Our World Today

Sun in the morning, moon at night

Sunrise (almost) over Northport harbor

We humans pay more attention to sunrises and sunsets than to the rising and setting of the moon, and that only makes sense, since our planet is dependent on the sun for light and warmth, and without it earth would be lifeless. There would be no us.

 

The moon, on the other hand, we could live without, right? We only see it, with no light of its own, because it reflects sunlight, and when earth blocks the path of that sunlight and the moon is “dark,” invisible to us, how much does the darkness of the moon change our daily lives? It’s only a satellite. 

 

And yet, I love a moonrise. It reminds me of summer nights when friends used to visit and we all (younger then) sat outdoors and watched the moon come up over the meadow. These nights it still comes up over the meadow and sets behind my big barn, but the other evening I drove to higher ground to watch the moon come up and the sun go down.

Moonrise on Saturday evening

Sunset afterglow

This is the little world of my country neighborhood, a peaceful place, and we have been having a beautiful, balmy fall. I didn’t even mind the rain on Monday, perfectly timed to begin at the end of Sunny’s and my agility session with our coach and then gently watering the rooted viburnum cuttings I’d gotten into the ground on Sunday afternoon. For me, the rain was perfectly timed.

Viburnum cutting in the ground

Sometimes forces we can’t control work out well in our favor, sometimes not. The onset of Monday’s rain worked out perfectly for Sunny and me, but not so well for the team that was supposed to follow us. 

 

 

About Trust (books mentioned in this section)

 

Do you have people in your life whom you trust? What does that mean to you, trusting someone? On one website I found with definitions of trust from people in a variety of disciplines, my favorite was this one from Brené Brown: 

 

Trust is defined as: choosing to make what’s important to you, vulnerable to the actions of someone else. Distrust is defined as: what I shared with you, is not safe with you.

 

In the novel Britt-Marie Was Here, by Fredrik Backman, the main character recalls the way her family life deteriorated after a road accident took the life of her sister and left Britt-Marie alive as an only child: Her father came home later and later, and her mother talked less and less, finally not at all. “They never spoke about the accident,” the author writes, “and, because they didn’t, they also couldn’t talk about anything else.” The death of a child, if it results in silence or blame, can also be the death of a marriage. 

 

In my own life, there have been at least a couple of times when someone (a man in both cases) ruled one particular subject out of bounds for discussion. It was not the same subject with the two men (one was personal, the other political), but both times it was a topic important to me and something I wanted, felt I needed—to explore and understand. 

 

Well, didn’t we have a lot of other mutual interests, other things to talk about? Certainly, in both cases, and yet in both cases I found the unilateral gag order chilling, which is why that sentence in the Backman book (you’ll find it on page 50 in the paperback edition) struck me with such force. Having one topic absolutely forbidden did not incline me to pursue other subjects with enthusiasm but rather to find other conversational partners who would not place limits on what I would be allowed to say.

 

My best friend is my best friend in large part (besides our history together) because I feel I can say anything to her. She doesn’t have to see everything just as I see it or agree with every position I take. Trust, as I understand it, does not demand total agreement or even complete understanding. It is, however, a willingness to hear and, if possible, to respond. 

 

Trust, for me—and anyone can make the first trusting move—creates room for dialogue in Martin Buber’s I-Thou sense. In this wonderful presentation by Ben Sax, he talks about taking off our armor. What a great way to put it! 

 

In another novel I read recently, What the Fireflies Knew, by Kai Harris, it was a father who died (of a drug overdose), and the child narrator remarks that her mother’s grief was so overwhelming that the mother had no room to deal with the grief of her daughters, who had lost their father. Again, a family death had become a forbidden topic, and the enforced silence damaged relationships. 

 

These limited examples of refusing dialogue on a particular subject don’t touch on other ways we may refuse trust. It’s a narrower focus that I address today. Obviously, we may fear that a certain person may harm us physically or take advantage of us financially or even betray a confidence. But Britt-Marie’s parents were not concerned that she would tell someone else about her sister’s death: Everyone already knew about their loss. You might say they had been hurt too badly to open themselves up to the possibility of further hurt by letting themselves feel their pain. (A losing proposition!) Kenyatta’s mother, in the second novel, takes a more positive step, going into therapy to deal with her loss so she can get back to mothering her children. 

 

“Feeling safe” with someone does not have to mean entrusting that person with a secret. Values important to me are not secret. Far from it. You are reading about them here. Actually, I think that “feeling safe” can be at least as much a matter of self-confidence as of trust in another, but that’s another large topic, one I won’t get into today.

 

Trust isn’t something we owe anyone else. (It’s more than respecting someone’s personhood.) If you are leery of trusting faceless strangers online, that just makes sense. Not giving someone a blank check, not handing over your car keys to a drunken friend—that’s simple prudence. And anyone who attempts to force your confidence is unlikely to be someone you’ll trust very far, if you're anything like me. 

 

There may be people, though, who would say it’s better, it’s ideal, to trust everyone. I can’t go that far. But I will stick my neck out to trust those I love and admire, and it’s important to me that they reciprocate so we can see and hear each other.

 

Color is coming on.

The larger scene

 

I have said before in this space that I am a lucky woman, despite having lost the love of my life. I live in a beautiful place and have what feels like meaningful work. (I believe in books!) I have in my life family, friends, a dog, many books, and lots of outdoor space to explore, thanks to continuing health. I have good neighbors. Given all these blessings, it’s not difficult for me most of the time to heed the wish, “Have a good day!” 

 

Because the majority of the inventory in my shop’s curated collection are used books, I am often asked, “Where do you get all your books?” and here’s my answer: I order most of my new books from Ingram, a national distributor, and a few I can’t get that way from self-published authors or small presses that don’t deal with Ingram, but the used books generally come to me. After over 32 years in the business, people with “too many books” either know me or easily find out that I’m here. Some of these books I buy outright, if they meet my criteria and budget; a very limited few I take on consignment; I frequently offer trade credit; sometimes, yes, books are simply given to me; but some I turn away (musty or otherwise unsalable), though always thanking the person who brought them in for thinking of me. However the books come to me, though, costly or free, I invest my judgment and my time.

The other day I was asked a different question, and the wording of the query landed strangely on my ear: “Where do you get your opinions?” Beg pardon? I don’t shop for opinions or buy them wholesale or pick them up at a social media thrift shop. If I did, they wouldn’t be “mine,” would they? I form my opinions in part from my own limited experience but also from facts at my disposal, which are generally also at the disposal of anyone willing to spend the time gathering and weighing information from reliable sources. 

Sunny's opinion: It's playtime!

My questioner was asking about political opinions, and I should say that his opinions and mine are at variance, to put it mildly. But as I told him, facts about current events are readily available. Sometimes we have to seek them out—no single source of news will present all the available facts—but they are there to be seen and heard. 

 

For example, the president of the United States speaks, and his rambling, insulting, threatening words of hate and derision are there on radio, television, and online video to be heard. ICE is ordered out, masked, in full tactical gear, into neighborhoods, and what they do is there, out in the open, to be seen, televised, and disseminated. Those words and actions are not my opinion. Now the governor of Texas has volunteered his National Guard troops and sent them to Chicago, against the wishes of the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. My very negative opinion is my judgment of those words and actions, combined with American values taught me from childhood. 

 

Where does my questioner get his facts? Which issues does he consider important, and how does he weigh the relative importance of the vast variety of important issues facing us today? Does he see immigrants and Democrats as enemies of the United States? (The president holds and encourages such a view.) Does he envision one-party rule as a solution to current divisions? 

 

Supporters of the current administration in Washington love to talk about “the law” when they discuss immigration. They want people to apply for citizenship through legal channels and “wait their turn.” I’m not sure how they feel about anyone seeking asylum. Usually it’s just “Do it the legal way!” -- end of story; that’s all she wrote. Adults brought here as children? Ship ‘em back to where they were born, even if they don’t speak the language, and let ‘em apply from there! Obey the law! But when it comes to the president following the law—NOT; or the president governing according to the Constitution—NOT; or the president pursuing frivolous, baseless lawsuits against a newspaper for criticizing him or against a judge for ruling against him—when it comes to a felon convicted on 34 counts sitting in the Oval Office rather than in prison, an American president claiming to be above the law—there these same vociferous “law and order” folks see no problem. Doesn't it hurt their brains to maintain belief in such a blatant contradiction? 

 

They also like to say our country is not a democracy but a republic. A republic? (Not a democratic republic?) But somehow it’s okay to send National Guard troops from the State of Texas to the State of Oregon when Oregon doesn’t want them? Where are the rights of Oregon when the U.S. president and Texas governor can conspire against Oregon? Read about it from a far-from-unbiased news source.

 

“We support law enforcement,” they say. They don’t add, “as long as the law is not applied to ‘our side,’” but how else can their talk of support for the rule of law be understood, given the many illegal outrages on which they remain silent?

Now the president, the same man who incited his followers to storm the capitol on January 6, 2022, to overturn an election he lost, is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to place Chicago under military control. The irony is unsurpassable.  

As for out-and-out corruption, read how a true conservative sees it. Can you read this without wanting to vomit? Without thinking the words BANANA REPUBLIC? I can't.

 

How to Remain Sane

 

I should put a question mark there. How do we face up to what's happening and not lose our sanity or our courage? Again, I live in a beautiful place, and if I were to close my eyes to the rest of the country I could pretend that I am living in Paradise, but innocent people in this country are being detained without cause in my name; children in this country are being separated from parents in my name; hard-working government workers are losing their jobs and the health coverage in my name; and slaughter continues in Gaza in my name. The list goes on and on. Because I am an American, what my country does it does in my name, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I cannot enjoy the benefits and privileges of citizenship in this country and wash my hands of its ongoing crimes as if they have nothing to do with me. Like it or not, I am implicated. 

 

It’s a narrow, wobbly walk from one day to the next, remaining aware and informed and vigilant and taking responsibility, on the one hand, while at the same time being grateful for the gifts of life, maintaining vital, loving relationships, and continuing to work and hope for a better tomorrow. I wake in the dark with a torn and lacerated heart but take up my hope and resolve again when morning comes because I love my country!

Salute and gratitude today to Governor J.B. Pritzger of Illinois. 

  

¡NUNCA TE RINDAS!

Never give up!

P.S. to those who need a refresher course in geography: Chicago is not on the border with any other country. Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes that lies wholly in the U.S. Look it up. You might start here, but any map or atlas will show the same thing. Border Patrol operating in Chicago, therefore, is way out of its jurisdiction, although I see they have redrawn the maps to show something very different.

The opinions here are mine.
You can verify the facts yourself.

Ask Me About the West Michigan Pike

We’ve got a lot of fall color left here Up North and a sunny Saturday forecast for tomorrow. It’s amazing there are leaves left on the trees at all, after several days of high winds, but leaves there are—red, yellow, brown, toast- and plum-colored and, yes, even green still--telling us that fall is not over by a long shot.

Speaking of shots, my leading photo image above was taken on one of my favorite back roads near home. Life in the slow lane is my chosen life, but what if all roads up from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and downstate Michigan were nothing but “serpentine sand trails through barren wilderness, rutted dirt pathways and thin gravel-covered roads”? Try to imagine that, and then imagine the improvement in travel meant by the advent of a good gravel road from Chicago to the Straits!

A new book by M. Chrstine Byron and Thomas R. Wilson is a kind of scrapbook of those early days along Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, back when vacationing in a car was a new thing. The new way of travel was called motor touring, and it began before the advent of numbered highways or even what we think of as highways at all, so when the good road was built between Chicago and the Straits of Mackinac (there would be no bridge for several more decades), motorists had cause for celebration. Ernest Hemingway wrote from Horton Bay to his pals back in Evanston that they could expect to make the trip on the new good road in “less than three days”!

The new road, born without a number, had something better. It had a name. It was called the West Michigan Pike. Ask a dozen people if they know anything about the West Michigan Pike. Fewer people remember this name than know of the Old Dixie Highway, of which the West Michigan Pike became the northernmost stretch. (The section of the West Michigan Pike through Illinois is the road I grew up knowing as the Lincoln Highway.)

Imagine what an adventure it would have been to start out from Chicago and drive north along the shore of Lake Michigan in 1922! How many times would the driver expect to stop for a flat tire, do you suppose? In those days that meant taking the tire off the rim, patching it and remounting it, but the new road was probably easier on tires than the old rocky, sandy trails had been, and gas stations and repair garages quickly sprang up along its length. The subtitle, after all, of Vintage Views Along the West Michigan Pike, M. Christine Byron and Thomas R Wilson (a.k.a. Christine and Tom) is From Sand Trails to U.S. 31. Big difference!

The book shows familiar Lake Michigan resort towns in earlier days when Northport, I note, touted itself as “the niftiest town on the pike” and the “Friendly Town on the northeast tip.” A friend of mine from Spring Lake found one of the old concrete mileposts in a farmer’s field. All the illustrations from this Vintage Views book (one of Byron and Wilson’s earlier books was Vintage Views of Leelanau County) are taken from period postcards, travel posters and advertising circulars, each page inviting close scrutiny and lingering enjoyment. The vision behind the West Michigan Pike Association, all but forgotten, is made vivid and fascinating by Byron and Wilson’s newest work.

Weird Dream Travels

Sunday night we watched an old Jimmy Stewart film set in World War II-era Chicago (downtown and old tenement districts) and Illinois State Penitentiary Stateville, Joliet, the maximum security prison designed after Jeremy Bentham’s plan for the “Panopticon,” and after the movie (“Call Northside 777”) was over I read myself to sleep with Dante’s Inferno, following the burning red river of blood and fire descending almost to the bottom ring, so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that my dreams were full of complicated geography and fabulous architecture on a grand, confusing scale.

In the first dream, I was working in a large, crowded, institutional room, where my job was to separate little bouquets from mountains of blood-red flowers. The place seemed to be a hospital, and the bouquets for patients’ rooms, but I had no vases to put the flowers in. This sent me off on a search through corridors full of steam pipes until I found a large room that had similarities to a kitchen and/or a canteen, and there in an open cupboard were vases and jars—a motley assortment, all needing to be washed, but I thought they would do. For a while I worried about having left my original work station but gradually realized that I had been given a public service assignment as some kind of punishment (for what, I don’t know) and that none of the supervisors in any of the work stations cared what I did, as long as they didn’t have to worry about keeping me busy. The place was a veritable formilière, an anthill, with all the uniformed people-ants rushing here and there, and every corridor and room full of stuff of all kinds.

A second dream involved elaborately constructed Japanese gardens with water features and narrow footpaths on many levels. There were tunnels and trellises and terraces, steps and gutters and miniature waterfalls. For some reason I was speaking French in this dream. There were two young men who could have been my grandsons, and when my foot slipped into water running alongside a footpath, and somehow a bit of water splashed into my mouth (I have no idea how that happened) I exclaimed about it to the two young men, asking them with great concern why the water was so bitter (amère) and what was in it. Though it looked fresh and clear as it flowed along, in my mouth it was frighteningly caustic. The whole place looked like a simple Michigan small town that was trying to reinvent itself, to become something exotic, for the tourist trade. It was fall, and the leaves on the simple old trees outside the gardens were November brown.

In the longest, most complicated dream David and I started out from Kalamazoo (where we did live, in fact, many years ago) with a group, on a bus, but when we arrived at the day’s destination, where we had a limited number of hours before the bus would depart once again for home, he and I (this is so like us!) separated from the group and went off exploring on our own. Our bus had dropped us off at very ornate, large, tall building that towered over the rest of the landscape, and we had the vague, general impression that it formed one of the furthermost ends of the huge, sprawling, campus-like place we set out to explore without a map. My dream impression was that this main building was at the north end of the complex and that we started out walking south and would have to turn back and walk north to reach our bus again.

It was the strangest place. I don’t know what it was supposed to be, but when I woke up and thought about it, the scariest part was that I could imagine people planning and building just such a place! It was a weird combination of college campus, shopping center, condominium development and TV evangelist “retreat” and residential worship center. All the buildings were unlocked, with no indication of what they were, so that we might (and did) wander into what looked like a beautifully wood-panelled, 19th-century clubhouse only to discover that it was a private house with naked people strolling around in it, very annoyed at our intrusion.

Inside the buildings, some of the hallways were more like mazes, with dead ends lined with vending machines, and some of the exits led outdoors not with simple doors and/or sets of steps but with elaborate garden statuary of miniature mountains to be descended to the ground. It was when leaving such a building that I realized David and I had become separated from each other.

I tried to hurry, but the thing I had to descend slowed me down considerably: the narrow ledges for feet were far apart, and the handholds far from the ledges. Someone gave me a hand, and I made it to the ground eventually, but David was nowhere in sight, and it was then that I tried to run, but you know how it can be with dreams, especially when one is asleep in bed, sandwiched between a spouse and a dog, with no room to move a leg! I seemed to be running underwater, except that the water was a thick syrup. My lungs were near bursting with effort, and yet I could hardly put one foot in front of another, and the buildings and the rooms in them and all the people buying hamburgers, shopping for cosmetics, proselytizing for their religions and hurrying to their classes were much too busy to help me.

Then I found a crowded fast food place where all the placemats were maps, and on the wall was a larger map, and I could see at last an overview of the place, with the building where we had started (it looked like a gigantic old-fashioned radio towering over the rest of the scenery) at the top of the map poster. Since I couldn’t get up any speed running, I leaped into the air and began to fly. This helped in terms of being able to see where I was, but even in the air my movement was frustratingly slow.

Where was David? Would the bus leave without me? Without us? Would we be trapped in this horrible Wonderland forever?

Dante and Stateville do not combine to make soothing dreams, but they don’t make boring dreams, either.

Elsewhere in Midwest

Dave Somsky of Northport and Chicago was back in our little village a few weeks ago, sharing pictures of the venture he and his son launched recently in the Windy City. Vrai Amour, at 953 W. Webster Avenue, is now open for business as a retail food establishment. If you’re there in the city and homesick for Leelanau County, you can find Black Star Farms wines at Vrai Amour, but you certainly don’t have to be homesick to shop their exciting selection of gourmet specialty foods and wines. Back here at home, we are all excited for Dave and Matt and wish them all the best. (Just thinking about Chicago, I'm remembering how exciting the city is in late springtime, when the trees are all in bloom along the lakeshore and the first sailboats dot the water.) Congratulations, Matt and Dave, on making your dream come true!