“How Doth the Busy Little Bee…”?

Can you believe it’s practically the middle of July already? Is summer half-over? Vacation just starting or still a few weeks in the future? Anyway, the marsh marigolds have given way to daisies, yarrow, and sweet peas along the roadsides, and while coreopsis and St. Johnswort were a little late this year they're now making quite a showing, as are garden roses, making up for the iris performance that's over for the season. Cherries are ripening. Hay is being cut and baled and transported from the fields.

It was another very busy week in your Up North bookseller’s life (making hay while the sun shines) -- so busy I’ve already forgotten what happened on Monday. Tuesday, I know, brought Barbara Stark-Nemon to the library with her new novel, Hard Cider; Wednesday our little reading circle escaped vicariously to Vienna for a couple of hours (with the help of a couple book and three special guests); and Thursday, of course, Kathleen Stocking was my Thursday Evening Author at Dog Ears Books, where we had, as I had anticipated, standing room only in the Artist’s gallery, with audience spilling over into studio and bookstore. I have to thank the versatile Artist, David Grath, not only for letting us use the space but also for setting up chairs and for his beautiful painting on the cover of the guest author’s book! Sorry I don't have better photos -- I mean, really, sorry I don't have good, illustrative photos at all of the evening. There was just no room to maneuver.

As it was, I had to elbow my way past the overflow crowd to get the above.

Kathleen Stocking is, to resort to a word I generally consider overused but one very appropriate in this case, iconic Leelanau. On this particular occasion (she seems to have a different twist for every appearance) she brought along children of a friend to perform a skit illustrating the history of the universe! Who would have expected that? And after her talk, copies From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces flew off the sales counter. 

Whenever I’m tempted to say the weather is or was “hot,” as it was on Wednesday, I am always reminded of a friend (you are gone but not forgotten, Chris) who forbade the use of that word in northern Michigan. He would allow his friends to say “warm,” when summer finally came after a long northern winter, but no complaining, ever! Whatever you call temperatures in the 90s, I was relieved when a cold front moved in Wednesday evening, so that the Artist’s gallery space on Thursday, even filled to overflowing, remained comfortable. 

If you missed the event, a few signed copies are still available, along with signed copies of Stocking's previous book (her third of four), The Long Arc of the Universe—Travels Beyond the Pale, which I highly recommend you read, also. In short, it was a glorious evening!

[Note on refreshments (skip if not interested): The event series is still called TEA, but I’ve switched to punch this summer. We had “library punch” for Jennifer Clark (Vernor’s and white grape juice — always good), and for Kathleen I modified a punch recipe that is so good that it needs a name of its own. Nancy Giles makes her punch with frozen orange juice, frozen lemonade, pineapple juice, 7-Up, water, vanilla extract, and almond extract. My modification was the substitution of Vernor’s for 7-Up, and because of that change I omitted the almond extract. Sorry not to include measurements here, but I kind of winged it on those, reducing the amount of Vernor’s and water and trusting on melting ice to make up for it. Tip on Note: Don’t add all the carbonated liquid at once, but add a more gradually as the ice melts to keep the kick in the punch.]

Friday morning was beautiful, too, and, with Bruce opening the bookstore for me, I treated myself to a leisurely late rising and unrushed garden-watering session. Forget Shakespeare’s sonnet about June — it’s July that is bringing perfect days to northern Michigan this year. Perfect morning for farmers market on Friday. Perfect evening for Music in the Park. Perfect all day long for strolling around the village to admire garden blooms.

Perfect days for relaxing with good books, too, so steal the time, one way or another. I look forward to these future TEA guests at my bookstore in Northport.

Authors and books still to come this summer

P.S. Today's title was taken from this poem. 

It’s About Time: Kathleen Stocking Comes Home

From the Place of the 

Gathering Light:

Leelanau Pieces

by Kathleen Stocking

Even now that I’ve moved to a senior residential community in nearby Traverse City, I’m still from the place that has made me, that has informed my sense of the world, that taught me who I am, who I think I am, that has given me my ideas and my core self. - Kathleen Stocking, From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces

Kathleen Stocking’s first book of essays, Letters from the Leelanau, burst onto the northern Michigan scene in 1990, selling in numbers that took the University of Michigan Press completely by surprise. The first print run was only 500 copies, but then, noticed by and raved in the New York Times, the book quickly went on to become a classic and is still in print. 

When she came to my bookstore in Northport to do a reading from her third book, The Long Arc of the Universe, essays ranging from her Michigan life to experiences teaching in California prisons, a rich kids’ school in San Salvador, and Peace Corps teaching assignments in Thailand and Romania, part of my introduction to the audience assembled was — and I believe this to be true, if not for descendants of the Odawa and Ojibway peoples or third- and fourth-generation locals, surely for those of us who arrived only in the latter decades of the twentieth century — “If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau.” So it is a great gift she gives us with her new book, Gathering Light — another collection of essays focused on the Leelanau but informed by almost thirty additional years of observing nature, participating in community, reading voraciously, traveling bravely, and endlessly pondering life on earth, from our little Up North paradise as it evolved through time to our place in the universe.

Kathleen Stocking’s essays, while personal, are about much more than her own life, rich and overflowingly full as that life always has been and continues to be. Essays in the new book are divided into seasonal sections, and over and over we are reminded that our brief time is but the thinnest of glazes atop the rich layer cake (she uses the image in one section) of geologic time.

Geology is interesting psychologically because to approach it, at least for me, requires examination of the fabric of space-time and the physics of consciousness. 

Thoughts of geology inform her thought as deeply as does her awareness of wildflowers and the history of county families. Following a fragment of quoted conversation by a Suttons Bay geologist about Michigan eight hundred million years ago, for instance, she writes:

The whole mass of quivering geologic time lies in that downhome, tossed-off remark.

Quivering awareness, I say, in her response And yet, presented in nonspecialist, everyday language and images. She writes, the reader sees.

Consciousness of history is also intricately woven into Stocking’s accounts of walks and drives and conversations and memories recalled from childhood, and woven in so gracefully, so naturally, that it never interrupts her narrative. How long, in the sweep of geologic time, have human beings been on earth? In the space of human history, how long have white people been in Michigan? How many of us who call Leelanau home today are aware of early black pioneer families in what is now Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, and how many know that while whites and blacks were buried together in cemeteries around the county, for a long time Natives were buried outside the fences? Why is this knowledge important?

History, like lighthouses, helps position us so we can understand where we are, relative to where we were, and relative to where we might be heading. 

Stocking, like an old-time lighthouse keeper, keeps track of everything at once — boats, storms, lives, mechanical equipment — such that her questions and thoughts infect our own. And thank heaven they do! Whether writing about the relatively youthful movement of local community-supported agriculture, new, start-up wineries, talented young local musicians Ruby John and Jonah Powell, or her own childhood days in the woods with her father, timberman Pierce Stocking, she never lets a reader get so comfortable that the broader worldview is lost. “It’s about imagining the future,” she writes. “It’s about seeing one’s self as another.” The lighthouse keeper in Stocking asks us to navigate between our safe, precious home and places in the world where privilege is unknown, life not safe. 

Years ago another dear friend, a woman who follows sports in a way alien to me but with whom I have many other abiding interests and loves in common, wrote to me something about baseball that I’ve never forgotten. Maybe she was quoting someone else. I don’t remember. Somewhere in a trunk that old letter, carefully saved, awaits re-reading, but for now I can only paraphrase. Baseball, she wrote, is the only game where the object is not about annihilating the opposition but about coming home. 

In some ways, of course, we never leave home. We take it with us wherever we go. And wherever we go, the experiences that we have come back home with us when we return. This is particularly apparent in Kathleen Stocking’s life and work. From Letters from the Leelanau to Lake Country to The Long Arc of the Universe to From the Place of the Gathering Light, we have now the arc of a serious and important contribution to American literature, and while we can take a kind of regional pride in the fact that the contribution grew from Michigan soil, I hope our gratitude to the writer and recognition of her accomplishments will eclipse any credit we may want to give ourselves. Kathleen Stocking is a treasure. We are fortunate to have her among us.

One more note: As was indicated in the title of her previous book, somehow -- with all her knowledge of world history and hands-on experiences in parts of the world where life is truly dismal -- Kathleen Stocking manages to be optimistic about the future of mankind. She thinks we have it in us to work together to expand the realm of human rights and even reverse the ongoing degradation of the environment. Even if our generation (hers and mine) doesn't live to see it, she has faith in a more-than-possible good future for our descendants. So again I say -- what a gift we have in her work!

They Light Our Way Along the Arc

Photograph by Marjorie Farrell

An essay's conclusion, writes William Dereshewicz, is not something we refer to as a fact but rather as wisdom. He allows that the ideas in an essay are “often openly impressionistic and provisional, colored by feeling, memory and mood,” going on to say,

But the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more than just emotional. – William Dereshewicz, “In Defense of Facts,” The Atlantic, January-February 2017

Not every reader is as fascinated by the essay form and its history as I am, but anyone who has been awake this past year realizes that there have been bloody assaults on truth and facts, and many of us find that cause for concern.

Although my new Atlantic arrived last Friday, it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I got around to Dereshewicz. I’d started the morning with the longest piece in the issue, “My President Was Black,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mine, too, I want to tell Coates, and I have a lot more to say about that, but I’ll save it for another time. For now let me just say that all my readers who don’t subscribe to The Atlantic should go right out and buy the current issue, because the Coates article alone is worth the cover price. After you read the whole issue, you’ll probably want to subscribe. I hope so.

Here are a few lines from the editorial in the current issue:

Obama is not an unalloyed idealist. He has complicated feelings about the nature of humanity, and harbors few illusions, in particular, about the moral systems that govern many other countries. But he has always seemed sincere in his belief that America is a place that possesses a unique capacity to become better, and then better again. “The arc of the moral universe is long [my emphasis added], but it bends toward justice,” he often said, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., but he really meant that America’s arc bends toward justice.

That stopped me in my tracks. Light dawned, belatedly, in one bookseller’s brain! The title of Kathleen Stocking’s book: The Long Arc of the Universe – that was her reference!

Originally I didn’t care for the title. It seemed vague and having little to do with the content of the essays – but only because I had completely missed the allusion! When I’d shared my initial misgivings about the title with the author, she kindly refrained from pointing out my ignorance. I wish now she had not been so careful of my feelings!

Because now it makes perfect sense. It captures perfectly Stocking’s optimism in the future, a clear-eyed optimism she shares with President Obama, despite hard truths both have faced in this world.

Neither Obama nor Stocking is optimistic because they live in ivory tower isolation. Both have served – Obama in Chicago activism, the Illinois Senate, and the White House; Stocking in country schools, California prisons, and in the Peace Corps – in ways and places demanding a pragmatic, hands-on, the-buck-stops-here approach to problem-solving. Neither can say that the problems they tackled are now only historical footnotes. That should go without saying. Problems persist. The world is hard on people, and it’s harder on some than on others. But, like President Obama, Kathleen Stocking continues to have faith in the human capacity to become better and to make the world better. And both can say they put themselves on the line, personally, to do something toward that end.

Obama is quoted in the Coates article as saying, elaborating on the statement of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

To be optimistic about the long-term trends ... doesn’t mean everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line....

Well, if optimism had to mean that, there couldn’t be an optimist anywhere in the world, could there? Kathleen Stocking wrote me in an e-mail, following the November election:

Ruth Gruber died today. She was 105. She was in Germany hearing Hitler's rants in 1932 and sounded the alarm, but no one heard. She photographed the people in the camps, the boats of refugees turned away by the British warships from Palestine, and so on. It can happen again. And it can happen here. There's no doubt at all in my mind about that. But I also believe, with Obama (that whippersnapper, that youngster) that history is not a straight line. Our species is evolving toward greater and greater consciousness, but there is backsliding, detours, and the process is slow, in any event. Julian of Norwich had to pretend she couldn't read and write and that everything was coming from heaven and had to be translated. Because any woman who could read or write was in league with the devil. As we all know.

But as she writes in her most recent book of personal essays, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale:

The hard thing about living anywhere, I decide, and traveling in general, is that one can never live long enough or see enough of the world to fully understand the long arc of the universe and make sense of it. Little bits are all we get, and it’s never enough to see the big picture.

Holiday decorations by Kathleen Stocking

I do not call myself a pessimist. At the same time, I often find it hard to be optimistic about “the big picture.” Little corners, yes. Pockets. Certain stretches of time here and there. But it’s true that none of us gets to see “the big picture,” the “long arc.” Kathleen Stocking and President Obama, however, remain optimistic in their long views, and they have seen much more than I can claim to have seen, so I’m taking their words seriously.

The philosopher of my heart is Henri Bergson, who lived in France from 1859 to 1941. In his heyday, he had been the equivalent of a rock star. The public swarmed his lecture hall at the Sorbonne – it was the place to be! – and finally a section of seats had to be cordoned off and reserved for students, because socialites had started coming in to the lecture preceding Bergson’s to assure themselves seats for the star.

Never a novelist, always a philosopher and teacher, he was nevertheless awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, but by 1940 his star had faded, and he lived quietly, out of the limelight. Then came the Occupation. Bergson’s earlier glory was not forgotten by those who had assumed power. Eager to piggy-back on his reputation, they offered him blandishments, their recognition – which apparently they thought would be an irresistible inducement. Bergson said no.

The immediate cause of his death during the Nazi occupation of Paris was bronchitis, but I have always suspected heartbreak. Ill for many years with crippling arthritis, on the arm of a caregiver he left his sickbed to register as a Jew, despite Nazi assurances that he was “exempt” from the new, odious racial laws. Again, he could have sold out, but he didn’t.

Bergson died on the fourth of January, 1941, and I have always imagined him on a cold winter day, in the city he loved, arriving home exhausted to die of a broken heart – in part because he had been a most optimistic philosopher, sure that the human spirit was evolving in something higher and finer -- and whenever I have told the life story of Bergson to someone unfamiliar with his name, it has been hard for me to keep tears from my eyes at the end. But the truth is that I wasn’t there. I did not know him. And the day he died was probably not, as it has always been in my imagination, the same day he stood in line to register for his yellow star.

Undoubtedly he felt deep, wrenching sorrow for what had come to Europe in his own last days, and I cannot imagine that his heart did not ache, terribly -- for the Jews, for France, and for the world. But that he chose to show solidarity with the persecuted, though he had never practiced the religion, was a choice entirely in line with his philosophy and his entire life. By his own definition of freedom, that is, arrived at as early as his 1889 doctoral dissertation (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), his was a free act in 1941, neither mechanical reflex nor directed from anything exterior to his own soul. It came out of everything he was, out of his entire life leading up to that moment.

And exercising his freedom would have been, necessarily, for him, an affirmation and demonstration of the possibility of freedom. Would he also have been able to maintain, amidst the horrors of that time in history, his faith in the evolution of the spirit?

Ready now for holidays

Richard Leakey of Kenya, when entering political life, was asked by an interviewer, “Are you willing to give your life for this country?” Leakey is a white man whose home is a black African country, and the subtext of the question was that in running for office he might risk death. His answer, however, spoke not to the risk of death but to commitment: “What else does any of us have to give?”

It is not for us to question life, Viktor Frankl wrote. Life questions us. How will we answer? An amazing, inspiring person! He saw the absolute worst of the twentieth century and somehow kept faith in humanity.

How do these people do it? How do they maintain faith and optimism, despite all they see first-hand that could drive them to despair?

There will always be those in the moral universe who blatantly steal and rob from others, as there will always be the less obvious free riders, who simply manage not to pay their legitimate dues. But at the same time there will also be, besides the mass of responsible dues-payers, those who not only pay their own dues but who move mankind forward (or at least keep us from being forever lost in the abyss) by being extraordinary, by doing more than their share, by achieving wisdom and by serving as models for the rest of us.

Moral progress, if there is such a thing, is not a smooth, direct line. Okay. There will be backsliding. All right. But does it exist at all, this moral progress? Is the human spirit evolving into something better? Was Henri Bergson able to believe that still as he closed his eyes for the last time?

Martin Luther -- not my favorite guy! -- thought faith a matter of grace: You are given the gift, or you’re not. But what if faith, like any virtue in the Aristotelian sense, is a matter of practice? You get up every day, regardless of circumstances, despite difficulties, and you do what you can. You’re as frightened as the next person, but you choose not to let fear paralyze you. And doing what you can, one day at a time, despite fear, strengthens your faith in the future and in your fellow human beings. Do you think it might work that way?

It’s the only way I can make sense of it – moral progress not as a matter of inevitability, not operating blind like the evolution of the physical universe, but as something created by human choices and actions. Because if the long arc of the universe is to bend toward justice, is it not up to each of us to do our part, though all we can see is our little bit of here and now?

Warmest holiday wishes, my friends. Keep the faith! And thank you for being in my life!

P.S. 12/23/2016 - Here is a very inspiring essay. My sister Bettie sent me the link. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, all!

Photograph by Marjorie Farrell

In Which Snow Arrives

You expected maybe a snow scene?

From inside the house, in the night, darkness all around, one feels the cushion of new snow around the foundations and blanketing the surrounding fields. We were warned to expect the storm on Wednesday night, beginning at midnight, but in the dark of Thursday morning I knew before looking that it had not come. The wind’s sound was unchanged: it swept yet across bare ground. Gusts of blowing flakes came midmorning Tuesday, but little accumulated, and still the cold wind blew. The forecast was rewritten, moved off another twenty-four hours, and expected accumulation revised upward.

Waking around 4 a.m. on Friday, however, I felt the difference immediately. Utter stillness ... that sense of being wrapped ... soundless insulation. In the South, I thought, there would be quiet after big winds as live oaks, sea grapes and palms would cease their rattling, but it would be an empty calm, would it not? Up North, in winter, here the calm of winter’s first heavy, swaddling snow is dense.

I got up for to make my morning café au lait, anticipating the light that would reveal, in a few hours, a transformed landscape, but for the moment content with my books, beginning my day’s reading with the final chapter of The Swerve, reading the story of Montaigne’s copy of Lucretius, of Anne Hutchingson’s translation, and of Jefferson’s correspondence with John Adams. For the morning, at least, in the dark with an untouched blanket of snow wrapping my old farmhouse, I smiled to think of the social pleasures of reading – not only communion with writers distant in time and space but also contemporary conversations and correspondence with book-loving friends.

We are not isolated from one another, we readers. We do not withdraw from society when we go into our books. We are deeply social.

I reach for pen and paper to begin a letter to a friend.

*  *  *  *  *

Later. The snow was not as deep in the yard as I imagined it would be, but that scene (and the one here in town) may change in the hours ahead. Meanwhile, if you are up here at the north end of the Leelanau County and don’t usually see The Glen Arbor Sun, stop by and pick up a copy today at Dog Ears Books to enjoy the article on “Orchards and Orphans” by Kathleen Stocking. Also, please note that, by Kathleen’s own request, we are running a “blue light special” (minus the blue lights) on her essay book trilogy: $25 for all three, if you get in here fast enough! That’s practically like buying one book and getting the other two for free – and what a great holiday gift for a special someone on your list!

Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well. 

Summer’s Busy, Warm, and Swiftly Moving Days

Bookseller Pamela Grath introducing author Kathleen Stocking

There you have it! Another author event, and for a change I got into a picture with my guest speaker for the evening, Kathleen Stocking, thanks to friend and customer Kirk O’Green.

Last time around, I wrote of the difficulty of scheduling summer events. So much is going on, every week of the season, that it is impossible to find a date that won’t conflict with something else. Kathleen and I chose our date before realizing we would conflict with the annual Leelanau Conservancy picnic. Then I found out it was also the first night of “The Music Man” and, if that weren’t enough, also Northport Village Council meeting night. Another spell of warm days, what people elsewhere might term a “heat wave,” was somewhat discouraging, also, to a bookseller without air conditioning (although I always think A/C for one or two weeks a year is plain silly, so I don’t want it). Would it be just the two of us?

One by one and two by two, e-mail and Facebook acceptances trickled in. Then I would see someone on the street who said, “I’ll be coming on Thursday for Kathleen’s talk!” So I assured my guest she would have an audience. “At least nine people,” I told her.

So David and I set up chairs, as usual. I mixed punch. We kept most of the gallery lights off to avoid excess heat, and people began to arrive. I introduced Kathleen, as you saw above, and she began to tell her story. Meanwhile, people kept arriving, and I kept squeezing more chairs into the gallery until, all told, we had at least twenty-five people in the audience, an amazing outcome on a warm evening with so much else going on throughout the village and township.

Lights off so as not to increase heat in gallery

And the audience loved her! I thought they would never let her go, even after she moved out of the gallery and into the bookstore, preparatory to saying good-night. If there is anything as gratifying to a bookseller as having a gracious writer as guest, it is having a warm (you should excuse the adjective), appreciative audience for that writer.

Kathleen Stocking

An author event is like a holiday, long anticipated and then, unbelievably, a past event. Kathleen Stocking’s books, however, I will be re-reading, as well as selling, for a long time to come, from Letters From the Leelanau through Lake Country to her latest, The Long Arc of the Universe.

Water in sunlight

“Possible thunderstorms after eight p.m.” or even “after midnight” never did materialize. The orchard workers, out shaking cherry trees long after midnight, were no doubt glad the rain held off, but my little home boardwalk garden was thirsty on Friday morning. Out came the hose! And then there was farm market, and then another bookstore weekend began.

Summer! Swiftly flow the days! There are only momentary pauses in which we catch our breath before plunging on to the next summer event. At Dog Ears Books, that will be another Thursday evening, August 10, with photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl sharing stories from their adventurous series of hikes around our beautiful Leelanau peninsula, memorialized in Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Hope you can join us again next week!

Momentary pause

Conflict! Every Way You Turn!

Timely photo unconnected to text that follows

Imagine (asking readers to imagine seems to be a theme of mine this week) two headstrong individuals in the same organization, each determined to rule alone as autocrat. That’s a recipe for conflict, whether the organization is a nation state or a high school club. If only the two would-be autocrats could join forces and work out ideas together, then go even further and present their ideas to the organization for feedback, what wonders they might achieve! Am I dreaming?

And then there is the national political scene, but I’m not venturing into that minefield today, except to say I am so glad not to have chosen a life in politics!

Idealism, pragmatism, or blind dogmatism; out to win at all costs or hoping to change the world; in it for self or for country – anyone who chooses a life in politics has got to start out with or quickly develop a thick skin, because it’s one thing to realize that no one, even dear self, is universally beloved and quite another, I’m sure, to be ducking slung mud on a daily basis, in public. I have chosen to dedicate my life to a different realm of what Greek philosophers called “the good,” that of literacy and literature and scholarship and art. And yet, even the quietest life presents conflicts, as I’m sure every reader is aware.

Some are small, momentary, and easily resolved.

Whether to linger over coffee and pastry or go for a walk with the dog – that was my first conflict last Wednesday morning, but I resolved it fairly easily by sitting in a park with Sarah for a while, sharing bites with her, and then doing our one-mile walk. No doubt a mere mile was not enough to counteract the effects of the pastry, but that was not a conflict for me, because I don’t have energy to fret about calories in the summer.

Remember those lovely yellow flags not so very long ago? Already Joe-Pye-weed has taken their place as streamside flowers in bloom, and there is loosestrife, too, and also – oh, good heavens! – a few very early goldenrod blossoms rushing the season.

Look closely....

Goldenrod!!!

Loosestrife is an invasive alien we are called upon to despise as an enemy, but I can’t help loving its colorful spires and old-fashioned evocative name. Loosestrife sounds much more poetic than “conflict resolution,” doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine a flower with the latter name! At least in English it seems impossible, but maybe there is a lilting Japanese or Ojibway phrase that would do the job beautifully.

More vexing for the bookseller in a summer tourist town are schedule conflicts that plague efforts to assemble audiences for author events. Impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on! Tuesday evenings are out for much of the summer (township library author series), and Friday evenings in Northport are for Music in the Park, and both the libraries series and Music in the Park are traditional, classic, wonderful public gatherings with which one would not want to conflict, anyway. Every weekend, it seems, has a festival going on somewhere in the area.

So I hit upon Thursday, thinking to land safely on an evening not already crowded with obligations for my target audience of friends and readers and bookstore supporters – but alas! Back to that unfortunately true sentence two paragraphs back: It is impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on.

Kathleen Stocking and I had agreed on Thursday, August 4, at 7 p.m. for a presentation she would give in connection with her new book. Kathleen has traveled all over the world in the past twenty years, always circling back to her Leelanau home when between trips, and she has a lot to share, and it is an honor to have her agree to give a talk in Northport. All good! Imagine, then, my dismay when a local visiting the bookshop looked carefully at our flier for the event and observed that the Leelanau Conservancy’s annual picnic is the same day!

Kathleen and I had already announced the event and put out publicity. We’ve been telling everyone. Too late to change the date now! “What will be, will be,” Kathleen Stocking observes philosophically.

Here are my suggestions:

(1)        It is possible to go online and bid on auction items, rather than waiting for the physical gathering. That’s one idea. Do that.

(2)        Another thought is that the picnic begins at 5:30, and Kathleen Stocking will not be speaking at Dog Ears Books until 7 p.m., so it would be possible to go to the picnic, place a couple of silent auction bids (if you didn’t do it earlier online), and then come on up the last six miles to Northport.

Of course, if you hadn’t planned to attend the Conservancy picnic, you don’t have that particular schedule conflict, and as for others, there may be a way around them, too. (3) Having family or friends visiting? Bring them along! It’s free entertainment, the talk will be lively and stimulating, and you can get ice cream nearby afterwards.

Please think about squashing us onto your calendar for August 4th! You’ll be glad you did. How many people do you know who have taught in a private school (under armed guard) in El Salvador and taught in the Peace Corps in Thailand and Romania? Her experiences gave her plenty of food for thought, and she will share many of her thoughts with us this coming week, as well as signing copies of her book for anyone who cares to purchase.