The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

On Sunday morning I finished one nonfiction book I’d been reading and had knocked off the remainder of another in the afternoon after housework, so at bedtime I was thrown back on a volume from Robert Hale’s Regional Series, books written in the mid-20^th century on various parts of England, featuring history, landscape, architecture, and so on. This second one, Exmoor, I’m not finding as charming as Olive Cook’s Breckland (each book in the series has a different author), but I am not reading it carefully for legal-historical detail, simply as escape from the present to another place and time. The “historic” parts that please me most are the most purely local. Here is an example: 

 

"From here we will cross Hoar Oak Hill to Hoar Oak Tree. This celebrated tree was, from 1300 when the Forest was curtailed until 1815 when Simonsbath was colonized, one of the only two trees in the entire Forest. In 1658 it fell from “very age and rottenness,” and four years later a young tree was planted there to take its place, and this newcomer was in turn blown down in 1916."

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

Bits like that I slow down to read and re-read, picturing the scene in my mind. I wonder if the replacement tree was replaced in turn when it fell in 1916. The author doesn’t say. 

 

I didn’t read very far in that book on Sunday evening before falling asleep, however, because before picking it up I read my entire 190-page journal from December 12, 2019, to March 16, 2020, reliving a long trip west (seven days on the road, longer than usual because in New Mexico I was felled by what I considered at the time a migraine attack but have since learned was more probably vertigo), ghost town hikes and social events, a first exploration of Turkey Creek Road, our “Coyote Christmas” (I would link this if I could, but the platform is not cooperating), Sarah’s last full winter with us, the onset of the pandemic, and so much more. A friend and I had been trying to remember when she and her then-partner visited us, first in Willcox and later in Dos Cabezas, and both of those visits I found recorded in this 2019-20 journal, the first of a series that has now reached Vol. XIII and page 2240 (as of this morning), memories important only to me. 

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

The Artist and I made a couple of trips to Tucson that winter and visited bookstores in the “Old Pueblo,” as locals still like to call their city. David loved Speedway Boulevard! I was happy to get back to our quiet ghost town. We both loved the old library in Bisbee. 

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

My son’s father died in the spring, and I spoke with my son by phone almost every day. The Artist and I found again, having become yearlings, the new foals on the edge of Willcox that had captured my heart the winter before. On Monday mornings I volunteered at the Friendly Bookstore and on Wednesdays at Willcox Elementary School. We made new friends in Willcox. I hiked with neighbors on our home ground and a piece of public land down the road. 

 

"Sandhill cranes not far off, heard before seen & sometimes not seen at all, they fly so high. Brief thrill of daily passenger train [speeding through town nonstop], and in the quiet that follows its disappearance, again the distant, purling music of the cranes, now visible overhead, sunlit in their turning."  

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

"A high forest of ocotillo as we climbed & at the peak gave way partway down along a fault line to beargrass at the sedimentary/igneous shift. Northeast slope, shaded, held surprising pockets of tiny ferns & flourishing mosses, & the trail in places was muddy. Moisture no doubt came from snowmelt; springs that high unlikely."

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

We saw the new “Little Women" film in Willcox, and a Stage-to-Cinema showing of “The Nutcracker,” the 1984 production of the Royal London Ballet created by Peter Wright. 

 

"And while a large group, we were told, had formed the afternoon audience, we were the audience at 7 o’clock. A private showing! As if we were the king and queen!

 

"David loved it every bit as much as I did. “Superb! Magnificent!” It was a perfect holiday gift. And before & after the show, there were the magical lights in Railroad Park, their glorious colors reflected in puddles from the day’s storms….

 

"Two years ago we went to Paris at the Willcox Historic Theatre when the show was “Figaro” from the Opera de la Bastille. Now, London. It would be thrilling to attend the opera in Paris, the ballet in London, but having these experiences in a little Arizona cow town & coming outside to the dark of high desert winter has a magic all its own, almost as unlikely as the fantastical “Nutcracker” story itself."

 

      - 1/29/19

Railroad Park, Willcox, AZ, lighted for holidays in 2019

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

"I had two sketchbooks with me yesterday, having taken the second as a mental reminder to get started. [Apparently the second was still empty, the first almost full.] It isn’t that anyone else cares … or that I would “do” anything with [the] drawings, even having made them. It’s that I feel good when drawing. Leave thoughts & self behind. Exist purely in the moment. See fully. And afterwards I can revisit those places & times: by looking at old drawings, I am plunged back into the ‘now’ of ‘then.’"

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

From ‘then’ I return to ‘now,’ as winter weather has returned once more to spring Leelanau, snow deep and heavy and still coming down as Sunny and I ventured out into the morning. Maybe I will not get to Northport today, after all, and that’s all right. There are potatoes and onions and lentils a-plenty in the house—“lentils for the apocalypse,” I found myself thinking, a thought perhaps arising from recollections of the drive the Artist and I made back to Michigan in June 2020, one night staying in a three-story motel in which we seemed to be the only guests, an eerie place I named “the motel of the Apocalypse.”

As always, the present is saturated with the past. We are time beings.

"No dog park today, huh?"

Note: As I say, the platform has turned uncooperative, and one of the several things it will not let me do is format quotations as indented paragraphs. I don't know if this is a temporary or a permanent problem. All I can do is use quotation marks and a different color font.

Plans, Explorations, Travel

 

The daylight faded altogether from the sky, and the stars came out and were reflected in the water as chips of silver that wriggled like tadpoles in the ripple of the paddles. Now the marshes looked to me uniform and without landmarks, the reed tops showing barely darker than the sky, and the route we pursued among the winding waterways seemed arbitrary, our destination a pretence. 

 

-      Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken by the Wind

 

 

New Yorker magazine called A Reed Shaken by the Wind “an almost perfect book of travel.” First published in London in 1957, the book tells of travels Maxwell made in the company of Wilfred Thesiger to explore first-hand, before it disappeared, the world of the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, living “in reed huts built upon little floating islands like dabchicks’ nests.” Even so, despite traveling among them and staying as a guest in their “nests,” Maxwell’s acquaintance with these human water inhabitants was perforce secondhand and at one or two removes. He did not speak their language, for one thing. For another, he was a “guest of a guest,” welcome as Thesiger’s friend and wholly dependent on the goodwill Thesiger had created over the course of many visits.

 

It is a beautifully written account, as can be shown by dipping into almost any page. Perhaps in part because he was not distracted by superfluous conversation, Maxwell’s observations were acute, detailed, and colored by his own responses. For instance, he writes of the water buffaloes thus:

 

…In the water, where they spend all the time when they are able, showing only a weary head or a length of dripping back like the keel of a long-submerged wreck in shoal-water, the buffaloes seem primeval, pachyderm, patient and wearily enduring; a little tragic, too, reminiscent, perhaps, of forgotten news-reels of swimming cattle left derelect by flood. Their eyes are suffering, reproachful. Their voice is the voice of despair, tinged faintly with resentment … not a moo or a bellow, but a very deep and infinitely prolonged groan. 

 

 

Maxwell and Thesiger may not have found their segregation from marsh women a limitation of their travel, since that was simply a fact of the way of life in the marsh – men in one room, women in another; and only women (by their nature already unclean) collected the water buffalo dung that was so essential as a fuel and building material – but as a female reader I found the omission of any woman’s real presence more than a small lacuna. Obviously, were it possible in the 21^st century to travel to this part of the world, it would not be among my chosen destinations. – Well, there’s another reason for travel books, eh? Not only to read about places we have been or would like to see but also about places we would never want to visit.

 

 

Visiting Tucson, Arizona – now, that’s a different matter, and it’s less than two hours from my rented winter digs. The thing is that when I switched cameras a couple years ago, the telephoto lens for my old camera did not fit the new, and it’s been frustrating doing without that capability. My first winters in Arizona, the old camera and long lens let me get close to the birds: lately, I’ve been kept at a distance.

Monument Camera: OPEN!

And so, a visit to Monument Camera has been on my wish list, but when the Artist and I made the trip a couple of years back, we stumbled on a day the shop was closed. This time I planned better (You see? Plan? Travel?), checked days and hours the shop would be open, and managed to find my way to the shop on Fort Lowell Road shortly after it opened on Thursday morning, using only printed maps and my own sense of direction. I was proud of myself – a little overexcited, too, as well as relieved and intrigued, with more than a tinge of melancholy to be there without the Artist. In short, quite a mix of emotions.

 

Luckily for me, there were no other customers that early in the day to witness or overhear the state I was in. Lee, the owner, showed me three different lenses. One I rejected immediately, as too large and complicated for my amateur needs. Of the others, I liked the price better on one but was pretty sure the other would give me more long-term satisfaction, so we concluded the business transaction easily. 

Proprietor in the Classic Camera Corner

Lee told me he had bought the shop three years earlier but that Monument Camera has been in business for over 50 years and is the sole survivor of dedicated camera shops in Tucson. I told him about my bookstore in Northport, which will be 30 years old this coming summer, and we agreed that our businesses share more than one delightful feature, the best being not knowing what any particular day will bring. “You never know who will walk in the door,” he said, adding, “mostly nice people.” Yes, that’s true for me in Northport, as well!

The second part of my Tucson plan was to meet an old Kalamazoo friend (not old herself: she is four years younger than I am!) at the Book Stop on 4^th Avenue. The Artist and I loved the 4^th Avenue neighborhood! We loved the Book Stop! So naturally a wave of memory threatened to submerge me as I looked for a parking place, but, with that accomplished, what a joy to see my tall, beautiful friend striding toward me on the sidewalk! 

The Book Stop: OPEN!

Now as any bookstore aficionado can tell you, a bookshop, especially one specializes in used books (or am I prejudiced?), is definitely a place of exploration (see my post from the first time the Artist and I found our way there), and my friend and I dove right in. Though I was too focused on my own discoveries to investigate hers and will have to ask her to tell me what she bought that day, here’s what I brought home: 

Note the book of poems by John Wood, late of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a dear friend. The bookseller was surprised that I “couldn’t resist” Anthony Trollope’s North America, a splurge that pretty much wiped out the trade credit for books I’d taken in, but impressions of my world by the author of The Warden – how could I not want to take that book home? What did his explorations of the so-called “New World” say to him? (Stay tuned to find out, if you haven’t read the book yourself.) When I mentioned to the bookseller that I was on “seasonal retirement” from my own bookstore, she asked if I were writing my memoirs. No! “Have you?” I asked. She brushed away the question as if it were unthinkable. And then I think of the secret scribbler in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop and wonder how many of us have secret scribblings we hope might someday add up to something. 

 

In the same block as the bookstore is a food court, made up of various old shipping containers, each one a different take-out restaurant, surrounding lovely, colorful, shaded seating, where we had hoped to have lunch. Dogs are even allowed! Sadly, however, although it was 12:15 p.m. when we explored the gems on offer, most were not open. Yet? That day? We walked on up the street….

 

…and found a small, unpretentious East Asian establishment, Lemongrass Restaurant, where we both chose the same item from the menu and were both more than satisfied. Delicious! When I splurged and added the fresh mango-yogurt drink to my meal, I thought I would have to take half the drink and half the meal home to Dos Cabezas with me, but everything was so good it entirely disappeared! Okay, I wouldn’t need dinner. And yes, we complimented and tipped appropriately.

 

Locks of love! Like Paris, France!

("Hippie chick," he used to call me.)

The 4^th Avenue vibe feels very Sixties to me, and yet since it’s practically next door to the University of Arizona, the sidewalks are teeming with young people. It’s a friendly neighborhood. One young woman complimented my “outfit,” and one older woman stopped me to say she liked my hat and to ask where I’d found it. “It was my husband’s,” I told her. I didn’t tell her I was also wearing his scarf, watch, and belt….

(Jim Harrison once made a scathing remark about ellipses, so I smile and think of him every time I use that punctuation….)

 

Since Sunny Juliet had stayed home, so she wouldn’t have to wait in the car on a sunny day while I pursued my urban explorations, once I started on my return trip there was no dallying. I missed her and was eager to get home. My friend and I hugged, thanked each other for our time together, and went our separate ways, and that evening I fell asleep over a bound volume of uncorrected proofs from 1986, something I’d been reading before the Tucson expedition: On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal, by Mary Taylor Simeti. Sicily is (sorry, Mary!) another place I’ve never yearned to see, but the author writes beautifully, and I feel I am seeing the island -- its contours, vegetation, traditions, and history -- through her eyes as I read, and so I have my travels without the possibility of losing luggage or having my passport stolen. There is a lot to be said for armchair travel, as well as roaming over the face of the physical earth. I like both.

Home following adventure is very satisfying.

 

And now comes another sunrise, another day in the high desert. This world, too, merits daily exploration, even when my plans are not much more than a trip to the feed store and doing laundry. Any day, really, is like a day in a bookstore or camera shop: one never knows what the day will bring. What will we see? Whose path will cross ours? 

 

Sunrise as beautiful as a sunset --

How I’m Coping Without My Bookstore

 

My old girl, Sarah, in her younger days

“It’s only temporary!” Loretta (played by Cher) yells at her father when he asks to see her engagement ring and she shows him (as he points out) what is obviously a pinkie ring. 

 

“Everything is temporary”! he yells back.

 

“Moonstruck” is one of my favorite movies, one of those rare films with nary a clinker. Every scene and line is perfect. I think of it as I write this post today because, as you know, my bookstore in northern Michigan is closed while I take my annual seasonal (winter) retirement.

 

The daily “Shelf Awareness” newsletter has had a regularly occurring feature since sometime in 2020, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, called “How Bookstores Are Coping.” The feature tells stories from all over the United States about how supportive customers have been, online orders being received on store websites, tales of curbside delivery; etc. And every day when I read those stories, I feel like a deserter from the front lines, although Dog Ears Books is not closed for the winter because of the pandemic, but only so this aged bookseller can have a respite before taking a deep breath and plunging into another busy season as one of the “working aged” (as another of my still-working friends informs me we are identified). 

Resting on her laurels in old age

Open for business only four months last year when stay-at-home restrictions were eased, I was full of trepidation beforehand, but after another still-working friend helped me out with a professional deep cleaning and I got all my pandemic precautions in place, things went fine. In four months, only two people complained about. having to wear masks (one of them told how to wear it correctly, up over his nose, made a fast exit, and that was okay, too -- his choice). Everyone else was cheerful, and more than one person thanked me for requiring masks and hand sanitizing at the door. 

Sarah with me for her last bookstore season

 

Bookstore people! They are the best!

 

Out here in Arizona in the early winter of 2019-2020, I was happy to arrange a couple of very parttime volunteer gigs for myself. On Monday mornings, at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox, a venture of the Friends of the Elsie S. Hogan Community Library, and on Wednesday mornings in a program that paired older volunteers with at-risk children in early grades at the local public school, reading with them and having them write stories. I loved that git – the first volunteer job of my life! The children were darling, and naturally I felt right at home in a bookstore. 

 

Then came the stay-at-home order, and everything came to a sliding stop – which is much faster than it sounds. No more reading with little kids at school. No more selling books and honey. No socializing with neighbors, either. 

 

Well, you all know. We were “all in it together,” we were told over and over. Now, almost a year later, we hope the end is in sight, but life is still not back to normal, and the stories of “coping” continue.

 

The first winter the Artist and I came out West, there were three independent bookstores in Benson, just 30-odd miles down the pike from Willcox. The one we frequented most often and always found stacks of books to buy closed when the bookseller decided 25 years in business was long enough. The second, which we belatedly discovered on a back street, was gone without explanation last year. And the owner of the third, way out in the country, on a ranch with donkeys (and yes, a little dog, too), died in late 2020 at the age of 90, after 46 years as a bookseller. 

 

From three indies to none in five years. 

 

So now, unless we want to drive down to Bisbee or all the way to Tucson (where I had discovered the wonderful Book Stop not long before shelter-in-place order hit), neither of which we’ve done so far this season, we’re thrown back on the pot luck of thrift shops and FOL bookstores, which are better than nothing -- and some very nice and friendly and COVID-aware -- but nothing like the curated collection of an indie. And the FOL place in Benson has been closed since the first of the year. 

 

I miss the indies and supporting my fellow indie booksellers, my colleagues. Who knows? Maybe before we leave for Michigan this spring we’ll make it back over to the Book Stop neighborhood in Tucson or down to Meridian Books in Bisbee. I hope so. Because I have not yet abandoned the front lines myself, and it’s important to me to support with my purchases – support that really counts -- others who are out there in this always-risky, always changing business called bookselling. 

 

We indie booksellers all need to make money to stay in business, but we didn’t go into this particular business to get rich. You know why we do it! You wouldn’t be reading “Books in Northport” if you didn’t love books!

Not there now, but I shall return!

Postscript Update, 3/13/2021: The Friends of the Library bookstore in Benson, closed January and February, re-opened March 3, and we made our first visit of the year on March 12. I was delighted to find the volunteer in charge none other than Lenore, retired from the the former Benson bookstore we visited so many times. She was able to tell us that Mary Ann, another of Benson’s booksellers, moved her shop to Apache Junction to be nearer her son. (Mary Ann's and Lenore's former Benson bookshops appear in this old post.) Also, that the heirs of the late Win Bundy, bookseller at Singing Winds bookstore (the one with the donkeys), are trying to figure out how they might re-open. That would be fantastic, as Win's inventory of books on the Southwest was nothing short of mind-boggling.

 

Report From the Field #2: Book Stop, Tucson

I'm calling this report #2 only because it never occurred to me before to label my visits to other people’s bookstores as field reports. How many posts have I written on indie bookstores, not only in Michigan but between Michigan and Florida and then from Michigan to Arizona and back, in the 12-1/2 years of Books in Northport? I’m not going to go back and count, but it’s one of the things I do during my months of “seasonal retirement” when I’m away from my own bookstore in Northport, Michigan. 

When the Artist and I go to Tucson, venturing 100 miles west on expressway from our winter rental cabin, because we do it so rarely we always have an agenda; however, we never accomplish much of the items on our list, and the most recent day trip was no exception. New exhibit at the art museum, a couple of bookstores, a new Chinese restaurant, and maybe the camera shop, if time permitted: Those were our goals. Result: We got to one bookstore. But the bookstore was all I hoped it would be, as you will see if you bear with me until we get to that part of the story. First, though, I’m very sorry not to have more photographs of the early part of the day, because after deciding to circle around more of the city and take the Speedway exit, we were seduced by one that came before, as it sounded like it would take us more quickly to 4th Avenue. It did not. We found 4th Avenue easily and enjoyed cruising north on it through South Tucson, where brightly painted buildings, murals, and colorful tiles reminded me of my trip a couple years ago to the Yucatan. So beautiful and exciting! Another time I’ll employ my camera, but sometimes it just feels more important to be in the moment, not worrying about capturing the present for future rumination. And I was loving 4th Avenue!

Just as it seemed we must be nearing our goal, however, we were unceremoniously dumped off 4th Avenue and hurried onto the new and “improved” Broadway, a wide, swooping road that will no doubt be great for high-speed traffic (for those who want that) when it’s finished. At present, however, it is not finished, so we were not only routed way off our desired path but stuck for what seemed ages in stop-and-go-and-stop traffic, which is never any fun at all.

Finally getting off the nightmare road and into what felt like a reasonable grid of streets, we somehow found ourselves caught up in the University of Arizona campus — which, in case you are not familiar with it, is an enormous campus — so that finally coming out on Speedway Boulevard, a long, busy street often avoided by locals but one that serves very well to orient us country mice, was a huge relief. From there we found the end of 4th Avenue we wanted and persevered until arriving, at long last, at the 100N block. 

At last!

Tip to other visitors to Tucson: If you’re looking for the Book Stop on 4th Avenue, or for Antigone Books (which we will visit on another field trip), take the Speedway exit. From Speedway you’ll turn south (right) and have an easy time locating the bookstores. 

[Speedway Boulevard: 1st degree of relief…  

4th Avenue North: 2nd degree of relief…  

Parking space around the corner from Book Stop: complete relief!]

My camera work inside the bookstore was hurried, at best. I wanted to look at books! But you can probably see from these quick shots that the Book Stop was exactly the kind of bookstore I had been hoping to find.

Tina, the proprietor, was quietly welcoming, friendly and helpful without being in the least overbearing or hovering. Like her bookstore, she was just right. I found five books to buy that day, took a few pictures, shared with Tina my own bookstore connection, and received information from her about the store’s buying and trade policies. I also told her how much effort had gone into our getting to her store, and it was she who recommended the Speedway exit (so you have it from a local and don’t have to take my word alone for it).

Thank you, Tina!

In its own way, 4th Avenue North is as colorful as the stretch south of Broadway, but in a different way. It has no dominant ethnic tone but more of a 1960s hippie dream quality, as perhaps you can see from these photos I snapped from the car window. 

We will be returning to Tucson next week, when I will attend the mammoth Festival of Books on the UA campus with a friend. The plan is that her husband will drop us off for the day. Hooray! We won’t have to drive or park -- or dodge around bicycles and streetcars! 

Streetcars, really, on 4th Avenue!

So that will be another travel adventure and field report from the world of books, Southwest style, coming up soon.