph lovely sights. 

That pond on Alpers Road again --

Books as Antifragile Technology

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and my, how that name keeps cropping up in my posts lately!) does not have an entry for ‘books’ in the index to his book Antifragile, but because BOOK is an important topic in my life, not only as a reader but also as a bookseller, I have added the term to his index, noting the number of each page where books enters the discussion. First, in the chapter on “Via Negativa,” he notes that “the future is mostly in the past,” by which he means that the longer a technology or a way of doing things has survived, the longer it probably will continue to survive. This means that, contrary to human beings, with technologies and ways of doing things, the older will typically survive the younger. Following that logic (and he gives several examples), we can predict with some assurance that the continued life of the printed book will greatly surpass that of the e-reader.

 

“No one reads books any more,” people told me when I opened my bookstore 31 years ago – hence my new motto: 

Surviving skeptics for over 200 dog years

 -- though I’m happy to say the skeptics seem fewer in number with each passing year, as more and more people seem to rediscover books and realize that paper and print are here to stay. In fact, I rarely hear the dismissive, skeptical claim about books so often voiced three decades ago.

Oldest on the premises -- at present

Taleb distinguishes between the perishable (objects) and the nonperishable, the latter having what he calls an “informational nature to it.”

 

A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology has survived about a century and a half (and we will speculate should survive another one). Humans die, but their genes—a code—do not necessarily. The physical book is perishable—say, a specific copy of the Old Testament—but its contents are not, as they can be expressed into another physical book [my emphasis added].

 

In this passage we deal with the technology of the book in a different way, not predicting the life of the technology but the “imperishability” of the information it carries. 

 

What of the perennial human craving for novelty, for whatever is “new and improved”? Anything that has an electronic on/off switch, Taleb thinks, is something that can induce neomania in us – the feeling that we have to have the very latest model – whereas what he calls “the artisanal” (and I take it this could be a book as well as a painting by an Old Master or a piece of furniture, examples he cites) continues to be satisfying even as newer items are available all around us. Thus the artisanal is antifragile, the electronic fragile to time and change. 

 

The e-reader is fragile in another way that the book is not. Accessibility to electric power, battery life, and the general fatigue that overtakes computerized parts all make the e-reader more fragile than the bound, printed volume. How many laptops have you gone through in the past 30 years? But do you have a paperback book from college days in the Sixties? I do – and it still “works” perfectly, as do these volumes from the late nineteenth century.

These have endured.

Taleb received a letter from a historian Paul Doolan in Zurich, asking how young people could be taught skills for the 21^stcentury, since we have no way of knowing what skills will be needed. Taleb’s perhaps surprising answer (perhaps not, if you’ve been reading his work) is to have those young people read the classics. This is where the sentence appears: “The future is in the past.” 

 

We cannot return to the past, and few of us would choose to do so. The wisdom of the past, however, the accumulated knowledge of our culture is the legacy to us of all who have lived before, and we can avoid many errors by learning what hasn’t worked out well for our human ancestors. 

 

What is success, for an individual, a corporation, or a culture? Taleb tells us the most important factor is the avoidance of unsurvivable error or the unforeseeable, rare but unsurvivable event. Mere survival does not insure success, but there is no success without survival, so it is crucial to avoid that fatal misstep.

 

We cannot learn from what has not (yet) happened or what might happen, only from what has happened.

History: Learn from it.

Any Day Now…

"Cherry-ripe," wrote poet Robert Herrick of Julia's lips.

Trees are full of cherries, and equipment is in place (shaker, truck, vats) for tart cherry harvest in the orchard around my old farmhouse. My guess is that the farmer is only waiting for the Brix reading to be right where he wants it. 

 

Meanwhile, trees so full of cherries are not so full of leaves, so there’s another question, and my tentative answer is tied to the fact that my black walnut tree (not sprayed with anything) is also dropping a lot of leaves. I think the trees are hedging their bets. In the economy of a plant, it’s the seeds that matter for the future: leaves are there to take in needed nutrition, and when that work is done, and as we come into hotter, drier weather, the tree’s economy is best served with fewer expenditures of moisture – a sparser population to provide for, in other words. That is the explanation of a bookseller, not a scientist, you realize.

 

Yes, summer is hurrying along, and on Sunday morning I saw the season’s first goldenrod in bloom. In July!

 

Sneaky little devils!

I have monarda and tall phlox blooming now in my garden. Black raspberries keep on coming, too, and I finally have two batches of my patented (not really, but it is my specialty) ‘blackstraw’ jam made, with no end in sight. I use twice to three times the amount of raspberries to the smaller amount of Bardenhagen (local) strawberries, and mine is cooked, not freezer jam, because I don’t want to worry about losing all my work in the event of a winter power outage. For the same reason, when fall arrives I will be drying and saucing my apples. Let’s not have fall arrive too soon, though! That goldenrod makes me nervous….

 

Jammin'!

Time flies by because these are busy days, and the coming week will be an endurance test for this old bookseller. I will be closing at 3 p.m. on both Tuesday and Thursday this week, selling books at events at the Willowbrook Inn both evenings. Tuesday is the third of four FOLTL Summer Writers Series evenings, with Abra Berens as guest author. Northport claims Abra for her eight years at Bare Knuckle Farm and Friday farmers market. Her three cookbooks are Grist (grains), Ruffage (vegetables), and the latest, Pulp (fruit). Doors for her presentation open at 6:30 (with cash bar), and the event will begin at 7 p.m. It's free, and the public is cordially invited.

 

Showcasing Abra's books today in Northport --

Abra will be doing a special chef’s dinner on Thursday, but if you don’t have tickets already for that, you're too late. Not surprisingly, tickets to the dinner sold out early. Here is an interesting, if slightly outdated, interview where you can learn more about author/farmer/chef Abra Berens.

 

Is it any wonder my reading is suffering these days for lack of time? Between customers at the bookstore, slowly I make my way through Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but at home there seems to be very little reading time at all, what with (Sunday, for example) hanging laundry out in the sun, watering gardens when it doesn’t rain, mowing grass, making jam, and, on all-too-rare occasions, vacuuming floors and catching up on recording and filing business expenses and decluttering (which means picking up things I dropped on chairs rather than putting them away throughout the week, because the majority of my time at home, when not sleeping, is spent outdoors). Every morning lately has also held a stint of editing, rather than the reading in bed with morning coffee that I did all winter and spring. But soon I will make time to read new books, and then I will report to you on some of them.

 

Part of every single day, of course, involves outdoor time with Sunny Juliet. We take long walks, work on agility practice, and have agility sessions with Coach Mike. I throw tennis balls for her, and there are frequent though unscheduled romps with her new friend and neighbor, Griffin. Below are Griffin and Sunny at rest (rather than running like crazy or wrestling and rolling around, which allowed me to get a halfway decent photograph of them for a change), although they are “resting” in this shot only because Sunny had retreated from the field of play, determined to keep possession of one of her precious tennis balls. 

Griffin and Sunny take a little break.

Do you think life is going to slow down? Any day now? Ha! Not a chance! Yet I recall, dimly, the long summer days of girlhood, when hours barely seemed to move at all, and if we try we can still find a few moments like that now and then. Make them, I should say. 

My little heaven on earth --

Another point of view --

Sharing a Few of My Secrets

Lake Michigan from Jelinek Road

 

I see things that aren’t there.

 

The probability that you would spot a great blue heron wading at the corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is low -- not impossible but unlikely. I’ve only seen a heron once at that corner, hunting in an ephemeral pool after a heavy rain, stalking – what? Surely not fish? What year was that? No matter. Whenever I make that turn, I look for the heron and see him in memory.

 

Not much farther up Jelinek Road I see the buck that leapt in front of our van one evening at dusk, missing the windshield by a hair, only missing at all because the Artist had seen it in time to be able to brake. We could not have been closer to the animal unless we’d collided. That spot in the road holds that incident for me.

 

Still on the same long, curving climb is where we pulled over to the side of the road and sat quietly for an hour or more, hoping to see some noteworthy celestial event, the nature of which I have forgotten. Was it a comet? Whatever it was, we never did see it, our view open to the west but not to the north. Still, it was restful and pleasant to be sitting out there by the side of the road on a summer evening, doing absolutely nothing but looking at the sky and talking to each other. And then we did see something: the International Space Station passed overhead! Neither of us had ever seen it before, and I have not seen it since, but I see again in imagination what I saw with the Artist that night in the evening sky.

 

All of these sights – heron, buck, ISS – I see over and over, although they are not there for anyone else to see who travels that road. And I have not even covered a mile on a single road with these examples, so imagine the many invisible (to you) sights I see along every Leelanau County road….

 

 

My life is a setup for coincidence. 

 

When my sisters and I drove down to Good Harbor a week ago Sunday, I pointed out another memory corner of M-22, this one between Leland and Glen Arbor. There in the woods used to be an unusual tourist attraction. It wasn’t exactly stations of the cross, as I recall it, but giant billboard-like paintings from the life of Jesus that one encountered along a winding path. I called them ‘dioramas’ when describing them, but they weren’t really that: as I say, more like billboards. But what was the place called? Not that my sisters cared, but I wanted to remember. One would occasionally come across an old postcard showing one of the scenes….

 

Well, the very next day I was going through a milk crate filled with booklets and ephemera and came across what I thought would be a menu (it was that size) from the Leland Lodge. It wasn’t a menu but did advertise the Lodge as available for large group dinners. What caught my eye, though, was a list of tourist sights near Leland. The dunes were on the list, of course, but so was -- Lund’s Scenic Garden! That was it! 

 

Not everyone is surrounded on a daily basis by old books and papers, which is why I say my life is a setup to invite coincidences.

 

 

Sometimes I DO dog-ear a book!

 

Rarely do I turn down the corner of a page … or underline sentences … or write notes in the margins. But sometimes I do all of those things to a book, though I never, ever use highlighters on book pages.

 

In almost every case, the book I mark up has to be a paperback, it has to be used, and if I’m dog-earing and underlining and writing notes in the margin and sometimes making my own index (if one isn’t provided) or adding to an existing index (if one exists) – if I’m doing all those things, it’s because I’m working with the book, treating it as an assignment I’ve given myself, wanting to make sure I don’t miss important ideas and information.

 

One book I treated that way last month was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which took me a long time to get through, because it was so upsetting (although I highly recommend it) that I couldn’t read all that much at a time. This month, at the shop and between customers, the book I am treating with apparent disrespect but, really, with my highest respect (isn’t it respect when one engages fully with someone’s words?) is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fortunately, Antifragile is not a world-historical horror show but a fascinating and original way of looking at the world in general and human life in particular. Taleb’s runaway bestseller, the book that put him on the map, was The Black Swan, which I have not yet read, and since all his books grow from one central idea and since he has his own somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary that carries through all the books, I am picking up his language piecemeal as I go.…

 

I am an introvert at heart.

 

This is a secret shared by many booksellers and librarians. We grew up with books as friends and had adventures in stories, and thus we are not the greatest of “party animals.” We were often shy as children and have had to work to overcome our shyness. My first summer selling books (yes, in Northport), I began each day with butterflies in my stomach, anticipating the ordeal of facing and talking to strangers! It probably took five years before I realized how shy many other people are. That was a growing-up lesson.

 

When someone comes into my bookstore for the first time (as is true whenever anyone enters a bar or restaurant or retail establishment for the first time), that person is entering “my turf” and trusting that the atmosphere will be welcoming, so it is (my tardy realization here) part of my role to put people at ease, to assuage their shyness rather than to indulge my own. Whether they want to browse without interference or have questions or want suggestions is up to them, and I try to be aware of those differences. There is no single way to treat all potential customers.

 

 

Sometimes I read on the job.

 

For one thing, reading books is part of my job, my sister reassured me years ago, but it’s also a way that my introvert self can stay out of the way of people who need to make their own discoveries and have their own experiences in my bookstore. I do look up and greet everyone who comes in and often ask if they want a particular subject area. If someone is looking lost, I’ll ask if that person has a question. But I don’t follow people around pushing books at them. Who comes into a bookstore for that?

 

 

I make things up as I go along.

 

Bookstore hours are something I’ve tried to keep consistent throughout each season. Last year Sunday was always a day off, Monday a BCOA (by chance or appointment) day. This year those days are sometimes reversed, and Tuesdays in July are different from Tuesdays in June and August, because the FOLTL Summer Writers Series takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Willowbrook Mill, and since I am on hand to sell books at those events, my Tuesday bookstore hours in July are only 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every year I make up my schedule season by season, or even month by month.

Tonight's featured author and book, 7 p.m.

It should be no surprise that I make up prices on my used books. For the more expensive items, I try to stay in the general ballpark of the national market; other times, with inexpensive books, or when I need room, there are bargains to be had! Right now, for instance, I have my rolling cart full of $3, mostly hardcover books, some of them minor classics, such as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelius Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. How many times did I read that book when I was young?

 

 

I love my work!

 

For years I worked at jobs that made me very unhappy. My parents had insisted I take a typing class in high school so I would have “something to fall back on,” and I fell back repeatedly, year after year, going to school for a while and then dropping out to go back to fulltime work I found terribly uncongenial. We natural introverts are, I think, often unhappy when we have bosses, but we don’t like bossing other people, either, which makes having my own one-woman bookstore the perfect work world for me.

 

But I love going home, too. 

 

Much as I love my bookstore, any season of the year I love going home at the end of the day, too. Home to books and dog, home to gardens outdoors and cozy reading chair in the house, home to homey projects, such as making jam or chutney or applesauce, or more professional projects, such as editing work.

 

I still consider myself a lucky woman. 

 

Nothing, of course, is the same or ever will be again since the Artist died in spring of 2022, but I often repeat to my dog words the Artist spoke aloud so many times:

 

“We live in a beautiful place!”

 

“It’s a beautiful day – and we’re alive!”

 

Also, I am rich beyond belief in memories.

 

Original Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo St.