Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Do You Know What Makes YOU Happy?

A few research findings gleaned from STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS, by Daniel Gilbert (NY: Knopf, 2006):

Absences are difficult to perceive, thus difficult to imagine.

“Distance” in time, like spatial distance, smoothes out and erases details.

What we feel in the present, we expect to feel in the future.

Looking back, we regret inaction more often than action.

We remember highlights more vividly than slogs.

We remember how things ended better than the overall course.

Our imaginations exaggerate differences and overlook similarities.

We think we are much more different from other people than we really are.

It’s hard for us to benefit from the experiences of others because we think our experience will be different.

For all the reasons above (the foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list, but I skimmed over a lot of information in the book that wasn’t new to me), over and over, human beings misjudge how much future happiness or unhappiness a particular event or course of action will bring them. Gilbert is a psychologist, and a lot of what’s in this book is the kind of thing found in behavioral economics, that fascinating intersection of psychology, economics, and philosophy (ethics).

For the stubborn reader who will tend to brush aside research findings, toward the end of the book (following the last three points I’ve put in boldface above) Gilbert provides this kicker:

Because, if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better “football sense” than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average, too. As one research team concluded, “Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, fair-minded, and healthy—not to mention attractive—than the average person.”  

[BUT!!!} 

This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others—often for better but sometimes for worse. When people are asked about generosity, they claim to perform a greater number of generous acts than others do; but when they are asked about selfishness, they claim to perform a greater number of selfish acts than others do. [Etc., etc.]

As a species, then, we are not all suffering from delusions of grandeur. (That’s a relief!) Asked to rate oneself on an easy task, most people say they’re superior to others, but asked how they would perform a difficult task, they generally rate themselves worse than others. As the author says, “We don’t always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique.”

And each of us is unique in our own experience, since our own experience is the only experience we ever have! Gilbert believes, however, that if we take scientific findings seriously, we’ll find plenty of reasons to learn from the experience of others, experience we never had or could have. To do so demands only that we recognize how much like other people we are.

On Monday morning, I heard the beginning of a story on NPR about a new smart phone app that would plug the user into an individualized research study on happiness. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, when the alert comes on you are asked to answer a number of questions, including what you’re doing, how you feel, and whether or not you have to be doing what you’re doing. (I forget the other questions. You can probably find this information somewhere online if you want to search for it.) The thing is, I was bustling around the house, getting ready for my day, and those questions alerted me to the fact that the radio voices were goading me into hurrying when I didn’t need to hurry. Summer’s over! Monday is a day off for me now! And I didn’t have to have the radio on, so I turned it—snapped it!—right off and instantly slowed down and felt more relaxed. Do I need an app to guide me to happiness? I don’t think so. Awareness is all that’s needed.

Later that day, when David and I (with Sarah in the backseat) had wandered and meandered our way deep into Benzie County, taking an unplanned, one-day vacation, I couldn’t help thinking about my mother’s report on the autumn trip she and my father took one year to New England. She said it was the most beautiful fall color she’d ever seen, and she never expected to see anything to equal what she saw then and there. Into my thoughts then came the distinction between ‘maximizers’ and ‘satisficers,’ the latter an awkward word that nevertheless captures pretty well my own approach to life, I think. Perhaps if I traveled to New England in the fall, the color there would so far exceed that of Michigan that Michigan would fall on my experiential rating scale from a 10 to a 7 or 8. The thing is, I am so perfectly satisfied with Michigan autumn that I feel no need to go in search of something better.

Similarly, on a trip out West one spring, David and I found ourselves on a winding mountain highway with views that took our breath away. The beautiful, inhuman immensity of the landscape went on and on until our souls were dizzy! We were and are, I guess, fully prepared to believe that the Grand Canyon experience, which we’ve never had, would eclipse that day’s revelations, but we felt more than completely satisfied with the experience we did have.

Then there were last winter’s ice caves out past Gill’s Pier. We didn’t go out on Lake Michigan to see them. Thirteen years before, there were ice caves out at the lighthouse, and we were fortunate enough to stumble out there by chance... to find all of Northport gathered at the shore... to be able to explore, right at the shoreline, caves of blue ice large enough to stand up in.... I know that last year’s caves were larger and more extensive and more varied and lasted longer. They were also much farther out on the frozen lake and harder to get to, and, since news of them had gone national, there were much bigger crowds. Everyone who went out said it was “worth it,” and I’m sure it was. At the same time, I’m satisfied to have had the ice cave experience I had.

And now all of this is reminding me of what so many people have said over the years in books about New York and Paris: “Oh, you should have been here [there] x number of years ago!” My father firmly believed that my Paris experience could never be as wonderful as his, and how many people have told you similar things about all kinds of places? “You should have been there then!” They were there then; you, poor thing, can only go now or in the future, i.e., too late!

Belief in a Golden Age of the past is one of mankind’s dearly held myths, difficult to demolish because it is immune to experience. Gilbert would say it depends on the second of my boldfaced points above. When I imagine myself living in 18^th-century America, I focus on those aspects of life that appeal to me, forgetting all the difficult mundane, everyday details I would encounter should I be able to transport myself back in time. Woody Allen captured this belief brilliantly in his film about Paris that has the writer protagonist transported back to the postwar period he so longs to have known, only to find people there longing for the earlier Belle Epoque, and so forth.

In the past year I’ve seen friends lose jobs, lose houses and businesses, go through bankruptcy and divorce and chemotherapy, and the way they’ve met those challenges has been very enlightening. They go on. They find happiness in unexpected places, sometimes from surprising sources. Gilbert’s research confirms this. Imagining future losses, we believe we will be devastated, but the truth is that we human beings are more resilient than we imagine, and that’s a good lesson to take away from this book, from our own experience, and from the experience of others. 

For the record, I'm happy that my parents each had a chance to see Paris (they were there separately, at different times) and that they were able to make a trip together to see fall color in New England.

The Only Constant: Change

Snow and cold are not news.

Maybe you’ve heard of Esther Forbes. In children’s literature, she made her name as the author of Johnny Tremaine, the 1943 winner of the Newbery Medal, but she also in her lifetime was one of the foremost scholars of Paul Revere and won the Pulitzer in 1942 for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Her first published short story, “Breakneck Hill,” won the O. Henry prize for short stories in 1915. The author was then 24 years old. You can read more about this fascinating American writer here. 

A novel by Esther Forbes that I’d never heard anyone mention fell off the shelf and into my hands not long ago. Rainbow on the Road tells the story, from the perspective of an old man in Kansas looking back on one summer in his youth, of an itinerant portrait painter in 18^th-century New England. No less than John P. Marquand wrote of Rainbow on the Road (he is quoted on the flyleaf):

A while ago I wrote a paper in which I tried to show that no historical novel can recapture the true spirit of the past, since its writer must always present it in terms of the present. I was amazed at how mistaken I was in this idea when I read Esther Forbes’s last novel. I have never seen the illusion of a period so beautifully presented. Somehow she has caught the whole spirit of New England, which I used to recognize when I talked to very old people during my childhood. In my humble opinion, it is outstanding in every way. It is literature and by far the best thing she has ever written.

It is interesting to see that Marquand called Rainbow on the Road the “best thing she has ever written,” considering Forbes had won the O. Henry in 1915, the Pulitzer in 1942, and the Newbery in 1943. Looking back on the fact that Johnny Tremaine has never been out of print, what would anyone say now was Esther Forbes’s “best” book? And what of John P. Marquand? Sixty or seventy years ago, who would have predicted that he would be found on a website (could websites have been predicted!) calling him one of America’s “Forgotten Writers”? Sic transit gloria mundi.

Book Club edition, 1954

This morning I was telling David the bare bones of the story of Rainbow on the Road – the unschooled portrait painter, trained by apprenticeship when young as a “limner,” who painted bodies and backgrounds all winter and then traveled the countryside come summer, filling in faces and selling his canvases for $3 to $5 apiece; the handsome, womanizing highwayman whose description was close enough to the painter’s that the two were often confused in pre-photography New England; the life of all the various peddlers on the road in late 18^th-century New England, days of horse-drawn coaches and stages, small town inns and public houses, rocky hills grazed by sheep, isolated farmhouses, flatboats and canals as good transportation, and political speeches as good entertainment.

Close to a third of the novel (this is only an impression, not anything I measured, and my impression may exaggerate the facts) is taken up with stories told by various characters. Speechifying, story-telling, and the making up and passing along of original ballads were ways that Yankees passed the time in those days. Their stories, added to the author’s descriptions of the countryside and plot complications as Jude Rebough is confused with Ruby Lambkin, make for a very entertaining novel. Historical verisimilitude, which Marquand praised so highly, is rich icing on a hearty cake.

One of the great themes of Rainbow on the Road is that of social change. The narrator was thirteen years old, he tells us, when he spent that summer on the road with the man who stood in the place of an uncle to him. (His “Aunt Mitty” was not a blood relative but had taken him in when his parents were killed in a road accident near her house.) As an old man looking back, he tells us, along with his story, about the way things were done then.

I guess I’ve made it clear by now that these days were before the time an artist (and seems like everybody is an artist now) could buy paint in a compressible tube with the oil and the pigment already mixed together. The powdered colors, each ground to the proper coarseness or fineness best for it, came to Dr. Bloomer in containers about like what rare tea come in. On selling them they were transferred to bladders of small animals. When Jude wished to use a certain color he’d prick the bladder with a bone tack, sprinkle out the amount he’d need, and mix in the linseed oil. But I associate the smell of oil of lavender with his work, and turpentine as well. From then on, the bladder having been breached, the tack served as a stopper....  

The biggest bladder used was that of a rabbit. If you wanted more, instead of going into sheep or swine bladders, you bought two rabbitsful. As I remember, this was about an ounce. A rat’s bladder was smaller. These were commonest but other animals served. A mouse’s bladder was the smallest unit.

I found these descriptions mesmerizing. The boy, accompanying the artist as an apprentice, never did learn to paint, but he learned to make brushes (also described), and he took over the handling of money, something for which the artist had no gift.

One of the novel’s minor characters is a peddler of broadside ballads, Phineas Sharp. Sharp puts words to tunes of his own invention and sings his way along the road, keeping his overhead low and selling copies of his lyrics. The last time Jude and Eddy meet with Sharp, the latter tells them abruptly, “I’m sixty-four,” adding, “What’s more, when I die there will be no more like me coming on.” This meeting, coming near the end of the book and near the end of the summer’s adventure for the painter and the boy, begins to sum up the changes that were in the wind all along.

“My trade’s done. Pianofortes and music stores. Sheet music. Music books. I’m the tail-end of the last. People, learned people, have told me there have always been singing men upon the road since the beginning of time. But I know they will not last on into time to come. If I had a son, or a grandson rather, I’d never learn him my trade.”  

We had come to the edge of the high ridge on which Bennington sits. Below us was the great valley into York State. The road he would follow on dipping and appearing and disappearing across it. 

 “Ballad singers and broadside men are done for,” he said.

That was the last they ever saw of Phineas Sharp, footing it along that ridge road, appearing and disappearing over and over until he passed forever out of their sight. In retrospect, the narrator sees that limners like Jude were as much a disappearing breed as broadside men.

...[Jude] was just about the tail-end of his trade too. Not the last of people like H. H. Hooper, who called themselves artists and had studios. But he was among the last of the traveling limners, for already (unbeknownst to any of us) that Frenchman, name of Daguerre, had done his work. Before you could guess it the itinerant limner was clean off the road and the daguerreotypist and the tintype men were on it.

The days of canal boats and rivermen were coming to an end, too. Soon the railroads would arrive, and the strong horses on the towpaths would disappear along with the ballad singers and limners.

As a bookseller for over 20 years, I am forced to think about and adapt as best I can to constant change. To extinction, however, one does not adapt: one succumbs. The question is, which is it to be? Bookshop proprietors have been worrying about their own demise since the first appearance of the newspaper. Movies and television and electronic games all presented new threats, while more recently it is the online world of virtual text, amusement, instant answers, and distance socializing that some think has booksellers doomed. What is the future for books? Many hazard predictions and have ideas, but no one really knows.

Lately I’ve been fretting (winter tends to encourage all kinds of fretting) about what seems like a new, disturbing development in the world of books and reading. Ten or twenty years ago, whenever anyone in my bookstore gave a sly little smile and referred to the local library as my “competition,” I’d shake my head and say, “Every town deserves a library and a bookstore. A library is not a bookstore, and a bookstore is not a library. There’s room for both.” I said that, and I believed it. For several years (two years practically single-handed) I helped run our local library’s summer guest author series. But recently I’ve felt a rumbling underground, changes beneath my feet, the carpet moving under me, and I’m wondering more and more if bookstores and libraries are complementary, as I have been invested in believing for so long, or if economic reality has conspired to cast booksellers and librarians as competitors.

Research into recent developments is better done online than in old books, so I began poking around. One library site, rather than describe or predict, went in for prescription: 

In the end, there should be no competition between bookshops and libraries.    Authors, publishers, booksellers, and libraries would do well to view each other as allies in the struggle to preserve literacy and instill a passion for reading and learning in all of mankind.  When everybody reads, everybody wins.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? That is definitely the world I want to see, the one I love to believe in, as I’ve loved libraries and librarians all my life -- and still do! On the other hand, here’s a retired librarian proposing that librarians become booksellers. What happens then to “no competition” between us? 

I found some ideas from the year 2010 for ways bookstores and libraries can collaborate, and I found an opinion from 2014 from a radio talk show host who believes bookstores should be more like libraries and libraries more like bookstores. Problem: Library funding is discussed; bookstore revenue is pretty much glossed over. Numbers of people through the door mean nothing to a bookstore’s bottom line. Nothing counts but sales.

A piece from Forbes magazine was the scariest. The writer, Mark Bodnick, predicts that public libraries will go extinct, following the disappearance of bookstores, because anyone will be able to download whatever they want to read without going to either a bookstore or a library.

I cannot read the future. Quite frankly, I find more enjoyment visiting the past via books – and visiting real, live friends face to face, whenever possible, spending time with them in the same room, although we have no “need” to do more than call each other on the phone or chat through Facebook. But that’s just me, and my feelings prove nothing about what will come to pass with books in the years ahead.

I could be that I am one of the last of a vanishing breed. If that’s the way things turn out, I will be grateful to the end of my days for such a wonderful experience: my own bookstore, surrounded by books, meeting strangers, making friends, helping customers, and getting to know writers in this world we shared as the 20^th century turned to the 21^st on planet Earth.