Elsewhere, Elsewhen

Green moss in winter

These things are no more, and the feeling I am telling here … may have perished, too. It felt like the tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore, a debris.

 

-      Niall Williams, This is Happiness

 

I had no celebratory plans for St. Patrick’s Day, either for the day itself or for the preceding weekend. Saturday would see me in my bookshop, and maybe Sunny and I would get up to the dog park on Sunday, if the weather didn’t turn wretched, but forebodings were somewhat against us. Ay, that’s March!

 

Without thinking, anyway, of St. Paddy on—was it Thursday or Friday? No matter—I picked up a paperback novel with blurbs on the back cover looking good enough that I thought I’d give it a try. I needed a new bedtime book, having stretched Olive Cook’s Breckland out about as long as possible, setting it aside repeatedly, both to read other books (both fiction and nonfiction) and also to make it last, then returning to it time and time again when sleep eluded me in the wee small hours, until finally, against my will, I reluctantly reached the last page. 

 

So now I would read Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness. At least, I would begin the novel and see if it held me. And now, to say that it did hold me did is to make a massive understatement.

 

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality. 

 

The narrator, an old man—well, exactly my own age!—is recounting a time much earlier in his life when, as a lad of seventeen years, he left the seminary in Dublin with lost faith and went to live for a while with his grandparents in a remote Irish village during the time that electricity, long promised to the village, came at last. The manner of its coming is not incidental to the story but woven into its essence. Here is the man who has come to the village of Faha to supervise the installation of poles and lines:

 

Everybody carries a world. But some people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released. 

 

And here are the strains of music woven into the story:

 

The quiet of country life can sit on your heart like a stone. To lift it, to escape the boundaries of myself awhile, I took down the fiddle.

 

One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that.

 

So now, thoroughly charmed and engaged, I read myself to sleep on Friday evening and again when I woke in the dark hours of Saturday morning, but only when dashing off an e-mail to my sisters on Saturday afternoon from the shop and mentioning the book did I realize what a timely choice I had made. Irish! How appropriate!

Woolly bear woke up on Friday!

The temperature rose to 70 degrees in Northport on Saturday, and the sun shone bright, but the wind blew like the devil, gusting up to 50 mph. (So much for my having swept the sidewalk with the push broom two days before!) Sunshine brought people out of their houses, and the wind in Traverse City—worse than we had in Northport, I was told—sent some of them clear up to Northport, so it was a fairly lively bookshop day, and only late in the afternoon, while a couple from Ann Arbor were happily browsing, did the power go out on Waukazoo Street. First the lights flickered, then went out briefly and came back on again, that happening two or three times, until finally they stayed off for good. Luckily, my happy customers were undeterred. We had a meeting of hearts and minds as their choices were books by Wendell Berry and Robert Reich. Closing up then, I only hoped the power would still be on at my house when I got home.

 

It was not. No lights. No furnace. No pump.

 

But I was prepared for a power outage with two deep stockpots filled with water and a brand-new, long-handled lighter so I wouldn’t need to risk fingers by lighting the stove with a match. Right away I lit my two fat candles and sorted through the collection of oil lamps for one with a good wick, cleaned the glass chimney, and filled the reservoir with oil. Success! The power company thought electricity would be back on by 3 a.m., I was at first dubious, but a look at the overnight forecast showed the winds gradually dying down, so maybe….

 

But we would be fine, Sunny and I, and now my reading choice struck me as even more appropriate. I had only reached Chapter 18, not even the halfway point of the novel, and while Noel’s grandparents had a crank telephone, the only one in the village, no one yet had the promised electricity. That was the fiction. Meanwhile, here in my “real” world I was all set with candles and oil lamps and a cell phone with 80% of its charge. Wind blowing demonically around my old farmhouse, dog lying across my feet, I felt a strong sense of kinship to the people of my own grandfather’s native land, back in times that were difficult and challenging in many ways but much simpler and probably more satisfying in others.

I haven’t said a word about the slowly unwinding plot of Williams’s novel and won’t get into that now. For me, it is the world of the story that matters. Early in my reading of it, I snapped a photo of the cover to send to my stepdaughter and texted her this brief message: “I am elsewhere. It is beautiful and restful.” So then, continuing my reading, I was struck by the passage quoted above about the Irish reels defeating time and space. Elsewhere! Yes!

 

Another of my Saturday customers was a young woman who said that if she could have a superpower, it would be to travel back in time for a day, not to intervene in history but simply to be there in that time. She agreed with me when I remarked that such is the magic of books. 

 

Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morning in the United States in the year 2025: Snow sifts in shifting veils from the barn roof. I am elsewhere, elsewhen.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all, Irish or otherwise.

Sunday morning...

...snow in Leelanau.

More Armchair Travel (because there is no such thing as “enough”)

But first, a Northern Michigan fall sunrise --
 

And then, oh, the advantages of armchair travel! Let me name a few of its wonderful features: You don’t need reservations, the weather is always fine, there are no layovers or long delays in airports, and whatever you’re wearing – sweatpants, pj’s, a shirt with half the buttons missing – you are properly dressed for the occasion. Costs are minimal, schedule super-flexible, hardships nonexistent. So curl up and get cozy. You can do it because others have made the trip for you. 

 

We are going to Ireland.

Two Leslie Lee books to start you off on your trip

Leslie Lee did the actual transatlantic travel with her sisters, while I only had to drive as far as Traverse City to visit her studio -- and actually I wouldn’t have had to go to town to pick up the books, but by making the trip I had the chance to see her wonderful space and can now share a few glimpses with you.

Where future magic will take place --

A different angle --

 

Possibly a pop-up retail space? She will let us know.

There is even a Betty Beeby room!

(This is why Betty Beeby's name sounds familiar to you.)

Leslie’s research into Irish prehistory and the DNA strains of Irish peoples is deep, but she also has light-hearted tales of inns and pubs, castles and ruins, and accounts of meeting Irish relatives she and her sisters never knew they had, all of her stories (as well as the little guidebook) illustrated with quick sketches made on the scene, watercolor added in later. Like the books of artist Frederick Franck (whose book The Zen of Seeing has never been out of print), Leslie’s illustrations are enchanting, and I am happy to have added her books to my bookstore offerings. You don’t have to be Irish to appreciate them, either, but if you are you’ll find them irresistible!

This week's front table focus

As you can see, Leslie’s books are sharing table space with the poetry of Richard Gilmore Loftus. The time of year prompted me to showcase copies of his collection entitled “Autumn,” and no sooner had I done that (before UnCaged, which was September 30 this year) when a message came from Rick about a new book, so here are signed copies of that book, too. In his new collection, “Canvas,” the poet’s focus is on the journey, not the destination, so we can travel with him, also – by boat, by car, and never far from water.

Rick's new poetry collection

We are never far from water with either Leslie Lee or Richard Gilmore Loftus, as we are never far from water here in Leelanau County, and if you are not physically here right now, you are here virtually if you are reading these words and perusing these images. Berries bright and red (haws) have set on the hawthorns, milkweeds are beginning to release their first seeds, and on the cloudiest day there is light somewhere in the sky, often over Lake Michigan for a few moments at day’s end. Thanks for coming to see me.

Spring Break Trilogy: Poetry, Dog, and Sunsets

another dawn

Until it does no longer more (an hour that comes eventually for us all), life goes on, here in the high desert and mountains as well as back in northern Michigan and everywhere else that that shelters family and friends. Sunrise, sunset, both moving north now that the equinox is past. Who knows how long we will be here or if we will be here again? But we are here now. 

 

Spring has played hide-and-seek this year in Cochise County, Arizona (as it always does back in Leelanau County, Michigan), and I see in my photographs of previous springs that wildflower blooms are tardy this year, compared to the last two. This is also the dustiest year we (the Artist and I) have ever seen here, though not necessarily the dustiest that has ever been. Dry, dusty, and very windy. I attribute late wildflower bloom and more frequent dust storms to a common source, drought, but that is not one of my three topics for today, so let’s move on. 

 

Poetry

 

Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems

by Thomas Lynch

Boston: David R. Godine, March 2021

Hardcover, 256pp.

ISBN: 978-1-56792-701-6

$25.95

 

When a mature poet offers us “new and selected poems,” it’s cause for celebration, but such a best-of-plus album is not to be hurried through in an evening or two. Initially I wanted to publish a post about Thomas Lynch’s new book for St. Patrick’s Day. Then for the book’s March 23 release date. And now – well, here I am, still gratefully reflecting as I linger over pages and turn back and forth to re-read.

 

Reflection invades poems that first appear to be simple snapshots. All the “heaving, tidal pulses of creation” are here. Do they rise from quiet hours of preparing bodies (the poet a funeral director in the family business since 1973) or simply any Irish man or woman’s penchant for dreaming and regretting? Or, most likely, the gift of poetry itself, bestowed unpredictably, like grace and then refined and distilled by the earthly craftsman. Particular poems pull me back to church, to Michigan waters, and then across larger salt waters to the land of my mother’s father, land I’ve never seen,

 

                                          …the land

between hayricks and Friesians with their calves

considering the innocence in all

God’s manifold creation but for Man,

and how he’d perish but for sin and mourning.

two parishes between here and the ocean:

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,

please God, and breakfast in the morning. 

 

The Sin-eater fills his belly at the bedsides of the dead, consuming their various sins along with bread and beer provided by the family of the deceased, that their dear departed might not languish forever in purgatory. After he“feasted on Easter Duties missed,” along with more repulsive sins that upset his digestion and gave him bad dreams, from time to time he considered retirement (or raising his rates, at least) but feels his living to be a mission equal to that of the priests. Although the twenty-four pages of poems selected from an earlier collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary, initially struck me as longer than I wanted to spend with old Argyle, I find now that it is these poems that haunt me, much as Argyle himself was haunted by the dead whose sins he had consumed by their bedside.

 

Which is not to ignore new poems that stopped me in my tracks. America and Ireland; families and outsiders; landscapes, realities, and fantasies (the fantasy of “Casablanca”); the quick and the dead; cats, cows, dogs, and horses – not only the Bible-inspired but all Lynch’s poems are about “the spiritual life” as he understands it, which (he tells us himself) is faith in “the life of language and its power to make us known to one another and to ourselves,” a faith in the possibility of connection. And to a poet, more than the meanings of words matters in making connections with language. Vowel sounds matter, line lengths matter, enjambment or its absence, internal rhymes rather than an end-of-line rhyme scheme. There is so much here, so many levels, that the table at the rich ongoing feast is fuller every time one looks. Thus does art work miracles.

 

As I’ve already said, this is not a book to hurry through (no book of real poems is), and I salute not only poet Thomas Lynch but also Boston publisher David R. Godine. Thank you both so much!

 

 

Dog: Peasy Tales Continue

 

I’m not sure what to report about my rescue dog. “You’re a better dog every day,” the Artist tells little Peasy in all seriousness, and it’s true that my sweet Pea is much calmer and quieter in the mornings now (usually) ... and that we are able to take him with us in the car or leave him alone for hours at a time, as weather and inclination dictate ... and that the three of us adore our evening “pack time” cuddling and snuggling. Such a good dog in so many ways! But you know how some people will say, “I’m a people person”? Well, Peasy is not a people dog. He is in love with me and looks up to the Artist and is happy being part of a family and having a home but still very fearful and skittish of other humans. Not a take-anywhere dog like Sarah. So (words of my mother that I dreaded above all others), we’ll see. 

 

 

A Sunset Drive

 

Sometimes, if we have an early supper and don’t immediately sink into our reading chairs with current books, the Artist and I like to drive a few miles to the east and take quiet leave of another day with the long, open views down across the buttes of the Sulphur Springs Valley to the the Chiricahua Mountains and Cochise Stronghood in the Dragoons, driving back to the ghost town after sunset. I’ll let images tell the rest of the story and wish you a pleasant, restful, and safe spring break, however you will be spending it.

 

Our One Dog, Many Books Life

Another day dawns...

Life With Dogs

 

Somewhere in my Cochise County travels, I picked up a copy of Abigail Thomas’s memoir, A Three Dog Life, and now I want everyone I know to read it. It’s that kind of book, though in the beginning you’re not sure it will be.

 

I found my husband lying in a pool of blood, his head split open. Red lights were flashing from cop cars and emergency vehicles….

 

-      Abigail Thomas, A Three Dog Life

 

Doesn’t sound like a book for everyone, does it? When I was trying to choose a section to read aloud to the Artist, I landed on a short chapter called “How to Stop a Dog Fight,” a chapter that had me howling out loud with laughter of recognition on the porch of the coffee house earlier in the day.

 

The next time the dogs start growling and circling each other, fling open the kitchen door and stomp down the steps shouting, “If you don’t stop that this minute I am leaving forever and never coming back!” Face the fact that this is probably not the first time these words have escaped your lips. Think about your children’s childhoods and fall further into the slough of despond. 

 

Somehow – was it my reading, or was it because the chapter doesn’t have the same punch taken out of context, or is it just something only a mother understands? – the Artist was not caught caght up in the author’s life as I had been. And really, I think now, though the urge to quote endlessly is almost irresistible, I’m pretty sure that the effect does come cumulatively -- and how could it be otherwise in a memoir? -- and that part of the laughter has a hysterical edge, coming as it does in juxtaposition with tragedy. So now I feel foolish, but I can’t buy the book for everyone I know, and I won't be back in my bookstore until spring, so you will all just have to find your own copy if you can't wait. 

He has found another treasure!

Thank heaven the Artist and I are both in pretty good health and as sound of mind as we’ve ever been, so one young, healthy, demanding dog “with issues” (mostly shyness and fear of strangers) is more than enough for our little hosehold. Dear little Peasy! What a handful! But every morning he is so full of bounding joy that it’s impossible not to smile and laugh at his antics. And laughter is reward enough for inviting a dog to join your family, because heaven knows the big, wide world of political people does not often give gifts of laughter.

Light vs. Clouds

Starving in Ireland

 

One grim book of history I read recently was The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith. A string of words on the dust jacket are what would have been a subtitle back in Victorian times: The Story of the Potato Famine of the 1840s Which Killed One Million Irish Peasants and Sent Hundreds of Thousands to the New World. Oddly enough, though Silas Durand was not Irish at all, it was my Silas Project (his diary, my transcription and commentary) that led me to the potato famine story. 

 

A couple of Silas’s throwaway lines in January and the first of February sent me looking for material on mid-century Ireland: first a sentence about being “tickled” when the Irishman was disappointed to find American equality more myth than reality, the second his choice of the Know-Nothings as a topic for his newly formed debate society. Silas recorded these two incidents briefly in his diary early in 1855, and I was curious about their wider historical context.

 

We probably all remember the name Know-Nothings from high school history, but what else do we recall of who they were and what they were all about? The 19^th-century movement was known popularly as the Know-Nothings because it began as a secret organization, and any member asked about it was instructed to say, “I know nothing.” Their anti-immigration and virulently anti-Catholic position was a resentment- and fear-fueled response to the flood of 1840s immigrants from Ireland and Italy (Is it any surprise that the foremost leader and first martyr of this cause also found women’s suffrage an abhorrent and unnatural idea?), and their nativism found plenty of support among politicians as well as among a white working class, such that what had begun as the secret Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB, formed in 1849) soon morphed into the very public – and briefly very successful -- American Party, the first serious third-party challenge in American politics. Between 1852 and 1854 the party won elections at every level and put xxx men in the U.S. Congress, but it disintegrated soon afterward over the issue of slavery -- a matter that proved even more incendiary and divisive than immigration.

 

There were no live television broadcasts to show the starving Irish to the world, whole families sheltering as best they could in muddy ditches after being evicted from cottages they had built themselves (all improvements in the end profiting only the landlords), and many in England believed reports of the potato famine to be a “false alarm,” the “invention of agitators” – in other words, what our recent former president would have called “a hoax” and “fake news.” It was no hoax. Since deaths went unrecorded, with uncounted numbers literally dying of starvation in the open, there is no way to arrive at a precise figure for the tragedy, but population numbers between 1841 and 1851 show a drop of two and a half million, and allowing for the roughly one million Irish who emigrated during the years 1846-51, this puts the death toll from starvation at approximately a million and a half. 

 

At first there was some public relief, as well as a long effort made by the Society of Friends (Quakers) to save lives, but in the third and fourth year of the famine the soup kitchens were closed, government work projects stopped, and the government in London announced a strictly laissez-faire policy, saying the Irish must help themselves. They were told to collect taxes -- in a land of bankruptcy and financial ruin, where no one any longer had the ability to pay taxes – and to provide locally for the relief of the destitute. At last even the Quakers stopped their efforts. Thad been willing to supplement government aid but were unable, they wrote, to substitute for it entirely.

 

Nor was starvation the only trouble during those years. Typhus and cholera contributed to the tragedy, spread all the more rapidly in workhouses, soup kitchens -- and on ships. Ships, ah, yes! As there looked to be no future for the Irish in their own land, those who could find any way at all sought to leave by whatever means possible. Passage to Canada was cheaper (some sold all they had; others had fares paid by landlords eager to be rid of them) than passage to the United States and entry into Canada easier, but most Irish had no wish to remain any longer under the flag of England, and so the vast majority who landed in Canada and survived crossed the border to the United States as soon as possible.

 

Such was the background in Ireland that led to the most massive emigration ever from any European country – and the entry into the young United States of vast numbers of desperate, unskilled immigrants, willing and willing to work for almost any wage offered – and such was the wave of a population movement that created fears triggering the rise of nativism and unsurprising political opportunism, much like what we have seen again in recent years a century and a half later. 

 

Black in America

 

A Page from History

But February is Black History Month, and eagerly I closed the book on the Irish tragedy and opened Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr., by J. L. Chestnut, Jr. and Julia Cass, a book I chose because Chestnut had figured in Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, by the late John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso. 

 

I was only in grade school when desegregation became the law of the land, so while I remember vividly the photographs in magazines of that time, I still have a lot to learn about the historical background and details. 

 

…When black people in some nmbers stopped telling white people what white people wanted to hear and started expressing their real views, it was a shock. The civil rights movement exposed as a rationalization the white South’s refrain that their blacks were happy, didn’t want to vote, weren’t interested in integration. There they were, hundreds of them, lined up at the courthouse.

 

-      J. L. Chestnut, Jr. and Julia Cass, Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

 

Only halfway through the life of Chestnut, I have already committed to reading next, with a friend back in Michigan, a book she recommended called Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility, by Alex Zamalin. Despite the no doubt intentionally provocative title (provocative titles get attention), from one review I found online I gather that the author distinguishes civility in everyday life from civility in political life. I take it he is not recommending rudeness in conversations with neighbors but taking a position that might be called (if my prediction about the book’s content is correct, which I’ll find ot next week) against gradualism, which was the position of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

J. L. Chestnut’s moment of “conversion,” as he called it, to what might be called political incivility came when he saw John Lewis face down Sheriff Jim Clark: 

 

…Clark said, “This is as far as you can go. Turn around and go back. You are not going in the courthouse today.” 

 

John said, “The courthouse is a public place and we have a right to go inside. We will not be turned around.”

 

And Clark finally said, “Goddamn it, go on in,” and in they went, with no smiles or handshakes offered by either side. I suspect that’s the kind of “incivility” Zamalin applauds in his book, but I’ll have to let you know when I get into it.

 

Bedtime Reading

 

Ready for later

Nighttime, after a movie and before falling asleep, I have to admit to a kind of temporary addiction (I’m sure it won’t last forever) and self-indulgence in the extreme: the author’s name is J. A. Jance, and the series of hers that I’m wallowing in at present features Joanna Brady, fictional sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona! 

 

My bedtime reading in general tends toward indulgence, as I’ve admitted before – Chiang Yee’s Silent Traveler series and Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Ramotswe novels, set in Botswana. Bedtime reading doesn’t have to be a series book, and it isn’t always, but there is something calming about getting cozy with familiar characters, people you’ve known and spent time with before. It’s like time spent with old friends. You have history together. You don’t have to explain everything. You can recharge and greet the morning with energy for newer acquaintance.

 

I Go (Back Again) to the Dogs – Dog, Singlar, That Is

 

That would be – Peasy! He is energy, enthusiasm, eagerness, joy! He greets each morning with unbounded happiness. I have a home! I have a family! I get to go outside and run and find bones and sticks and chew them! I have a stuffed bear and a stuffed lion to run around the house with – and the lion even squeaks!

 

Peasy never knew life could be this good, and even when he is driving us crazy with his boundless enthusiasm for life we can’t help laughing at his antics. 

 

Postscript: An expected coincidence this morning is Dawn King’s blog post for the day -- her photo tour with and personal commentary of Selma, Alabama! Just when I had reached the point in Chestnut’s book where he recounts the 1965 event on the Edmund Pettus Bridge! So follow this link and read Dawn’s post, and then find yourself a book of 1960s U.S. social and political history. Read about those days when unrest and even occasional violence somehow spelled HOPE -- and think about what we can do to revive hope in our own time for all Americans.

R&R on the Rocky U.K. Coasts

On New Year’s Eve, our physical selves, David’s and mine, stayed home, while our hearts and minds traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, with more of the same on New Year’s Day. In my case, it was travel to multiple destinations, involving both books and DVDs.

It began when bookstore customers and friends Walter and Marjorie learned a month ago that David would welcome movies during his post-surgical recovery. They kindly loaned us two boxed BBC series, and we are now over halfway through the six-series Irish story, “Ballykissangel,” thoroughly immersed in the life of the little rural village and its inhabitants. Here’s part of what Wikipedia has to say:

The name of the fictional village in which the show was set is derived from Ballykissane, a townland near Killorglin in County Kerry, where the show's creator, Kieran Prendiville, holidayed with his family as a child. The village's name in Irish is shown as "Baile Coisc Aingeal", which means "The town of the fallen angel" on the sign outside the post office.[1] 

The show was filmed in Avoca and Enniskerry in County Wicklow.

Quite by coincidence, two different novels also transported me to stretches of rocky United Kingdom coastline. The new M. J. Rose novel, Seduction, is set on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel (an advance reading copy came my way just before Christmas), while Meg Rosoff’s What I Was features the landscape of East Anglia, so what with going back and forth between these books and the Irish DVDs, I spent a very restful New Year’s Day on dangerous cliffs and in frightening caves, on rock-strewn beaches and tidal marshes (ever watchful for tides), and amid ruins of earlier cultures near the edge of the sea.

The third book claiming bits of my attention from time to time—short bits because each paragraph is so dense with information—was, of all things, a textbook. But what a textbook! First, the marvelous title (which I associated at first glance with Chinese history): Five Kingdoms. This introductory work by Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz is subtitled An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth and has a foreword by no less than Stephen Jay Gould, one of my science heroes. Does anyone remember my shock a few winters ago when I stumbled on what was “news” to me, namely that life on earth is no longer divided into two simple kingdoms? Whether the field of biology will eventually settle on three or five still seems up for grabs, but at least I’m starting to catch up in my very amateur way. The biggest kingdom is that of bacteria. A bacteria cell is without a nucleus. As for viruses, they are left out altogether, on the grounds that they lack cells and can only “live” (feed, grow, & reproduce) by hijacking living cells. Besides bacteria, then, the remaining kingdoms are those of Protoctista, Animalia, Fungi, and Plantae. Each chapter is illustrated with photographs and line drawings, and many pages hold a sort of illustrated frieze along the top-right page that shows the habitat in which the lives under consideration are to be found.

Gould’s foreword gives justification for the book's purpose, to anyone who feels the need to have it justified:

Some people dismiss taxonomies and their revisions as mere exercises in abstract ordering—a kind of glorified stamp collecting of no scientific merit and fit only for small minds who need to categorize their results. No view could be more false and more inappropriately arrogant. Taxonomies are reflections of human thought; they express our most fundamental concepts about the objects of our universe. Each taxonomy is a theory about the creatures that it classifies.

Margulis and Schwartz base their evolutionary theory partly on the timing of branching of life forms as shown in the fossil record. You see? Back we come again to rocks and oceans and geological discoveries, and once more we find ourselves peacefully visiting prehistoric earth through the comfortable lens of distant time.

Caught up as I was in my own reading, I can’t say what literature David enjoyed on New Year’s Day. I can attest to the fact that he also spent time with books, but the other special treat of the holiday for me was that from morning coffee through after-dinner treats, and including dinner for Sarah, David took it all on himself. A third unusual feature was that when we were not actively listening to the radio or watching a DVD, the house was quiet. No background noise or chatter. I cannot remember having a day that completely relaxing in the whole of 2012. It was sybaritic, it was voluptuous, it was almost unreal luxury. I did not miss being "out in the world” at all.

Ireland When You Least Expect It

Wednesday, yesterday (the weather today’s the same) brought a grey, cold morning, with clouds threatening rain. Not the morning I’d hoped for, but that didn’t keep me from writing, and for that two dogs deserve a little credit.

Weiser had stayed overnight. Wise is demanding when he wants in late at night and can bark for hours on end outside the door, making reading, movie watching and sleep all equally impossible. Once indoors, he goes instantly into bedtime mode and is no trouble at all. Having him here gave Sarah a good pre-dawn play session, and when she needed to go out (and he was ready, too), I got an early start work start to the day, rather than sleeping in, so it all worked out well.

But before fully waking up, I was already at work. (This, I think, is one of the many advantages of starting the day without an alarm clock.) An idea for the final story in my short story cycle in progress, the tying-together story, was taking shape in my sleepy head, so that before my eyes were open and before my feet hit the floor I had the two main characters and the opening lines of the story. That, for me, is when it’s important to get up and get to work, while “genius is burning,” as Jo March used to say, and today the dogs helped, reinforcing the voice of the muse. I worked right through David’s getting up and walking over to the store, stopping only when friend Sandra stopped by for a visit. By then I’d pretty much reached what my father always called “a good stopping place,” and when David returned and asked what I wanted to do with the day, I told him I needed a little library research time.

No books on screenwriting in the library in Spring Hill (I’m not writing a screenplay; my two new characters are), so we set out for the main library of the county system, over in Brooksville. Flowering shrubs along the way brightened our path, but we were already feeling good. At the library, cruising the 800 shelves, I happened on a book of plays by Ray Bradbury, who introduces one section of his plays, set in Ireland, by admitting that his seven months there (writing a screen adaptation of Moby Dick, no less) were not a happy time, what with “the poorness and the rain and feeling sorry for myself in a sorry land” (Ray Bradbury, On Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays), and he thought he would never write anything about Ireland. Several years later, however, his “secret mind,” his “interior eye,” the “subliminal eye” that had been taking in more than his conscious self realized at the time, began flooding him with stories calling out to be written, stories and plays with Irish settings and Irish characters.

My interest in the book was dramatic form, but there on St. Patrick’s Day a science fiction writer gave me Ireland.

The church has put her on her knees, the weather drowned, and politics all but buried her, but Ireland, dear God, with vim and gusto, still sprints for that far EXIT.

“And, do you know? I think she’ll make it.

So wrote Ray Bradbury in 1962. I think Ireland's come a long way since then.


P.S. Today’s temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit: 50 in Northport, MI; 54 in Traverse City, MI; 59 in Aripeka, FL. ????????