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.)

D’habitude je voyage en français

It was a while ago....

Most of my travel to foreign countries has taken me either to Canada or to France. I have lived in Paris for brief periods and could live quite happily in Montreal. Even on a road trip around Scotland once, I was with bilingual speakers of French and English, and we generally spoke French in the car. Is it any wonder, then, that I associate foreign travel with the French language?

Sometimes going places within the United States triggers my French response. During the two years I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, whenever I crossed the beautiful Roebling Bridge to Covington, Kentucky, I had the feeling I was leaving English behind and would be asked to show my passport on the far bank of the river. The Ohio River seemed that significant a border. And there are still occasions, driving around my home ground in Leelanau County, when I imagine my dear friend Helene, from Paris, with me in the car, and as we go down the roads I point out and explain to her various aspects of the Michigan landscape.

As the twig is bent, it is said, so the tree inclines. The high point of my father’s life was the time he spent in Paris after the city’s liberation at the end of World War II. 

His high school French got such a workout, he said, that it gave him a headache, but the experience was also heady in a positive sense. The young American lieutenant, sitting up all night in a bistro in Paris, discussing Corneille with Frenchmen! Is it any wonder he wanted his daughters (and I was the first-born) to learn as a second language the one that had brought him such excitement? Or any wonder that I caught the francophone fever at a very young age and never recovered?

“Je t’adore,” my father would murmur affectionately, and he would call me his “petit choux-fleur” (little cabbage or Brussels sprout, an untranslatable term of endearment), but when he barked an order it was always issued formally: “Fermez la porte!” Thus when my high school French teacher on the first day of class, bound to immerse us in the language, began by issuing the familiar command to shut the door (the hallway was very noisy in a school of 5,000 students), it was no mystery to me what he was saying. I felt, happily, right at home. 

The French-speaking parts of my father’s war experience were his best times, first billeted in a private home in the Netherlands, and later, as liquor control officer in the south of France, making trips up to Paris for troop “supplies.” Between those times, however, he was stationed for a while in the Tongan Islands, where his group of engineers constructed an airstrip for Allied landings in the Pacific. That place was a very different kettle of international fish. Outdoor showers! An enormous bunch of fresh bananas hung in a tree outside his tent every day!

In the 1940s, as I understand it, the Tongan language had yet to take written form. My father, therefore, ever the amateur linguist, took it upon himself to assemble the beginnings of a Tongan dictionary. Alors, besides French, my sisters and I learned to say a few simple phrases in Tongan. Imagine my surprise and delight, many years later, to encounter Tongan phrases in a book (by a young man who sailed solo around the world) and to understand those foreign phrases! The sounds really meant what my father had told us they meant! Real people spoke to each other in those words I was taught as a child! How satisfying!

In the wee dark hours of the night before departure for Mexico, where a friend and I would be conducted on a five-day, six-person tour of Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula, as I was casting about in the middle of the night for phrases in Spanish (a language I studied for only a single year in high school), more often French words and phrases, maddeningly, came to mind. After all, the total experience and history of my lifetime was deciding, in whatever unconscious part of the mind that sorts these things out, that I was going abroad; therefore, I should be speaking French. Descartes would have understood, I’m sure (I; therefore, I, if you see what I mean), but I felt the decider in my head was decidedly unhelpful in this instance. 

How to escape middle-of-the-night travel anxiety? An emergency scenario came into my mind, of course! There I was in Mexico, having to explain myself in a foreign country to medical personnel who spoke no English! Omigod! Mon dieu!

— Was it cheating on my part to introduce into the imaginary scene an intern from Haiti who spoke (thank you again, Descartes) clear and distinct French?

I cannot now reconstruct the train of thought that took me from that imaginary hospital back to the lobby of an imaginary hotel or how I managed to bring imaginary Tongan tourists to the hotel lobby, but you can guess how delighted I was to encounter them! “Malolalei!” I greeted them with joyful enthusiasm, and broad smiles and sparkling eyes on their part told me my greeting had succeeded. One of the women had a baby. “Tomasii? Taahini?” I asked. (My spellings of all these words are my own, the best I can do. Ask me to pronounce them, and I’ll do just fine.) The baby was a boy, the mother told me, and I gave my compliment on the child’s beauty immediately: “Faka ofa ofa opito opito!” and somehow I worked into the exchange my two remaining Tongan phrases, the How-are-you-I-am-fine component, before I was thrown back, once more, onto French — which one of their party spoke perfectly! 

Just my luck! Saved from the middle-of-the-night heebie-jeebies!

Back when I was eighteen and for many years after, I had great language-learning hopes and plans. I wanted to learn Greek (to read Aristotle in the original), Hebrew (for reading the Bible and works of Jewish scholars), Russian (such great literature!), and Amharic (because an Ethiopian friend and I had concocted a scheme that called for me to spend a year with her family in Addis Ababa). I would also, of course, brush up on and extend my Spanish to a proficiency level and add a bit of Italian while I was at it. Ambitious program, but others have done it, made whole careers in languages.

One spring in Paris, I gave myself an assignment to learn Italian from a book written for French speakers, reasoning that building a bridge from French to Italian, rather than working from English to Italian, would strengthen rather than eclipse my working French, but the only phrase that sticks with me now is “I ate too well.” On a different project, another year, I learned to say “I’m sorry” and how to order “baked eels” in Dutch. More seriously, I took beginning American Sign Language over and over again, year after year, each time temporarily achieving a decent beginner’s level of proficiency, only to lose it for lack of practice.

But French, its rudiments drilled into me at a young age, has persisted. Over the years, occasional French tourists in my bookstore have provided me with an opportunity for conversation, and there are always French movies and books in French to keep those brain cells alive. I never did learn the Greek or Hebrew or Russian or Amharic alphabets but am pretty comfortable with French accents and vigorously oppose (for reasons of history and tradition and personal attachment) the abandonment of the accent circonflex. 

One of my two biggest complaints against the program I am using on my new laptop is that it has no way to insert symbols or accent marks! (I managed the heading for this post by finding the word in my Internet search bar and copying and pasting it.) They are not in my mail program, either, as they were on the old laptop. Curses! I must overcome this lack in the near future….

1/6/2018. I set myself this little composing task before sunrise on departure day, and it has served its purpose: That is, re-living my personal foreign language history has successfully taken my mind away from worries about a drifted-over driveway or icy roads or a delayed or cancelled flight. And everything will be all right, I’m sure. — In fact, by the time this post is published on Books in Northport, I will be back from Mexico, with worries all behind me, a great store of new memories, and many more recent stories, including whatever splendid successes or horrible failures I have with the Spanish language south of the border.

Friday, 1/12 - I am back home!!!

Frustrations of Blogging

Morning Sky

(1) Not having enough time to post. Events and seasons fly by. Life leaves little time for blogging, as yesterday's dry laundry must come in off the line before today's rain arrives, and last night's drawing class homework must be started; and the latest special order for new books must be processed; and; and; and; and....

(2) Glitches with the platform. For instance, why -- when all I wanted to do was update my "Coming Events" section in the right-hand column -- will the platform delete the old but not publish new changes?

So, sorry! I have a lot of photographs from last Saturday's "Leelanau UnCaged" street fair, which was a roaring success, but right now I'm focused on this coming Saturday, only two days away, and my first -- perhaps Northport's first -- bilingual poetry reading. Here are the details:

Saturday, Oct. 5, 2 p.m.

Art Mantecón & Mark Statman: Bilingual poetry reading original and translated works in both English and Spanish 

The reading should be great fun, so don't miss it! Mark Statman comes to us all the way from New Orleans, and besides poetry his books include Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry, and The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing, so we will have something for everyone on Saturday. Your local bookseller will also be severely challenged, as she has been put on notice by the other poet's wife that Arturo (from Traverse City and California) does not like standard (i.e., boring) introductions. Oh, dear, what shall I say? Something else to worry about.... 

Books for Saturday

(There's also the way the spacing has gone all wonky in this post, but I don't have time to worry about that.)

David Grath at the Old Art School Building, Leland, August 2013

Bookstore sign

When an artist is, for weeks and months ahead of time, preparing for and working toward a two-day event, there’s a lot riding on those two days. Many aspects of the outcome are beyond the artist’s control. Will disastrous weather arrive on the big weekend or a major unanticipated festival occur in a nearby town? How many people will be free of other obligations and able to attend the first night opening? Even the work itself, the focus of the artist’s labors, can present surprises of its own. And so the artist always wonders nervously, in between those blessed spells when everything is rolling as if by heaven’s decree and beauty pouring from the brushes onto the canvas, will the show “come off”? The weeks leading up to the show, therefore, are filled with days and nights of hard work, a hundred niggling little details, and a boatload of anxiety. I’ve known a lot of artists, and I’ve never known one for whom this is not true, so I’m not talking out of school or giving away personal secrets.

Well! Everything worked out splendidly for David’s Leland show! Everything! The paintings were beautiful! Some I saw for the first time on the walls of the Old Art School Building, as they went directly from his studio to the show while I was occupied at the bookstore. 

David’s arrangement of the space, with standing panels for some of the paintings and groups of chairs for viewing ease, worked to perfection. 

People began to arrive right at 5 p.m., the crowd built up nicely and stayed, paying a lot of attention to the paintings – and sending me running for the all-important red dots that mean a painting has been sold. Every village in the county was represented, as well as towns beyond Traverse City and on around Grand Traverse Bay. Not until after 9 p.m. had the visitors all dispersed.

It was so, so, so lovely to have so many friends gathered in that lovely, airy space, on an idyllic summer evening, surrounding by David’s beautiful paintings. I know it is an evening we will remember for the rest of our lives. So with that, I want to say thank you to all our friends who made time in their busy summer schedules to be with us on Friday night. You will never know how much your presence meant to us. To those who returned on Saturday or came on Saturday because you couldn’t make it Friday night and to those who were with us in spirit although unable to be there in the flesh – to all of you, each and every one – is it too much to say that we love you?

After nine o’clock, we cleaned up and locked up. The weather had been perfect, too, measuring up to the standard set by every other aspect of the day and evening, and the darkening night was filled with delicious Up North aromas, cool and spicy and green. Back home to relax on the front porch (with Sarah, of course), we relived the entire evening, sharing perceptions, conversations we’d had, and memories we’d brought home -- and will hold onto through the years.

The long-awaited evening was over. Ah, but there was yet a week of summer remaining, as well as another day for David’s show, and so morning saw him headed south for Leland while I drove north to Northport. Saturday would be another long, busy day for both of us. (Inserting a P.S. in the middle rather than post-: See Saturday evening's sunset here.) Ditto Sunday....

But allow me (how can you say no?) to backtrack here and digress briefly, because Friday was a memorable day for me starting with sunrise. When Sarah and I went out for our morning constitutional (I took along a container for blackberry-picking), there was music coming from the east. From the orchard? No, from beyond the orchard and the other side of the eastern woods, lively, happy-sad Mexican music floated through the air. The accordion put me in mind of Cajun music, and later in the day, telling someone else about the mood and feeling of the music, I said it’s like the blues but in a different tempo and with different orchestration: often sad lyrics, but somehow playing and singing the songs – or just hearing them – makes you smile and feel good. That was the first unexpected joy of the day, the joy of Sarah and the blackberries anticipated but no less lovely for not being surprises.

My to-do list in Northport started me out at the farmers’ market, where a chance conversation briefly shattered my concentration, and I had to stand still and rack my brains. What did I need? When I exclaimed triumphantly, “Cheese!” the young woman trying to help me kick-start my memory pointed behind me, and there was a display from Northport’s new goat farm, Idyll Farms. Listening to the speech of the young man behind the display, I knew, although he was not one of the workers I’ve met before, that he was French. The woman in front of me didn’t want too much cheese, she said – just enough for two people – so when it was my turn, I told him, “Moi, j’en ai besoin pour beaucoup de monde!” and that got us off to a good start. He helped me select a Camembert and a chevre roll in ashes, the ashes, he assured me, perfectly edible. It was a thoroughly satisfying exchange, as was the purchase of an almond croissant from the Nine Bean Rows lady and choosing and purchasing fresh flowers and the cutest, tiniest cucumbers in the world (“They look like watermelons for Barbie,” someone said that evening at the opening) from the Bare Knuckle Farms stand. And after that I put in four busy, pleasant hours at the bookstore before closing at 2 p.m. to get myself and refreshments ready to take to Leland and set up for the show, the story of which you have already read.

But here’s what I want to say: How profoundly satisfying it is, how rich the rewards, when a day comes together as this one did, from my outdoor, international, multicultural beginning through the familiar literary atmosphere of my own dear bookshop to a cultural and social evening of art and friends and then home again to our dog and the old farmhouse. There is nothing I would go back and change. Oh, maybe I would remember the nasturtium flowers for the cheese plates -- but nothing else, surely.

Drained. Exhausted. Satisfied. Fulfilled. Grateful. Happy.