Deer Season, Among Books

Another morning through the windshield

 

Oh, baby, it’s cold out there!

 

Donuts are disappearing earlier in the morning, and you are apt to hear gunshots as soon as the sun is up. It’s firearm deer season! Time to keep your dog leashed and to wear some blaze orange yourself. Question: Why is it called blaze orange? Why not just orange? Anyone know?

Field corn harvest is underway in Leelanau Township. Many trees have been wind-stripped of their leaves by now, but you can go over to Karen Casebeer’s blog to see the remaining rich browns of oak leaves, and I’ll give my own pitch here for beech leaves, which also hang on after maples and other trees are bare. Sometimes leaves on very young beeches stay attached all winter long, thinning as the season wears on.

 

This is not a podcast.

 

This is not my bookstore.
It's a photo (of my bookstore).

Someone who still reads bound books printed on paper, still handwrites letters to friends and family, does not have TV, has never had a dishwasher (and feels no need for one) – it should not surprise you that such a person is not sufficiently up-to-date to produce a podcast, but you don’t need to see me, anyway. Or, should you want to see me, you are welcome to visit my bookstore. I’m presently here five days a week and plan to be here four days a week through the long, cold northern Michigan winter. Otherwise, what I have to share in a public forum I will share on this old-fashioned platform.

 

Isn’t it frightening how quickly our innovative, cutting-edge modes of communication become old-fashioned? Blogs are not yet completely obsolete, however, and I’m comfortable here. Web + log = blog, a kind of ship’s log that has no need of an ocean, a diary of sorts that anyone may read. Quite public enough for me.

 

 

This is not a Substack.

 

That’s where the action is these days: Substack. Professional writers, professional journalists, counselors, historians, and other professionals of every stripe can all be found on Substack. Friends have suggested I jump on board, but I am content to keep my amateur status. Should I ever write a book, I’ll do what I can to see that it sells, but in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere I don’t ask anyone to subscribe and pay. My paid gig is that of bookseller.

 

 

Writing Letters: Not a Paid Gig, Either

 

My family has always been a family of letter-writers. Back in the days when telephone calls were divided into “local” and “long distance,” frugality dictated written correspondence, except for holidays and birth and death announcements. “Getting the mail” is still, for me, an errand brimming with possibility, and I take pleasure also in popping a stamped envelope into the mail slot, addressed to a friend or a sister, anticipating the recipient’s surprise and delight. 

Love this postmark! Love USPS!

[Note to self: Write more notes and letters soon! You are falling behind!] 

 

My posts here on this blog are a form of letters, too, stuffed into metaphorical bottles and thrown out onto a metaphorical sea, not addressed to any one particular person but intended for anyone who finds them interesting enough to read.

 

 

Old Friends and New

 

More than once here, I have mourned the passing of old friends, and today I want to make clear that my sadness over those losses is no reflection on newer friends! “No one replaces anyone else,” a dear old friend remarked years ago, and I have never forgotten her words. No one can ever take the place she filled in my life and still holds in my heart, but my new friends have found their own places. The silver and the gold....

 

Not the morning I expected

 

On Monday, my day to accomplish tasks and errands that don’t fit in with days I’m at my bookshop, the weather was cold, the sky grey. On Sunday, the strong, bitter wind had made it difficult for me to stay as long at the dog park as Sunny wanted to stay, but she deserved some fun, so I stuck it out. Now on Monday morning my first task of the day was to load snow tires into the back of my car so I could take them to the garage and have them mounted for the season ahead. Then, what would I do with myself while the car was up on the hoist? Van’s Garage opens at 8 a.m., but the library in Leland doesn’t open until 10. Trish’s Dishes was the answer to my dilemma, and I was the first customer in the day, six minutes after they opened at 8:30.

Good coffee. Warm, quiet atmosphere. Delicious breakfast burrito filled with vegetables and melting cheese, with a couple slices of melon on the side. My own little table up in the front corner, where I could look out and remember when my friend Ellen had her garden business and she and I planted daylilies in front of what was then her husband Bob Pisor’s Stone House Bread. Book to read, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, not a book that would be everyone’s cup of tea but one I was finding delightful. A morning I had been dreading unexpectedly delivered bliss!

 

The Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was one of the youngest members, invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to join them, but he kept his distance. Probably just as well. Members of the circle never grasped the significance in incompleteness that Gödel himself saw there, and Wittgenstein was similarly misunderstood. In question for both were the limits of language and whether or not those limits are also the limits of human knowledge. Goldstein contrasts the two misunderstood geniuses, Wittgenstein the dramatically tormented and Gödel the silent, reticent sufferer, and the two men live in her pages. 

 

Bliss! Except for the empty tables, I might have been back in the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, but besides the lack of other intently studious customers there was also the happy circumstance that I didn’t have to take notes and could simply enjoy my reading. I almost laughed out loud over Goldstein’s description of the way the Vienna Circle members, “sworn enemies of cognitive bewitchment,” worshipped Wittgenstein. I had a little taste of that in graduate school. A Wittgenstein study group (at the home of one of the professors) was practically a cult gathering, where LW’s texts were the sacred scripture, never challenged, although at times a member of the congregation would admit to being “puzzled” by a particular passage. ("Puzzlement" was permitted.) Following discussion, an acolyte served tea. All very formal and esoteric and refined and oh, so English! No, I was much more comfortable and much happier with my book and breakfast burrito and coffee, all by myself, a philosophe fauve, as my friend Annie once termed the two of us, both by that time far from the halls of academe....

 

After a heavenly two hours with my book, walking back to retrieve my car I encountered the only fly in the morning’s ointment, because what is more maddening than the roar of a leaf-blower? The roar of three leaf-blowers!!! Soon back in my car, however, armed against the future with snow tires, with beautiful guitar music playing as I drove toward home, I was eager to share a joyful time with Sunny Juliet by taking her to the dog park for the second day in a row, where I was glad to find the wind not quite as horrifically strong and cold as it had been the day before. 

"Wanna play?"

"Yes!"

 

More of the blaze orange story.

 

Its other name is “safety orange,” and the point is to make oneself (or one’s dog) highly visible against a brown leaf background or snow or blue sky, which we had pretty much already figured out, right? The other advantage of orange for hunters is that it’s not a color deer can see. They see blue and green, but orange to them just looks brown or grey. Okay, that makes sense, too. 

 

Here's another factoid new to me: “Caltrans orange” (no apostrophe, for some reason) is the name for the color as given by the California Department of Transportation for their construction zones and equipment. It’s easier to see in rain or fog than other colors, apparently. 

 

An article in the Paris Review, sharing from a book by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color, gives more background, not on the blaze designation but on orange itself as a color term. Before the fruit came to Europe in the 17^th century, Europeans used yellow-red as the color term. In the 1960s people started calling it hunter orange, thanks to an article in Field & Stream. 

What color would you call this?

Safety orange, hunter orange, Caltrans orange, OSHA orange, the color is government regulated, but nothing I’ve turned up explains why we so often call it blaze orange. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Safety first!

Theory and Practice of Life

Crabbing upcurrent some evenings [walking in the river], feeling the force of the water on my legs and a night breeze in my face, I often think of myself as passing the house offshore. Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking through, a theory of rivers, of trees, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening in the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying up with a staff, the practice of wood.

 

-      Barry Lopez, “The Whaleboat,” in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

 

Carried away as I had been and still was by the writing, I felt a shock of recognition (a happy shock) when I came upon these lines in the Barry Lopez essay. This must be, I thought, the seed that Jim Harrison found and nurtured into a tree, his poem “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” and then into the forest of his collection carrying the same name. Jim himself was a walker of rivers—the Sucker River that flowed by his U.P. cabin, the Santa Cruz (or was it a tributary?) outside the place he and Linda lived in Patagonia, Arizona, and others I don’t know at all in Montana. Somehow I feel closer to Barry Lopez through this bridge Jim built between us, and of course the Artist is there, too, with us, as one of the Artist's images along with a stanza from Jim's river poem appeared on the poster and wine label from the 1991 vendange Leelanau Cellars called Vis-à-Vis. 

(The Artist and I walked the Crystal River many times....)

 

***

 

But now, breaking news, sent by a friend in Tucson: There is a new threat to the Santa Cruz River, in the form of a 30-ft.- tall stretch of new border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, 25 miles of it, through the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley, where cameras placed along that section of the border have recorded an average of five pedestrian crossings a month, including Border Patrol agents, hunters, and hikers. Estimates are that there is one illegal border crossing in the area every 20 months.

 

Read those numbers again. Now once more. 

 

An article in the Arizona Daily Star by Emily Bregel reports that conservationists forecast “devastating” effects for migrating animals, along with a disruption of the hydrology of the Santa Cruz River. “‘Wall construction will bulldoze into a steep cliffside at the [Coronado National] memorial, which already acts as a natural barrier,’ said Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager for the Sky Island Alliance. ‘The cliff where they're going to place new wall will be twice as tall as the wall itself,’ he said. ‘It really highlights how disconnected from logic this wall is.’”

 

Some pork barrel projects are simply a waste of money. This one qualifies on that count: “The $309 million contract for the border-wall project went to Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota-based company with a record of thousands of environmental violations and legal problems including a 2019 lawsuit, filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging poor workmanship on a 3.5-mile border-wall segment in Texas, which was privately funded by Trump supporters.”

 

But other kinds of pork barrel—and this one qualifies also on the second count—seem calculated not only to make money for a private construction company but also to set the stage for environmental tragedy and, no doubt intentionally, to spit in the faces of those who care.

 

In sum, the current U.S. administration has given a $309 million contract to a company with a record number of violations and lawsuits against it to build an environmentally destructive, unnecessary wall, accomplishing nothing of value. Hello, DOGE? Anyone home?

 

Oh, rivers, rivers! How the human race continues to desecrate you!

 

***

 

Back to my little corner of the world --  

 

(Not its permanent location)

The Artist and I moved from Leland out to our Leelanau Township farmhouse 24 years ago, and only now, inspired by having grandson Jack and his crew camping here recently, have I finally taken the plunge and gotten a fire ring for the yard. Sunny and I did not have our agility session this morning, due to rain and wet grass, so a trip to the hardware store fit in nicely, and I was also able to score some jar lids for the next round of rhubarb chutney, having made the first batch on Sunday.

 

My bedside reading stacks had gotten out of control, so it was good to finish three books in the last couple of days—Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, a mesmerizing post-Katrina true story; The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner, a reality check for all would-be published authors; and, finally, the book of Barry Lopez essays quoted at the beginning of this post. I had gotten about 1/3 of the way through a biography of Judge Learned Hand before other books tempted me away from it. Will I ever read all of To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, by Edmund Wilson? Fascinating as it is, I find myself skipping around in the chapters…. And then there is Wilma Dykeman’s The French Broad from the “Rivers of America” series. I’ve only just begun that one and should really not have started it, with the others still waiting to be finished, but—no reading rules in my life! Taking classes, required reading, even teaching are all behind me now, and I can browse the endless buffet to my heart’s desire.

 

It's almost the 4^th of July! And the day after the 4^th (the 5^th, right?) is the annual Friends of Leelanau Township Library book sale in Northport, beginning at 9 a.m. Last year I was so busy and had so much on my mind that I completely forgot the sale, and the organizers were exclaiming to each other over my absence, as I am one of their best customers every year (if not the best). In the coming week the FOLTL summer author series kicks off with Karen Mulvahill and her historical novel, The Lost Woman, on Tuesday evening. I’ve taken a picture of the poster, since I didn’t see the list on the FOLTL website:

Planning an August bookstore guest

And sometime in August I’ll have as my bookstore guest author Tim Mulherin. (Note to self: We really need to set a date for that!) Tim’s book, The Magnetic North, addresses the idea that, as I put it, “Everyone wants to be here!” If you grew up in Leelanau County, do you regard newcomers as an invading force or grist for your make-a-living mill? If you’ve been coming up for summers all your life, are you dismayed or heartened by changes you see? Maybe you have just “discovered” Leelanau (I know it feels like that to a lot of people, some of whom have never been in Michigan before) and dream about living here someday. We are not the only area in the country experiencing growing pains, either, so Tim’s exploration of the issues will be of interest to just about everyone.

 

Before leaving the subject of books, I’ll mention that I’ve started carrying a few bilingual board books for little ones. So far I have English-French and English-Spanish but will look into other languages if anyone is interested. 

Now, breaking news, local—and good!

 

Saw this sign when I walked by today! Hooray!

More ice cream! Now there is Buster’s on Nagonaba, Barb’s Bakery on Mill Street for frozen custard, and Deep’s at the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba for your Moomer’s fix!

I wrote a four-page letter to a friend this morning, and almost all of it was about trees and wildflowers, appearances and disappearances of same in my little world. Will the purple coneflowers that failed to show up last year get back to me this summer? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m enjoying every blooming thing in its time. 

 

Lately, the letters I write are less and less like chatty “newsletters” and more and more like rambling meditations, occasionally on a single theme. Do you ever read collections of some famous person’s letters? If you do, what interests you most in them? Their daily activities, family and social interactions, their reflections on contemporary events, or something else entirely? What do you most appreciate and enjoy in a letter you receive in the mail?

It occurred to me this morning that I may never write a book for publication—my doing so isn’t unthinkable, but neither is it highly probable after so many decades—and so my writing is of a very ephemeral nature, mostly letters and blog posts. Ephemeral and unremunerative, not to put too fine a point on it. But that takes a lot of pressure off. Metaphorically, I am scrawling messages and corking them up in bottles flung out onto the waves, in hopes someone will be entertained or someone's heart warmed, if only briefly. Sending a letter says, I hope, “I’ve been thinking of you. You were on my mind. Wish we could sit together in the shade and visit in person. If we could, here is some of what I would have to say.” Of course, if my friend were here, there would be no telling where our conversation would go. Even a reply to a letter isn’t always a response but the correspondent’s own rambling thoughts shared in turn. And that’s just fine! 

 

Last thought for the day: One of my recent customers thanked me for having the Ukranian flag in the window, telling me he was born and raised in Ukraine and showing me his tattoo (you can read about the symbol here), which he allowed me to photograph. Here is a statement today from Johann Walter David Rudolf "Jo" Wadephul , member of the German parliament and current Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, pledging European support to Ukraine. Why? Because all men are brothers. And because theory of freedom is nothing without practice. Will we Americans hold onto our freedom? That remains to be seen.

When Letters -- on Paper -- Were Everything

Reading a diary from before the Civil War, I am struck by the number of letters the young male diarist tells of regularly writing and receiving. His lawyer brother in New Orleans seems to have written to Silas almost every day, and it was a rare day that Silas did not write to James or to Warren or to one of his sisters back home and perhaps also to the editor of a local newspaper. And all his correspondence was, of course, conducted in longhand (Does anyone still say ‘longhand’? Or was it only necessary to make the distinction when secretaries took dictation in shorthand?), with every cranny of space filled.

I have trouble considering anything a book if the words aren't on paper. Likewise a letter. E-mail messages can be important and precious -- I don't pooh-pooh them. But they are not letters. And a "diary" kept in digital format? Really?

 

Silas did not write in his diary every day, but when he did, it was in addition to letters he had also written that same day. The diary he kept for himself; the letters were to and for others. Way back then, without cell phones or e-mail or so-called social media, letters were the way he and others kept in continuous contact with family and friends. His letters to newspaper editors, less frequent, were a way to voice his opinions publicly, as he also did in amateur debates and public addresses.

The debates in which he participated, like his letters, were as much public entertainment as they were communication. Conversation, reading books, and playing musical instruments were ways to pass a quiet lamplit evening at home in those days, and letter-writing was another way, but Silas also made preparation for a debate or for offering a public address by writing longhand notes in the pages of his diary, another occupation that filled his evening hours and also served as preparation to reaching out to others, near and far. Back then, townsfolk and country people regularly traveled to schoolhouses, village halls, and churches for evenings spent listening to debates, public addresses, and sermons. Yes, even sermons were entertainment in those days, with visiting sermonizers critiqued afterward in depth by audience members -- often as much or more for performance quality as for theology, judging from Silas’s diary.

 

In our time, now the third decade of the 21^st century (can you believe it?), a general “felt need” for handwritten correspondence seems almost to have disappeared. We have public forums for our every thought and deed in social media, the instant gratification of texting (often with almost instant replies), and none of it requires paper or stamps, let alone a trip to the post office. But if letters are classed by collectors as ephemera, what can digital exchanges be called? Even if the storage media are somehow preserved, is there any guarantee it will be readable in future? Whereas I can take in my hands Silas’s diary and the handful of private letters tucked into the diary pages, all written over a century and a half ago, and read them as if they were written yesterday, how many of the thoughts and experiences shared on Facebook will anyone be able to visit a century and a half from now?

As thrilling as it is for me to time-travel via Silas’s diary, it is just as thrilling or more so to find a letter in my own mailbox, written to me by a sister or a friend, bearing postage and return address and cancellation that tell of its journey and the thought that went into someone caring enough to reach out to me over hundreds of miles. I can tear the envelope open in haste or slit it carefully with a knife, read the letter immediately or tuck it away and carry it with me to enjoy later – or I can do both, reading it eagerly at once and folding it away to read again an hour later, beginning already to form in my mind the reply that will eventually becomposed and sent off, a personal, intimate, committed-to-paper, taken-time-to-write missive sent to one person alone -- although perhaps to be shared with a partner or friend at the other end, too, because once the letter reaches its destination it belongs to the recipient. The gift has been given.

Then there are the enclosures that letters may contain, as delightful in their way as the letters themselves. This old bit of "ephemera" captured my attention, and I wish I still had new snapshots every week to send with my own letters. Sadly, our photographs are another thing we rarely commit to paper any more.

The biggest problem for me with Sundays is that there is not even the possibility of finding a letter in the mailbox. Monday’s return to mundane, everyday life does not trouble me at all, because the postal carrier may bring me news and thoughts from someone I love.

 

One friend back in northern Michigan who shares my enthusiasm for written correspondence is doing more than writing letters: she has started a movement for slow correspondence called Leelanau Letter Writers. You don’t have to live in Leelanau County, Michigan, to join. There are no membership fees, no meetings. 

You may also elect to join the LLW pen pal group, but you don’t even have to do that. Just let it be your inspiration to write and mail letters. Will you write about what’s really on your mind? What will that be? You need share that only with your recipient. It's that personal. Who will receive the next letter you write? No need to tell me -- just write and send that letter. On paper.

 

Message in a Bottle

Not palms, but you get the point

You know those one-panel cartoons that depict an unshaven man sitting on a pile of sand the size of a small area rug, and he’s leaning against the single palm tree that constitutes the island’s entire vegetation? The humor of the situation often focuses on a message in a bottle, either to be thrown out onto the waves by the unshaven man or already bobbing there, tantalizingly close to shore. Well, sometimes posting to a blog feels like throwing bottled messages out into the ocean (in northern Michigan, either Lake Michigan or Lake Superior would do, with a pine tree substituting for the cliché palm), so when two people on the same day tell me they regularly follow "Books in Northport," it makes me smile – behind my mask, of course. 

 

These days (there are those two words again!), with summer festivals curtailed and social interactions with friends reduced to distance visiting, don’t you sometimes have an island feeling? Island = isolated land. I’ve been a letter writer all my life but find letters in the mail take on new significance for me these days, what with in-person communications as limited as they presently are.

People who write letters usually read books, but maybe the implication is not as strong in the other direction. Do all readers of books usually write letters? I doubt it, and I hear some of you ask, “Does anyone write letters any more?” Yes. I do. And so do a few of my friends and relatives. Not as often as we might have in the old days of expensive long-distance phone calls, but we still delight in putting pen to paper and buying beautiful stamps – and in receiving handwritten or typed letters from afar! Sometimes, from over the bounding waves! Among letter-writers’ topics (weather, flora and fauna, politics, mutual friends and acquaintances), the question of what we’re reading demands a different answer every time, so now, since each of my blog posts is like a letter thrown out onto the water in a corked bottle to wash up where it may, and to be read by whoever may find the bottle, mention of books I’ve been reading here seems most appropriate. 

 

 

To Whomever This Message Reaches:

 

Saturday turned rainy before noon here. Surprise! We had not looked for rain to arrive before Monday, but a rainy day is a good reading day, with time saved by not having to water gardens. Also, Saturday morning before the rain, I saw my first migrating hawk of the season. Are hawks migrating earlier this year, or did the summer simply pass more quickly?

 

I’ve found myself going back and forth between serious books and what I have to admit classify as “escape.” Most recently in the latter category was Wild Cow Tales, by Ben K. Green, his cowboy reminiscences beautifully illustrated with pencil drawings by Lorence Bjorklund. I picked up a lot of technical information on catching and driving cattle that have gone “wild,” along with a few terms like dallying and chousing. 

 

Before finishing Green, however, which I read in bits and pieces, usually before falling asleep, I picked up and read The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland, by Walter Thompson-Hernandez. Again there were horses, and again the book was nonfiction, but the time period and setting could not have been more different. Mayisha Akbar founded the Compton Junior Posse on a small, historically black-owned ranch in the middle of a progressively urban and increasingly neglected area of Los Angeles. When Mayisha retires, will the ranch survive? Will former Junior Posse graduates succeed in realizing their Compton Cowboy dreams? 

 

Compton Cowboys was a tougher book to read than Wild Cow Tales, the challenges of urban poverty more heart-wrenching than adventures with wild longhorn steers. Still, a reader can’t help wanting this ranch to survive forever -- because the Compton Cowboys aren’t reminiscing; they are trying to hold onto their dreams against the odds. Mayisha had switched over to English riding to appeal to wealthy donors, but her successor, young nephew Randy, thinks going back to Western saddles and Western riding style will bring in more young, at-risk kids from the neighborhood (an important part of their mission, as the cowboys see it) and get “back to the roots of black cowboy culture.” 

 

Just My Type, by Simon Garfield, more nonfiction, was not total escape, since it relates, via printing, to publishing and bookselling, but I have to admit it was partly escape. Nothing I really need to know, either professionally or socially, but fascinating, although I’ll never become obsessed enough with the subject to qualify as a “font nerd.” 

 

YA novels these days seem to fall into two camps: there are the “problem” novels, in which young people face sometimes grueling life situations, and then there is fantasy. The Zebra Forest, by Anna Rishe Gewirtz, falls into the first camp and includes some pretty scary scenes.

 

And on Saturday morning (the morning I saw the hawk and that rain arrived before noon) I finished Colson Whitehead’s novel, Nickel Boys. It’s fiction but since the situation faced by Whitehead’s characters was a real part of Florida’s history, the author could easily have “sensationalized” his story (as some people would have said), without exaggerating any of the gruesome facts. He chose to tell the story differently, though, as a calm recital, and as readers we enter perhaps more readily into the lives of the boys at what purports to be a school because of that deceptively calm delivery and soon find ourselves longing for the boys' eventual escape. The ending is one I didn’t see coming.

 

I’m not sure what I’ll be reading next, but I’ve got a couple of candidates lined up.

P.S.

...We met in 1971 after my first poetry performance.... After the performance, he told me I should front a rock 'n' roll band, but I just laughed and told him I already had a good job working in a bookstore....

...At the time I was seeing Sam Shepard and I told him what Sandy had said. Sam just looked at me intently and told me I could do anything. We were all young then, and that was the general idea. That we could do anything. 

- Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

Decision made. Have a good rest of the weekend, friends.

The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.