As August Slip-Slides Away

Note for 2027: More phlox!

Blooming early or late or repeatedly?

I did not start life as a bookseller until until I was 45 years old, Tree Guy was 41 before he “found himself” as an arborist, and several friends of mine have now published first novels after retiring from life-long careers, so I have to smile at a little book by Brendan Gill called Late Bloomers. It is encouraging to turn the pages and see how many other men and women can legitimately be called “late bloomers.” Artists, composers, writers, scientists, and more. One wonders what answers they give when asked in grade school what they wanted to be when they grew up. 

Book cover

Some late bloomers knew all along what they were destined to do with their lives. 

One of the most agreeable forms of blooming late is to have bloomed early without the knowledge of the world beyond one’s doorstep and then, on being discovered in old age, to find the world crowding that doorstep and singing one’s praises.

That is the paragraph introducing the reader to photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, though Julia Child’s discovery of French cooking is more in line with what we usually think of as a late bloomer’s blossoming. It is a friendly little book, each biographical sketch only a page long, with a photograph of the bloomer on the page opposite. And what a cast of characters!

List of book's "late bloomers"

At this time of year, however, I can’t even think the words ‘bloom’ and ‘blossom’ and such without thinking of wildflowers and gardens. The little grey-headed coneflower is one of my favorite native meadow flowers, and I’m pleased to see it appearing in more and more yards and fields, as well as noticing it spreading to new areas in my meadow. 

At home on the porch

In front of Northport Area Heritage Association building

Daylilies take their name from the all-too-short length of their blossoms, but for the single day that each flower blooms it is glorious!

One of my favorite annuals for three or four years now is bacopa, which seems to go through at least three periods of flowering throughout the season. I didn’t used to care much for snapdragons—until I realized how extraordinarily hardy they are: Two pots from last year survived on my unheated porch all winter, without watering, and came back to life this spring, blooming all summer long. Then there was this year’s exciting discovery of the black petunia! Wow! Not a big petunia fan in general, I am in love with the black ones and the way they set off green plants without flowers of their own. 

Counterclockwise from lower left:
Bacopa, rose, black petunia, ivy, blue salvia

Summer is too short! It flies by too fast!

Back from a quick overnight to the U.P., we plunged into laundry and yard work, and I had one of my these-days-rare author events on Thursday afternoon with Jennifer Sager. Naturally, I would have liked three times as many people in attendance, but those who were here had a very good time. Jenny read, people asked questions, and the room rang with many bursts of laughter, always a sign that people are enjoying themselves at a book event.

Monday following U.P. and author event, Sunny and I got back for another session with Coach Mike, only our third this season. We had done well the first time, but I was very muddled in our second session. This past Monday we were on top of our game! My sisters had arrived on Saturday afternoon and stayed until Tuesday morning but didn’t get to see the agility teamwork, as they were on vacation and not getting up early (and who can blame them?). 

What did sisters and Tree Guy and Naughty Barker do together? There were lots of meals, of course, and lots of tennis ball throwing. We humans also made a visit to Good Harbor beach (my first Lake Michigan day of the season!), and on Monday, with perfect temperatures and a sweet little breeze, the sisters made a brief stop at Tandem Ciders, just long enough to taste three ciders and come home with a bottle of Smackintosh to go with our porch supper. Tree Guy pronounced the three sisters “Amazing!” Aw, shucks!

A handful of links, given with as little comment as I can manage:

If you do not regularly read Robert Reich's substack, please take the time to read this one. Do it for me!

Adam Kinzinger is someone I follow daily. Here's what he had to say about the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

Another Kinzinger post, this one reminding all of us that we can be brave and what it takes.

I read this morning that SCOTUS has “halted the pause”--or was it “paused the halt”?--on the new ballroom for the White House. If only I could include a friend's response here! But I'm afraid my blog would explode. As for my response, I can only hope that there will soon be a suspension of the halt to the pause (or pause to the halt).

Need a change of pace? Here's an esoteric bit from the literary corner, something about a children's series author whose name is completely unfamiliar to you. Or should I not assume?

Heads Up for October

Michigan author Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Q Road, Once Upon a River, The Waters, as well as several volumes of short fiction, will be in Northport on Thursday, October 30, at 4 p.m. (MARK YOUR CALENDAR NOW!) with her new novel, The Spirits, a contemporary Christmas Carol billed by her publisher (Norton) as "a tale of love, transgression, and the miraculous healing power of the holiday table.” I do wish I could have Charles Dickens here on that day to meet Bonnie Jo Campbell, as I’m pretty sure they would have a lot to say to each other—and what a lively conversation that would be for the rest of us to hear!

BJC has written a Christmas story!!!

Taking a Short Break

Besides my usual Sunday-Monday closure, my shop will also be closed Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, as Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and I make another dash to the U.P., this one for three nights instead of only one. I’ll be back in the shop on Thursday, 27, and then no more absences until maybe the second or third week of September. I’ll let you know. At least one reader of my blog has requested a “travel” post, though, and you know I have to leave home to produce such a thing.

"Will I have to be a good girl in the car?"
"Yes, Sunny, you will."

But yes, I shall return, because we are nowhere near the last rose of summer yet! And when I come back, I will have a new book to share!

Recent Past in Village and at Home, In the Midst, and Coming Events

 

Dinosaurs sighted in Northport

That was a surprise as I was leaving the bank parking lot on Thursday morning, and I had to go back for a better view. Apparently both male and female T-rexes had been at the Leelanau Township Library. The plant-eating dinosaur over by the Depot did not seem fazed by the arrival of carnivorous cousins.

Other of us (non-dinos) were somewhat fazed by commotion on Waukazoo Street a little later. What was going on? It involved shutting off the water for our whole block, which meant closing our block off to vehicular traffic and unanticipated time off for the restaurants. 

Bookstore stayed open, though. We had lights. And now, on Friday morning, everything is back to normal.

Home Life

Life continued busy as we northern Michiganders launched ourselves into August. Raspberries have peaked, however, and rain overnight on Wednesday meant I didn’t have to water gardens on Thursday morning. I also picked what look like the last of the beans for this summer (having failed once more to stagger bean plantings). So a few things are no longer on my daily to-do list.

Purple on the outside,
these beans turn green in hot water.

We had our first August company, as my younger stepdaughter and her husband brought their adorable little camper and set it up in the yard for a couple of nights. 

Her sister drove up from Kalamazoo to join the fun, and we all had a collaborative al fresco dinner at the farm on Tuesday (featuring fresh Kolarik sweet corn, a neighborhood treat), followed by a night out at the new Bluebird on Wednesday (treated by the sisters). Wonderful, all of it! Tree guy pronounced our guests “cool,” and they found him “delightful!” Sunny was even exceptionally good with company in the house and yard—as long as there were plenty of tennis ball tosses and as long as her momma didn’t forget Sunny’s meals. I admit she had to bark a couple times to remind me.

Cherry pie was my contribution from one of the three quarts of fresh tart cherries Carlos Fuentes gave me from his gleaning adventure in a neighborhood orchard where he has known the owner for years. He picked and offered, I pitted. (The end of a potato peeler works great for pitting cherries, by the way.) Result: Yum!

My reading

I continue to make progress in the fascinating saga of the 17th-century life of Roger Williams, having gotten him at last from England to colonial America. Among the many, many fascinating facts and events, I was delighted to learn that before he undertook to act as missionary to the Native Americans, Williams took the time, on his own initiative, to learn the language and the customs of local indigenous peoples. The treatise he wrote at the request of the governor of Plymouth authorities and presented to Governor John Winthrop unfortunately exists no longer, but apparently he ruffled a few feathers when he argued (having learned the law in England under Coke) that the Native Americans did make use of the land on which they lived and therefore had legal ownership of it, that the land was not just lying there unused for the indiscriminate taking by Englishmen! He ruffled even more feathers, however, when he stated baldly that the English king was a liar. I am liking this Roger Williams fellow more and more all the time, but he offered his treatise to be burned when the authorities persuaded him that its existence put him in danger. As had so many others and as is still the case today, he gave in to the pressure of the group. 

Reading more than one book at a time sometimes brings surprises. One such for me is how well The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, dovetails with the life of Roger Williams. Late 17th-century colonial America and the early 21st-century United States of America have more in common than I would have guessed. 

Three years earlier suffrage had been restricted to male church members, but during those three years, three years during which the population grew enormously, church membership became increasingly exclusive. Initially, one had had to do little more than sign the church covenant to become a member. That soon changed: to join a church now, potential members had to prove themselves “visible saints,” had to prove that they were among the precious few whom their Calvinist God would save. This forced potential members through a stringent and arduous process that included standing before the entire congregation and presenting evidence that God had made the seeker a saint…. This was no pro forma ritual. It was an intimidating, difficult, rigorous, and by no means always successful test. In most churches the congregation had to vote unanimously to accept the new member. Those who either did not seek or were rejected from membership could worship in a church—in fact, the law required them to do so. But they could not belong to a church.

As a result, only a minority of the population, and a decreasing minority, were church members and qualified as freemen with voting privileges.

- John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

Who are the “true” Christians? Can a non-Christian be a good person (or a good American)? Should the laws of the community—colony, state, nation—be determined by churchmen? (If so, which churchmen?) What of people who disagreed, whether church members or otherwise? What of those who followed other religions or no religion at all? What gives law its authority? 

Kramer and Alstad argue that Americans today (though not only Americans) have internalized authoritarianism in ways we don’t even recognize. Blind submission to any authority, they say, has its root in self-mistrust, and self-mistrust comes from a psyche divided against itself, with one part labeled ‘good’ and the other part labeled ‘evil.’ They point out that most religions, including Buddhism, consider self-centeredness to be bad, selflessness the ideal good. And so, when we seek a positive good for ourself that does nothing for anyone else, we feel selfish and bad. The divide is embedded in our culture.

Here is an insight I had the other day about their idea: Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” philosophy does not introduce a new value system at all. It merely flips the good/evil division, insisting that selfishness is good and altruism bad. The “new” morality she offers is just as divisive as the old was, and, like Nietzsche, the “purity” her morality demands can do nothing to integrate what Kramer and Alstad identify as a divided psyche. In the obsession with purity, where someone following a traditional morality would have to twist her reasoning considerably to find altruism in a selfish choice or action, the Randian practitioner has to brand her altruism somehow as selfishness to feel good about herself. 

Kramer and Alstad write (and they are always very clear when stating their opinions that they are doing just that), 

In our framework[,] being self-centered is simply an aspect of being human, as is the capacity to truly care for others. Not only does each have its value and function, they are intertwined rather than totally separate or even separable. Any morality that separates the two, giving much more value to one (the selfless), cannot but deeply divide the psyche of those who accept this frame.

        - Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 

While they do not address Ayn Rand’s philosophy,* I find a general parallel in what they say about American society’s double message--the fascination with rule-breaking individuals, the romance of the “lawless” frontier, the American love affair with criminals and with fictional bad boys. 

“Rebellion is bad and dangerous,” on one side; and “Rebellion is not only exciting and exhilarating, it is freedom,” on the other. Double messages from parents have been shown to cause schizophrenia in children. The double messages a society puts out likewise must fragment its members, but here the resulting pathology is disguised by being the social norm.

A fascinating book! I was able to find The Guru Papers still available from my distributor so put two copies on my last order. One sold almost immediately. The other is still available. My own copy was already marked up by a previous reader, and I have marked it up even more. 

I finished reading The Meadow, by James Galvin, and still re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T.H. White, though I haven’t gotten through many pages of either book the past few mornings or evenings.

*Next day: Nearing the end of the book, I find this in a passage about guilt and frustration creating "a self-absorbing vicious circle, for most guilt can be traced back to guilt about being self-absorbed." They continue:

Either/or thinking creates various types of reactions. For example, the "me first" attitudes much in evidence these days (we call it the Ayn Rand syndrome [my emphasis added]) react against puritanical, selfless values by embracing self-centeredness as the "real truth." ...But being an either/or reaction...it also mistakes one aspect of the person for the whole. If we were instead to acknowledge the reality of self-centeredness along with the reality of care and love for others, we would be able to focus more on appropriately balancing the two, both in our own lives and in our social systems.

Coming bookstore author event

Trying to keep up with myself as summer races by, I managed (just barely) to get a press release to our county newspaper for the bookstore event next Thursday, a reading by and audience conversation with Jennifer Sager, whose book Steph’s Story won my heart. Jenny is a delightful person--read more about her here--and I hope many of my local bookstore friends and summer visitors will find time to come learn about her book and her sister. 

The date is August 13, the time 4 p.m., so you’ll have plenty of time to hear and speak with Jenny and not miss your cocktail hour, let alone dinner. 

Oh, and this very Saturday, August 8, is Northport's annual dog parade! Theme this year is “Pawty Like a Rockstar,” so we anticipate a lot of creative and colorful costumes. Wow! It's summer, and the hits just keep on comin'!

Time’s Wingèd Chariot

 

She might like to speed me up sometimes.

Excitement in Northport

 

“Have things pretty much slowed down now?” people frequently ask in my shop. Good question. There are slow hours now, even the occasional slow day, but time’s general pace continues inexorable for the busy small town bookseller, homeowner, and dog mom. One day there were leaves to rake, the next day snow to shovel! One day it was Halloween, and then—it seemed suddenly—the long-anticipated author event of November, Chuck Collins with his latest book, right there in little Northport!

Author and bookseller

There’s no way to make a room larger than it is, try as one might, so with thirty chairs set up and more than forty people eager to hear the speaker, a group of us crowded around the doorway between bookshop and gallery. Author Chuck Collins had a lot of bad news to deliver, but he delivered it calmly, as a friend, and he is not at all a gloom-and-doom kind of guy. He does not counsel despair. He gave examples of “fixes” that can begin—and in some cases, are already underway—at the grassroots level to return power to the people. The audience was fully engaged.

Author and SRO crowd

One of his more obvious illustrations of bad news was how, after a couple of decades in which wages rose in concert with productivity, the economy continued to grow while wages stagnated, this wealth gap fueling a social divide. But in the midst of this discouraging talk, almost as a throwaway line, when citing some positive examples of what can be done, he used a phrase that sang out to me: “reweaving the social fabric,” words seemed to sum up the import of how the gap, having been widened, can be narrowed again. 

We in this country need the feeling again that we are all in it together, that we are all one another’s neighbors, so I am taking my inspiration from Collins’s phrase: Reweaving the social fabric. That is our task. 

Again, Chuck Collins’s new book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, and though my stock is currently sold out, I have additional copies back-ordered and will be happy to put names on a waiting list.

For now, I extend many, many thanks to Chuck Collins for graciously coming to Northport to speak at Dog Ears Books! And many, many, many thanks to Northporters who turned out to hear him and to purchase his book and to do me proud! It was certainly an event to remember. I'll add (blowing my own horn as well as the author's) that Chuck’s book tour takes him from little Dog Ears Books in Northport to Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., today! Now what do you think of that?

 

 

The chariot speeds along!

We had our first snow of the season on Sunday, November 9. Glad it was a Sunday (day off), I stayed home all day (no trip to the dog park), alternating work and play outdoors with food preserving tasks indoors. Scenes of snow, however, like those warm-toned autumn leaves, demanded attention, too, and I clicked away on my phone, storing up images as eagerly as I was storing up food. I won’t say I have a million photographs of autumn scenes—let alone a ton (have you noticed how everything seems to be described in tons these days? except when quantities come in bunches?) —but I have so many that it’s difficult to choose from among them. Maybe a couple of contrasting pairs will best give a picture of our Up North world. 

Leaves on my boardwalk

Second clearing of snow from boardwalk in one day

New life from old at a corner of the woods

The same woods corner after first snowfall

There are more (though never enough) over on my photo blog, A Shot in the Light, but maybe I just need to do what is inelegantly called a photo dump over there, eh? Yeah, that’s the idea….

 

 

Jim Harrison, A Life

 

I devoured the biography of Jim Harrison, Devouring Time, by Todd Goddard, and it was a strange, moving experience. Although the Artist and I were not in the inner circle of Jim’s friends in poetry and publishing or hunting and fishing (overlapping groups), much less part of the high-profile Hollywood personality crowd, we spent a fair amount of time with Jim and Linda in Leelanau County in the 1970s and ‘80s. When I first met the Artist, in fact, he had just returned from Key West, from the shooting of “Ninety-Two in the Shade” and from having been in Jimmy Buffett’s apartment when the first pressing of “A Pirate Looks at 40” arrived (40? Wow! That seems so young to me now!), and he had many stories to tell of Buffett and Harrison and McGuane and Kidder and all. Then I began reading Jim’s books. 

 

Eventually the Artist took me to the Writer’s home for our first meeting, and there was a time when I did a spate of manuscript typing for Jim (a poetry collection, a novel, a couple of screenplays), but then the Harrisons moved west, and the last time the four of us were together was in Patagonia, Arizona, in the spring of 2015.

 

As it was, all through the book, as each chapter announces the years covered, I relived my own life, remembering where I was in those years and picking up all the successive threads of love and friendship and acquaintance as time went by, braiding them together and feeling them tug at my heart. I wasn’t even sure I could manage the very last pages of the book. I miss the love of my life, my dear friends, the way we all were! That last spring evening in Patagonia, the Artist asked the Writer's wife, “Do you miss Leelanau County?” She answered, “I miss the way it used to be.” I do, too.

 

Lucky woman!

 

When the Artist and I lived in Kalamazoo, we sometimes fantasized about having a bookstore in Paw Paw. We were always drawn to small towns and country life and always discovering and bringing home used books wherever they found us. It was a long and winding road that brought the two of us together again in Leland, with more books than our little house could hold when, without the benefit of long-term planning, rather as a summer lark, I first fell into bookselling, having no idea that I would be selling books 32 years later, no idea at all of the many adventures and friendships that would enrich those years.

 

When Chuck Collins arrived for his event on Wednesday, one of the first things he wanted to do was to buy the Goddard biography of Harrison. He gave his talk in what is still David Grath's gallery. Later, over dinner, Bobbie Collins reminded me of the images of Grath paintings that grace a series of music CDs her husband Edward J. Collins commissioned, music written by his own father, Edward Joseph Collins, who was born in Joliet, Illinois, the town where I grew up (after my parents moved there from my birth state, South Dakota). 

We had dinner after Chuck’s bookstore talk at the new Bluebird in Leland, only opened recently, where I was touched to see the Dreadnaught on the menu. It was the Artist who “invented” that burger, “the Dreadnaught of our cheeseburger line,” he liked to say—although he always insisted it really should be served on an English muffin, but that’s another matter entirely. My point is that, in the old days, in addition to the Bluebird’s printed menu, there was an unwritten menu of things that could be ordered only if one knew about them, and always, before ordering one of those items, you would ask, “Who’s cooking tonight?” The Dreadnaught was one of those items. Now it's on the printed menu. 

“My husband invented the Dreadnaught,” I told the waiter on Wednesday evening. I didn’t think he had registered my statement (why would he?), but later he came back to ask my husband’s name, and Bobbie Collins said, “He was an artist,” and I said, “You can Google him,” and he, the waiter, said, “I will.”

 

Is that a pointless story? Not to me. To me, it all ties together, because it's all part of my life, and when an old friend of the Collins family who had joined us for dinner told a story about Fred and Molly Petroskey, that tied in, too. All those nights around a big table at the old Bluebird, all those old “regulars” now dispersed or even gone from earth—they all still live in my memory, and Chuck and Mary are now woven permanently into the fabric of my life, too, along with Bobbie, who was already there.

 

Many years ago, my son once complained that he was “tired of being poor,” and the Artist corrected him. “We’re not poor, we’re just broke. We have a very rich life.” Our life together grew richer and richer in later years, in ways so much more meaningful than money! My memories are “savings” that I live on each and every day, and yet the wealth does not diminish. 

Of course there is Sunny Juliet, too.

Sometimes an apple is a plaything.

Sometimes it's a snack.

Friday was a blue sky day, and after closing shop at 3 o’clock I hurried home to my girl. “Go for a walk?” I asked her. “It’s a beautiful day, and we’re alive!” How many times did the Artist say that to me? We had so many beautiful days!

The world is still beautiful.

It is rich in color and memory.

And it keeps on turning....

Postscript: Friday sunset

Color/Light and Home in Autumn

 

 All the color that you see is light, pure and simple. And when there is no light there is no color. We think we see colored things, and in a sense we do. However, it is more accurate to say that we see the colored light reflected, transmitted, or emitted by things. It is the light alone that we see, not the things themselves. Thus our only visual contact with things is through light, light that enters our eyes.

 

…The only colors that we see are light, and as we are seeing them this light is falling on the retinas of our eyes. Were it not for light and the light-sensitive retina, we would see no color at all. Remember: color is light.

 

-      Ralph Hattersley, Beginner’s Guide to Color Photography

 

 

The Artist and I used to have frequent conversations about color and light. In my graduate philosophy classes, I learned to categorize color as a ‘secondary quality,’ that is, a quality not inherent in objects but created from interaction between objects and our senses, or, as Hattersley writes, between the “things themselves” and the retinas of our eyes--which leaves out the brain’s interpretation, but you get the point. Quick review of primary and secondary qualities, ignoring subsequent challenges to the distinction, can be found here. 

 

There are certain seasons, certain sensual prompts, that take me back to the Home Place. Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. In autumn one is treated to an orgy of sights, sounds, and smells that can be wonderfully overwhelming. … The tired sameness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories. In those days of crispness I want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever. 

 

-      J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature

 

 

Of all the seasons, autumn for me is the most deeply drenched in memory, the most saturated (even in its colorful dress) with poignancy and longing for what will never be again. And yet, it is not only September getaways and “county cruises” with the Artist that haunt me, but long walks home from first grade, university classes, my son’s baby and toddler years, past dogs, and so on, split-second images from years ago flashing, superimposed, on achingly beautiful scenes of the present. And yet (again, “and yet”!), fall is so beautiful, whether colors are shining in the sun or gleaming in the rain—or, as last Sunday evening, sleeping in the dark while an old ivory crescent moon lit my way home—that despite the pangs, I find myself wanting to gather up every moment of it and hold it tight, as if it could be harvested to carry through the monochromatic weeks ahead.

 

More than anything else, the degree of satisfaction to be gained from a life rooted in home depends on the strength of one’s conviction that there is nothing better down the road. Betterment comes from within a person, not from within geography. But I believe that had I not left home for awhile [sic], I would not have been completely convinced of that. There would always have been a lingering question in my mind: Would life somewhere else have been more pleasant?

 

-      Gene Logsdon, You Can Go Home Again

 

I had an interesting conversation today with a younger woman whose dream of country living in Leelanau County did not bring her the contentment it brought me. Perhaps it was the commotion of extensive remodeling added to raising three children in it that broke the marriage’s back. Whatever it was, taking care of the farmhouse and acreage on her own proved much more work than she wanted, and she is happier now (divorced, the house sold) with a lighter load of responsibility. She is also particularly hungry for travel. 

The two of us realized that our present situations and feelings, hers and mine, are diametrically opposite. I don’t know if I will ever travel again, if it involves flying and leaving my dog and/or the borders of my country. (Day trips with my dog are another matter.) Even on the rare occasions when I go out for an hour or two in the evening, I often look forward to coming home to Sunny again before I’ve gotten out the driveway. 

I have traveled to other places and lived in other places (I still miss those winters in Cochise County, Arizona), but where I am now is home. “We’re very lucky to have a home,” I tell Sunny.

Sunny seems to agree. At least, she isn’t complaining. And we will get through the winter together.

With a little help from our friends!

Very Important Postscript: Identity of November guest author has been revealed on my Northport Bookstore News blog! I will post more about the author's new book on this blog before his appearance on Nov. 12.