Nineteen Years Ago

What is written down and kept brings the past back to life.

I read a lot of books (over 150 in this year that is soon coming to an end), but now and again I look back and read my own words. For instance, on and off in my life I have carried around little dimestore notebooks filled with random jottings. This red-covered one from 2006 that surfaced recently begins with names of people met for the first time in my bookshop and in social settings. Nancy P., Michael H., Angela W. and Dennis S., Trudy C., all of them lasting friends, I first met that year. 

 

A few pages in, however, the jottings change character, because when the Artist and I traveled, I always kept notes, so I see that we left Leland on September 10^th that year, with the odometer reading 176,729. The day was sunny, clear, and cool, morning wet with heavy dew. East and north of Traverse City, it seemed to me that we entered a different world.

 

None of the elements is foreign to our own peninsula, but here they occur in unfamiliar configurations—not the hills, trees, fields we know but strange hills, strange pines, strange oaks, orchards, barns, subdivisions and business development.

 

That would be Antrim, Charlevoix, and Emmet counties going north. The September sunlight, I had written, was 

 

…soft and glaring at the same time, bringing every color forward—asters and goldenrod, the subtle lavender and plum and purple underlying green….

 

When we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, I spotted the firewood drop-off site and vowed to drop off “my worries and frets” at that point in our travels and leave them there. What was worrying me in 2006? Luckily, I don’t recall.

 

Crossing from the lower to the upper peninsula is always significant, but that September we were going farther, crossing into Canada at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie). We stopped for gas on the U.S. side (12 gallons), and noticed a group of couples on motorcycles going in the same direction we were headed, searching for their passports to have them ready to hand, “so we won’t have to get off the bike,” as one of them put it.

 

In Ontario we stopped at the Visitors’ Centre to change money, then at a gas station to buy bottled water, and already I was “elated, giddy.” Everything was different! We were in a foreign country! I overheard a man at a pay phone speaking in a dialect of French so far from the French I had learned in school that I could hardly pick out a single word. Down the road at Bobber’s Restaurant (Bruce Mines, Ont.) was a trio of Germans conversing in their home language. A foreign country, a different Great Lake—not Michigan or Superior, our home lakes, but north Lake Huron, with pre-Cambrian shores and wild verges of tansy.

 

Next day: 

 

17-East is a road from heaven this morning. Traffic light. Fall color coming on. The bones of the Canadian Shield thrust up through a thin skin of soil. Old wooden fences surround pioneer fields, [and there are] small stone cairns on rock shoulders, glimpses of cool lakes and rivers, signs for trailer camping parks.

 

Sometimes all I write is a list of place names: Spruce Grove Cemetery, Iron Bridge (pop. 900), Iron Bridge Motel, Three Aces Restaurant, Elly’s Diner—“Mom & Pops,” I write. Then—“Mississagi River, big and beautiful, shining on its way.”

 

Finally, this list:

 

      patch of loosestrife

      iron bridge

      old board-and-wooden shingle house

 

with a note to self appended: “Picture these. Souvenez-les.” Remember them.

 

There were people congregated across the river at a rapids, many of them fishing, not many catching. Mississagi First Nation issues permits. And next came Blind River, pop. 3600. A float plane! Helicopter! Mixed yellows of tansy, butter-&-eggs, goldenrod, hawkweed, and coltsfoot.

 

Rocky points jut out, horizon filled with islands, sky with clouds, water with whitecaps and glints of reflected sunlight.

 

Next to the library (I remember the street and picture it today in my mind) was a real estate board listing 1000’ of shoreline, with 10 acres and year-round access, for $49,500. We were only in the market for lunch, though, and happy to find a Chinese restaurant and meet the proprietor, Ivy Chen, 16 years in Canada, over a year in Blind River, Ivy’s family including a husband and two children, 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl who sat with us while doing their homework. The soup was turkey broth with pork and pork wontons “and no MSG,” Mrs. Chen assured us. It was beautiful and delicious. I bought four books at the library for $1.25, and we were on our way again. Much later, when we were back in Leelanau County, I sent a couple books they had requested to the Chen children, who would be all grown up now. Looks like Blind River has grown, too, since we were there.

 

Serpent River … First Nation Trading Post … what I called “a sea of nothing but cattails in the sun, their seasons short-lived.” Above an outcropping, leaves were red and orange, “echoing the iron-stained color of the ancient rock surface.” Then I noted parenthetically, casting my mind back to the day before,

(Yesterday, somewhere, golden ferns and seedlings of red sumac on the ground looked as if the color had dripped down from the branches above.)

 

In Massy, Ontario (pop. 1,000), where we had stopped on a previous trip to photograph outdoor metal sculptures by Laval Bouchard, we decided to stay overnight at the Mohawk Motel, stopping while it was still afternoon. While the Artist rested from the drive, I sat outdoors with book and notebook, looking forward to exploring nearby Chutes Park and then, the next day, reaching Manitoulin Island, where I had arranged to rent a little cabin on a lake on the island for four nights. We decided we would come back to Massey on Saturday, after our time on Manitoulin, for a big street painting event. 

 

The Mohawk Motel was German-run and had a long list of written rules—quite a long list!—but the room was large and had “everything,” and the Artist loved it. Our cabin on Manitoulin would have no TV, so he was happy to have a movie channel for one night in Massey. Later we walked (1 kilometer) to Chutes Provincial Park and found our way through the campground to the waterfall before a light supper and well-earned sleep. Morning was coffee in our room, a dog walk, TV, then more coffee in the lobby, with toast, fresh muffin, and conversation with the owners, who were looking forward to the second year of their street painting festival. The wife had organized the event, and artists would be coming from Germany, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. Previous year’s attendance had been 10,000. Government funding had helped with a publicity campaign. I wonder if that festival is still going on…. 

 

And that is only a few pages in the beginning of a little notebook that goes on to recount our time on Manitoulin, the return visit to Massey for the festival, and finally a stretch of days in dear, familiar Grand Marais. It was one of our longer September getaways and one I love revisiting now, seeing those scenes once more as I flip the little pages.

 

Do you keep written notes on your travels? Sketchier or more fulsome than mine? Do your notes or diaries help you recall those earlier times?

Happy new year, if I don't write again until NEXT YEAR!

The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

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

 

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

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

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

 

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

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

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

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

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

 

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

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

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

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

      - 1/29/19

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

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

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

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

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

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

"No dog park today, huh?"

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

What Do You Think You Will Remember?

My desk in December

When we arrived at our ghost town hideaway for the winter, I made notes on the route we’d taken west and the places we had stayed: Kalamazoo, MI; Springfield, IL; Sedalia, MO; Wellington, KS; Dalhart, TX; Alamagordo, NM; and finally here, Dos Cabezas, AZ, 15 miles southeast of Willcox, AZ, and about 25 beautiful, winding miles west of the Chiricahua National Monument. The first page of the same composition book was already taken up with lists of things to pack (one list for the humans, another for the dog), and it was only on our second morning in the ghost town that I began keeping a sketchy narrative history of our season here. Back then, happy to be settling in for a few months under a sunny sky filled with wintering sandhill cranes, I had no idea that my notebook would become, in time a plague journal!

I always read a lot of books during our Arizona winters … write letters … blog about my reading and about our Cochise County adventures and explorations. It just happened that this year, for the first time, I also began keeping a journal. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would be recording historic events; I merely wanted to fix everyday small details on paper. Because those little everyday details, the stuff of short-term memory, are easily lost as days slip into the past, and my time here is precious to me. I want to be able to hold the days in my hand as it were, and look at them again and again when I am far from these mountains and this desert. 

Winter morning

So most of my mornings began, starting in December, with a session of journal-writing. The weather (no, it isn’t boring), social engagements, personal happenings (getting keys to the mailbox is a big deal to me), daily errands, and descriptions of surroundings flowed from my pen, along with re-emerging childhood memories and a few observations of the current national political scene. Quite a lot about hearing coyotes, through the night and in early, still-dark morning. A few notes on books read.

In short, nothing particularly earth-shaking. And that’s how it went, week after week.

… Sandhill crane count … first visit to the Smile4Jesus Thrift Shop … tales of my husband’s new friend in Willcox, the one I call the Born-Again Bear … brief accounts of dreams (very few remembered long enough to write down) … walks and hikes with neighbors.… 

There were only a few words on the impeachment, although I thought it would never end … and very little on presidential campaigns, debates, caucuses, as I tried to keep attention on politics to a minimum … much more on my volunteer mornings at the library bookstore and the elementary school in Willcox. Of course, the political issues bled in from time to time, from impeachment to debates to caucuses to the State of the Union, because that was the news, nonstop, on the radio and television, but I tried to keep my attention locally focussed, as much as possible, escaping from the news to the outdoors.

People I love found their way onto the pages. One of my sisters was in Mexico for two weeks. The other went through the pain of losing an old dog. We spent February 15-17 in Tucson and anticipated a return in March. The Artist had a birthday. Then in late February, my former husband, the father of my only child, was moved (after only three days) from hospital to hospice, where he died a week later, and my son and I began spending daily time together on the phone. 

In the larger world, a few of the Democratic hopefuls began to drop out of the race for candidacy, but too many yet remained, and far from business and home responsibilities in Michigan as I was, I found the world crowding in, events racing along, piling on top of each other without time to catch a breath. In many ways, the world seemed all present, minute by minute. 

Yet only on March 10 did coronavirus come into my journal, when I noted that the Tucson Festival of Books, scheduled for March 14-15, had been cancelled the day before, adding at the bottom of that page: “Politics and coronavirus — our world today.” Two days later, March 12, I recorded that the president had announced, the evening previous, a ban on travelers from Europe, Ireland and the U.K. excluded. We began hearing daily about the terrible situation in Italy. COVID-19, the virus was now called. Less than two weeks ago. And yet now, March 20 as I am composing these thoughts, just past the spring equinox — such a short time since we were first told to stock our pantries for a possible two-week emergency quarantine — almost all universities and public schools are closed, churches have stopped holding services, restaurants all over the United States are open for take-out only, grocery store shelves are near-empty in key aisles (paper products, soaps and cleaning products, the dairy case), and more and more Americans, even those not yet on “lockdown,” are “sheltering in place,” even if they have not put themselves under “self-quarantine.” That is our national language now. 

Still, though all of us are affected, each of us is experiencing these days of isolation differently. We are spread out across a very large country, and while some friends find themselves alone, far from family and close friends, others see their households expanding with schoolchildren and college-age sons and daughters home all day. I lost my volunteer jobs, but many other people have lost paying jobs, jobs they needed for basic food and shelter. “Lucky” ones see their savings “evaporating before our very eyes,” while the homeless appear at intersections, holding up cardboard signs. No one can hope to remain unaffected, from the most expendable part-time hourly wage worker to the most pampered trust fund baby whose investment portfolios has plummeting in value.

Here’s another personal note, this one I know shared by many — the strange realization that, simply because of our ages, the Artist and I are in a “vulnerable” group, members of an “at-risk” category. It was already strange enough just trying to get it through our heads that we are no longer young — hell, no longer middle-aged! — we still can’t fully believe that! — and now we are also particularly “at risk”?

For me, personally, there is the added strange feeling of being disconnected, physically, from the world that has been mine for almost 27 years, i.e., the world of books. I am not, after all, in my Northport bookstore, weighing the question of whether to entirely for the duration of the crisis or stay open to process phone and mail orders, make sales through the front door (or deliver books to local customers), and gratefully accept whatever help my little community might offer, along with doing what I might do to help the community. I’m not there. Instead of being “on the front lines,” as it were, I only read each day in Shelf Awareness what is happening with other bookstores around the country. So peculiar and unsettling! My feeling must be something like what my sister felt when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans just after she had moved away, that feeling of I should be there! Then added to that the uncertainty of not knowing if we will even be back in early May as planned — if that will be possible at all. 

That’s part of my story. Everyone else has a story, too, quite different from mine. The general point I’m making is that each of us is having a unique subjective experience of these times, which means that together we will have a staggering number of stories, coming from myriad different vantage points, looking through lenses offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives. 

So, are you keeping a “plague” journal? Years from now, what will you remember? What is strangely ordinary about this time for you? In what ways does the crisis seem real or unreal? What other times of crisis does it call to your mind? How is it unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced? 

What books are you reading, and what kinds of meals do you find yourself putting together? Are you able to get outdoors for fresh air and exercise? Do you listen or watch or in some way follow news compulsively, every waking minute, or do you ration what you let into your consciousness each day? Do you sleep through the night or lie awake? If you sleep, what do you dream? If awake, what are your thoughts? How do you seek out comfort, and what gives you comfort?

With how many other people are you “sheltering in place,” and how is that going? Are you spending more time on the phone, calling and texting, or on your computer, e-mailing and following friends’ posts on social media? Do you feel more or less connected to those you love? Differently connected?

What is the best and worst aspect of this time for you? I should add so far to that previous question, shouldn’t I? Because we don’t know yet what will be the best and worst in the days and weeks ahead.

When I look at my own handwritten journal and see that I only used the word ‘coronavirus’ there for the first time ten days ago, I can hardly believe my eyes, but there it is on the page, although subjectively, right now, it feels like at least a full month that we have been obsessed with this news, every waking minute, to the exclusion of almost all else. I know I heard the news from China before March 10, but at that point, as the absence of it in my journal illustrates, the danger must have seemed very remote, a foreign problem only. That’s how fast everything has been happening.

Friends, I see some of your posts on Facebook, but those “news feeds” will be superseded overnight, you know, by whatever comes next, and even a year from now we will have a hard time remembering exactly when and now the pandemic (another frequently occurring word these days) first touched us personally. And besides, as long as you are “sheltering in place,” wouldn’t you like to use some of your time to make a lasting record for yourself and those who come after you? In all human lives, there are watershed events, some personal, others part of a national or world-historic fabric, and this is one of those times that will stand out whenever, in future, we look back on our lives. If you don’t see yourself as a writer, maybe you can keep a scrapbook or a photo album or make a quilt of “plague times.” We don’t have to be greedy opportunists to find opportunity in crisis. 

What stories will you have to tell years from now?

We each see the world from our own little corner....

Book Review: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

A Tale For the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

NY: Viking, 2013

$28.95

Do you love wordplay? Are you fascinated by the mysteries of time? Have you ever felt all alone in the world? Hopeless? Do you think the direction of a life can be changed? Have you ever tried meditation, or do you practice it regularly or maybe just thought about it? What about walks on the beach and finding surprising objects washed up by the waves? Do you believe in magic of fiction? Answering ‘yes’ to even one of these questions tells me that you will find this book as absorbing as I did.

For the time being,
 Words scatter . . .
 Are they fallen leaves?

In Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, one of the two protagonists is named Ruth and has much in common with the author. Ozeki says of Ruth the character that she is “semi-fictional,” adding that “if pressed, I would have to call myself semi-fictional, too.” One difference is that Ruth Ozeki the author is a Zen Buddhist priest, as well as an author and filmmaker, while Ruth the character only learns about meditation from Nao.

Nao. Now. Can we ever grasp ‘now’? This is one of the questions that the character Nao brings to the story and brings to Ruth the character (hereafter called simply ‘Ruth’), who finds Nao’s diary washed up on the beach inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox protected by a series of plastic bags, the outermost covered with barnacles. There are letters in the package, too, and a Japanese military watch from World War II. Did the plastic bag ride the tides all the way from tsunami-struck Japan to Ruth’s island off the coast of British Columbia?

Ruth is a novelist and has been working on a memoir ever since her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and is now deceased, came to live with Ruth and Oliver on the island. The memoir isn’t going well, and Ruth worries at times that she herself may be developing Alzheimer’s.

The spring had dried up, the pool was clogged and stagnant. She blamed the Internet. She blamed her hormones. She blamed her DNA. She pored over websites, collecting information on ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, parasites, and even sleeping sickness, but her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. ... Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

And now comes the distraction of a diary washed up on the beach, the diary of a Japanese teenager who writes as if addressing an unknown friend, as if she is writing to Ruth.

Nao’s voice begins the novel. She is writing because she has decided to commit suicide and before dying wants to record the life story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, still living, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun. Nao writes with a purple gel pen in a repurposed book—that is, a book in which the original pages have been removed (“hacked,” she says) and replaced with blank pages. She writes in English, having spent most of her girlhood in California before her father lost his job and the family returned to Tokyo. The title on the cover of the diary, the title of the book it used to be, is À la recherche du temps perdu.

The girl’s life has become a nightmare. Her father is unemployed and depressed, suicidal. The family’s savings was lost when the dot-com bubble burst and his American stock options went belly-up. Now back in Tokyo, they live in cramped, miserable housing with the sounds of their neighbors’ sex-for-hire activities coming through the thin walls. Her years in America schools have put Nao behind her classmates in Japanese language and thus in every other subject, and they bully her unmercifully, so severely that it amounts to torture, and her clueless mother (Nao hides her victimhood from her parents), working to support the family, can only suggest that Nao spend more time with her “friends,” maybe participate in some after-school activities. All this Ruth learns gradually as she reads the diary, pacing herself to try to read at the same speed that Nao was living when she wrote the pages.

At first the reader may suspect a deus ex machina when Nao is packed off, against her will, to spend the summer with her great-grandmother in a remote mountainside temple. Will the girl solve all her problems through learning meditation? Her father accompanies her to the temple, and when she sees how happy he is there, it begins to seem like an answer for his unhappiness, too. Nao decides will persuade him to spend the summer there with her. Perfect! But no, when she wakes in the morning he is gone. And while Nao learns much from old Jiko and passes the summer contentedly learning the temple ways, when summer is over she must return to a father still depressed and suicidal and classmates intent on finding ever more ingenious ways to torture Transfer Student Yasutani.

Jiko is an important character in the book, perhaps the central character in a way, although she says less than anyone else, but also important, in their different ways, are Nao’s father, Haruki Yasutani, and Ruth’s husband, Oliver. Oliver is an eccentric botanical artist with visions of enormous, time-dependent, living works that few can understand or appreciate, a fascinating character in his own right. Then there is the cast of the scattered isolated Canadian island community, people such as Muriel, a retired anthropologist who worked on middens and who loves nothing better than sorting through garbage, and Benoit, the  Québécois who runs the local dump. Here is a description of Oliver and Muriel at the kitchen table:

Oliver and Muriel talked on, although it was not quite a conversation they were having, Ruth noticed. Rather, their exchange sounded more like a session at an academic conference, two professors taking turns at the podium presenting information that they both knew, and more or less already agreed with.

Although facts are being presented, the talk is more mutual grooming behavior than any delivery of information. Haven’t we all heard and even been part of such sessions? Ozeki does not write about "social glue" but catches the gluing in process.

Nao’s troubled relationship with her father finds quieter echoes in Ruth and Oliver’s marriage. Ruth shares the diary with her husband, reading aloud to him at bedtime, but is offended and upset when he does not respond in the same way she does to the unfolding story. Does Oliver think Ruth is crazy? Does Ruth see Oliver as a loser?

The dead in this story have a great influence on those who remember or rediscover them, adding their complications to developing plot. Ruth’s mother lives on in island memory and in her daughter’s love and fear, while across the Pacific Nao discovers her great-uncle, Haruki #1, through her great-grandmother, and elevates him to hero status for his suicide death as a patriot kamikaze pilot. When she compares her father to him, she is ashamed of Haruki #2, who cannot even commit suicide successfully.

The living and the dead, the spoken and the written reveal themselves only in and through time. There is no all-at-once but a gradual unfolding. Oliver’s cat, the cat at the temple, the crow that calls to Ruth from a tree in the yard and in her dreams—all these, too, are time beings.

Because you see, on the first page of this novel we are jolted out of an ordinary, unreflective and passive reception of words. “Oh, it’s all right for the time being,” we say casually. For now. Until something better comes along. We put the accent on the first syllable of the word ‘being,’ having given the first three words equal, unstressed status. We are accustomed to the phrase and give it little thought, and so the title does not jar us. Then Nao introduces herself: “My name is Nao, and I am a time being,” and to make sense of this statement we must put the stress on the word ‘time’ and rethink the phrase. And so it continues through the novel, the gentle pressure to rethink what we think we know.

“Together we’ll make magic,” writes Nao to a reader she imagines in the future. Ruth Ozeki has made magic with this novel. I finished it one afternoon and began rereading the same evening.