Time: The Environment of Life -- Change: The Only Constant

Time looms large over our lives!

 

It’s a generational divide, that between the digital generation and “those of us who were brought up among clocks with old fashioned dials,” writes Nancy Willard, in an essay entitled (from a poem by e.e. cummings) “When By Now and Tree By Leaf.” She goes on: 

 

For us, time is space. An hour is as round and friendly as the full moon, which often peeps through a tiny window on the dials of grandfather clocks. A quarter of an hour is a quarter of a pie, wherein the minutes nestle as closely knit as cells in a comb, and if they are joyful, every cell is filled with honey, and if they are dull, they stand empty and flavorless as wax. To the digital generation, I suppose time is linear. The minutes fall away, never to be heard from again. There is no record of the past and no promise of the future, only the swiftly vanishing present. 

 

-      From her collection Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors and Stories (Essays on Writing)

 

Two pages later, Willard tells of her childhood living room, with three electric appliances – toaster, radio, clock -- and only one electric outlet. (I pause, bemused, at the idea of a toaster in the living room.) “You could have news or you could have time or you could have toast,” she tells us, but not all at once, and then she recounts how a gift of homemade elderberry jam from a neighbor had the family choosing toast over news and time until their bread supply ran out, whereupon they started out for town, ostensibly to buy bread, but with bread really only the excuse for a day-long adventure --  over a lake, across a pasture, along the highway until sidewalks were reached. Time (without the electric clock plugged in) was expansive and stretched to make room for ice cream and for browsing dime store toy counters. It was, she says (time, that is), “not so much measured as observed.” Those six words seem worth lingering over. Maybe you want to look away from your screen for a while now, get up and walk to the door, look out at the world and see what there is to see, even go for a walk….

 

…Since childhood I have been obsessed with time, and that all-consuming subject for thought and reflection has only grown as my decades have accumulated. I am fascinated by material traces of the past that survive into my own present, whether back in historically youthful Michigan or here in the arid and older Southwest. Here in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, crumbling adobe and rusted metal attest to the passing of time. The mountains, by contrast, feel permanent. And yet, we know even they are not, that violent, prehistoric earth forces brought them into being, and that there is no reason whatsoever to believe them eternal. As my high school earth science teacher told us on the first day of class, the only constant in the universe is change. 

The Artist, my love, at Chiricahua National Monument

 

Ah, but when iconic placeholders in our personal landscapes are swept away by sudden change, something of our own, oh-so-brief individual life history erased, the shock is akin to a death in the family. In fact, it adds to the losses death has already visited upon us, because now we can no longer take our leisure in a place that feels so much like home that we still feel the presence of departed friends and loved ones there. After Leland’s Bluebird is razed to the ground, sometime soon, a new Bird will arise, phoenix-like, the old name (along with the family owners) providing some kind of continuity, but the old bar, the old tables, everything familiar where so many now gone once gathered will also be gone, as are they, the atmosphere of past years forever banished. When this news was followed by an announcement that Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern will close permanently at the end of the current year, my northern Michigan neighborhood reeled in disbelief. Far from home, I felt the tremors as if on-site. How could it be true?  

We were always happy there.

"Someone left the cake out in the rain...."

What, I wondered, would a Cochise County, Arizona, equivalent be? In Railroad Park I saw, with a shock, that the old, giant Arizona ash tree had died and been felled, and where once it offered shade, now it lies on the ground and serves as playground equipment. -- A friend questioned the safety of the arrangement, but after all, local toddlers ride horseback almost before they are old enough to talk….

How it was, only last year --

 

How it is now.

It is time, however, to change my tune, or at least to modulate into another, brighter key, because not all change involves loss. Whatever did we do in Northport before the advent of the New Bohemian Café? 

Back in northern Michigan, New Bo welcomes.

Saxon House, home of Source of Coffee in Willcox, AZ

And how did the Artist and I get along in Willcox until Source of Coffee opened two years ago in the beautiful old historic bungalow, Saxon House, on Haskell Avenue? I was at the coffee house the other day and saw the tribute to my love in his old, favorite corner, but although I took time to photograph his hat, the sight affected me too much just then to linger, and only on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (the day Source of Coffee was celebrating its second anniversary, by the way) did I look more closely and see that there was more to the tribute than the hat. A photomontage of the Artist at work was overlaid with a quotation from him, and in front of that and his hat was a statement by the custom hatmakers who had done so much to memorialize him, without ever having made his acquaintance. 

A young woman at a nearby table, working on her laptop, looked up as I moved away from the display, so I said, to explain photographing the corner, “That was my husband.” She, it turned out, was the very Teresa who with her husband, Josh, had been responsible for turning David’s hat into a memorial to him! How lovely to meet her in person! 

Teresa of Dusty Desert Hat Co.

She and Josh will be opening a hat shop and art studio (Teresa is a painter) on Railroad Avenue in the spring. Meanwhile, they are in the Air B&B business, and Josh gave me a tour of the lovely short-term rental in the remodeled casita behind the coffee house: three large, beautifully appointed rooms.

The coffee shop made a huge positive change in the Artist’s and my winter life in Arizona, and I know that his friendship was a positive change in the lives of Bear, Dana, Deb, Ben, and others. David Grath, the Artist, is part of the history of Source of Coffee in Willcox, Arizona! 

Life is a continual gaining of experiences, even experiences of loss, and an accumulation of memories. Although in the great cosmic sweep of All Time, memories and history will no doubt someday all be lost, for now, at least, while I am here (mantra: I am here now), I am happy to see my love so well remembered in Cochise County, Arizona.

Making friends wherever he went -

Books, Grief, Hope, and Holidays

How I live now....

Desert nights are cold, already down in the 20-degree range, and for the last two nights high winds have been battering the cabin. Saturday morning was sunny, calm, still. A good morning for a walk. Sunday was a different story, with the wind continuing relentless throughout the bright daytime hours.

 

No one sleeps well here on windy nights, and in what my mother always called the “wee hours,” when I would turn on the light and pick up a book, Sunny would bring me a toy and nudge me to engage in play. She can be as relentless as the wind! So I would indulge her with a little gentle wrestling on the bed and tell her she’s a good girl before picking up my book again (though often I added to myself, “Not really,” if she had trouble settling down again so I could read myself back to sleep).

 

And now for that long-neglected topic, books. Since I haven’t given a list of the recent books I’ve read for a while, I’ll annotate today’s to help you decide whether or not you might want to read any given title.

 

112. Hill, Grace Livingston. The Enchanted Barn (fiction). One of my early bookstore customers, back in 1994, was a big fan of Grace Livingston Hill and told me that Hill was a Michigan writer. I have been unable to find a Michigan connection, however, and in my bookstore no longer shelve Hill in the Michigan section. While her books are generally categorized as Christian fiction or Christian romance, religion is presented gently, as are the characters’ struggles, and The Enchanted Barn is a good example. Much as did the author herself, the main character is working to support her mother and siblings (in Hill’s own life, she had children to support from two failed marriages, in addition to her mother) and struggles to keep from becoming discouraged by poverty, to find a way to a better life. Where the story will end is obvious early on, but the details of the family’s move to the country, planting gardens, and making their home in an old barn make for a charming fictional escape from modern life. The Enchanted Barn was published in 1917. 

 

113. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Cloud Howe (fiction)

and 114. Ibid. Grey Granite (fiction).

These are the second and third titles in the author’s trilogy, A Scots Quair, which I have written about previously, novels that can only be considered “escape” in the sense that one is immersed in intriguing and sometimes lovely language because, other than that, they share with most of classic literature a clear-eyed confrontation with the hardest aspects of life. Here we see poverty not simply as one family’s temporary situation but the grinding poverty of workers in general, generation after generation, as they are caught up in the social and economic forces of history, and the author provides no deus ex machina to bring about a happy ending. But these are books (along with the first of the trilogy, Sunset Song, its story beginning in 1911) that deserve to be much more widely read and known, definitely worth a reader’s time, and I would add worth reading more than once.

 

115. Bythell, Shaun. Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops (nonfiction). If I’m being honest – and what’s the point of being otherwise? – I have to say I was disappointed with this one. A very slim volume, it comes off more like a lengthy magazine assignment than like a continuation of the author’s delightful Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. Perhaps it was a case of a publisher pushing a writer to take advantage of previous success by getting a new title out too soon. I don’t like to say that -- and wish my impressions of Seven Kinds had been different -- but there you are. Bob’s your uncle.

 

116. Deutsch, Jeff. In Praise of Good Bookstores (nonfiction). Obviously not a book rushed into print, this one is worth reading carefully and lovingly, as any lover of books and bookstores will. The bookseller-writer makes a case for bookstores as something distinct from retail business. His primary example, the unabashedly scholarly Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, went from a cooperative model to a nonprofit model in 2019 (after many years of having paid no dividends), and Deutsch says the nonprofit model acknowledges the store’s “financial realities” and its privileging of “cultural value over financial dividends.” Browsing here is raised to a new level. 

 

While I would love to browse this store, I am not convinced that nonprofit status is the only way forward for bookstores. Seeing socks for sale in a bookstore bothers Deutsch. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t sell socks myself but have no problem with other booksellers who use such items to enhance their slim profit margin, as long as they are also stocking good, important books. Most of us in the used book trade realized early on in our eccentric “careers” that following our calling (because I agree with Deutsch that it is a calling) would demand certain financial sacrifices, and for us no price can be put on our independence, so I even wonder if a nonprofit model, with all the record-keeping and particular laws governing that model, might not put a crimp in my independence. But the book – yes, I do recommend it. 

 

117. Leiris, Antoine. You Will Not Have My Hate (nonfiction). The Eiffel tower on this book’s cover made me reach for it. It is broadly classifiable in the category of books on grief, a category in which I have read more extensively this past year than ever before – but with a difference. The author’s wife not only died suddenly but was murdered, gunned down in the terrible scene of mass violence at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris in 2015. The title of the book comes from something Leiris posted on the Internet, refusing victory to the killers. His book is a behind-the-scenes account of that night and days and nights following, as he had to go on with life for the sake of his very young, now-motherless son. 

 

118. Hill, Jemele. Uphill: A Memoir (nonfiction). An interview with Jemele Hill on NPR prompted me to buy this book. Careers in journalism are very different from life as a bookseller but also focus on words and writing. Hill is from Detroit, therefore a Michigan author. Perhaps the fact that she is a sportswriter made my choosing this book surprising because, in general, I could not care much less about sports, but Hill has always gone beyond sports in her career as a journalist, and her social insights and opinions fascinate me. (When asked to write an opinion column, she wondered why anyone would care about her opinions and was astonished by how deeply her readers cared.) Also, along the way, I picked up a couple of wonderful uses of contemporary Black English, one I’d seen before on a friend’s Facebook posts, the other a new word to me: “Ride or die” was the phrase; caucasity the new word I learned. Brilliant word!

 

119. Barry, Jane. A Time in the Sun (fiction). This one, like the nonfiction Empire of the Summer Moon, was a book that I both wanted and didn’t want to read. Western frontier history, whether fictionalized or not, is brutal – and often, to make it worse, it is inappropriately romanticized or has a political axe to grind, so wariness is my byword. Barry’s book, as it turned out, was of particular interest to me, as the story was set in southeast Arizona, from Apache Pass (between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas mountain ranges) up to Fort Grant and over to Tucson. It is hauntingly well written. Of course, it ends in tragedy, for the Apaches and for more than one of the white characters, but what else could you expect? It is worth reading, both for the historical perspective, diversity of characters, and for the lyrical writing.

 

120. Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (nonfiction). This book of essays is a re-issue, and re-issuing it was a good idea. Solnit’s message is that those “in love with despair” or so given over to pessimism and cynicism that they answer any bit of good news with “Yes, but –” is that there is good news, along with the bad and that it’s important to keep hope alive and celebrate victories even while continuing to fight for a better world. Hope in the Dark is a tonic, good for what ails many of us from time to time. 

 

And finally --

121. Penny, Louise. A Better Man (fiction). Many of my friends and bookstore customers are devoted fans of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries, and yet somehow I had never gotten around to reading any of them. There it was, though, on Margaret’s counter at Readers’ Cove in Deming, New Mexico, and the time seemed right. (Note: I seldom begin to read a mystery series with the first book. Instead, whatever title comes my way is where I dive in.) And now, count me as a fan of Inspector Gamache, especially of his three questions to ask oneself before speaking: Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?

 

So there are the books that kept me company from Michigan to Arizona. For me, the company of books has always been essential and never more so now that my only daily companion is a very vocal but not at all verbal 11-month-old puppy. 

The Artist remembered at Source of Coffee in Willcox, AZ

This morning, doing errands in Willcox, I was struck by all the places the Artist and I used to go together. In fact, nowhere did I go that we had not gone together, and every mile of the road between the cabin and town is a mile we traveled together countless times. It was – difficult. But everywhere I went, when paying for a purchase I made a point of saying, “Happy Thanksgiving” to the cashier, because while holidays can be particularly challenging for those of us who have lost a beloved partner, whenever I think (as I so often do), There are ghosts everywhere, in Arizona as well as in Michigan, I have to stop and remind myself that there are friends in both places, too, and that I have much for which to give thanks. 

 

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! A what have you read lately that you want to recommend?

Also how I live -- and always will.

Random Glimpses and Treasures

Gripping the wheel, flying toward the looming darkness of the Chiricahuas, Joanna felt incredibly alone….

 

It had been years since she had traveled Highway 181, but she knew it all too well. It led to a place in the mountains where volcanic activity, combined with wind and water erosion, had carved a forest of spindly rhyolite columns and magically balanced boulders. As a child, that part of the Chiricahuas had been Joanna Lathrop’s favorite place on earth.

 

J. A. Jance, Dead to Rights: A Brady Novel of Suspense

 

 

Not every book I read during my Arizona winters is set in the Southwest, let alone in Cochise County, but just as I enjoy the occasional Michigan mystery in summer and fall, so it seems natural to immerse myself from time to time in fiction and history set here where I spend my winter. Last night I was wide awake at 2 a.m. and got up to read a while, something that hasn’t happened in weeks. Sleepily, Peasy got up from his own bed to follow me and lie on the floor next to my reading chair while I followed Sheriff Joanna Brady to the conclusion of her Cochise County adventure. 

Indoors or outside, it’s pretty obvious that a dog lives here, isn’t it? The Artist and I have a little companion wherever we go these days.

But we three are not always adventuring to the Chiricahuas or the Dragoons or making a beeline down the Kansas Settlement Road. Often a day’s “adventures” are a simple trip to the post office and grocery store in Willcox, with stop for coffee (latte for me) on the porch at Source of Coffee, the wonderful new coffee house on Maley Street in Willcox. We usually carry books along with us, and sometimes I take my laptop. 

A bungalow is just about my favorite style of house, and there aren’t many in the Southwest (not nearly as many as can be round back in Traverse City, Michigan), so when this one in Willcox was being remodeled last winter I cast many an admiring eye in its direction. Now I’m very happy with what the new owners have done with it – and that they are sharing it with the rest of us!

Peasy may stay in the car or come up with us on the porch, depending on how we’re feeling that particular day, but if he’s in the car you can bet he’s sitting up and watching us like the proverbial hawk, eagerly keeping tabs on us and awaiting our return. Such is the life of a lucky dog who now has a home and family.

The Artist and I are lucky, too. We enjoy our winter days in the sun, however much or little we do on any particular day. There are also phone conversations and texts and mail to fill the social vacuum of these continuing COVID-19 days, and in the past few days I’ve had two long letters from old friends, one back in Kalamazoo and the other up in Seattle. Being separated by miles doesn’t have to mean being out of touch. One of the beauties of a letter is being able to carry it around and pull it out to read whenever the urge occurs. Kind of like always having a book in the car or in your big jacket pocket, isn’t it? 

 

As for Mr. P., he has his own little treasures. This morning it was a deer jawbone he discovered and brought home yesterday. Today on our morning walk, he carried his treasure proudly, lying down several times to gnaw to his heart’s content. I guess chewing can be as much exercise and fun sometimes as running and jumping. Ah, yes, life is good!

Postscript: I hit the jackpot again! Another letter, this one from back home!!!