Recent Past in Village and at Home, In the Midst, and Coming Events

 

Dinosaurs sighted in Northport

That was a surprise as I was leaving the bank parking lot on Thursday morning, and I had to go back for a better view. Apparently both male and female T-rexes had been at the Leelanau Township Library. The plant-eating dinosaur over by the Depot did not seem fazed by the arrival of carnivorous cousins.

Other of us (non-dinos) were somewhat fazed by commotion on Waukazoo Street a little later. What was going on? It involved shutting off the water for our whole block, which meant closing our block off to vehicular traffic and unanticipated time off for the restaurants. 

Bookstore stayed open, though. We had lights. And now, on Friday morning, everything is back to normal.

Home Life

Life continued busy as we northern Michiganders launched ourselves into August. Raspberries have peaked, however, and rain overnight on Wednesday meant I didn’t have to water gardens on Thursday morning. I also picked what look like the last of the beans for this summer (having failed once more to stagger bean plantings). So a few things are no longer on my daily to-do list.

Purple on the outside,
these beans turn green in hot water.

We had our first August company, as my younger stepdaughter and her husband brought their adorable little camper and set it up in the yard for a couple of nights. 

Her sister drove up from Kalamazoo to join the fun, and we all had a collaborative al fresco dinner at the farm on Tuesday (featuring fresh Kolarik sweet corn, a neighborhood treat), followed by a night out at the new Bluebird on Wednesday (treated by the sisters). Wonderful, all of it! Tree guy pronounced our guests “cool,” and they found him “delightful!” Sunny was even exceptionally good with company in the house and yard—as long as there were plenty of tennis ball tosses and as long as her momma didn’t forget Sunny’s meals. I admit she had to bark a couple times to remind me.

Cherry pie was my contribution from one of the three quarts of fresh tart cherries Carlos Fuentes gave me from his gleaning adventure in a neighborhood orchard where he has known the owner for years. He picked and offered, I pitted. (The end of a potato peeler works great for pitting cherries, by the way.) Result: Yum!

My reading

I continue to make progress in the fascinating saga of the 17th-century life of Roger Williams, having gotten him at last from England to colonial America. Among the many, many fascinating facts and events, I was delighted to learn that before he undertook to act as missionary to the Native Americans, Williams took the time, on his own initiative, to learn the language and the customs of local indigenous peoples. The treatise he wrote at the request of the governor of Plymouth authorities and presented to Governor John Winthrop unfortunately exists no longer, but apparently he ruffled a few feathers when he argued (having learned the law in England under Coke) that the Native Americans did make use of the land on which they lived and therefore had legal ownership of it, that the land was not just lying there unused for the indiscriminate taking by Englishmen! He ruffled even more feathers, however, when he stated baldly that the English king was a liar. I am liking this Roger Williams fellow more and more all the time, but he offered his treatise to be burned when the authorities persuaded him that its existence put him in danger. As had so many others and as is still the case today, he gave in to the pressure of the group. 

Reading more than one book at a time sometimes brings surprises. One such for me is how well The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, dovetails with the life of Roger Williams. Late 17th-century colonial America and the early 21st-century United States of America have more in common than I would have guessed. 

Three years earlier suffrage had been restricted to male church members, but during those three years, three years during which the population grew enormously, church membership became increasingly exclusive. Initially, one had had to do little more than sign the church covenant to become a member. That soon changed: to join a church now, potential members had to prove themselves “visible saints,” had to prove that they were among the precious few whom their Calvinist God would save. This forced potential members through a stringent and arduous process that included standing before the entire congregation and presenting evidence that God had made the seeker a saint…. This was no pro forma ritual. It was an intimidating, difficult, rigorous, and by no means always successful test. In most churches the congregation had to vote unanimously to accept the new member. Those who either did not seek or were rejected from membership could worship in a church—in fact, the law required them to do so. But they could not belong to a church.

As a result, only a minority of the population, and a decreasing minority, were church members and qualified as freemen with voting privileges.

- John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

Who are the “true” Christians? Can a non-Christian be a good person (or a good American)? Should the laws of the community—colony, state, nation—be determined by churchmen? (If so, which churchmen?) What of people who disagreed, whether church members or otherwise? What of those who followed other religions or no religion at all? What gives law its authority? 

Kramer and Alstad argue that Americans today (though not only Americans) have internalized authoritarianism in ways we don’t even recognize. Blind submission to any authority, they say, has its root in self-mistrust, and self-mistrust comes from a psyche divided against itself, with one part labeled ‘good’ and the other part labeled ‘evil.’ They point out that most religions, including Buddhism, consider self-centeredness to be bad, selflessness the ideal good. And so, when we seek a positive good for ourself that does nothing for anyone else, we feel selfish and bad. The divide is embedded in our culture.

Here is an insight I had the other day about their idea: Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” philosophy does not introduce a new value system at all. It merely flips the good/evil division, insisting that selfishness is good and altruism bad. The “new” morality she offers is just as divisive as the old was, and, like Nietzsche, the “purity” her morality demands can do nothing to integrate what Kramer and Alstad identify as a divided psyche. In the obsession with purity, where someone following a traditional morality would have to twist her reasoning considerably to find altruism in a selfish choice or action, the Randian practitioner has to brand her altruism somehow as selfishness to feel good about herself. 

Kramer and Alstad write (and they are always very clear when stating their opinions that they are doing just that), 

In our framework[,] being self-centered is simply an aspect of being human, as is the capacity to truly care for others. Not only does each have its value and function, they are intertwined rather than totally separate or even separable. Any morality that separates the two, giving much more value to one (the selfless), cannot but deeply divide the psyche of those who accept this frame.

        - Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 

While they do not address Ayn Rand’s philosophy,* I find a general parallel in what they say about American society’s double message--the fascination with rule-breaking individuals, the romance of the “lawless” frontier, the American love affair with criminals and with fictional bad boys. 

“Rebellion is bad and dangerous,” on one side; and “Rebellion is not only exciting and exhilarating, it is freedom,” on the other. Double messages from parents have been shown to cause schizophrenia in children. The double messages a society puts out likewise must fragment its members, but here the resulting pathology is disguised by being the social norm.

A fascinating book! I was able to find The Guru Papers still available from my distributor so put two copies on my last order. One sold almost immediately. The other is still available. My own copy was already marked up by a previous reader, and I have marked it up even more. 

I finished reading The Meadow, by James Galvin, and still re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T.H. White, though I haven’t gotten through many pages of either book the past few mornings or evenings.

*Next day: Nearing the end of the book, I find this in a passage about guilt and frustration creating "a self-absorbing vicious circle, for most guilt can be traced back to guilt about being self-absorbed." They continue:

Either/or thinking creates various types of reactions. For example, the "me first" attitudes much in evidence these days (we call it the Ayn Rand syndrome [my emphasis added]) react against puritanical, selfless values by embracing self-centeredness as the "real truth." ...But being an either/or reaction...it also mistakes one aspect of the person for the whole. If we were instead to acknowledge the reality of self-centeredness along with the reality of care and love for others, we would be able to focus more on appropriately balancing the two, both in our own lives and in our social systems.

Coming bookstore author event

Trying to keep up with myself as summer races by, I managed (just barely) to get a press release to our county newspaper for the bookstore event next Thursday, a reading by and audience conversation with Jennifer Sager, whose book Steph’s Story won my heart. Jenny is a delightful person--read more about her here--and I hope many of my local bookstore friends and summer visitors will find time to come learn about her book and her sister. 

The date is August 13, the time 4 p.m., so you’ll have plenty of time to hear and speak with Jenny and not miss your cocktail hour, let alone dinner. 

Oh, and this very Saturday, August 8, is Northport's annual dog parade! Theme this year is “Pawty Like a Rockstar,” so we anticipate a lot of creative and colorful costumes. Wow! It's summer, and the hits just keep on comin'!

And Then It Rained

(I am in love with pagoda dogwood!)

Reminder: This Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m. at Dog Ears Books, author Robert Downes will give his presentation on Native American history prior to European exploration. This is a free event and one you can take in before your dinner hour!

Seasonal thoughts and projects

Reading one of Jean-Luc Bannalec’s murder mysteries the other evening at bedtime, I ran across a phrase—and here I have to paraphrase what would be a translation, anyway—about summer always arriving on a certain day. That is, there is a day when you feel, at last, Yes, this is summer. I felt that way last Friday. It wasn’t the first day I’d been able to have the bookshop door open, nor the first day warm enough to go about in sandals and without a jacket, but it felt different. Not just a temperate spring day, but summer. 

That being the case, my two “days off,” Sunday and Monday, were busy ones at home. Accomplishments included getting my lawn mower working again (it had gone on strike, and I was able to persuade it back to work again all by myself!), mowing grass, running out to a couple of nearby garden centers for more plants (both flowers and vegetables), getting all the new arrivals in soil (either in the ground or in planters), along with catching up on laundry, hanging the heavy items out on the line and later bringing them indoors to fold, wrapping up the day by watering everything, even though rain was in the forecast for after midnight.

The garden is coming together.

Did it rain overnight? If so, I slept through it. Morning was misty and calm, my world jungly green, only a sweet, slight breeze through the open window. No need to water on Tuesday, so, after her morning sortie, Sunny and I had a leisurely porch breakfast. Later in the day, it rained for sure. 

Poppy after rain

All three cuttings I took from my cranberrybush viburnum survived the winter well, one of them even flowering its very first solo season, which encourages me to try more of this manner of propagation. For 2026, the experiment I have in mind is pagoda dogwood, Cornus alternifolia, which I am delighted to discover blooming very close to my house as a volunteer, not far from the legion of volunteer black raspberries I depend on harvesting every summer for my signature ‘blackstraw’ jam, a combination of black raspberries and good local strawberries. Yum!

Dogwood again...

...and raspberry-to-be!

Again, reading

Besides the Bannalec mystery, I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time and in English translation, Rabelais's big work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, but don’t know if I’ll get through the whole fat paperback volume. It is entertaining, I admit, but entertaining in the way of “Saturday Night Live” rather than as a movie with a strong narrative from beginning to end. Lots of smart-aleck nicknames and jokes. Lots to do with controversies of the time of Rabelais and his opinions. A few pages at a time, I can do. The whole thing? In my mother’s deadly phrase, We’ll see!

Thoughts on “being an author”

An author is the originator of a written work. Some authors are writers by profession, while others are not. 

Being a professional writer, like being a professional musician or fine artist, involves long-term commitment, sometimes lifetime commitment. Other people come late in life to writing, often as a second (or even third) career in retirement. 

Not all professional writers are book authors; they may author (the word here functions as a verb) articles or short magazine stories. Some are journalists or columnists or grant writers. Also, not all authors of published books consider themselves—or even aspire to be—career writers.

I’ve been sorting through my thoughts on this because a couple of women visited my bookshop recently with a new book written by one of them. “I’m not really an author,” Jennifer Sager said, modestly introducing her book. “She keeps saying that!” her friend protested. After the three of us conversed for a while, and I took a careful look at the book they had brought in to show me, I said to Sager insistently, “You are the author of this book!” And she is, whether or not she ever writes another. 

Steph’s Story, published by a relatively new small press in Bloomington, Indiana, Filibuster Press, is a story Jennifer Sager felt “compelled” to write. Jennifer is a middle daughter who grew up with an older and a younger sister. The oldest, Stephanie, was born with Down syndrome. In telling of her sister’s life, the author of Steph’s Story also tells her own journey from sheltered childhood to dawning realization of handicaps faced by many different groups of people for various reasons. Because her parents did not heed doctors’ advice to put Stephanie in an institution (and “try again” for a “normal” child), Jennifer’s growing up introduced her to a range of other young people with disabilities, from those in wheelchairs to those with high-functioning autism. Only as she grew older and had experience outside her immediate neighborhood did she realize that poverty and skin color, like disability, could trigger discrimination. 

All of the author's factual information, history, and advocacy, however, is woven into a very personal, engaging story. I started reading on Monday evening and had soon eagerly devoured over 100 pages.

Three sisters! For me, as the oldest of a trio of sisters, that idea alone sparked my interest, but it was Jennifer’s love for Steph and her joy in their bond that is holding me page after page. Who wouldn’t enjoy this book? I’m sure the affirmative messages will be especially important for anyone with a child or grandchild who diverges from the “norm,” but I’m also sure that anyone at all interested in families—and who of us is not?—will enjoy reading Steph’s Story. 

From where I stand

Is this section a rant? Call it what you will.

Let me first note, briefly, that a request for evidence is not satisfied by insults, name-calling, or the sheer repetition of an unsupported claim. However loudly you may yell, however nasty you get with the person who asked for evidence, if yelling and name-calling and hurling insults is all you can do, that just tells me is that you have no evidence, no ground for your claim. (You know who and what I'm talking about here.) 

Day after day, it remains astonishing to me how many Americans are willing to accept not only patently false claims but outrageously bad public behavior from someone elected to serve our country. Serve, not harm, not injure, certainly not destroy. What are they, those sticking with him, getting from supporting loss of dignity and destruction of hope for others? Anything other than the satisfaction of seeing their opposition’s misery and frustration? 

Now, something else: Less than 1% of the American population identifies as transgender. One percent. Of this one percent, only 0.002% (ten out of 500,000) are college athletes. How and why did transgender people come to be such a huge political issue? 

Two words: smoke screen. 

Just say the word ’transgender,’ and certain groups of people completely freak out. They are filled with fear, their fear fuels their rage, and they forget everything else. Jobs are vanishing while wars are not, and the rich get richer and richer as the poor get poorer and sicker and more and more disenfranchised. 

Someone must be blamed for the woes that afflict us! Where do we look for a scapegoat? Let’s find a very small, vulnerable population and focus fear and anger on them!

I am so tired of that cruel strategy and sick of watching people fall for it!

On the other hand--a life well lived!

Leelanau Township lost a priceless citizen recently. At 99 years of age, however, Julia Brabanec was ready to go. “I don’t know why I’m still here,” she had confided to me in one of our visits in her last year. 

Julia's contributions to the northern Michigan food landscape were featured in Emita Brady Hill’s 2020 nonfiction book, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming.  In fact, the first chapter in the book is “Julia Brabanec,” in the opening section, “Two Orchards and a CSA: Becoming Organic.”

Julia and her late husband John first came to Leelanau County on their honeymoon in 1948. Later they bought land here and on it developed an organic orchard. The Brabanecs lived simply, pumping water from their well and lighting their house with kerosene lamps until a home wind generator enabled them to electrify. They did almost everything themselves, too, so although they built the foundation for their new (second) home on the property in 1985, the house was finished only in 2005 with the help of their children. Julia and John were always too busy farming to build a house. One thousand, one hundred trees—apples and peaches—“mom & pop” doing it all, from planting to delivery.

If you haven’t read Northern Harvest yet, you really should, to learn the rest of Julia’s story, as well as that of other women in food and farming in Northern Michigan. 

My late husband always referred to John and Julia as “the Helen and Scott Nearing of Leelanau County.” John died 16 years ago, and I remember his funeral well. Julia wanted to go out more quietly, and she got her wish. 

It’s easy sometimes to say and think, as we witness the passing of the old guard, that the future will never again know such good people, and yet I see men and women in younger generations already coming up with solid values such as Julia and John lived by: love of the land; belief in organic methods; a strong work ethic; and dedication to the future. That last is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Care for the future and all who live on the land, urban and rural. Respect for life and the dignity of all.

I am honored to have a beautiful portrait of Julia Brabanec, a photograph by author Emita Brady Hill, behind my bookstore desk, as I am honored to have known Julia Brabanec and to have counted her as a friend.

Julia Brabanec: A good life, well lived!