“You May Quote Me”

No peepers peeping yet on Tuesday....

The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faultering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring. In the one case you are about to part with a friend, who is becoming more gentle and agreeable at every step, and such steps can hardly be made too slowly; but in the other you have been shut up with black frost and biting blasts, and where your best consolation was being smoke-dried.

 

-      Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

 

Ah, spring, you are such a tease!

The sun shone in Leelanau on Easter! All day long! We couldn’t call it a warm day, but it was lovely. Even though the daffodils hadn’t opened yet, the little blue squills were cheery in the sunlight.

Monday was a day of rain. Shrug! “April showers”— you know the rest. On that rainy day I drove south of Traverse City on an errand that had been postponed long enough but on the way stopped at a thrift shop to look through music CDs for something to combat the dreariness of the day and give me voices in the car that were not battering me with current events. What I found was the original cast recording of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It more than fulfilled my requirements: I was in another world all afternoon! The mood of the rain … memories along every mile of road … images of the Paris Opera … the lyrics and the music!!! “Wishing I could hear your voice again….” Oh, yes! And, of course, "The Music of the Night"! I was ecstatic and miserable and floating on air and drowned in sorrow. When I got home, I told Sunny, “I’ve been breaking my heart in Paris. It will take me a while to come back to you.”

From the previous century's bulbs 

Tuesday the sun returned, and the “wild” daffodils at my place began to open (the ones that I planted not quite ready but getting close), and with another day of sun in the forecast, I hung towels out on the line. Sunny and I played in the yard, I worked at outdoor tasks, and we made it to the dog park and met with friends there. 

No more snow!!! Airborne puppy!

Mrs. Trollope said it first.

The passage quoted at the beginning of today’s post is the first paragraph of Chapter XIV in Mrs. Trollope’s book (I call her “Mrs. Trollope” because that’s how she was referred to at the time her book made such a sensation), and I used it today because it captures so well the feelings of most of my fellow northern Michigan residents. But naturally, most of the book is given over to subjects other than climate and weather. It was after reading both the Rev. Isaac Fidler’s and James Stuart, Esquire’s accounts of visiting the young United States, comparing them, and musing over the difference in the two gentlemen’s impressions, that I decided the time had come for me to read the famous account, read by both Fidler and Stuart, of American life written by Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose visit began in the last days of 1828 and extended into 1832. 

 

Look again at those dates above. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont made their nine-month visit to “America” (i.e., the United States of) in 1831-32, so their time here would have overlapped with that of Mrs. Trollope, but I can find no evidence that the three ever met. The latter expressly says in the preface to her book (speaking of herself in the first person in the preface but in the first person in the main text):

 

She leaves to abler pens the more ambitious task of commenting on the democratic form of the American government; while, by describing, faithfully, the daily aspect of ordinary life, she has endeavored to shew how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many.

 

In other words, she isn’t going to get into politics, but it’s obvious to her, after over three years in the U.S. that England, with its monarch and aristocracy and established national Church, has the better form of government for all concerned. That, of course, is her opinion. Her observations and the conversations she committed to paper as quickly as possible so as not to lose either the words or the tone—those cannot be as easily dismissed as her opinions, if one does not share or appreciate them. 

 

Fidler and Stuart, men, along with Monsieur de Tocqueville, focusing on politics, had little to say of the life of American women, and Fanny Trollope gives detailed observations on that topic. 

 

In general, she sees the two sexes mixing very rarely. In public gatherings (mostly religious but occasionally a lecture), the norm is for men and women to sit separately. Men do their drinking at night, away from home, in places where women are not welcome (probably not allowed), and even in the home, the midday dinner meal lasts only about ten minutes, with husband and wife separating as soon as they leave the table, while at breakfast the husband reads his newspaper until he leaves for his office or shop. Boarding house meals are similarly silent and rushed.

 

As dancing and theatre-going are mostly out of bounds for 1830s Americans, young people meet at preachings or are introduced in the homes of friends. “Refined” young American ladies in this time period would never dream of allowing so much as an elbow to come into contact with any part of the body of a man or boy at a dinner table or on a staircase! When Fanny proposed a “pic-nic,” she was advised by a very proper young lady that it would be very improper for men and women to sit together on the ground. In cities, there are occasional balls. When refreshments are offered, men and women go to separate rooms. (How, though, I wonder, did they dance without touching?)

 

Mrs. Trollope gives it as her opinion that American manners would be much improved if there were more mixing of ladies and gentlemen. For one thing, she suspects the men would do much less chewing of tobacco and spitting on the floor, which was one of her constant complaints. This spitting occurred even in the House of Representatives, although the Senate, she allowed, was more dignified: its members sat up straight, rather than lounging and putting up their feet, and there was very little spitting. From the gallery, she was unable to hear much of the discussion on the floor.

 

Everywhere in the country, however, she found conversation among men almost exclusively political, while the women, in their limited sphere, gossiped among themselves and spoke of dress. Mrs. Trollope was frequently bored to tears and wondered how the women could stand the tedium of their lives. She hoped to find literary conversation in her American travels, but this hope was dashed again and again. Americans of the merchant class were not conversant even with Shakespeare and could hardly imagine they were missing anything. Their ambition was all financial, getting ahead the focus and aim of their lives.

 

Despite fierce denials met with in the United States, and despite James Stuart’s suspicion that Mrs. Trollope exaggerated or invented much of what she reported, I found her observations quite believable and calmly expressed. As to the narrow American focus on getting ahead financially, this is confirmed in de Tocqueville’s writings. Mrs. Trollope finds confirmation of her impression given by an Englishman she met.

I heard an Englishman … declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffeehouse, or at home, he had never heard Americans conversing [this would be American men] without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.

I have read elsewhere (perhaps in Dickens?) about the constant spitting of chewing tobacco and the haste with which Americans rapidly gulped down meals in silence. Could Mrs. Trollope return today, she would find Americans enjoying more leisurely meals but snacking and sipping and gulping throughout the day, too. She would find conversation of men and women to include lively discussion of professional sports, books, films, and more, along with politics and financial matters. 

 

Our own pictures of American life in that period, whether in the North or the South, in cities or plantations or on the frontier, is generally oversimplified to the point of falsehood. Seeing our country not through history textbooks or hagiographies of famous men but through the eyes of visitors from overseas, making contemporary observations firsthand, makes for eye-opening reading. And if those observers sometimes disagree on specifics, don’t we do the same now, in the present? It’s a reason not to read only one account and think you have gotten a complete picture.

 

***

 

Well! After writing the paragraph above, I picked up the book again to continue my reading, and what did I come upon?

 

While reading and transcribing my notes, I underwent a strict self-examination. I passed in review all I had seen, all I had felt, and scrupulously challenged every expression of disapprobation; the result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things which had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true, might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received.

 

Further along, near the end of her book, she devotes an entire chapter to the American reception of another English visitor’s writings following his visit to the U.S. Travels in North America, by Captain Basil Hall, was met with exactly the kind of angry denial that was to greet Mrs. Trollope’s own work, although when she finally procured her own copy of his Travels, she found that this visitor of goodwill ”earnestly sought out things to admire and commend” in America.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure, and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint….

Both Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope (and the captain had traveled all over the world) found it more difficult to be understood by Americans than by men and women of any other nation, which Mrs. T imputed to the exceedingly thin skin of Americans, who wanted to hear nothing but praise. I do think we have improved in this regard since the 1830s and realize that our way of life is not perfect.

The subject was metaphor, the teacher said.

 

Here is one of those silly, unimportant little issues that turn me unreasonably peevish. I was reading a book review online, and the writer of the review, a teacher of writing, praised the book author’s use of metaphor, proceeding to give half a dozen examples—all of which were similes, not metaphors! This would probably not matter to me at all, except that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on theories of metaphor, and metaphor is a puzzle for those who wrestle with literal meaning. Simile is no problem. Something is like something else. Fill in ‘something’ and ‘something’ with two different things, and you’ve got a simile. A metaphor, on the other hand, says that the first something is the second something. 

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.” Fine.

 

“Juliet is the sun.” A different kettle of fish!

 

Simile, I’m thinking, is a pretty easy case to make, because, at least for a philosopher, any two things are alike in some way or other, however remote. Persuading someone of identity, merely by stating it, requires a skillful writer and a reader who trusts that writer. 

 

At least, so seems to me. Your thoughts?

Blue sky over blue water

REMINDER --

Elsewhere, Elsewhen

Green moss in winter

These things are no more, and the feeling I am telling here … may have perished, too. It felt like the tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore, a debris.

 

-      Niall Williams, This is Happiness

 

I had no celebratory plans for St. Patrick’s Day, either for the day itself or for the preceding weekend. Saturday would see me in my bookshop, and maybe Sunny and I would get up to the dog park on Sunday, if the weather didn’t turn wretched, but forebodings were somewhat against us. Ay, that’s March!

 

Without thinking, anyway, of St. Paddy on—was it Thursday or Friday? No matter—I picked up a paperback novel with blurbs on the back cover looking good enough that I thought I’d give it a try. I needed a new bedtime book, having stretched Olive Cook’s Breckland out about as long as possible, setting it aside repeatedly, both to read other books (both fiction and nonfiction) and also to make it last, then returning to it time and time again when sleep eluded me in the wee small hours, until finally, against my will, I reluctantly reached the last page. 

 

So now I would read Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness. At least, I would begin the novel and see if it held me. And now, to say that it did hold me did is to make a massive understatement.

 

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality. 

 

The narrator, an old man—well, exactly my own age!—is recounting a time much earlier in his life when, as a lad of seventeen years, he left the seminary in Dublin with lost faith and went to live for a while with his grandparents in a remote Irish village during the time that electricity, long promised to the village, came at last. The manner of its coming is not incidental to the story but woven into its essence. Here is the man who has come to the village of Faha to supervise the installation of poles and lines:

 

Everybody carries a world. But some people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released. 

 

And here are the strains of music woven into the story:

 

The quiet of country life can sit on your heart like a stone. To lift it, to escape the boundaries of myself awhile, I took down the fiddle.

 

One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that.

 

So now, thoroughly charmed and engaged, I read myself to sleep on Friday evening and again when I woke in the dark hours of Saturday morning, but only when dashing off an e-mail to my sisters on Saturday afternoon from the shop and mentioning the book did I realize what a timely choice I had made. Irish! How appropriate!

Woolly bear woke up on Friday!

The temperature rose to 70 degrees in Northport on Saturday, and the sun shone bright, but the wind blew like the devil, gusting up to 50 mph. (So much for my having swept the sidewalk with the push broom two days before!) Sunshine brought people out of their houses, and the wind in Traverse City—worse than we had in Northport, I was told—sent some of them clear up to Northport, so it was a fairly lively bookshop day, and only late in the afternoon, while a couple from Ann Arbor were happily browsing, did the power go out on Waukazoo Street. First the lights flickered, then went out briefly and came back on again, that happening two or three times, until finally they stayed off for good. Luckily, my happy customers were undeterred. We had a meeting of hearts and minds as their choices were books by Wendell Berry and Robert Reich. Closing up then, I only hoped the power would still be on at my house when I got home.

 

It was not. No lights. No furnace. No pump.

 

But I was prepared for a power outage with two deep stockpots filled with water and a brand-new, long-handled lighter so I wouldn’t need to risk fingers by lighting the stove with a match. Right away I lit my two fat candles and sorted through the collection of oil lamps for one with a good wick, cleaned the glass chimney, and filled the reservoir with oil. Success! The power company thought electricity would be back on by 3 a.m., I was at first dubious, but a look at the overnight forecast showed the winds gradually dying down, so maybe….

 

But we would be fine, Sunny and I, and now my reading choice struck me as even more appropriate. I had only reached Chapter 18, not even the halfway point of the novel, and while Noel’s grandparents had a crank telephone, the only one in the village, no one yet had the promised electricity. That was the fiction. Meanwhile, here in my “real” world I was all set with candles and oil lamps and a cell phone with 80% of its charge. Wind blowing demonically around my old farmhouse, dog lying across my feet, I felt a strong sense of kinship to the people of my own grandfather’s native land, back in times that were difficult and challenging in many ways but much simpler and probably more satisfying in others.

I haven’t said a word about the slowly unwinding plot of Williams’s novel and won’t get into that now. For me, it is the world of the story that matters. Early in my reading of it, I snapped a photo of the cover to send to my stepdaughter and texted her this brief message: “I am elsewhere. It is beautiful and restful.” So then, continuing my reading, I was struck by the passage quoted above about the Irish reels defeating time and space. Elsewhere! Yes!

 

Another of my Saturday customers was a young woman who said that if she could have a superpower, it would be to travel back in time for a day, not to intervene in history but simply to be there in that time. She agreed with me when I remarked that such is the magic of books. 

 

Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morning in the United States in the year 2025: Snow sifts in shifting veils from the barn roof. I am elsewhere, elsewhen.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all, Irish or otherwise.

Sunday morning...

...snow in Leelanau.

Not Just Waiting Around For It

Enough of dark and cold!

Oh, where to begin? A random plunge? 

 

Above is the title (perhaps no longer appropriate?) that I used for a first draft, now discarded—lengthy paragraphs that wound on and on, giving excessive background on my experience with unsought joy, revisiting at length past days of happiness (back in “the old Vienna,” as the Artist loved to say) before arriving, at last, to the place where I find myself now, where being open to the possibility of joy and ready to welcome it when it comes is not enough. In the present place intention is required. I need to seek joy out with the expectation of finding it.

Sunrise again -- that's better!

That, briefly, was the theme I had in mind, but my intention took a beating, even after having been written down and gone over repeatedly, pen retracing the words over and over, the words spoken aloud, visualization effected—the whole nine yards. All that, and yet joy eluded me. Irritability, not joy, was my companion. Rats!

 

Have you ever had meditation go sour on you? My intention session itself was fine, but joy did not (shall we say) manifest. And irritability is not much of a muse! No one wants to hear about it! We don’t need that from each other, do we? So I held off posting anything new here—especially after a comment from one reader about how he came to Books in Northport for “positivity”!

 

What brought on the bad mood? A combination of factors. For me personally, this is a difficult month, with a string of three-year-old milestones lying in wait on the calendar, but there is also the dark, dark cloud hanging over our country and the world, a cloud impossible to dispel and very difficult to put out of mind for long. 

 

Then, too, I was in the midst of a reading slump! Whether that was cause or effect of the mood, I cannot tell. I only know that Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, after an evening spent with it, struck me as silly and pointless and that I subsequently abandoned Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall halfway through, after the introduction had filled me with eagerness for the story. Eschewing literature after two or three impatient nights, I spent a couple of evenings with one of Lillian Braun Jackson’s Cat-Who mysteries and a big bag of potato chips, wallowing in escape reading and junk food.

 

(It really wasn't much of a party.)

My next reading choice, The Personal Librarian, was a relief and a step up. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray kept me turning pages in their engrossing work of historical fiction, and I have now ordered a biography of Belle da Costa Greene to see how known facts of her life stack up against the fiction. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Greene occupied a unique position in the world of art and book auctions of the period, her uniqueness taking on added poignancy 49 years after her death, when it was discovered that her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” It’s that secret identity that drives The Personal Librarian, certainly a fascinating aspect of the woman’s life, but I would like to know much more about how she learned about rare books and am hoping the biography will tell me that.

 

What really turned the tide of my mood, however, was the novel Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, a spellbinding story of a complicated family with complicated secrets, all connected by a recipe from “the island” that was their ancestral home. It was a book that carried me away and, finally, lifted me up. Awake half the night over its pages, only turning out the light after the book repeated fell from my hands as sleep overtook me, I had a happy reason to wake up in the morning: I had that book to finish! 

Have you ever had that feeling in the morning? Remembering as you came awake that an irresistible book was right there waiting for you? (So much better than only waking once again to the continuing nightmare of the current American political scene!) Now I see that Charmaine Wilkerson has published another novel, Good Dirt, and I am eager to get my hands on that, confident I will not be disappointed. 

Most highly recommended!

Switching gears for a moment: Meanwhile, when was the last time Sunny Juliet and I went to the dog park? When did poor Sunny last see anyone other than her dog mom? We’ve been alone too long!

This is her impatient face, between barks. Sigh!

What with bitter cold weather and then five days without our plow guy, it was a siege of togetherness, but I remedied that sorry situation for my girl on Sunday (though I rarely get photos at the dog park and didn’t on Sunday). On the way back through the village, I stopped at my bookshop only intending to snap one photo for my other blog, but then a family appeared, outside, gazing wistfully through the windows. I went to the door. “Would you like to come in?” They would! We visited, talked dogs, and they bought books—altogether a perfect encounter!

 

Back to reading: I’ll mention one more book here today. I’d ordered two copies of it, apparently, and then for the life of me could not remember why. The title, Faith, Hope and Carnage, seemed to threaten politics, but the content was actually a lengthy interview with an Australian musician whose work was entirely unknown to me, Nick Cave. (I know, I know—I’m totally out of it!) In an attempt to refresh my memory, I opened the book.

Not knowing what to expect, I am drawn in.

Even knowing nothing of songwriter-performer Cave’s work, I was taken by the way he talked about his creative process. Improvisation with collaborator Warren Ellis, he is quick to point out, is a lot more and something completely other than “winging it” (the interviewer’s suggestion).

 

No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. 

 

This theme of experienced, mindful improvisation comes up again. 

 

…[For] magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

 

Cave’s seriousness about his music came clearly through his articulate statements, and without knowing anything of his music I was fascinated, but that wasn’t all. In the interview, he also talks a lot about God, about faith and doubt.

 

…[O]ne way I try [to find deliverance from suffering] is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. … I guess what I am saying is—we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.

 

I thought of a friend of mine and a book she and her late husband worked on for years. She will recognize their work’s conclusions in Cave’s words, I know. 

 

And still there was more. This famous person completely outside my ken had, it seems, lost two of his four sons to death, losses that greatly informed both his music and his religious beliefs, and he has given a lot of consideration to grief and how it changes us—one of the major themes of my own life for the past three years, as you know. He speaks of the physicality of grief as “a kind of annihilation of the self—an interior screaming.” But he also speculates that “perhaps God is the trauma itself,” words that need a little more explanation: 

 

That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.

 

He speaks of grief as “transformative,” in which we may be “essentially altered or remade.” Another friend will perhaps be reminded by these words of our conversation on Sunday evening.

 

More of the book remains for me to read than what I have read so far, but I will definitely continue with it, as the themes resonate perfectly with this month of milestone days in my life—my husband’s hospitalizations, surgeries, his birthday, our last days together, and his death. 

 

Perhaps searing memories and my current reading of creativity and God and faith and grief in words from a musician who has had no part whatsoever in my listening life will not strike any of you as the joy my carefully worded intention sought to manifest, but it is what has come, and I am welcoming it. Taking it in. Seeing where it will take me in my improvised life during this last week of February as temperatures rise into the 30s, bringing rain to erode our mountains of plowed-up snow.

How long will this mountain last?

Where will the next weeks take me?

Seek Comfort and Welcome Joy

Pure joy!!!

Some of you have no doubt realized already that many of my recent topics up to and including this one—courage, loving care, strength, comfort and joy—are not really separate or separable. True it is! Just as our desires are multifaceted and complex, not singular and “pure,” so it is with our emotions. Still, focusing on one aspect at a time can be helpful, and while comfort and joy are important parts of loving care and strength and courage, I want to focus in on the former pair today, because it’s all too easy, when we’re trying to be strong and brave and take care of ourselves and others, to narrow our gaze to difficulty, to all the challenges we face, and lose track of the importance of experiencing—letting in—ongoing comfort and joy. 

 

Joy helps reduce stress in your everyday life, and that’s a good thing, but if stress reduction is all we consider about it, we are selling joy short, judging it good because it’s useful to us, good for us, rather than inviting joy into our lives because we’re alive and because the world is basically beautiful and we are made, I truly believe, for beauty and for joy. 

 

Many people I know are grandparents, the fortunate ones able to interact with grandchildren on a daily basis. “The light of my life,” one grandfather told me of a young grandson, while another friend describes her new granddaughter (quite rightly! I’ve seen pictures!) as irresistible. Others of us, living miles from family, find comfort and joy in friendship, our companion animals, and in the beauty of nature. 

She gets me outdoors!

Spring and summer WILL return!

Music, whether playing it or simply listening to it, is important—and not only Beethoven. Klezmer music, despite the minor key, is joyful, and country music can be. Do you hear the blues as music of a sad sad, downtrodden people? Not if you are playing or singing it yourself or if you read the interpretation of Albert Murray. When the spirit lifts and lungs take in larger breaths, smiles wreath our faces, and laughter bubbles over—joyful responses!

 

Here is a site I found with “joyful literature for dark times.” I’ve read a few of the books listed on that site but have my own favorites, as I’m sure you must, as well. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is a series I find both comforting and joyful. Mma Ramotswe is such a kind, thoughtful person, and she loves her country of Botswana so much! 

I love these books.

Do you have a favorite book that you consider joyful and that gives you joy to re-read? Or simply comforting? Have you discovered a new book lately that fits the description? 

 

You might not think a presidential memoir would figure into this discussion, but I am taking a lot of comfort from Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, even when the topics are grim. Reading of such an intelligent, capable, principled man in the White House, who never thought he knew everything but was always eager to learn more, and who did a lot more “politicking” than most Americans realize, makes me glad for the time I’ve had on earth.

 

In the middle of the night, though, when I wake to frightening reality, I turn to a different kind of book, and at present my middle-of-the-night reading is Breckland, by Olive Cook, an early volume in the series of “Regional Books” from Robert Hale, Ltd., of London. These postwar books on various regions of the United Kingdom describe landscape, agriculture, architecture, and so on in close and loving detail. They are not fiction: In these books nothing happens. What a relief! It’s as if you are on a walk, a stroll, a ramble with someone who knows the area intimately and points out what you might otherwise miss. After a day in the “real world” where all too much is happening, it is a great comfort to travel back in time to rural England when and where the horrors of the Second World War were finally over.

 

Online, Dana Frost with her “Forced Joy” project, an idea she had when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and one she had to work hard after he died, looks at how to find joy in grief and loss, and Valerie Kaur, a warrior for revolutionary love, writes and talks about how we can focus on love and joy in the midst of hatred and violence. 

Big pot of soup!

Batch of homemade flatbread --

I also watch a few short videos online, including Sean the Sheepman and chef Jacques Pépin. Dogs and cooking are important sources of joy for me, so watching Sean and Jacques at work is a quiet, comforting pleasure. Border collies are still working sheep, and Jacques is still glazing carrots. Ah, how lovely!

 

Painted rock, gift from a dear friend

When you do an online search for “joy” topics, one of the suggestions that comes up over and over is to look for joy in small, ordinary moments, something I’ve done for years. It was crucial back when the Artist and I were so “poor” (in financial terms) that going out for coffee was a splurge, and now cultivating gratitude for small pleasures in my life alone is just as crucial. 

Pleasure and happiness and comfort and joy are hardly interchangeable terms, but joy can be quiet and blend into comfort, don’t you think? Can’t we experience joy in silent contentment, as well as in glad shouts? More than gratitude, I see quiet joy as the realization of all we have for which to be grateful, a kind of overflowing fullness in the moment. 

 

Where do you find yours? Where do you look for it? Are you giving it a big welcome?

The sun was shining!

We played!

My Lovely (Lucky!) End-of-September in Leelanau

Northport celebrates! 

Although a little slower in general, the month of September brings its own highlights and excitement, not the least of which is Northport’s fabulous street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. “Get out of whatever cage you’re in,” a sign urged in a previous year, and the John Cage-inspired event brings music and dancing, art and crafts, food and drinks out onto Waukazoo, Nagonaba, and Mill streets. 

Sign on Mill Street

As a business proprietor, I spend the day indoors, 10 hours straight this year. (You might not think people at a street fair would come into a store and buy books, but they do, bless their hearts!) Before opening, however, I walk around with my camera to photograph our town making preparations. 

Setting up the dance stage

Cheerful volunteer Ty Wessell on Mill Street

Vendors on Nagonaba Street

My friend Sally getting ready

Waukazoo Street vendors setting up early

New Bo warning: only BREAKFAST sandwiches today!

Added string of beautiful birds this year

With this year’s absolutely perfect weather, I had my shop door wide open all day and could enjoy jazz coming from just up the street. Lovely!

 

After all that excitement, my Sunday at home was pretty much a day of rest. Only minimal mowing and raking. The gardens needed watering, of course, because after a single night of precipitation we are still waiting for more rain. Sunny and I worked on the hurdles and weave poles, and we got in a little Frisbee practice, too. Sunny, nunca te rindas! You’re getting better and better! 

I haven’t given up on my morning glory vine, either, and look! When these unfurl -- !!!

Early morning and late evening these days, as September turns to October, I have been spending a lot of mental time in Alabama and am now traveling all over the country with a band. Other than cowgirl, singer with a band was my other dream life for years, but it’s the magic of reading that takes me on these journeys, and my author-guide and companion is a writer I should have met long before now – but so should other avid readers, and so far no one I’ve asked has been familiar with his name. Does that make me feel better or worse? I was not alone in my previous ignorance, but such a writer deserves to be far better known in his own country.

 

Albert Murray, novelist and poet, music critic, essayist, and biographer, was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. Britannica says of him that his writings “assert the vitality and the powerful influence of black people in forming American traditions,” in particular, that jazz and blues styles developed “as affirmative responses to misery.” Among many awards he received in his lifetime, from a variety of groups, Murray won the very first Harper Lee Award in 1987.

 

My Library of America volume contains all four of Murray’s semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with Train Whistle Guitar (title alone gave me an appetite for that one), and I’m now well into Seven League Boots, a hero’s journey in music. It didn’t take many pages of Train Whistle Guitar, however, before I began looking forward to future readings in years to come. I want to read other books of his, too, especially The Omni-Americans and South to a Very Old Place.

 

Monday, believe it or not, I had an appointment to have snow tires mounted, because yes, winter will come (last year it snowed on Halloween), but first Sunny and I went for an agility session for Coach Mike, and we had a great session. We concentrated on my giving hand signals to Sunny without vocal commands (except for “Tunnel!”) and giving more commands to her from a distance so that I am not trying to run the course as fast as she can run it. For the sake of documentation, we slowed the action to a few successive stops for the following photos, with Sunny on the “teeter,” Coach Mike on my phone, and me with Sunny. When we are actually running the course, there are no more treats at the end of the teeter -- we just race to the next station! 

Teeter: uphill,

Downhill,

Target area and reward.

The sun is coming up later these days in northern Michigan and setting earlier, but while it shines it is bright, bright, bright, and has given us a beautiful “locals’ summer” September. I am counting my blessings and thinking about which organization to donate to for hurricane and flood relief in the South, where the sun was not shining recently, many died, and millions are without power. Unimaginable devastation -- time for Americans to come together....