Direct From Paris!

Somewhere along life's road, we paused.

Do you need a vacation from the tense present? Come with me to the past nearly perfect, and from there we will circle back to a recent day of happiness for me in Northport. 

 

Most Americans, whether they have been able to make the dream come true or not, have a dream city. For some it is Manhattan or San Francisco, for others London or Rome. For me, all my life, it was always Paris. It had certainly been that for my father, who was there in the intoxicating days following the Liberation and who had a chance to see and hear Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow,” in person one evening. And for the Artist—well, how many artists from all over the world, through the years, have sought refuge and validation in Paris? 

 

So Paris was a dream we shared from the beginning. As it turned out, however, each of us made our first trip solo, which was as important for me as it was for him. When I went for the month of May in 1987, it was because so much else in my life had fallen apart that I needed to save at least one important dream. I didn’t want to speak English at all during my weeks in Paris and avoided situations to do so. For me, it was a personal test. When the Artist went for three weeks in April of 1992, it was a different kind of test for him. He needed to make his way around independently with only smatterings of the language. 

My beautiful room!

Complete with a cat named Sirius!

Both of us succeeded, and we made important friends, as well, during our solo times in Paris. The older Frenchwoman from whom I rented a room on the rue de Vaugirard became one of the best friends of my life, and the young Englishman he met became an important friend to the Artist. We dreamed of having these two visit us in the U.S. so we could show them our country. That dream was never realized, but in September of 2000, when the Artist and I finally went to Paris together, it was natural that we would introduce our two dear friends to each other. 

Justin and Hélène as she shows some of the art on her walls

What an enchanted, unforgettable evening that was! Drinks and hors d’oevres at Hélène’s apartment, followed by dinner at a little Auvergnat restaurant in the neighborhood! “We are making beautiful memories!” Hélène said to me, resting her head on my shoulder. She did not speak English any more than the Artist spoke French, but to my great delight they “got” each other without a common language. Of course! 

 

I had chosen our hotel, le Recamier, in part because of its proximity to Hélène’s apartment, my first “home” in Paris, but the peacefulness of the Place with its fountain of the Four Cardinals (and the four cardinal directions), the church of St.-Sulpice with its grand organ, and the bookshops nearby all added their own charms. 

After an exciting but somehow leisurely Paris sojourn, we took the train of grande vitesse south to Avignon, picked up a rental car, and wandered north. We had maps but no reservations, simply exploring as the spirit moved us—and by great good fortune happening upon the village of Blesle, which I will never, never forget. 

We always talked of a return. We wanted to go back to Paris, to see Justin and Hélène again, to visit places we hadn’t had time to see, and maybe spend an entire week in Blesle, seeking out the treasures of the Auvergne. But it was not to be. We never gave up the idea, but time ran out on us. 

 

So imagine the thrill I felt when an email came from the publishing house of Gallimard in Paris, saying they were putting together a new volume of some of Jim Harrison’s work in French translation and that the translator had discovered a couple of screenplay treatments, never sold, that the Artist and the Writer had cowritten back in the 1970s—and would I give permission for translations of those two pieces, with credit given to David Grath, to be included in the volume?!

 

But of course!!!

 

There followed months of emails back and forth between Paris, France, and Northport, Michigan. The flood of forms seemed to multiply overnight like wire coat hangers in the closet of an old farmhouse. (Do I know about that, or do I know about that?) It was international business, there was an advance on royalties involved, etc., etc. About the time I was ready to give up and tell them “Forget the royalties! Just make sure the pieces get into the book!” I was assured that the last form requested would be the final one required and that when the book was published in November 2024 a copy would be sent to me. 

 

Publication timelines are often subject to alteration, so I was not surprised to learn that Métamorphoses would not be released until January 2025. It had been so long since the initial email that for days, even weeks at a time, I would forget about the book completely. Last week, then, when I had a yellow slip to pick up a package at the post office, the contents took me completely by surprise.

Identifying name on package

 

Contents of package

The two screenplay treatments are near the end of the book in a section called “Unedited texts,” and the Artist’s name is in small type in a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the first screenplay (this is, after all, a work of the revered Jim Harrison), but I remember how absolutely thrilled David had been, on his first visit to France, to see the Bob James album, “Grand Piano Canyon,” in a shop in Paris with the image of his painting of the same name on the album cover, so I can easily imagine how pleased he would be to have the collaborative work he did with his friend Jim in a book issued by the one of France’s leading publishers, which is the reason I jumped through that seemingly endless series of bureaucratic hoops—not for money but for love. And there you have it. That's my story.

 

Which brings us back to northern Michigan, on a cold January day, in a turbulent and disturbing moment in American history, but I promised myself and my readers a vacation in today’s post and am not about to renege on my promise. So, some more happy news? There was practically no wind this morning! What joy for the momma and her girl when they went out for their first walk of the day! A perfect morning for chasing chunks of icy snow and slipping and sliding in the process! What fun!

Where Shall I Go Now?

This is not how it looked. This was an unintended fancy setting.

The past is no longer there.

 

When I learned that my friend Hélène had died – and although she was my mother’s age, it came as a shock -- I knew that Paris would never be the same for me. It was in her apartment on the rue de Vaugirard that I rented a room for the month of May 1987, and one of my fondest memories from the long-deferred dream journey David and I made together in September 2020 was an evening in an Auvergnat restaurant in Hélène’s neighborhood, David’s young English friend, Justin, completing our international quartet. “We’re making beautiful memories,” Helene said to me, leaning her head on my shoulder for a moment. 

From album of that trip in 2000

Was that really 24 years ago? We always thought we would go back. 

After the expected yet deep pain of losing our old Sarah to old age, followed by the more tragic loss of poor little Peasy, the Artist and I had a few weeks (all too brief) in which we thought about making a much longer, more roundabout trip back to Michigan in May, going north into South Dakota (a state David had never seen but where I was born) and then to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, home of children and grandchildren we hadn’t visited on their own home grounds for too long. But that trip was not to be….

 

One of my sisters spends a couple weeks in early spring down in San Miguel de Allende and says I’d love it there. People I’ve known for years here in Leelanau have bought a house in the south of France and tell me the guest room is waiting for me. “But I have a dog,” I tell them. I’ve crossed the U.S. between southeast Arizona and northern Michigan three times with Sunny Juliet, so domestic travel presents no problems (even Canada would be doable, except for big cities), but how could I leave my little partner to go out of the country?

***

 

The foregoing I set aside without posting and eventually put up something else instead. Travel? Not in my cards at present.

 

Then along came Sunday morning, as it does reliably every week, and the sky was a cloudless blue, sun bright, barely a breeze stirring -- features of the morning that may or may not come together on any given Sunday, so hallelujah! -- and I realized that I had not been any farther from home than Grand Traverse County for almost a year. Several errand trips to Traverse City and one drive to Interlochen were the extent of my “travel” since return from Arizona in May 2023. Also, this year April 15 marked 32 years since the Artist and I exchanged vows for the second time (Kalamazoo, MI, the first time; Paris, Illinois, second). 

Paris, Illinois, April 14, 1992

My gypsy feet itched for the road, and I thought about Benzie County. Specifically, there was allure in the idea of following M-22 south of Empire. But there was a loose button on my shirt….

 

 

Surprise trip back

 

So I got out my sewing basket, and found when I opened it a little red notebook, a diary from April and May of 2015, that began with our last days in Dos Cabezas – that is, the last days of our first time there, a mid-January to mid-April stay. We were eleven days on the road home that year, stopping often and doing a lot of sight-seeing, and every day’s sights and every evening’s stop were recorded in this book. I began reading and couldn’t stop, mesmerized by the memories brought back by my own handwritten lines. 

The little red travel diary

When I reached the last page and closed the book, I looked out my window at robins on still-bare branches and felt as if I had just crossed the continent again and had aged nine years in half an hour. That is the power of written words.

April 2015

 

The road to Benzie

 

Most of the day remained after my half-hour in the past, however, so dog and I, with camera, binoculars, water bottle, and water dish, piled into the car and headed south. Without going into all the details and every road we traveled, here are a few highlights from our Sunday on the road:

 

These were the true colors of Benzie County's Platte River.

 

Old work by beaver artist

Best views of Long Lake were from the road,

where there was no room to pull over,

so a tiny boat launching area was the best I could do.

In Frankfort, Sunny Juliet and I lunched at the A&W drive-in. 

A real drive-in! Shades of my childhood!

From there we drove around Crystal Lake to rejoin M-22, and then it was back home again and dog play for Sunny and Griffin, followed by bedtime with book and dog for me, finishing up my reading of William Kent Krueger's Windigo Island. Sunny and I slept well. We had had a big day.

Again, September

Once, we were there....
 

Not at all like a thief in the night but perceptibly, on Monday evening, August 21st, a good week and a half before the calendar announced ‘September’ to us, the season turned the corner. Already there had been blackberries fermenting on the stem, wafting their sickly, drunken perfume abroad, and goldenrod putting forth its brilliant pyrotechnical displays, but that Monday evening, as friends and I were finishing up the pizza they’d brought for dinner, which we’d been enjoying outdoors in the shade of black walnut and basswood trees, all at once the temperature dropped and we agreed to have dessert on the porch. The calendar didn't say so yet, but September had come. 

U.P. "home away from home" in the old days

Bessie and Heidi

Superior Hotel, Grand Marais

September used to be the time the Artist and I would take a break after our summer in the public eye – my bookstore, his gallery -- and drive up to the U.P. for a few days on Lake Superior or, the last couple of years, over to Lake Huron, where his grandfather had farmed long ago. All traces of the old farm are gone, but we hunted out his grandparents’ graves in a little country cemetery and one time ran into one of his shirttail cousins having breakfast at a lakeside diner...

... and we ventured down to the tiny crossroads of Glennie and little Vaughn Lake, where his parents had rented a cottage for a few years and for a while owned a lot that David fondly imagined, as he, a boy, cleared away popple trees with his little axe, would be his someday. When a neighbor on the lake became more than a little nutty, however, his father sold the lot. 

“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy in Detroit,” I would say when nighttime found us both sleepless. “Or the time you buried the chartreuse bop cap [his most regretted fashion faux pas] at Vaughn Lake.” Sometimes he would protest, “Oh, you know all my stories,” but I could prime the pump and weasel him into a storytelling mood every time. He was, as all friends and family will attest, a wonderful storyteller. I only wish I had recorded some of those sessions, because he was never interested in writing them down. He sometimes made brief notes for stories but never went further. Maybe, though, record his storytelling would have put a crimp in his style, and I need to be content with the memory of our intimacy and not yearn for wordy details….

I’ve been reading a very dreamy book, Pamela Petro’s The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. I live daily with "presence of absence” since the Artist died, but the idea she describes of having more than one sense of “home” is familiar, too, and has been since David and I went out West and I encountered and fell unexpectedly in love with mountains. Oh, and then there was Paris – and the Auvergne! I recommend the Petro book to all dreamers, but for now I ask you at least to follow this link for an introduction to the Welsh concepts of hiraeth and hwyl.

 

I did not grow up in the place where I was born, and the place where I grew up is one I longed to leave all through my childhood and youth. I love France, and I truly love Cochise County, Arizona. But Midwest, mountainless, English-speaking, Great Lakes-surrounded Michigan is my home, mon chez moi, and I cannot imagine giving it up. My own life stories are here.

Here, where every mile holds memories

 

A third echo my own life finds in The Long Field is the author’s love of stones, of rock. She writes not only of mountains but also of megaliths, rocks made to stand upright by ancient humans for reasons lost to time. The mystery of them.

 

We know we can’t live forever, but stones can, almost. Right up to the threshold of immortality. So we prop them up and carve them. We make cairns and temples and snuff bottles. Sometimes we shape them to look like us. 

 

I wonder if she has ever read David Leveson (whose name I see I spelled wrong in this old blog post). Stones, rocks, mountains – their “innocence” (as Leveson sees them) and their vast age (Petro’s focus) as compared to our own brief lives combine to make them endlessly fascinating – to those of us fascinated by them, I suppose. Perhaps others are left unmoved. Probably. Chacun à son gout, said the old lady as she kissed the pig.

Hiking Arizona rocks with a neighbor

September, though – ah, September! No more going back to school for me, either as student or teacher, and no more rambles with my love in our familiar home-away-from home, Grand Marais, with its hollyhock-lined, grass-carpeted alleys. (Here was our getaway in 2015, and another the following year.) The haunting music of the song “September When It Comes,” by Johnny and Rosanne Cash, fills me with hiraeth and the bittersweet, unquenchable longing evoked by the presence of absence.

 

On a lighter note, if you’re in Ohio and you visit these people, tell them Dog Ears Books sent you. They came to Northport and visited Dog Ears Books on August 29, 2023. 

A Dog in a Paris Bookshop

W  O  R  D

 

Sometimes I play around with possible book titles. Certain words, I find, have an irresistible quality to them, bait on hooks we can hardly keep ourselves from biting. A few such are:

 

    light

    sun

    journey

    path

    road

    sea

    ocean

    river

    lake

    woods

    forest

    mountain(s)

    desert

    city

    village

    country

    west

    north

    south

    way

 

East of Eden, okay, but is ‘east’ an irresistible word? Does it have romance in it? What do you think? Anyway, you see what I mean about magic words?

 

Numerous new releases and fairly recent book titles feature other words that have magic for many of us, telling me I am certainly not alone in being drawn in by them. I've noticed a lot of books with these words in their titles:

 

    Paris*

    dog

    bookshop

 

Hence the title for today’s post, because – well, didn’t it draw you in? I don’t know of anyone who has used this exact title, but I offer it to anyone ready to write the book, and my plea has an addendum: You must, please, include lots of details about Paris and the bookshop and the dog, because as lovers of Paris and dogs and bookshops (please let there be used books, and let the dog be of mature years!), we your readers want a generous literary getaway and can never have too much of what we love.

 

(*Two of my all-time favorite books set in Paris are nonfiction, and neither one is new. Elliott Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris tells of his time on the tiny Rue de la Huchette in the years leading up to World War II, while Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, essays originally published in the New Yorker magazine not all long ago--in my sense of time--, introduce the reader to places and experiences that few tourists would uncover for themselves. Both these books give a quirky alien insider’s perspective on Paris insolite.) 

So once more I ask: Where, where, where is the Paris bookshop dog story? And could the dog have been Pierre’s dog in another life?

What words are irresistible magic for you in book titles? Because I know my list is only a beginning...

Practical matters: Dog Ears Books is generally open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 to 5, but will close early today (June 8, closing at 2 p.m.) and may have to fudge on a few upcoming Tuesdays, but whenever the bookstore is open, David Grath's gallery next door is also open. It's the 30th anniversary year for the bookstore and the last summer for the gallery, so please don't miss visiting.

 

 

Beautiful Music From an Old Saw

 

Sketch from that day in Paris

One September day in the year 2000, the Artist and I were at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, awaiting our train south to Avignon, where we would stay a couple of nights before picking up a rental car to meander our way back north. We were watching the arrivals and departures clicking over on the board and listening intently to hear, over the hubbub of a tightly packed crowd, announcements of departures from the loudspeakers when, floating as it were over sound so dense it seemed almost a solid mass, came strains of music ethereal. I had to find the source! We made our way through the noisy throng and came upon a small clearing, in the center of which was a man playing a saw. Yes, a saw – that old-fashioned carpenter’s tool, only bent with his left hand to different curvatures and bowed with his right like a cello. I saw it and heard it and still could hardly believe the beauty of it!

 

Oft-repeated bits of conventional wisdom are sometimes referred to as “old saws,” a usage that has nothing to do with the tool but comes from an old English word for discourse (‘saga’ comes from the same source), and so my introduction today is not etymological but metaphorical -- if that! More homonymic, really. 

 

Conventional wisdom has it that a sure way to happiness is to count one’s blessings daily. I’ve written about counting blessings before, although gratitude last year for me came not from following advice, conventional or more personal, but as a spontaneous emotional response. My husband was dying, and yet in the midst of agonizing grief I was overwhelmed and greatly surprised to feel gratitude, also. At the same time! Gratitude for the happiness we had shared for so long, as well as for family and friends supporting us in the moment. It astonished me that I would feel gratitude along with grief – that I could feel gratitude at all at such a time. (I would never have anticipated it.) But I was, if you will, grateful for the gratitude, too, as it got me through those difficult, unreal days.

 

As time goes by, however, and grief drags on, the spontaneity of gratitude is not always available. At least, that has been my experience, and that’s why I turn to the old saw about counting blessings. My need for conventional wisdom is especially strong right now, as day after day brings one anniversary after another of last year’s events. 

 

I will not even attempt to list all my blessings here, for truly they are infinite, but will focus on two that are deeply meaningful to me this January. 

 

I am grateful beyond what words can say that my beloved was spared the loss of his cognitive abilities and attendant loss of independence and decision-making, possibilities he dreaded much more than he feared death. [I re-read this sentence and realize that it is misleading. He did not fear death at all. More than once he told me (and I heard him say the same on the phone to friends), "I'm not afraid to die. I've had a good life."] His biggest worry whenever he had to have surgery was, would there be some problem with the anesthetic that would injure his brain and alter his mind for the worse? After an operation, his most pressing question was, “Am I still smart?” Yes, my love, you were, every time! He was himself, right up to the end of his life, and he went out on his own terms, as he had always lived. 

 

I’m certainly not grateful that he’s gone but deeply grateful that he was able to hold onto what was most important to him as long as he lived. Not everyone is so fortunate. He was, and his good fortune must be mine, too, now as always.

 

My other cause for gratitude this January of 2023 is the presence of my dog, that lively little puppy the Artist encouraged me to bring home, a puppy he decided was more important to both of us than the Italian motorcycle he’d been contemplating buying. I am grateful to my beloved for the puppy and grateful to the puppy for her presence. In the morning, there she is, and I say to her, “Good morning, sweetheart. I’m glad you’re here.” Then I look at my husband’s photograph next to the bed and say to him, “Good morning, sweetheart. Thank you for the life we made together, and thank you for Sunny!” 

He knew me. He loved me. We were happy and knew it and did not take our happiness for granted. In this world of so many woes, how wonderfully fortunate is that? And though I miss him every day, an eager little dog face makes me smile, and I have a companion indoors and out, and my two streams of gratitude run together into a river.

 

January. The “bleak midwinter.” We are under a winter storm advisory this weekend, though most of the snow should fall and stay above 7000 feet, that is, on the mountaintops. May we all be safe and be grateful this holiday weekend for the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

P.S. For an urban adventure featuring books, see previous post. Book reportage and stories of my Cochise County expeditions on Christmas Eve (wildlife) and New Year’s Eve (uphill climb) at links in this sentence. 

Regaining Balance

Poor little thing!

Boulverser is a French word meaning to disrupt, to confuse, but to me its meaning comes in more concrete images. Metaphors long ago buried in ordinary words, usually unnoticed when we speak a language learned in babyhood, are easier to see in a second language, where they stand out for us like pictures. Since boule is a ball, and verser is to pour or spill, I don’t see abstract confusion but a scene full of action, something like a bowling ball sending stout wooden pins every-which-way, many of the pins doing involuntary somersaults before coming to rest. The pins are knocked off their feet — that is, if I were to be thrown upside-down and sideways by a bowling ball, that’s how I’d feel — boulversée. Once in a while I am, anyway, metaphorically. It is a sense of disorientation, of “How can it be?” 

Many of us felt that way on Monday when we learned, each in our own way and time and place, that Notre Dame de Paris was on fire. 

Those of us old enough to remember November 1963  can tell you exactly where we were when we learned that President Kennedy had been shot. In 2001 the event seared into consciousness was the planes flown into the World Trade Center. Looking back, those are memories, but in both cases, when we first heard the news, it didn’t fit at all. It wasn’t history then but a disruption of reality. It can’t be happening. It can’t be real. The first response was disbelief, resistant to evidence. Dazed disbelief. Then gut-wrenching fear and explosive grief. It can’t be happening. It can’t be real. Please, don’t let it be true!

Long, long ago, when I was a little girl, my beloved cat died, and I cried so hard and so long over the unthinkable loss that my parents thought I might have to be taken to the hospital. At last, my sobs giving way to heaving sighs, my mother thought to distract me from my grief by taking me for a little ride in the car. We drove to the drugstore down the highway from our neighborhood, and I remember my mother’s loving smile as she tried to tease me back to life by saying, “Why the sad face? You look as if you’d lost your best friend.” My mother was not a cruel, insensitive person. She was a good mother. Yet at that moment there was nothing she could have said better calculated to throw me back into paroxysms of tears and wailing. “I have!”

We were at the library on Monday, and I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw the first image of Notre Dame on fire. No, I thought, this must be someone’s idea of a sick joke. (That had been my first reaction in November of 1963 when a classmate told me, as we were taking our seats in English class, that the president had been shot.) I left Facebook and went to the news. It was true. No, it couldn’t be true. “Oh, no! “Oh, no!” I looked around me, but everyone in the library was going about their business in ordinary, everyday ways. 

Where was David? I looked in the video/newspaper area, the art book section, glanced into the sunroom. Not there. I went back to my screen but was soon on my feet again. Had he gone out to the car? No. On my third or fourth search mission I found him in the sunroom, around the corner from the door where I hadn’t seen him the first time. “Come with me.” And then we looked and read and watched together, both of us near-frozen with grief. 

He had a stack of movie videos for me to check out, so I had to go to the desk on our way out. “Are you all right?” the librarian asked. I managed to find words to say, briefly, “Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral, is burning.” She checked out the movies for me and then said, “Have a great day!” I thought of my mother so many years before and knew the librarian meant no harm. And yet —

David called a friend, who seemed curiously unmoved by the news. “Was it very old?” he asked. 

Yet I know that the two of us were far from alone in our feelings, that all over the world others were with us in our disbelief and grief and fear and, finally, whispers of hope. The roof and spire were lost but much was saved. The world as we have known it is not ended.

So why such shock and grief? The fire was accidental, not the result of hate or violence, and no lives were lost, but had the building been utterly destroyed, as we feared for hours it might be, the loss would have been incalculable. The building represented and embodied centuries of faith, of history, of culture. It was part of individual memories the world over and part of the collective French, European, Western, and world memory, too. 

Living much of our 21st-century lives in the make-believe of fantasy games and films, virtual currency, identity algorithms, and instant gratification of various kinds, we can too easily lose sight of the fact of our own embodiment. Human beings evolved for life on earth, not on other planets. and our memories, too, attach in great part to physical objects, places, the whole of our embodied world. A face, a place, the feel of the stones or the wooden floor beneath our feet, a scent on the breeze, a certain angle of light striking just so, a taste on the tongue.

Only two weeks remain for us here in the high desert, beneath the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas. Already overwhelmed by the idea of packing up and heading once again cross-country, then boulversée by the news from Paris, I really, really needed Kathleen Stocking’s new book, From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces, a book of essays about the home to which we will soon return. I’ll write about that soon. For now, Kathleen’s essays and backyard birds, in addition to the more hopeful news about Notre Dame, are working together to put me back on my feet. Little things: a bee on a flower....

[Note: the goldfinch photo at the beginning of today's post is an old image from my files, a bird that flew into one of our Michigan porch windows. -- Coming back to correct this note: the bird at the top of the post is not a goldfinch but a yellow warbler. One of my neighbors here in Dos Cabezas corrected me when we ran into each other at the library in Willcox. She envied me for having seen a yellow warbler. "Yes," I said, "but it was dead!" Also, I didn't know what it was until she told me. Thanks, Dorothy!]