Meeting Dogs vs. Being Married, Searching for God, and Building Community

The dogs are excited enough.

First, the dogs --

 

Whether you are meeting a dog for the first time or coming home to your own dog … whether the dog is reactive or simply exuberant or whatever … the rules of engagement as formulated by Cesar Milan are simple: No talk, no touch, no eye contact. Or as I tell friends coming to my house, “Ignore the dog.” What you’re doing is keeping your own energy calm. You don’t ignore the dog indefinitely, of course, but what you want to reward is calm behavior, not excitement, on the part of the dog. 

Calm is rewarded with play.

I am completely on board with Cesar’s advice and only wish more people would practice it. Even when directly instructed, too many find it difficult not to approach a dog head-on (an aggressive approach in the dog world) with big smiles (showing teeth) and/or cooing voices (inviting dominant behavior from the dog). Then when jumped on, many of those people assure the owner, “It’s all right.” No, it is not all right! You are working against the owner and not in the dog’s best interest! 

 

But that’s all I’m going to say today about dogs...

Then, marriage --

 

...because what I want to focus on today is a book by David Brooks, and I want to begin by saying that the way to approach a dog is not the way to make a good, strong, satisfying and lasting marriage. 

 

On Sunday morning I was writing to a friend, telling her about The Second Mountain, and admitting that I did not fully engage with the book until I came to the section on marriage. And then, as I was writing that to my friend, it occurred to me that what I miss most since my husband died is exactly what we should not do when meeting or reuniting with a dog! 

 

I miss the talk: the shorthand of “trivial” daily sharing (never trivial to the sharers of it) and the deeper conversations extending over hours or even years. 

 

I miss the touch: holding hands while walking, sitting side by side in a restaurant instead of across the table from one another, being in direct physical contact as much as possible. 

 

I miss the eye contact: seeing and being seen, not as two strangers glancing at one another on a sidewalk but as intimates, seeing each other’s hearts and minds and souls. “He saw you,” that same friend wrote to me once. 

"The first time ever" -- I saw him.

Here is the sentence from the section called “The Stages of Intimacy” that changed my casual, desultory reading of Brooks to total engagement:

 

When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. 

 

That sentence stopped me in my tracks. Brooks continues:

 

It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day together and the words don’t stop. Everything can eventually be said, and every topic can be discussed. This is what Martin Buber called ‘pure relation,’ when I-It becomes I-Thou. This is what it feels like to be known.

 

We saw each other.

I really appreciate how David Brooks does not set aside passion to focus on common interests and common values. Friendship is not enough to make the kind of “maximum marriage” he describes and most of us (those who wanted marriage) always wanted to find. A relationship can “make sense” without touching the depths of the soul. Couples who enjoy each other’s company and admire each other 

 

…may tell each other that they love each other, they may feel real love for each other, but somehow it’s not the kind of love that makes it painful to be away from the person, the kind of love that stirs up turmoils of fear that the other person might go away, the kind of love that produces enchantment and deep happiness when the two of you are just next to each other doing nothing, the kind of love that calls forth the everyday service and constant solicitude that marriage requires.

 

I can almost see some of my readers recoiling in disgust at this description of what they would call “codependence,” but my money is on the quite well-known woman whose name escapes me at present who said in one of her comedy routines (or in a book she wrote?) that what other people call codependence she simply calls the human condition. Well, but maybe not everyone wants enchantment. Someone once accused me of romanticizing my life, something the Artist and I certainly did, but if we didn’t, who would, and why would we want to stop? 

The Second Mountain is not a book about marriage alone but about commitment and transformation. (Or should I say transformation and commitment?) Brooks calls the first mountain the one on which we strive to measure up as adults.

 

On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark on the world….

 

The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorces….

 

Then something happens.

 

What happens varies from one person to another, but the result is the sense that there is another mountain to be climbed. There may be but is not necessarily a change in careers or marriages, but it is transformation that characterizes the second mountain, a move from acquisition to contribution. Topics such as intellectual commitments, spiritual seeking and/or conversion, and community building—these are reasons why I think everyone, not just romantics, should read this book. I loved the idea of community building focusing on possibilities rather than problems, especially the story of the Spartanburg (SC) Academic Movement. 

Basically, the story is about the joy of commitment, which reminds me of the answer Richard Leakey gave when asked if he was really willing to give his life to Kenyan politics. His response was, “What else does any of us have to give?” Where we give our attention and care and time is where we give our life. Something to ponder….

 

Pointless Rambling Thoughts

How many leaves remain on this tree today?

We are slip-sliding into winter. Is that an excuse for my lack of focus? In my last post I used a French phrase, sous un ciel couvert, which means under a cloudy sky. Not actual rain but “menacing,” or (I would say) threatening rain. Here is another French word, one that moves easily and frequently from skies to moods: maussade, which means gloomy, dreary, dismal. 

A customer from France brought me this little souvenir!

I love French words the way so many of us also love music. It makes me happy to hear them, to speak the language (to the best of my abilities), to read and write the words. In an often cold, hard world, it is one of my little comforts, a small joy. Malheureusement (unhappily), we have been in greater-than-usual need of comforts if we’re paying attention to world news, but to imagine how comfortless their world must be for those in the midst of war is heartbreaking and goes far beyond first-world self-care.

 

I’m ditching most of what I had composed for today as a draft in the past week. The first frost in my garden feels like old as well as trivial news, along with that green tomato chutney project. Also, I’d written about a forecast for snow “in the coming week,” but now that forecast is only scant hours away. And other parts of the country have the same, so it’s hardly a headline story.

 

For no other reason than because it’s somewhat cheery, I’ll insert here a couple pictures of my latest kitchen production. It’s applesauce with pears cooked along with the apples and a homemade drizzle of black raspberry syrup added for color.…

I like it chunky.

And now I’ll use that food theme to segue to books and at the same circle back to the French. A friend tells me she doesn’t mind being alone but does mind eating alone. I told her I always have a dinner book nearby. The book that has seen me through many dinners lately, a few pages per meal, is Fernand Braudel’s L’Identité de la France. 

 

On our side of the Atlantic, in a country stretching from ocean to ocean, we tend to think of France as medium-sized and  unproblematically unified, but Braudel tells a different story. For reasons entirely different from those pertaining to the United States, as he sees it France is almost two different nations, north and south, with an intermediate buffer zone separating the two, and even that is an oversimplification. Histories, languages, soils, customs – la belle France is one nation politically in the larger world, but its peoples are diverse even from one village to the next.

 

But stop and think. Isn’t that the reality of human life everywhere? We may live under one law, but we inhabit multiple different and distinct smaller worlds. An Ethiopian friend of mine was astonished at how strong regional loyalties were in the United States, e.g., my ties to Michigan, she having expected we would all identify simply as Americans. My friend and I were in graduate school together for two years in Cincinnati (before I transferred to the University of Illinois), and in that unique river city – neither purely northern or southern, eastern or western -- each neighborhood had not only its own name (Clifton, Hyde Park, Over-the-Rhine, etc.) but also its own complete shopping district, so that the neighborhoods were like villages clustered to form the larger city but retaining their village identity. 

 

Similarly, in Leelanau County, still largely rural, every village (incorporated or not) and every informal lake community has, if not always its own grocery store or library, certainly its own history and traditions. Northport and Leland schools resist consolidation – that is, Northport resists being incorporated into Leland schools – because of Comet vs. Wildcat pride. Empire and Northport are worlds apart! I only get south to Empire maybe once a year and always feel, when I do, that I’m very far from home.

Now let me express my increasing crankiness about the term “community” that’s being thrown around so continuously and haphazardly in ways inappropriate to my ear and sensibilities. The word has become ubiquitous, with people (on the news, at least) now speaking of the “world community,” as in, “What has been the response of the ‘world community’ to the crisis in [fill in the blank]?” As if there could possibly ever be a unitary response across all the nations and peoples of the world unless we were invaded from outer space! A local union of musicians or plumbers or autoworkers or screenwriters may put out an official statement, but how long did it take to hammer out something on which all members could agree even in such a limited case?

 

Okay, back to my sheep. My Ethiopian friend was proud of the fact that her country had never been a European colony, but she acknowledged that it had been “colonized from within” by the Amhara group, who dominated politics under the country’s period of monarchy. One could say of France, also, I suppose, that it was “colonized from within” by the powers of the Île de France region, as it was their language that eventually became the official national tongue, edging out Latin (brought by the Romans), Basque, Provencal, Occitan, etc., etc. Free, mandatory, secular education instituted in 1882 prohibited regional languages in French public schools after, as I understand it, the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) convinced the government that in times of war, soldiers needed to understand each other and their commanders. A young generation growing up across the country with one language was also ripe for the subsequent age of empire – wars and annexations and conquests around the world – but that’s another story. Colonialism within preparing the way for colonies overseas? 

 

Years ago, when we lived in Leland and started our mornings with coffee at the Early Bird, the Artist and I sometimes had conversations with an older man who had been – or his father had been; I forget which – superintendent of county schools here. It was he who made the decision, finally, that all public instruction should be in English. Before that, various small country Leelanau schools conducted classes in the dominant language of that area’s immigrants. Note: As for Catholic schools in Leelanau County, St. Mary’s School in Lake Leelanau had classes in English, but Holy Rosary for a long time had Polish nuns teaching Polish-American farm children in the Polish language. Then there is the history, now well known, of Native American children in boarding schools being forbidden to use their native languages, which was the case for many Ojibwa and Odawa from Leelanau. 

And now, all over at least the Western world, the Odawa, the Irish, the Welsh, etc. are reclaiming the language lost by the generation before them.

 

Curious, I looked up sites discussing the Tower of Babel and found this one interesting, but the idea of verticality led me to think of homo sapiens beginning to walk upright, and then I questioned the writer’s conclusion that humans seek verticality to escape the earth’s surface. Did early bipedal humans want to escape the earth’s surface or simply be more at home on the ground than in the trees?

My friend Laura calls this the coming-home tree.

 

I have no conclusions today, only questions and sadness, because what more can we ask other than to feel at home on the earth, wherever we are? But being driven from home, cut off from the place of memories, or having that place invaded and stolen – sadly, this is a major theme in human history. Une idée maussade, vraiment. Truly a dismal idea – but accurate, isn’t it?

 

If only humans could see difference among our species as enriching rather than threatening -- 

Le monde est un souk énorme!

My plan for my next post is happier and more book-focused. Although the year is not yet at an end, I am too impatient to wait: I want to share with you a few novels I read this year for the first time (not necessarily newly published, in every case, but I’m not including those I re-read) and highly recommend without reservation. Maybe you will want to think about your top fiction picks for the year so far, too. I’d like that. 

 

Happy Halloween (if that's your thing)!

New Bohemian Cafe folks do holidays well. (They do everything well.)

On the Ground in Apache Pass

Seasonally retired Michigan bookseller at ruins of Tom Jeffords's Indian agency

You’ve been with me to Fort Bowie before, when my first day on the trail with my sister brought many unexpected delights. This year I joined three neighbors, and they doubled the challenge: we would hike in both directions, returning not on the low country trail we would take in but by way of a high ridge. I was assured that the mileage would be no greater — 1-1/2 miles each way, for a total of 3 miles — and that surely I could handle it. After all, I’ve routinely been doing a couple of miles back in the neighborhood once a week or so on dog-walk mornings. 

Shade tree at Butterfield Stage station ruins

Therese at Butterfield stop

Because the trail we took in from the parking lot trailhead to the ruins was, for the most part, a repeat of last year’s story, I won’t go over every detail. A few, however, will serve to introduce my fellow hikers from Dos Cabezas. First is Therese (above), the day’s driver and my regular dog-walking companion back in the ghost town. 

Apache Spring

Ah, but already I need to slow down here (as I did so often on the trial!). About three-quarters or more of our way to the fort, my energy level was dropping. Double-checking, I asked Therese if we would stop for a rest break when we got to the fort, and she assured me that we would but said we didn’t have to wait until then. We were coming at that very moment to Apache Spring, a lovely, shady spot with a trickle of flowing water and some nice, big rocks for seating. The other two hikers (to be introduced shortly) were agreeable, and we slipped out of backpacks and dug out comestibles. The water was low enough that I had a chance to explore back almost to the spring itself and to see much more of that cool grotto than I’d seen before from the trail, and that was as satisfying as the rest and refreshment.

And now you meet Dorothy and Sam. These intrepid hikers and birders own and operate the Dos Cabezas Retreat B&B (sorry, they are booked solid for the next 26 days!), and they still find time and energy to put in plenty of volunteer hours in Cochise County. Last month they volunteered for the second year with the Wings over Willcox festival, and they have put in a total of about 40 hours (spread out over many weeks) right here at Fort Bowie, where willing hands under the supervision of a fifth-generation mason from Mexico are using old methods to stabilize what remains of the fort. 

Sam, Therese, Dorothy at gun shed ruin

Sam and Dorothy have worked on many sections, but this particular little ruin, this old wall section of the old artillery gun shed from 1890, is one for which they feel particular fondness. 

Volunteer ranger standing, Sam seated in rocking chair

Therese rocks!

The inviting porch at the ranger station/visitor center seduced us with its beautiful rocking chairs, and our second short break stretched to a full half-hour, as we caught our breath and rocked and visited with volunteer rangers who live the non-winter months of the year in Bozeman, Montana.

Climbing path

But soon it was time to take up the challenge! The trail up to and along the ridge! Our path up (new to me, remember) climbed and climbed and kept climbing, and the higher we climbed, the more spectacular the views. The layout of the fort ruins, spread out before our eyes so far below, looked tinier and tinier in the immensity of the surrounding mountains as we rose above it. 

Fort Bowie below us

Fort Bowie farther below

Looking San Simon way

View north

To our northeast lay the San Simon Valley, straddling the Arizona/New Mexico border, and to the northwest towered Government Peak, a mountain in our own Dos Cabezas range. In fact, from where we were, Government Peak was hiding the distinctive, more familiar, and, by us, much-beloved twin peaks from which our range takes its name. Apache Pass divides the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua mountain ranges, and it's clear how welcome that mountain opening with its freshwater spring must have been to everyone traveling from East to West.

And oh, the vegetation! We made our way over hard rock and loose stones through a veritable forest of ocotillo wands. “Ocotillo likes limestone,” Sam remarked. And sure enough, on our way down, when we reached the fault line on the path — identified by a sign pointing to the line where sedimentary limestone is left behind and a subregion of igneous granite entered — ocotillo immediately gave way to beargrass, the two different plants keeping each to its own bedrock territory, with areas as distinctly marked off as Midwestern fields of corn and soybeans separated by a fence or hedgerow.

Beargrass region

Dorothy on trail

While I was almost invariably bringing up the rear, sometimes Dorothy lagged behind with me, and that was fun, because Dorothy has an eagle eye for spotting tiny natural wonders, such as an old praying mantis egg case on a branch or a baby cactus hiding under a larger, sheltering plant. 

Dorothy called our attention to this darling little baby cactus

Other times it was Therese who slowed her pace to be companionable. “I just love plants!” she exclaimed once, after the two of us had paused to delight in bright green ferns and patches of fruiting moss in moist cracks of rock shaded from sun, while Dorothy and Sam led the way ahead.

Therese spotted moisture-loving ferns in cool, shady spot

Sometimes, though, I stopped long enough with my camera that the other three grew small in the near distance ahead, and if a mountain lion had been stalking us, I would have been its dinner. But somehow that dire possibility seemed remote, and I enjoyed my quiet moments, too. I smiled gratefully and happily to myself, looking at my hiking companions farther up the trail and knowing with confidence that they were keeping tabs on me, too, and would miss me were I to slip on a loose rock and plunge off the side of the mountain!

The weather forecast for the day had foretold cloudy skies and temperatures in the 50-degree range. The longer we were out, however, the brighter the sun and the more layers of clothing we shed, and by the time we were on the road back to our ghost town the outdoor temperature had reached almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So will we have rain tomorrow? Will we have, perhaps, even snow? What will be, will be. Whatever the future, our happy quartet was brimming with contentment, even as we began excitedly planning our next outdoor adventure.

More rocks!

More mountain flora!

More open spaces!

When Therese dropped me off back at the cabin, the front door was wide open to let the sun stream in, and David and Sarah greeted me eagerly. “Did you two go anywhere?” I asked the Artist. No, he and our dog had stayed home, enjoying the day at the cabin. All three of us were happy with the day we had had.

But I do have one final doubt, because I find it hard to believe my friends and I walked only three miles. With all the ups and downs and steep climbs and big steps, it felt like at least five to me.

You don’t have to read between the lines.

Anyone can be a book critic. All you have to do is read each word, each sentence, each paragraph carefully, generously but analytically, and then weigh the author's overall vision as well as the book's details against your wealth of background cultural knowledge. And the way to read a review is just the same. So in today’s post I invite you to come along with me for the reading of a book review and the questions and reflections it prompted in me. I don't imagine we will be a large party, but we happy few can enjoy ourselves.

Saturday morning, having come to the last page of a book I'd been reading, I picked up a New York Review of Books, the Nov. 21 issue, and found in it a stunning review by Robert Kuttner of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Having thoroughly appreciated Kuttner’s Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, I was eager to read what he had to say about Deneen’s book, which was published last year to wide acclaim and has already been issued in an expanded paperback edition.

A careful reader and astute reviewer, Kuttner wastes no time in accusing Deneen of setting up a straw man argument. 

Liberalism is not and never was merely, as caricatured by Deneen, ‘the greatest possible freedom from external constraints.’ Rather, it is fundamentally about limiting abuses of public and private power and creating space for free inquiry. 

What Kuttner calls the 'liberal project,’ then … “included the rule of law, limits on inherited privilege, constraints on arbitrary power, freedom of conscience and speech, and reliance on liberty to develop a natural aristocracy of talent” — all features we might hope to find flourishing in a democratic society. It was not about encouraging individual excess or magically freeing mankind from constraints imposed by nature, as Deneen would have us believe. Thus Deneen's cartoon version has little relation to either the origins or historical development of true liberalism.

Of course, the point of setting up a straw man is to have an easy target, so it is probably not surprising that Deneen goes on to blame his cartoon 'liberalism’ for every woe of modern society. He conveniently ignores the fact, Kuttner points out, that much of today’s so-called ‘conservatism’ [so-called is my addition] takes its starting point with libertarianism, not classical liberalism, and it is this hybrid libertarian ‘conservatism,’ not liberalism, that has led to such modern ills as 

...the commercialization of health care, the commodification of education, the sale of private data, the outsourcing of employment, and the economic collapse of entire regions….

Even given the easy target he has created, Deneen still resorts to cherry-picking quotes, according to Kuttner, thus misconstruing and misrepresenting Locke, Toqueville, and others.

I have read enough of Locke and Tocqueville to side easily with Kuttner on the cherry-picking question. Also, having taught as well as studied logic, I am alert to the trickery of a straw man argument. Finally, as a one-time though not long-term follower and advocate of libertarianism (I got over it), it didn’t take Kuttner to open my eyes to fairly recent radical changes in American so-called conservatism and in today's Republican party. (My father would not recognize his party today.) What today’s Republicans call conservatism, religious avowals aside, is “based on a common embrace of corporate capitalism,” an ideal in which [here I extrapolate] privatization, i.e., having "everything for sale” — banking, education, health care — is the only legitimate goal.

Perhaps Kuttner’s most serious criticism, though, is the one he makes on pragmatic grounds -- and here, as a self-described romantic pragmatist, I perk up my ears. This will be the payoff! Deneen, he tells us, having indicted what he calls liberalism, offers no idea whatsoever about what would support democracy better. Surely it would not be the “Benedict Option,” that  option that counsels forming groups to retreat from secular society. Such orthodox religious communities, guided only by religion precepts and without liberal, secular safeguards to rights, would hardly be immune to autocrats and would-be dictators. And here I note that the position of women in such communities is almost always subservient, submissive, and silent. Deneen has already decried the emancipation of women, so now any remaining doubts I may have had are dispelled.

"Democracy does not work perfectly," Kuttner admits, but what system of government ever has? Before the state was overrun by the market, democracy worked better than it's working today, but whatever form it takes, Kuttner does not see -- and Deneen does not offer -- a viable alternative. 

...All of the alternatives are even more corrosive of human dignity and personal virtue. Liberal democracy may indeed be under siege; but if we are to constrain the tyranny of dictators on one flank and the rule of overweening global corporation on the other, democracy is all we have.  

- Robert Kuttner, "Blaming Liberalism," The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019 

The book Kuttner reviewed was Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen (Yale University Press, 2019).

Disclaimer: Some readers might consider that, as an emancipated woman, I am biased in favor of liberalism, and they would be correct. I would say, however, that my bias is the result of being persuaded by facts, logic, and experience, not an undisciplined outgrowth of ignorance or brainwashing.

But that's not all I think.

So now, my take: 

The more I survey this whole messy political stew, the more I mistrust both socialists on the far left and libertarians on the far right, and I mistrust them on pragmatic grounds; therefore, insofar as socialist ideology has saturated progressive movements and libertarian ideology has certainly taken over and cannibalized what used to be conservatism, the more and more I mistrust all ideologies and ideologues. To say either that government intervention and regulation is always (socialist) or never (libertarian) the correct prescription to social problems — the extreme opposing ideological positions — strikes me as so short-sighted as to be downright blind to reality. 

Kuttner’s own view is more nuanced, but I wonder if even his prescriptions have the flexibility I see as absolutely necessary. It’s been a while since I’ve read Everything For Sale, so I cannot say with certainty that he would put whole domains under government oversight and leave other entire domains completely free-wheeling. Banking, education, and health care are, as I recall, fields in which he advocates government regulation, and while I have no quarrel here in general, I would still not have the federal government regulating every aspect of banking, education, and health care in every state of the union. Neither would I leave domains on the free market side of things absolutely free. Think about it. How can the two domains possibly be completely separate, when manufacturing necessarily affects health, commerce necessarily involves banking, and the education of youth comes before entrance into any section of the workplace?

What makes more sense to me is to have general federal safeguards enforced and leave the fine-tuning of details to the local level (regional, state, town -- whatever is appropriate), since conditions on the ground vary so widely from one part of the country to another. Imagine, for instance, a hospital and its procedures for admittance, care, and billing. Doesn’t it make sense that the situation in Los Angeles will be vastly different from that in a farm town in North Dakota or an isolated mountain community in eastern Kentucky or a university teaching institution in Illinois? A procedure that works in one place may be very ill-suited in another. The mix of public and private funding and control, therefore, will also vary, and we should expect that variation.  There must be room for variation to meet local needs. 

It is foolish, when advocating social policy, to ignore variations of climate, physical geography, culture, history, and demographics across a country as large as the United States — almost as foolish as believing that some populations of the nation can be governed and protected by law while others can operate as gangsters.

Pragmatism, as a social philosophy, does not say that whatever course of action gets me the most is the right thing for me to do. That is a perverted view sometimes attributed to so-called “pragmatic” individuals in business. Pragmatism is not egoism ("what’s best for me is best”). Rather, pragmatism tells us that we should look for policies that work to achieve community goals, local or state or national. Sometimes but not always a government hands-off approach will be best. Sometimes but not always a government program will solve a particular problem. What I am advocating, you see, is attention to particularity. What approach is best for a particular community problem? Can we set up a small test and see how it works out? Which aspects of the results will then be applicable to some other community, and which ones do not travel well? It is exactly this kind of experimentation that is the justification for a federal system.

All too often politicians and Americans and, I suppose, human beings in general want a “hammer mechanic” solution: I’ve got a hammer, and I’ll just pound until this thing is fixed! Not generally the best approach, I’m saying, whether you hammer from the far left or the far right. An ideological hammer will generally create as much mess as it tries to eliminate, leaving you no further ahead. 

Surgery is not always the best answer. Neither is avoiding surgery always the best answer. 

That’s my two cents’ worth, anyway.

Pollyanna, Mr. Rogers, and the Trials of November

And so it began....

November so far has been a rough month, starting with the weather. Unusually early snow, unexpected in its quantity as well as its timing (calendar winter not yet arrived), was a trial to all of northern Michigan. Even the business provided to the guys who do the plowing was not an unalloyed cause for rejoicing on their part, because many of those same guys do lawn maintenance and hadn’t yet gotten up all the fall leaves. In fact, many of the leaves had not yet fallen and are even now coming down on top of the snow and making a real mess of things. 

Autumn storms also brought additional shorline erosion, not as gradual loss but overnight disappearance. 

Well, what would Pollyanna say, that character in the novel by Eleanor Porter (1868-1920)? Pollyanna was a little World War I-era orphan who pulled crutches as her gift from the Christmas barrel instead of the doll she wanted. Well, she got through the trials of her life by playing the “glad game,” finding something to be glad about in every situation. The good thing about the crutches was — she didn’t need them! So if we apply the glad game to a blizzard that kept people home from work and school on one November Monday, we see how lucky we were. Spared forest fire, hurricane, and tornado, most of us were able to take refuge in place rather than being forced to flee our homes. And while we may not have chosen to have it in early November, who doesn’t love a snow day?

And there's no denying it was beautiful.

Trial #2, the impeachment hearings, is more of a challenge to a player of the glad game. The president, of course, feels persecuted, but the whole country is suffering, and the suffering goes back to the campaign that led to the 2016 election, when partisan divisions became more than acrimonious and turned downright nasty. Also, unlike a snow day, we can’t turn the impeachment hearings into fun by baking muffins and making hot chocolate. 

Impeachment is always regrettable. Whatever anyone’s feelings and opinions about whatever president it involves, the impeachment process is an attempt to solve a worst-case scenario -- or what we have come to hope is the worst that can happen. And what if it isn’t? If things got worse? Much worse has happened in many countries around the world over the course of human history. And so even sleep provides no surefire escape: “Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub!” To have the country’s leadership invade our hours of sleep seems a most egregious violation, does it not?

As a nation, though, we have suffered and survived periods of horrible political division before this. Without harking back as far as the Civil War, I think back to violent protests over desegregation in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, and the rash of nightmare assassinations then, too. Surely, in those times as well as these, lies were spread, friendships destroyed, families torn apart. 

But it does seem that lies travel faster in these times — almost at the speed of light. “Misinformation,” as it’s called, has become an industry, prolific and profitable. So it’s hard to find anything to be glad about in our present whole situation, isn’t it? 

And yet — as I must remind myself almost hourly — we can be glad that the situation is being addressed by hearings in Congress rather than by military coup; that men and women of courage and principle are willing to put their devotion to country above political expediency; and that we still have reliable sources of news and can hear testimony for ourselves rather than having it filtered and presented in Newspeak.

Overwhelmed, we have to carry on.

Well, the blizzard was regional. The hearings are national, with international implications. But of course each of us has, besides, always, our personal trials. I will not go into mine, because it’s an old story — the behemoth in the room — and I would be either preaching to the (tiny) choir or beating my head pointlessly against the wall. 

What I can be and am glad of in the current global retail situation are those individuals, both the ones who saw the writing on the wall from the start and those only belatedly seeing where present trends would take us all, if continued — that small but perhaps expanding contingent — the people who value and support real bookstores. I’m glad of every visitor to my bookstore who doesn’t waste my time with idle questions about business but asks instead about books and takes the time to browse seriously. I'm glad of the many wonderful authors I've met over the years. And I am especially glad of and thankful for every single customer, neighbor or stranger, who leaves with a purchased book (or more than one), because that’s what it means to “love bookstores.”

Strange as it may seem, then, when I take the time to dig down under what I can’t help perceiving at times as the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” I’m still glad to have chosen this life in the slow, challenging, difficult lane strewn with trials and tribulations. Not giving thanks for the hardships, you understand, but grateful for the opportunity to scratch out a living without compromising my principles and extraordinarily grateful for having a coterie of loyal supporters in that endeavor. 

I’m so glad my goal is not now, never was, and never will be world domination and expansion into outer space! What could be better than our green planet? I’m glad to be able to say that I have invested instead in myself and my own small-town vision.

Now, as for that small-town angle, a couple paragraphs above I used the phrase “neighbor or stranger,” but I’ve been reading quite a bit lately (as have you, perhaps, the new Tom Hanks film getting quite a lot of press) about the late Fred Rogers, who so famously and unforgettably asked on his television show, "Won't you be my neighbor?" And reading about Mr. Rogers, I can't help looking into the way I live my life and asking myself some pretty hard questions. 

Mr. Rogers spoke directly to children, to all of their fears and confusions, and also to the confused and frightened children inside every adult. I wish I could say that I always do the same, but that wouldn't be true. More often than I want to admit, I respond too quickly (even when I attempt to hide that response) from a feeling that I have been attacked or insulted or dismissed as inconsequential when there was no such intention in the words that wounded me. 

And what if there really had been an intention to inflict pain? 

I think the possibility of intention to hurt is much rarer than our almost automatic response of self-defense, actually: my personal concerns are not the center of anyone else’s consciousness, and so what other people find important to say, whatever the context of our conversation, will seldom address my core concerns but simply express their own. But whether the words of another came from ignorance, thoughtlessness, or what looks like plain meanness do not matter at all if I think of them as the words of a child, which is how Mr. Rogers counseled us to respond to one another. 

Years ago I did substitute teaching and regular tutoring up at Northport School (one of many “side jobs” undertaken over time in order that my bookstore might survive). Teaching children wasn’t what I had been educated to do, and I quickly realized that subject matter (math or spelling or whatever) is only part of the job. Kids don’t leave their personal lives and feelings in their lockers when they come into the classroom, and sometimes they can say or even do hurtful to one another or even to their teachers. They can behave destructively. And if the behavior is not somehow checked they can be dangerous to themselves and others. 

My big take-away from those experiences was this: I never encountered a child I felt was really malicious. Bad behavior might result from frustration or hurt or embarrassment or fear or confusion, but it was always a reaction to something, never sui generis meanness. 

American society in our time has taken on a pretty mean look. Movies, “reality” television, business, politics — in all these realms, it seems that dirty tricks and name-calling are held up to us as behavior to emulate. Even “Pollyanna,” the name of the character in the old story, is generally used as a derogatory term, like Goody Two-Shoes. It’s like calling somebody “Stupid!” Kind of a dispiriting picture of twenty-first American culture, isn’t it?

A year or so ago I asked someone I don’t know all that well how she maintained her positive attitude. I really wanted to know. I needed her answer. Didn’t she sometimes feel overwhelmed by threats to free speech, truth, democracy, and the natural world (of which we’re all part, even when we forget the fact)? Didn’t she ever feel downright hopeless? I cannot quote her response exactly, but it was something like “Lead from your strength.” When speaking or writing, putting her words out in the world, she wanted those words to be encouraging and hopeful. 

We need those words.

Because we can all see the negative. What we need from each other are reminders that good things are true, too, maybe something we’ve overlooked or forgotten or just temporarily lost sight of, something good we can build on. I don’t know how many times I have sat down to write in a terrible mood but managed to find some small kernel of gratitude and hope, a kernel that grew as my sentences proliferated, and that's because I am aware of writing for a community and trying -- honestly! -- to draw and lead from my strength, although I may have to dig pretty deep some days to find it!

More than one good friend has told me in person or has written to me that they appreciate my ability to find joy in small, everyday sights and events. Whenever anyone says or writes something so complimentary, I feel compelled to tell them not to give me too much credit, because it can often be a huge effort for me to seek out those small joys, and that's true despite the fact that my life in general is really quite blessed. So if you're struggling, you're not alone. Many of us can slip all too easily into feeling overwhelmed and despondent, particularly in November. 

Even that lucky dog, Sarah, is not always wagging her tail.

But who wants or needs to hear the sob story of a fortunate person? The old Eric Berne book on transactional analysis, Games People Play, called that game “Ain’t It Awful?” Ick! Who wants to be invited to that party? Besides, commiseration even with real tragedy can be best in small doses, or it risks being counter-productive and exacerbating the misery.

And we all need the gift of light.

Pollyanna’s game was one she played to keep herself cheerful in trying situations and times. Fred Rogers went deeper, inviting everyone to be his neighbor. The two messages are different but compatible. Don’t we enjoy neighbors who bring cheer rather than gloom into our lives? And aren’t we better neighbors when we look for the good in others, wherever we meet them?

Neither path is always easy, and most of us will fall down over and over, but we can get up and try again each time. As little children must.

One word of caution to neighbors in northern Michigan: what looks like wet pavement these days can sometimes hide — yes, in plain sight! — a thin coating of ice, so step carefully! My own Wednesday morning fall on an icy sidewalk brought no terrible consequences, but not falling must be the standard for which we aim.

Namaste, as neighbor Paul says. Thanks, Paul! You are a good neighbor! And thank you, Maureen, for starting my bookstore Thursday off with your smiling face, and Karin, for the beautiful journal you made for me out of that old, falling-apart school book from Quebec, and all the rest of you who buy your books from me in Northport. And please, I urge you all, while I'm gone this winter, to take your custom down the road a piece to Leelanau Books in Leland and/or Bay Books in Suttons Bay. We will keep getting each other through, one day at a time.

Love to all,
Pamela