Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

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!