I’ve just been living my life.

Someone to walk with...

Except for a letter or two, I haven’t been writing. More astonishingly, I’ve hardly been reading. 

 

Still having coffee every morning, getting outdoors with my dog, going to my bookshop four days a week (Wednesday through Saturday) for four hours a day, then back home and outside with the dog again before supper, but it’s been different for the past week because, in addition to Sunny Juliet, I have had a constant human companion. I have slept better and have awakened happy, despite  continuing corruption and chaos abroad in the land. 

 

Oh, my country! Cry, the beloved country! 

 

I need to read Alan Paton’s novel again, set in the era of racial tension that directly preceded the 1948 election of the National Party government. The party's appeal to white fear and white supremacy, as well as strong anti-British sentiment (subsequent to the Boer War) and promises to improve the economy for farmers and (white) laborers, put them in power and inaugurated apartheid in South Africa. Their rule lasted for 46 years, with apartheid the law of the land. 

Paton’s book, because a novel, focuses on individuals affected by conditions in their country rather than the more abstract march of history, and I have been thinking of how easy it can be to ignore issues not part of our immediate daily lives, events that do not touch us personally. Almost every life is touched by tragedy sooner or later. But it is the specific nature of the tragedy touching any particular person that usually dictates the cause or causes that that person finds urgent, while other people’s tragedies and other people’s causes never feel as desperately compelling.

 

Thus it is that the large group of people who care deeply about something, whether mental illness or abused children or cancer research or autism treatment or whatever (and a majority of people in any country, I feel sure, care about at least one issue and usually more than one) can accuse one another, because their cares and concerns are different, of not caring. 

 

For instance, ICE raids continue in Minneapolis and elsewhere, abducting first and asking questions later, with families and whole communities living in emotionally crippling anxiety day after day. Although we haven’t heard as much about it in the past week, because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone in the streets in the past week, a family member in the Twin Cities tells me nothing is better there and that the daily stress and anxiety continue, along with volunteer operations to help the terrified. 

 

But if no one in your family or group of friends has dark skin or was born in another country or is of a “nonconforming” gender or practices a faith tradition outside of Christianity, perhaps you don't consider the current administration dangerous. And so it is with every heartbreaking issue. As for immigration raids far, far from the border, even when American citizens are picked up and held without being charged, perhaps it's still easy to look away and say that, well, of course a few mistakes will be made, but ICE troopers, after all, are “just doing their job.” It shouldn’t be easy to look away and dismiss concerns, I keep thinking. If you’re at all concerned about legal vs. illegal (as ICE supporters insist they are), then you ought to care, I fervently believe, for little aspects of American law such as probable cause and due process. But maybe some people haven’t followed those events too closely, because other issues that do touch their own personal lives take all their attention. Or because they don't want to know?

 

Can people be persuaded to care? How? 

My life has been more peaceful during the last two weeks, not because various horrible conflict situations in our country have been resolved or even improved but because I have stopped trying to make people care who have not yet seen the horror. I have not given up all hope that their eyes will eventually be opened—if only when they are personally touched, at last, by some aspect of it—but I have given up the hope that any information and opinions I might share will make a difference to them. When their eyes are opened, they will see, and not before, and when they see, good people will care.

There are always, of course, a minority of people (I feel certain they are the minority of human beings on earth) who care only for themselves and whose “care” for themselves is so fixed on money and what it can buy that they are willing to sell their very souls to see their worldly wealth increase, and unfortunately, those presently in power in Washington seem to belong to that don’t-care-for-others group, their greed and aggressive natures giving them outsized visibility on the national and world scene. —Perhaps you say not all in that highly visible cabal are motivated by money? Some are afraid! Ah, but what do they fear? Losing their jobs? Doesn’t that come down to sacrificing integrity in order to hold onto wealth and position?

 

Read my friend Dawn’s pithy summary of the Gordie Howe Bridge brouhaha, written before the news came out that it isn’t about “Canada” or “respect” or “fairness” at all but—surprise!—the old billionaire club protecting one another’s interests, and to hell with American (and Canadian) workers! Grift and corruption, old political allies. 

 

Another current issue, one bound to affect generations of Americans yet unborn (think about it, you who advocate tirelessly for the “unborn,” with nary a thought for living children and their families), is the threat to the “endangerment finding.” (Update: More than a threat.) The name alone may not tell you much, but the endangerment finding has to do with environmental pollution and public harm. In 2007 SCOTUS recognized the responsibility of the EPA to limit greenhouse gases, citing public harm. Now in February 2026, the current administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, a 46-year-old Republican from New York State and father of two, appointed in January of 2025 by then-incoming president DJT, is poised to stop protecting the American public. Pollute, baby, pollute! Your investment portfolio will love it!

 

(But of course! In department after department of the federal government, the current administration’s strategy has been to find someone not to direct valuable operations but to gut said department of its budget, expertise, and the ability to fulfill its mission, with the overall goal of eliminating government services and turning them all over to the highest bidder, i.e., to those who can guarantee squeezing the last dollar out of the American public for private profit.)

 

Threats to free elections? Don't even get me started. Anyone who isn't concerned is just not paying attention.

Midday Thursday, Northport

So I come back to Alan Paton’s novel, which begins with a contrast between green, grassy land and overgrazed bare earth, a contrast of human wealth and poverty mirrored by the land itself, and I think of aquifers in North America depleted by CAFOs, wells polluted by mining and other industry, water made undrinkable and air made unbreathable by industrial and automotive effluents and emissions. I think also of the deepened and still deepening divisions in this country of ours, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, racial divides that I had hoped were healing back when President Obama was elected, splits political, dogmatic, religious, and also (because the issues have to do with our most dearly held values) deeply personal, such that it seems the legacy of the current administration will, for the remainder of my life, be a tragically divided national landscape. 

 

“Cry, the beloved country,” wrote Alan Paton of South Africa in 1948, a country he loved deeply and gave generously of himself to try to heal.

 

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, not stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, not give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

 

-      - Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)

- 

Will the legacy of our time on earth be a Divided, Poisoned, Polluted and Hate-Filled States of America? Will those of us who have loved our country “too deeply” have our hearts broken over and over before we die? And if that happens, if we do not live to see our country turn back from fascism and oligarchy, will a future generation yet be able to regain the betrayed ideals our parents lived by and some died for? Will American children not yet born have another chance to find healing and to make of this country a shining city on a hill? Or will America go the way of so many former empires, a story of the dead past for history books written and read in a few surviving free nations? 

My father, WWII

Book Review: WHITE DOG FELL FROM THE SKY

White Dog Fell From the Sky, by Eleanor Morse (NY: Penguin, 2013) 

$16 paper

David and I don’t travel far from home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, going only as far as my bookstore in Northport on the days before and following the holidays. In imagination, however, and especially in the books we read, we are unconstrained by time and space. One gift that fell into in my bookseller life during the last, very wintry month of 2013 was a review copy of Eleanor Morse’s novel, White Dog Fell From the Sky.

Set in Botswana and South Africa during the period of apartheid (there is mention of Nelson Mandela still in prison), the novel weaves together the lives of a young black South African medical student and an older white American married woman. Alice came to Botswana with her economist husband to do government work, she in the Ministry of Local Government and Lands. She meets Isaac, an illegal refugee from the South African apartheid regime, when he comes to her house seeking work as a gardener, a task for which he is both unprepared and vastly overqualified.

We meet Isaac first. Upon his clandestine arrival in Botswana -- the border crossing a story in itself but quickly told, with quick flashbacks explaining its necessity -- Isaac meets by chance an acquaintance from South Africa, Amen, and, with little in the way of options, accepts Amen’s temporary hospitality, sharing the family’s single-room house and meals but declining to become involved with Amen’s mission, the then-violent ANC.

Isaac’s search for employment eventually leads him into Gabarone’s Old Village neighborhood and to the American couple’s house. If Alice had ever been in love with her husband, there is no longer much between them. When she learns he has been having an affair, he swears that it is “over,” but catching him in repeated lies convinces her otherwise. They have no children.

Alice does not want to be called “Madam,” she tells Isaac, and does not want a square or rectangular garden of marigolds. He should please himself with the garden design. Alice and Isaac recognize something in each other that commands respect, but their worlds touch only at the edges.

Isaac walks the long distance between Amen’s home and hers, adding hours to his workday, until Alice provides him with a bicycle. Now Alice has a job and a house, Isaac a job and a bicycle, but life for both is without any clear direction. Isaac has been cut off from his goal to become a doctor and see his siblings educated, and when Alice and her husband separate, their separation is uncertain and informal. Then on government expedition to gather information for the formulation of a land policy that will protect natives, their livestock, and wildlife, Alice meets Ian, an “uncivilized” Englishman whose passion is the !Kung San paintings in the Tsodilo Hills. And while she is away from home and falling in love with Ian, through a series of unfortunate blunders and outright indifference Isaac is arrested, deported, and imprisoned in South Africa.

What will become of Isaac? Is a future with Ian possible for Alice? At this point in the story, the worst is still ahead for all of them. But what of hope? If hope is reasonable at all, where does its reason lie?

Beginning with Isaac and Alice’s first meeting, I felt anxious in the back-and-forth movement between narrative lines. As fascinated as I was by the unfolding of whatever was happening with either Isaac or Alice, at the same time I couldn’t help worrying and wanting to get back to the other. The ignorance of both of what was happening with the other heightened that anxiety. Only when Alice and Isaac were in each other’s presence, speaking to each other, did I feel able to fill my lungs completely with breath, but even that was only momentary relief, as so many dangers and uncertainties and questions always persisted.

Of the characters we see at close range in this novel, most are good people. Not a single one is uniformly and always good and right, but they struggle, these people. In a beautiful land, they struggle in particular to see life as beautiful and meaningful. Whether or not – and how -- to try to “save the world” is a question that touches them all in one way or another.

Of other, more minor characters, such as prison guards, we see only a rough, inhumane surface. Even that made me think of the words of Nelson Mandela:

A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. – Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Morse gives us only glimpses of these oppressors robbed of their humanity. They are not the focus of her story, but what we see gives the truth to Mandela’s words.

White Dog, who seems to have come from nowhere, is no haunt but a real if exceptional dog, her character marked by loyalty and integrity, and in very important ways she serves as a home anchor for both Isaac and Alice, and later for Moses and Lulu. Drought and dust are other characters in the book. Hunger is a character stalking many. Another is torture, its essence mindless, pointless, unreasoning cruelty.

The language and especially the figures of speech in this novel are lyrical and rooted in the landscape of southern Africa. “He braced his mind the way a wildebeest braces its body against a sandstorm.” “Yellow grasses blew in the west wind, rippling, as though a hand were being drawn across them.” Can't you just see it? The imagery of the white butterfly migration early in the book recurs in a later section, and the sunken garden Isaac begins, only to find it suddenly flooding when he hits a water main with his pickax, is eerily similar to the flooded mining pit of his nightmares, from which his father makes no attempt to escape. Only one passage went beyond a lyrical realism for me into something that stretched credulity, but because the author had so surely and skillfully carried me until then, I accepted the magic of that moment.

A writer can give his or her fiction any locale on earth or beyond, but only a writer like Eleanor Morse, who knows and loves a real place and has the ability to evoke it in her work, can take readers there and inspire them with love as well. The qualities of the landscape, its flora and fauna, and particularly its people – black, white, brown, and grey – did not seem “faraway” or “exotic” as I lived my way through this story. It was with the greatest reluctance that I left them on the last page of the book, all of them so real to me that I keep thinking, That was years ago. Where are they now?

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As 2013 came to a close, I asked myself what I would rank as #1 of all the novels I had read during the year. My nonfiction choice had been made without difficulty: Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing, by Daphne Miller, M.D. (NY: William Morrow). Since closing the cover of the book reviewed here today and comparing it to other long fiction in my "Books Read 2013" list, at last I decided that this choice, too, was an easy one. My #1 fiction choice of 2013 is White Dog Fell From the Sky, by Eleanor Morse.