A Really Big Evening

Down by a couple of ponds outside Willcox, Arizona, back in early 2015, I pursued a flash of brilliant red with my camera and captured, to my great delight and excitement, an image of a vermilion flycatcher, a bird I had never expected to see. I am hardly what might be called a “birder,” serious or otherwise, but even my aviphobic husband, the Artist, became somewhat interested in the birds of Arizona. We went out of our way, for instance, to pilgrimage to the western wintering grounds of sandhill cranes. But that solitary vermilion flycatcher was more a private triumph for me, one I could hardly wait to share. “Is it a big deal?” David asked. Not excited. So when we planned a trip from our Cochise County home base to Santa Cruz County to visit old friends, I was eager to share my sighting, knowing they would appreciate what a big deal it was. And that was a lovely evening we had in Patagonia, sitting outdoors outside the restaurant (so Jim could smoke) long after dinner was finished and darkness fallen. I hoped for many more such evenings, but that was our last with Jim and Linda, as she died the following fall and Jim less than half a year later.

Saturday evening at the Opera House in Traverse City we attended an event billed as “A Really Big Tribute: An Evening of Life, Art, and Stories,” the event taking its name from a posthumous collection of Jim’s essays on food (and life and art and stories) titled A Really Big Lunch. We had no idea what to expect. Also, while I had taken my camera in the car, I decided against taking it in with me for the evening (though I’m sure other people will be posting pictures on Facebook and elsewhere), so my report will be idiosyncratic and sketchy at best.

Okay, here goes.

In the course of the evening, various people from Jim’s life spoke of their friendships with him and their work with him, and they read from his work and from work that he had found meaningful. I cannot attempt to capture the overwhelming flood of detailed memories, but here are the speakers, in order of their appearance:

Joseph Bednarik, co-publisher of Copper Canyon Press

Michael Delp, Traverse City poet

John Evans, bookseller, Lemuria Bookstore, Jackson, Mississippi

Andrew Harrington Bahle, family friend

Lucy Fisher & Douglas Wick, American film producers

Robert DeMott, Montana poet

Will Hearst, chairman, Hearst Corporation

Anne-Marie Ooman, Leelanau County poet and essayist

Les ValMadre, Australian architect & yachtsman and former Leelanau County resident

Norm Wheeler, retired teacher, Leelanau School

Judy Hottensen, associate publisher, Grove Atlantic

INTERMISSION

VIDEO PRESENTATION

J. Stephen Sheppard, New York attorney and Jim’s literary agent since 2005

Chris Walton & Steve Byrne, co-directors and co-producers of the evening’s video presentation

Doug Stanton, bestselling nonfiction author from Traverse City and founder of the National Writers Series

Amy Reynolds, sales manager, Horizon Books, Traverse City

Colum McCann, novelist and short fiction writer and National Book Award winner, born in Ireland, now residing in New York

Ray Zepeda, award-winning poet and professor of English at California State University, Long Beach

Michael Ondaatje, acclaimed writer of fiction and nonfiction, born in Sri Lanka and now residing in Toronto

Gary Snyder, poet, environmental activist, Pulitzer Prize winner

Joyce Harrington Bahle, Jim’s aide-de-camp and personal assistant since 1979

Gary Wilson, event planner and “silent partner” in planning the evening of tribute

I am serious when I say that the deluge of personal memories presented by this cast of participants was overwhelming. So many people, so many stories, so many different perspectives on a man and writer so many of us loved! All the words continue to roil and tumble in my heart and mind, but certain phrases struck deeply in the moments they were uttered: 

• Colum McCann noted that Jim had created, in all of us, a community, “a community of feeling.” 
• In the video presentation, one clip caught Jim saying to an interviewer that a poet’s job is “to bring the gods back to life.” 
• And then Joyce, at the end, using a phrase David and I often use as an accolade of someone we admire who has passed on, stated simply that Jim “got his work done.”

Afterward, old friends were gathering here and there in Traverse City to continue the evening, but David said if we went anywhere at all, he would be most inclined to stop at the Blue Bird in Leland for a drink, “for old times’ sake,” since in many ways that's where it all used to happen. We wondered a bit what we would find there and if the bar would be filled with rowdy young strangers up for fall color. "If it looks impossible, we just won't go in." Fine.

Happily, not so. There were half a dozen or so people seated at the bar, one of them old friend Cris Telgard (who had been at the "Tribute," too), and the atmosphere calm and welcoming. We were happy to “belly up to the bar” with Cris and have him introduce us to a couple of new Leland residents -- with ties of blood, as it turned out, to old Leland friends. David was soon engrossed in conversation with the new couple, and Cris and I fell into Arizona talk. Then --

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I have to run out and get something from my car.”

It was a magazine. 

About a year earlier, he had bought an old copy of Arizona Highways from September 1951, the month of his birth, in near-mint condition, with the entire issue devoted to cattle ranching and cowboys. Cris didn’t find much in the issue that spoke directly to him, but there was one feature he knew would speak to me, and so he had been carrying the magazine around in his car for months, waiting for our paths to cross. Never mind that we live only about 7 miles from one another – all of us tend to become very busy with our own lives, especially when we have businesses to run.

Cris encouraged me to open the magazine and look for the reason he was giving it to me. “Keep going,” he said – and there it was! “My little cow town!”

I’m sure the residents of Willcox would be taken aback to hear their town called “little” and particularly to have someone who spent only three months there – and not even in Willcox but out in the ghost town beyond the playa – using a possessive pronoun in connection with it. I wrote down “Red Rock West” and the name Nicholas Cage on a bar napkin for Cris so he wouldn’t forget to look for a film I love because of its Cochise County setting, and Cris urged us to stop overnight in Mesilla on our way West this winter. Because – yes – after three years of wondering if I would ever see the ghost town again, we will be returning to Dos Cabezas. 

There will be bittersweet moments, I know. For one thing, we will not have the happy thoughts of Jim and Linda over in Patagonia, an easy day trip away. But we will once again have cows in the yard and coyotes yipping and howling and singing in the mountains at night (as they do here at home in the woods and fields of northern Michigan). We will have Arizona’s winter birds and the dry mountain air that lets me breathe so easily. We will have yellow legal pads (I have already bought a pack) for our winter’s writing, along with David’s paints and canvases and my sketchbooks and pencils. And we will have, besides memories of our first sojourn on the frontera, time for new experiences to form new memories, attached to the former like a new layer of sediment on older solid rock.

When we finally got home on Saturday night, we were shocked to discover that it was already Sunday morning, 1:45 a.m. to be precise. In the old days, that would have been no reason for a party to end, but these days are different. We couldn’t remember the last time we had been out so late.

It was more than worth it. The memories, the old friends, the stories -- then wrapping up the evening with Cris at the Bird to bring it all back home again. Perfect.

And it was 2 a.m. before we went to bed! In the old days, that would have been nothing, but nowadays that spells a really big evening.

Rain and Deeper Questions

Thursday morning in Northport. So far it looks like Wednesday morning, pictured above. But let’s not complain. It’s good for those seeds planted in the garden, the transplanted trees, the morels we’re all waiting for, other field and orchard crops, and for generally recharging the water table. And as a friend pointed out yesterday, it’s good reading weather.

Ellen Airgood, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jim Harrison, and Christine Byron & Thomas Wilson—what do they all have in common? All people known and admired by your friendly bookseller at Dog Ears Books, for one thing. For another, all have Michigan Notable Books awards for 2012. Well deserved, friends!

On another literary front, National Writers Series in Traverse City scored another success on Wednesday evening with Harvard ethics professor Michael Sandel. A sold-out house was Sandel’s classroom for the evening, as he pushed audience members to think about two separate issues, immigration and motivating children to do better in school. The questions: Should citizenship be up for sale? Why not put it in the open market where it can be bought and sold? How about paying children to read books? What are the arguments for and against that practice? At the close of his talk, Sandel received a standing ovation. Here are some of the audience members leaving the Opera House on a balmy Front Street evening in May. Recognize anyone?

The best part of an evening like that is continuing to think and discuss the questions afterward, as David and I did on our way home and at our dining table before turning in for the night. One of my observations in the car was that the interesting present intersection of philosophy, psychology and economics has a lot to say about motivation. (For more on this topic, see my book review here.) David wanted the question of citizenship sales pushed harder. “Who owns my citizenship?” he asked. “Do I own it, or does the government?” One woman in the audience had objected to the idea of being able to sell one’s citizenship to a would-be immigrant on the grounds that the government has always been the arbiter of who is allowed into the country.

On my way to town this morning, it occurred to me that both questions might be put together in an overarching question about what sorts of “goods” (things we value, not necessarily limited to material objects) are properly seen as property. Is my citizenship something I own. With advertising, we can buy people’s attention, at least to a degree, but can we buy their caring, their commitment? I see that the question now splits back into two: (1) what kinds of “goods” does it make sense to think of as property, and (2) what kinds of “goods” have a market at all? What do you think?

Currently my reading is going in many directions as I make my way through several different books at once. One is David McCullough’s The Greater Journey, another a book on Hellenism, a third Portrait of a Jew, by Albert Memmi. One of the books that took much less time to read was Mildred D. Taylor’s Song of the Trees, a book written for young people. In all of these books (least on this topic in McCullough, but there’s some of it there, too) I find important questions of who can own what in different parts of the world at different times in history. Michael Sandel’s question is a different one—not whether some people are allowed ownership while others are not, but should everything we value be subject to the market? It is one thing, he says, to have a market economy, quite another to be a market society.

While rain waters my transplanted hemlock trees, the radish and chard seeds still sleeping in their coats, the healthy, green rhubarb and strawberry plants asking nothing more than rain, I will be in my bookstore in Northport. It’s a good place to be while pondering life’s deep questions.