Little Joys and Comforts

Hawthorn trees have been a recurring joy to me since I discovered the first one in my meadow. This year I’m appreciating how much earlier they leaf out than some of the other, statelier trees, how sweetly they hold raindrops, and the way last year’s berries (haws) still attract my dog. She will stand on her hind feet to reach the ones on the branches and root through the grass hunting for those on the ground. Funny girl!

 

Sunny Juliet herself is a joy and a comfort both. As she becomes a more relaxed and easy companion, though, I find myself addressing her and speaking of her more and more often as Sarah! Will she ever be as mellow as our practically perfect Sarah? Will her name have changed completely in my mind to Sarah by the time she reaches old age? 

These days, still Sunny Juliet, when she and I go outdoors for our morning rambles I take along a foraging bag and bring home leaves and flowers for my evening salads. Our walks and finds and my salads are all quiet joys of my country life.

Of course, not everything in life can be a joy or a comfort. Sometimes -- though I realize this may sound odd -- I find a kind of satisfaction in understanding something, some event or trend or belief system or outcome, even when I would wish it completely out of existence if I could. How does such-and-such a system work? Why do people pursue certain policies? In what ways are we manipulated to believe and act against our own interests and that of the earth? And how can human interests ever be separated from the interests of the earth’s health? (That’s a rhetorical question. The separation is impossible.) Like a farmer friend of mine, interested in economics as I am myself, I want to understand, whether or not I can change a thing. I would add, and whether or not there is the slightest hope that human beings will see the light in time to save the earth and the human race.

 

With that in mind, I sit down to read Naomi Klein’s bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It is not a comfort book, by any means, nor is there anything joyful in the reading (other than the intellect that put the thoughts together), but it makes so much sense that what I cannot understand is how some people think that every aspect of our lives should be “privatized” and others think that pure and complete socialism is the only answer to organizing society. How can people not see that a mixed economy is the only one supporting a society that works for all? How can the world at large not see that private enterprise has important strengths and should not be thrown out but that there are important aspects of life that cannot be left to a winner-takes-all game? 

 

Meanwhile, they who see clearly their own (short-term?) advantage in disadvantaging others are leading country after country, including the United States and Canada, down the winner-takes-all road, and I don’t expect to live long enough to see this turn around, though maybe I will be proven wrong. Maybe, as an optimistic friend believes, the Eighth Prophecy of the indigenous peoples of the world will turn us away from the edge of the cliff in my lifetime. I would love to be wrong in this way! 

Just because -- for the relief of beauty!

Satisfaction in inquiry, in understanding, in an exchange of reasonable views with others is all an important part of my life and always has been. I have that with books and with friends, in my work as well as in my leisure. When evening comes, however, I am ready to welcome comfort. By evening Sunny and I have been outdoors more than once, and I have surveyed the progress of spring in field and forest. We’ve had fresh air and exercise, and my salads of foraged greens are satisfying. Maybe Sunny has had the added benefit of a play session with her new friend. All in all, it’s been a good day, in the bookstore and at home, reading and talking to people and getting out into the natural world. But at bedtime, what I want is comfort. 

 

Maybe a new novel or a book of essays or, not infrequently, something I have read before, perhaps many times, will be my cozy bedtime reading. One favorite in the re-reading category is Christopher Morley’s novel, The Haunted Bookshop, sequel to the equally enchanting Parnassus on Wheels. Everyone in the secondhand book business knows these two novels! They were part of what seduced us, eventually, gradually, but ineluctably, into the bookselling life.

In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a subscription book service founded in 1926. Originally, a panel of judges chose each month’s selection, and one year Morley’s novels about bookselling were chosen as a monthly selection, the two books together coming to our family home. Despite the ages of the two main characters in Parnassus on Wheels (it is a romance between two middle-aged people, as well as a paean to reading, books, and bookselling), I was captivated by a story that had, for me, all the necessary dream elements: a horse; a “gypsy” wagon; country life; travel; and books! Then came The Haunted Bookshop, with an attractive pair of young people, mystery, suspense, danger, and love in the air! As a girl, I read both books over and over, and I continue to read them over and over today, decades later.

On the subject of re-reading, as on the subject of books in general, I am passionate. Never re-read? That would be like never revisiting a place once loved, spending no more time with a friend of many years! And as every re-reader knows, each reading of the most familiar book is a new experience. New but familiar, yes. As with people we have known and loved for years, there is always room for surprising new realizations. 

 

When I chose The Haunted Bookshop for my bedtime reading the other night, I thought as I held it in my hands how many associations and memories the book contains. To begin with, my volume is from the same book club edition my parents had, so it brings back my earliest readings, and I pause lovingly over the illustrations, which delight me as much if not more than they did years ago. Now in my eighth decade of life, I have still never been to physical, geographical Brooklyn, but thanks to Christopher Morley, Betty Smith, Alfred Kazin, and other writers, Brooklyn has come into my life – here, in this book, in that “between the wars” period that so fascinates me. But also, the chapter headings, the paper – all these little details are important, and as I hold the open book in one hand and rub Sunny Juliet’s chest with the other – she is lying on her back, unmoving, her feet in the air -- the two of us indulge in the most contented hour of our day together. 

 

Charms of this story for me personally? There is the location of the bookstore, its entrance below the level of the sidewalk, exactly like the imaginary tea room the Artist and I planned for the Marlborough Building in Kalamazoo; a coal furnace, so like the furnace in the basement of my parents’ house, where I, like Roger Mifflin (only without a pipe), would gaze into the flames after shoveling coal and see another world; an Elevated railway, like the wonderful, noisy, smelly El I knew in Chicago; and, naturally, a winsome little dog, with a quaint packing case dog bed, decorated like a library.

There is the excitement of the bookseller when called to appraise an important private library; there are windows with transoms; there is corned beef hash (and that is distracting, pulling my mind away from the story and to breakfast at J&S Hamburg in Traverse City); there is that magic name, later adopted by a Sixties a cappella vocal group, Manhattan Transfer. In short (and I am reining myself in, because I could go on and on in this vein), because this book has been part of my life since girlhood, and because I have read it over and over in the ensuing years, my own life’s memories and associations are part and parcel of my re-reading. I notice in tonight’s reading but decide to overlook the sexist attitudes, including the violent impulses that accompany the leading man’s love for the ingenue, because it is all taking place so long ago, my father only a year and a half old, my mother not yet born – and anyway, it is a story, and these are fictional characters. And it means more to me now, as a story set in a bookstore, than it ever could have before my own bookstore had been around for over 30 years. 

Following the final page of his story, Christopher Morley adds a page about bookstores, first quoting from another of his own books, John Mistletoe:

 

The bookstore is one of humanity’s great engines, and one that we use very imperfectly. It is a queer fact that most of us still have the primitive habit of visiting bookshops chiefly to ask for some definite title. Aren’t we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise bookseller?

 

Without claiming wisdom for myself, I will urge my blog readers – because surely you are all bookstore visitors, too! – to visit bookstores as you go to a potluck dinner, ready to discover and be delighted by something you didn’t know you wanted until it came into your hands. Then your excitement will be a bookseller’s joy.

 

I say, “To hell with it!”

 

I call this cozy and inviting.

To hell with minimalism, I'm saying. You can have it. Just be sure it's what you want.

 

Books and websites selling “the new minimalism,” often simply called “decluttering” and “simplifying,” like to tell us we can’t buy happiness. Let’s think about that. Okay. You can’t buy happiness, neither can I, but — think about this with me, please — I believe it's possible to throw happiness away and regret it later.

These things speak to me daily.

Follow the link here and look at the top image on this internet site. If that looks like a cozy, restful, snug and happy refuge from the world to you, read no further in my post today. On the other hand, if you are an inveterate hoarder — that’s another whole ball of wax — then you should go back to that link and follow the steps to clean up your act, because no one wants to have friends or family members living in absolute squalor. Hoarding is a sickness. Heal thyself!

 

Coming back from my digression, though, don’t we all know that hoarding vs. minimalism is a false dilemma? Collecting is not hoarding. And while most of us, I’m guessing, are not serious, committed collectors, with homes that could be mistaken for museums, neither are our homes junkyards, simply because we prefer more visual stimulation and activity than minimalism offers. 

Colorful tins, that's all.

Found objects

Little things

I bought him the box; he bought me the cow.

As for me, I look at bare, minimalist-“decorated” rooms and wonder if lives are being lived there at all. As I have written before on this blog, the Artist and I together were never minimalists. Our life together was rich, although that life, as well as the one I have now, could well be called a simple life. “Too many books”? To me, that sounds like “too much art,” i.e., an oxymoron of the first order. 

Yes to books!

Yes to art!

When my sisters and I had to clear out our mother’s house, we did think she had “too many clothes,” it's true, but none of us were sorry she had kept boxes of photographs, letters, and other personal mementoes, some of which we had never seen before. I wrote about that and about how much it meant to see a scrapbook my mother had started back when she and our father had their first date. 

 

I have saved old letters myself, and along with several albums of photographs I also have piles of loose photos, as did the Artist – and I am keeping all of his, along with my own. He loved his memories, and I love mine, and we shared many wonderful years. Why would I “declutter” my life by throwing out reminders of happiness when I can, through those reminders, re-live more youthful times, our years together, as well as years before we met? 

A little messy but full of life!

Paintings, prints, and photographs on the wall; books on the shelves; a beautiful, “useless” vase; perfectly shaped bowls; little collections of tins and boxes; a row of cowboy boots here and hats hung there; even the ubiquitous scattering of stones on a windowsill that all northern Michigan people seem to have (is that “in our DNA,” as people are so fond of saying nowadays?) – my surroundings are brimming with associations that tell me in a thousand ways of the richness of my life. 

Mine (need polishing)

His --

“Declutter”? You first! What happiness is left to me, I will not be so foolish as to throw away, and I can imagine people today falling for the minimalism fad and wondering on some tomorrow years from now whatever possessed them. “I’d give anything if only I still had my mother’s high school ring ... my father's letters ... that sketchbook from our trip to Paris!” 

Obligatory photo of Sunny Juliet!

Death and Donkeys

Donkeys outside Arizona ranch bookstore

Death, donkeys, and books, that is. Let me explain.

We can probably agree that life is a mystery, and love is strange, but nothing is stranger or more mysterious than death, and not that every death feels the same, for each brings its own universe to bear upon the bereaved. When one’s mother dies, whatever her age, a watershed comes to divide life into before and after. And, as I’ve noticed with other people in their days of mourning, the most trivial and contingent encounters can become magnified into significance within the aura of death.

My son and my mother

My mother would have been 96 years old in October. She was still living in her own home, doing her own laundry and fixing her own meals, very active socially and in her church (overlapping domains, those), enjoying meals out with friends, spending time with family, reading books and newspapers, working crossword puzzles, and caring for her two companion cats. We (daughters and sons-in-law) worried about her going up and down basement stairs to do laundry and tried to persuade her to think of selling the old family home and moving to an apartment, but she “wasn’t ready,” she said. And so one day her youngest daughter took her to the doctor (she was fine) and downtown to pay her property taxes, and later that day she talked to her middle daughter on the phone. I would have been calling or sending her a postcard from Lake Huron or both the next day but instead got a message that she had fallen asleep in her chair and not awakened. 

A good, long life. A good, peaceful death. And yet, now, for her daughters, nothing will ever be the same again. 

An old cookbook I had never seen before

The Artist and I had looked forward to a little getaway after our work-filled summer, so we were over in Alpena, after an overnight in East Tawas and breakfast with friends, when the news came to us. We had crossed the state west to east on Tuesday, recrossed it from east to west on Wednesday, and covered most of the lower peninsula from north to south on Thursday. I took with me the book I’d taken to Lake Huron, A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin. In every story that mentioned death, that event jumped out at me, but Berlin’s writing, so moving, affected me deeply on every page. Yet the sentence that engraved itself in my heart, because of the time of my reading, was a tearful exclamation from the author’s sister, dying of cancer, which Berlin made part of one story: “I’ll never see donkeys again!” 

My mother will never see Michigan again. I’ll never see my mother at Sunrise Landing again. Donkeys…. Yes, I can easily imagine shedding tears at the thought of never seeing donkeys again, although in my case it would probably be horses. My mother, though — I don’t think she had time for a thought of anything she might never see again, dying peacefully in her sleep as she did. 

She had a lot of clothes but wore this jacket a lot

My husband and I were staying in my mother’s house, the house she occupied for 68 years (I lived there for almost 16 myself), when I came to the end of Lucia Berlin’s book, and I needed something else for those dark but wide-awake 3 a.m. hours. My next choice might seem a strange one — a murder mystery, Critical Mass, by Sara Paretsky -- but circumstances made it a logical choice. Not only are Paretsky’s novels are all set in the Chicago area (my mother lived 45 miles SW of the city), but my mother and one sister and I (the other had a scheduling conflict) had gone to see and hear Sarah Paretsky in person onstage in Traverse City where she appeared as part of the National Writers Series in the fall of 2013. 

This particular volume was also a copy signed by the author and with one of my mother’s address labels on the front-facing endpaper. So whenever I picked up the book, and as I turned the pages, I was reading a book my mother had held and read, written by an author we had gone together to hear speak, and when Paretsky described farms, cornfields, and small towns south of Chicago in the novel, the terrain described (minus murdered bodies) evoked memories of my Illinois girlhood, 4-H and all, and all of us were connected by the physical book as well as the story it told. 

In her kitchen

Years ago, someone I knew only slightly wrote a quasi-philosophical paper around the time of her father’s death, and I was perplexed by some of the books she mentioned in the paper, books that spoke to her at that time in tones of deep significance but that seemed to me tangential at best to her theme. I understand her state of mind better now. In such circumstances, everything is highlighted, foregrounded, important — but by “everything,” I don’t mean contemporary world events as much as the weather, the season, chance encounters and random remarks.  

Both of these books are well worth reading, whether or not you pick them up in a state of grief. For me, though, they will always have added depth, due to the associations that will always cling to them for me.