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