Looking and Looking and Looking!

 

Morning comes to Suttons Bay

Collecting Mornings

 

Day was at hand. … The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting into gold…. A solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. 

 

-      Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey

 

My “travels” are with a dog, but lately I too have been collecting early mornings, saving them up against the weeks of darker dawns to come. One day last week an appointment in Suttons Bay took me in that direction, and I went earlier than necessary to make a stop for coffee and donut, giving Sunny and me a chance to watch daylight come over the water. The very next morning I had to get garbage out to the highway for pickup by 7 a.m. and decided, because I needed bread, to keep going to 9 Bean Rows. I'm not quite sure how I ended up in Omena to watch darkness fade away, but it was another “lovely coming in of day,” to quote RLS. 

Another day begins in Omena

But whenever rain doesn’t interfere and I have no business or errands elsewhere, Sunny and I begin our days outdoors more simply, with about an hour-long walk from our front door and back home again. So much to see! And for her, I’m sure, so much to smell! 

Sky one morning closer to home

Then there are Sundays and Mondays, too, my days off from bookselling, so again, if rain or other business does not conflict, after our early morning walk, Sunny and I can go to the dog park to meet friends! – a word Sunny recognizes, although I think she interprets its meaning as “fun.” 

On the way to the dog park via Mill Street in Northport

Coming back the same beautiful way

With the last of October’s leaves still clinging to the trees, as well as blowing in the wind, I took long routes back home on both Sunday and Monday. 

View from high on Onomonee Road

Winding along Gills Pier Road

These are my “travels,” then: walks and drives with my dog in the near vicinity of our home, as I tell her frequently how lucky we are to have a home and to live in a beautiful place.

 

Doggie Digression

 

I’ve said that Sunny thinks ‘friends’ means ‘fun,’ so what does she think it means when I say, ‘Momma has to go to work’? What is ‘work’? What she knows is the routine that accompanies the words—her water dish filled, treats sprinkled on the bed, the momma leaving the house, and Sunny staying home. 

Then there is ‘Go for a ride?’ and ‘Go for a ride, go for a walk?’ Those phrases mean we head for the car together. 

‘Bring it!’ encourages her to bring back that tennis ball she chased and caught. Sometimes she starts back without it and needs to be reminded with ‘Get it!’ and 

‘Bring it!’ 

I haven’t stressed the word ‘car’ to her, but ‘house’ is one all my dogs have learned. It means we’re going indoors now, and Sunny knows that word, too. Will there be food involved? I’m sure that’s uppermost in her mind. Maybe that's what ‘house’ means to her?

 

Past, Present, Future

 

Pascal’s wager is so uninteresting. Like all bets, it lives in the future. It is just another presentiment, just another theology of postponement, in which the present is disowned. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

Solitude intensifies the ache of beautiful autumn days for me, the excitement of panoramic color in sunshine as unsharable as the closed-in feeling of a day of rain, and so, hungry to share, I crowd images into my blog posts. But we were not, you and I, gazing at these scenes together in the same moments, and my sweet dog was, I’m sure, more intent on watching for squirrels or deer or turkeys than she was delighting in scenery. Still, I cannot disown the beauty of the present, even as I long for the sharing times of autumns past.

 

I used to think the worst part of dying would be leaving the story in the middle and not knowing “how it turned out,” but of course there is no “turning out,” no end to the story, as long as the human race manages to avoid extinction, and do I really want to know “how it turns out,” anyway? Either the final end of our species or the nearer, intermediate results and consequences of present events? Henri Bergson, one of history’s most optimistic philosophers, died during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, not living to see the Liberation. But then, was the Liberation “the end”? Could anyone celebrating the end of World War II in 1945 have foreseen the resurgence of Nazism—and in the U.S.A., of all places? 

 

Recently, in a box of deacquisitioned books from a private library, come to inhabit my bookshop until they find new homes, I found a fascinating little paperback published in 1945, just after the end of the war. The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and Its Application, by Thomas James Norton, contains more than the bare text of our Constitution. Line by line, Norton gives background and explanation for phrases and statements, and his explanatory commentary is illuminating, to put it mildly. 

For example, the reasoning behind counting each enslaved black African as 3/5 of a person was a compromise between North and South having to do with direct taxes, the North contending that the South would be undertaxed if slaves were not counted, Southern states arguing that they would be overtaxed if slaves were counted. It had nothing to do with recognizing personhood of enslaved peoples, nothing to do with envisioning the end of slavery, and everything to do with taxes. Only after the compromise was reached was the counting method applied to determining how many representatives each state would have in Congress, and there it is interesting to note that while not counting the enslaved population at all would have benefitted the South in terms of taxation, counting every five enslaved person as three state residents worked to the advantage of those states in the House of Representatives.

 

What I’m really excited about is that this Thomas James Norton title is still in print and currently available through my national book distributor, so I should have copies here in the shop by the end of the week! Of course, if I need to order more, I’ll be happy to do that, too. As Americans, we all need to educate ourselves on the background of current debated issues.

 

 

Taking It (All?) In

 

My hero Brown Dog usually lives in borrowed deer cabins. I’m aware that he’s almost become a survival mechanism when I’m at desperate ends. My life at my cabin when I’m not working bears similarities. I might wake early and take a walk while my mind is still empty which allows me to see the landscape more vividly and, at rare times, holographically with the additional illusion that you can see all sides of a tree or a hill at once, the slightest filaments of time herself flutter in the air. 

 

-      Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

 

 

The landscape around me is vivid in autumn, so how could I see it otherwise? But seeing all sides of a tree or a hill at once is something I have never managed to do, and though I do sense time’s filaments fluttering nervously, even when the air is still, when I stop to think about it all I wonder what is there that I’m not seeing. All the hidden elements and workings of nature and man. 

Impossible not to see this!

But what happened here?

And what is going on in this corner, hidden under the leaves?

The other day I had a discussion with someone who blamed “migrants” for rising medical costs. When I asked for clarification, she said she didn’t mean only immigrants, with or without documents, but apparently food stamp recipients and people on unemployment, all of whom she saw as contributing to costs borne by others, including herself. She is intelligent and hardworking and has often worked two jobs in order to meet expenses, so after she described a couple of scenarios, I finally saw part of the problem. 

 

People in an ER waiting room or using food stamps at a grocery store are visible. CEOs and high-stakes investors in private equity companies, the companies buying up medical practices, dental practices, hospitals, nursing homes, even veterinary clinics—those people are not visible! You don’t see billionaires in the ER or at the grocery store or pumping their own gas or anywhere you and I usually encounter our fellow Americans. 

 

Two years ago I had no clue about private equity companies, either. Didn’t know what they were or how they operated. No idea. They were not visible to me. Learning about them was a shock.

 

How often do we see our United States representatives and senators in person? We certainly never see them being entertained by high-stakes lobbyists! Those scenes form no part of our daily lives.

 

Add to the visible/invisible divide all the media machines that concentrate on and exaggerate the visible poor (priced out of so many aspects of the market economy), while ignoring, except for glamor or sex scandals, the invisible ultra-wealthy who profit from that same market, reaping higher and higher dividends from our rising costs without being taxed accordingly, thanks to their connections to power.

 

As a bookseller, my responsibility is to select books I think people already want but also, as the fictional bookseller Roger Mifflin put it, those they don’t know they want. Want. Besides meaning desire, ‘want’ can also mean a lack or unfulfilled need. “It wants salt,” the Artist used to say.

 

And then sometimes—often?—after cramming my head full of economics and history, I want a light-hearted murder mystery, maybe one narrated by a dog, so believe me, I understand that, too, and no one has to be embarrassed by asking for what they want in my bookshop!

Recent binge!

 

Chuck Collins will be here next week!

 

Despite the title and cover illustration of his latest book, Burned by Billionaires, Chuck Collins is a calm, personable, mild-mannered, approachable human being with both feet on the ground and a mind open to questioning, so please come hear him speak next Wednesday, November 12, at 4 p.m. Bring your own open, questioning mind and please feel welcome to join a discussion following his presentation. I have some questions of my own, and we will have a stimulating time, I’m sure! I even have an idea for a very, very modest and (I hope) somewhat amusing door prize....

Don't forget our world's beauty!

Turn, Turn, Turn

Not AI-generated! Completely unedited!

Peak Autumn Color

People kept asking if the turning fall leaves had reached peak color, and I kept saying, day after day, no, not quite yet. There was still a lot of green left. Late Saturday afternoon’s sunshine, though, invited me for a little drive after work, and Sunday’s rain, because it put the kibosh on dog park fun, tempted me farther afield in the car. You can see more of those Saturday and Sunday scenes on my photo blog, and take a look at the Lake Leelanau Narrows on Wednesday morning, while you’re there.

When did we turn the color corner? In Leelanau Township, I’d say it was overnight from Sunday to Monday. Monday! What a perfect fall day! On Tuesday came the rain and wind. Black walnuts thumped and clattered to ground, windblown leaves tossed restlessly, yellow popples shimmered and gleamed.

My stepdaughter (Artist’s oldest child) and her husband came up on Monday, and Tuesday evening we went to the Happy Hour for dinner. I kept saying that Tuesday felt like Saturday and asking why. “Because we’re here,” she said, “so it feels like a weekend.” Also, we agreed, because it just seems that peak color should land on a weekend for all those travelers and visitors hoping to catch it.

Re-reading

At least a couple times a month I pull an old favorite book off the shelf. As October races past, after having read for the first time Le premier homme, by Albert Camus, and Medicine Walk, by Richard Waganese, I turned once more to Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, the closeup portrait of a Parisian neighborhood and its denizens and how they are storm-tossed by events in the larger world.

The years Paul lived in Paris were the fraught years between the two world wars when the wounds of France and Germany were still festering, both between the two countries and within their borders. My many readings of this book have made almost personal to me the anguish of that time, as the author shows growing tensions of people living on one small street of shops and residences in central Paris, but with every reading, also, something jumps out at me that hadn’t jumped out before. Elliot Paul’s portrayal of his years in France does not spare the corruption or “backwardness” of French politics or society, but he is also put to the test to explain his own country to the French, and never more so than when Sacco and Vanzetti are put to death, news that set off demonstrations across Paris by workers sympathetic to the condemned. 

 

It was no new thing to the French to have undesirables railroaded and executed on one flimsy pretext or another. But, somehow, they had hoped it was different in America, and so, in my innocence, had I.

 

-      Elliot Paul, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942)

 

His neighbors, Paul reports, were kind to him on the sad occasion and did not hold him accountable for what they saw as his country’s miscarriage of justice.

Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, age 32, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, age 29, were immigrants from Italy and avowed anarchists. That much is fact. In 1921 they were tried and convicted of armed robbery and murder, numerous requests for appeal were refused, and they were put to death by electrocution on August 23, 1927, continuing to insist on their innocence.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty? The court said they were. Some believed Sacco was guilty, Vanzetti innocent. In 1925, another prisoner in the same prison as Sacco, Celestino Madeiros, member of the Morelli gang of robbers, claimed in writing that it was he, not Sacco, who was guilty of the armed robbery and murder of the two payroll guards, and in 1927 Felix Frankfurter, later to become a Supreme Court justice, wrote that “every reasonable probability” pointed  to the Morelli gang and away from Sacco and Vanzetti. History, while not taking a definite stand on guilt or innocence, agrees that the defendants did not receive a fair trial, that they were condemned for their beliefs and their status as immigrants rather than for anything they had done or not done.

 

 

Another Four-Letter English Word

To HATE: to dislike intensely, passionately; to feel aversion or hostility toward. 

Most of us growing up in the U.S. in my generation were told as children that hating is wrong. We were even told often that we were mistaken about our own feeling. “You don’t hate your baby sister,” a parent would say patiently, if we were lucky. No, we were jealous, worried that the baby would take all our parents’ attention, etc. That wasn't hate. Later, did another child at school hate me? Or was that child jealous (for some reason) or even, if a member of the opposite sex, attracted but confused?

In the Christian Gospel of Matthew, Jesus counsels against hate and sets a high bar for those claiming to follow a God of love: 

 

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor^’ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

 

Last Saturday across the United States of America protestors demonstrated against the current administration in joyful, high-spirited pro-democracy rallies. The president and his Cabinet members insisted ahead of time and continued, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to claim that these were “hate America” rallies, peopled by Marxists and other extremists, including “Antifa” (which the president thinks is an organization). It was also claimed, entirely without evidence—because it was a false claim—that George Soros and other “leftist billionaires” had funded the demonstrations, paying people to attend.

HA! They would like that to be true, but it is not.

I know those demonstrators, not only in Traverse City, but in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Marquette, Chicago, Joliet, Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They were my friends and neighbors. They were my bookstore customers. They were my family. They carried hand-made signs. And yes, some of them made negative observations on the president, because “No Kings” was the theme of the day, everyone having decided ahead of time not to fragment the message with a variety of issues, because the bottom line is we do not want anyone in power running roughshod over freedoms guaranteed us in the U.S. Constitution.

Demonstrators were out on Saturday because they love this country! There were many American flags. The protests were peaceful. Counter-protestors were safe, too.

Republicans (I do not call them “conservatives” because they are not) who decry “hate” coming from the president’s opposition would be well advised to look to the president himself. “I hate my opponent! And I don’t want the best for them!” Words from the president of the United States. As for his king-in-the-plane social media cartoon, enough has been said about that. The image spoke for itself. 

Hate pours down from the top, coming from the same source since the campaign of 2016. It takes a lot of resolve not to respond to his words and actions with reciprocal hate but with determination and hope and resolve for a better future. Because there is, too, the image of the East Wing of the White House under demolition, after the president’s earlier assurances that the structural integrity of the building would be preserved. Now, it turns out, he never thought “much” of the building. It was “very small,” he says, way too small. Not the first time he’s promised one thing and done the opposite. All presidents have made changes, you say? Redecorating and even remodeling are not demolition. The demolition image is a metaphor, a friend said. Sadly, yes.

I attended Saturday’s rallies all over the country in spirit. In my bookstore, my colors were on display for everyone to see. 

Hostility, aversion, passionate dislike? Yes, I feel it. What do I hate? 

I hate the militarization of American cities, the setting aside of due process, the attempts to gag the free press and allow only government propaganda as “news.” I hate the storm trooper actions, under orders from the administration, that tear men, women, and children out of their beds and zip-tie them for hours before deciding that some of them have done nothing wrong and can be allowed to return to their ransacked apartments. 

I hate the lies. 

I hate the desecration of the White House, the attempted destruction of unions, and the executive demolition of long-established social safety nets and environmental protections. I hate the killing, by my country and therefore in my name, of unknown people from other countries in open waters with no evidence presented against them and no trial to determine guilt of any kind. I hate having my own government violating the First Amendment here at home.

I hate the lies. 

I hate the way Americans have been encouraged by a would-be dictator (“Vote for me, and you’ll never have to vote again”) to turn against each other and see their own neighbors and family members as enemies.

I hate the lies.

He would never have been put in the White House if he had told the truth all along. No one can support the current administration and the rule of law. To support one demands opposing the other. 

 

Did you mark your calendar yet?

The date is November 12. It’s a Wednesday. The time is 4 p.m., so it won’t interfere with any evening meetings or keep anyone away from dinner or up too late at night. We will have a special guest speaker, with a new book, in the gallery next to Dog Ears Books. I’ll tell you all about it when November arrives.... 

 

But first, Halloween!

A couple of young moms in Northport have been going around town to get those of us in the central part of the village on board for trick-or-treating. I’m on board. Whether or not I’ll be in costume is an open question, but I’ll be there at the bookstore door from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 31, and I hope Halloween 2025 will be as much fun as past Halloweens on Nagonaba Street years ago. Here are some trick-or-treaters from 2004. Yes, 21 years ago in Northport!