Trees, Dogs, Books, Musings

Are the trees really taller above the Mackinac Bridge?

Once more, the North beckoned!

We went up over the Bridge again, Tree Guy and I and Naughty Barker. This time we left on Sunday and stayed until Wednesday, our mission to spend time with TG’s kids and grandkids. It went great! Thanks for asking. 

Notably, Naughty Barker dove right in with Good Dog Behavior! She recognized the place, jumped out of the car without barking, and immediately began racing happily around the yard with her new best friend! If I were able to load a video, you would see what I mean, but here are the two of them, relaxing together between romps.

Sunny and her new best friend, William

I did a lot of relaxing myself. Other than pancakes on Tuesday morning, I didn’t cook at all, and while the young people got canoes in the water, took saunas, played ping-pong and cards, I basically read my books, took long walks, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Oh, and here and there a nap. Truly, it felt like vacation—and there will be a few similar days in the weeks ahead, because, as we all know, the North never ceases to beckon.

The river never pauses....

Books that kept me awake --

When not napping or exploring or entertaining canines, and other than time spent around the table eating and socializing (socializing even after the eating had ceased, not shunning society!), I finished a couple books brought from home. One was a little Robert Louis Stevenson volume that Tree Guy couldn’t wait to get his hands on (pictured above), and the other that John M. Barry book I’ve been reading off and on for such a long time, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Reading books on the Civil War and what led up to it, as well as what followed it—all led me, over time, to conclude that our nation was born divided, and now, having read a single, very detailed book on the history of New England, I am strengthened in that opinion, even as New England complicates the picture, showing me that divisions in American society have never been as simple as North vs. South or Europeans vs. Native Americans. In New England, it was also English vs. Native Americans, Puritans vs. Quakers, freethinkers vs. Quakers, Rhode Island vs. Massachusetts, Plymouth vs. Providence, and on and on and on. There were massacres over control and ownership of land, and there was torture and cruel, disfiguring punishment (ears cut off, holes bored in tongues, etc.), as well as excommunication and banishment, over matters of religion—which makes it sound as if religion and land ownership were separate issues, whereas actually they were hopelessly entangled.

Some 17th-century disagreements seem today nothing short of absurd, e.g., should grace be said before or following a meal? (Thanks is thanks, isn't it?) Others went to the heart of the body politic, with loyalty oaths demanded and then accepted or refused, but the deepest, and one that continues to divide Americans to this day, was over the relation of the church and the government, or religion and the state. 

State religion or a wall of separation? Which was it to be? Which is it to be?

Those who wanted 17th-century government to champion one particular religious view—not only to protect that religion but also, in doing so, to sanctify government—cited a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 49, verse 23, saying “that the state must be 'nursing father and mother' to the church” in order to

…protect and preserve not only the church but to create a moral society. From this … it also followed inevitably that church and state were inextricably linked.

Roger Williams and others disagreed. Williams thought the danger of intermingling church and state was to the church, as it was bound to be corrupted by politics. He took his stand for freedom of conscience, implying freedom of religion, and Rhode Island was founded on the principle of a “wall of separation” between religion and government.

Besides large disagreements of principle, Barry exposes other divisions nascent in the American colonies. The English of the 17th century, he notes, “had relatively little outright racial prejudice against Indians,” acknowledging that they themselves had recently been “‘savage and uncivill and worshipped the divell,’” but when one Englishman went on to compare Native Americans to the Irish, Barry reminds us how the English slaughtered the Irish—men, women, and children—on more than one occasion. English “war” on the Irish was a prequel to American “war” on North American indigenous populations.

All these disagreements, all these divisions! What has held our country together for 250 years? Nothing, I would say, but our love for the land and respect for law. So now, when we see due process and habeas corpus brushed aside by our federal government, I ask, what will hold us together? If not law, what can unify such fractious multitudes?

Solid ground! We need the law as our solid ground!

After Roger Williams, my brain needed a vacation, and I picked up an old Agatha Christie paperback, but it belonged to the cabin and did not come home with me, so I’m now reading a Studs Terkel-like book of oral histories called Chinese Lives. Priced (used) at only $6.50, it sat long on the shelf in my shop, unchosen and passed over, and only now do I realize what a gem my customers have missed! It will return to the shelf in time, giving customers another chance, but only after I have finished it myself. The lives are out-of-date, of course, the book published in 1985, with a preface by Studs Terkel himself, but history, always pregnant with what was to come, makes fascinating reading.

What condition is our condition in?

I don’t know what to say about the state of the union, because if we have ever been a union, we are certainly not one now. Daily episodes of insanity mix with daily episodes of cruelty and are stirred together daily with corruption, grift, and complete disregard for the history and ideals of our nation, as well as contempt for the law under which we all should be living. Destruction of habitat and of national monuments, absurd and childish attempts to rename geography—all demolish not only our physical country and its history but tarnish our world reputation in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to overcome in the future. The present nightmare will not go on forever, but its end is no guarantee of the restoration of the United States of America, a country that was never perfect but a country that aspired to continual improvement. Now? 

…Roger Williams, this devout Puritan, this man of faith who loved God, was willing to risk more than his life [for freedom]. For of all the remarkable things he said, the most remarkable was this: “Having bought Truth deare, we must not sell it cheape, nor the least graine of it for the whole World, so not for the saving of Soules, though our own most precious.” 

How indeed could one save one’s own soul by selling truth? 

For he knew that to believe in freedom and liberty required faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience. And that was soul liberty.

Quoted material above comes from John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (NY: Viking, 2012), a book your Northport bookseller strongly recommends, either for solitary self-enrichment or lively book club discussion.

Anyway, in case you wondered, we in Northport are very patriotic. We love our country! And our post office!

4th of July photograph on post office counter

Coming soon to your bookstore in Northport!

A new book co-created by someone with a well-known family name will soon be at Dog Ears Books. Next week, I hope. For now, that’s all I’m going to say, except that if you have any kind of travel itch, you’ll want to take a look at it and get some brand-new ideas, so watch this site!

❓❓❓❓❓

Another feather in the dog’s cap

Not only more sociable than ever before, she was a really good dog in the car, too! Best ever! Little girl is growing up at last.

Lengthy postscript 8/29/26:

Michigan author Robert Traver (his pen name), otherwise known as lawyer and flyfisherman John D. Voelker (his legal name) served on the Michigan Supreme Court until the success of his novel, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, allowed him to retire from the law and devote himself to fishing and writing. Born in Ishpeming, son of an Ishpeming saloonkeeper, Voelker practiced law first in Chicago, then at home in Ishpeming, before winning his campaign to be the Prosecutor of Marquette County. It was Governor G. Mennen Williams who appointed Voelker to the Supreme Court, but Voelker tried the case on which his novel was based before he served on the court. As Robert Traver, he wrote both novels and books on fishing that continue to be popular today, and the John D. Voelker Foundation continues to do good work in his name.

I was passing a few quiet moments between customers today (Saturday, 8/29/26) when I came across this passage in ANATOMY, lawyer Paul Biegler chiding his client, Lieutenant Manion, for making disparaging remarks about the law:

‘…[F]or all its lurching and shambling imbecilities, the law—and only the law—is what keeps our society from bursting apart at the seams, from becoming a snarling jungle. While the law is not perfect, God knows, no other system has yet been found for governing men except violence. The law is society’s safety valve, its most painless way to achieve social catharsis; any other way lies anarchy.’

Biegler pauses and then goes on:

‘The law is the busy fireman that puts out society’s brush fires; that gives people a nonphysical method to discharge hostile feelings and settle violent differences, that substitutes orderly ritual for the rule of tooth and claw. The very slowness of the law, its massive impersonality, its insistence upon proceeding according to settled and ancient rules—all this tends to cool and bank the fires of passion and violence and replace them with order and reason. That is a tremendous does accomplishment in itself, however a particular case may turn out.’

The lawyer character’s speech soars as he argues with his client that 

‘...all our fine Magna Cartas and constitutions and bills of right and all the rest would be nothing but a lot of archaic and high-flown rhetoric if we could not and did not at all times have the law to buttress them, to interpret them, to breathe meaning and force and life into them. Lofty abstractions about individual liberty and justice do not enforce themselves. These things are reforged by the law, for every jury trial in the land is a small daily miracle of democracy in action.’

- Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1958)

The Best Things in Life -- and --

Redbud on the creek, Northport

Northern Michigan is in bloom!

Let’s start with beauty, because there is no such thing as too much beauty. Leelanau County has been bursting with blossoms. Cherries first, then apple blossoms, now lilacs. Not only orchards, though. There are lots of flowering plants in the villages, too. 

Chokecherry and viburnum, Northport

Closer look at viburnum called 'Chenault' (somewhat past peak)

These blooming trees in Leland stopped me, too.

At home, wild violets gave me enough for two batches of violet jelly (lots more violets, but how much violet jelly do I need?) and made a stunning setting for photographing my dog when Sunny Juliet plunked down in another little sea of deep purple. And while there aren’t many redbud trees this far north, those few do their part, even the spindly little volunteer behind the old henhouse at my place.

Wild Violet Jelly

Redbud flower closeup

It’s worth looking close to the ground, as well, for beauty you would not be able to take in from a speeding car.

Not much to look at?

Look closer!

And gardens! This is the time of year I live for! I think of it as my real life, with before and after mostly prologue and epilogue. 

Lobelia! Need I say more?

Black petunias! Bacopa! Splendid iris from the late Al Bona!

That got me to thinking the other evening about seasons and how, for me, here in Northern Michigan, the four seasons as generally divided don’t make sense. Spring isn’t really March-April-May, but (in my opinion, in my life) April-May-June, with summer July-August-September, and so on. December is more late fall than early winter, and winter usually hangs on through most of March. What do you think about that?

My reading these days--

As is so often the case, my attention hops like a flea (or buzzes like a bee?) from one book to another. Having trouble with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (I could not seem to hear the characters’ voices in my head), I picked up a less demanding book, Dark Light, nonfiction about the dawn of electric light and all the promises and fears any revolutionary new technology spawns, but have yet to finish it, because morning reading on the porch for several days was Remember, by Lisa Genova, neurologist and author of the novel Still Alice, in which the main character develops signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. Not being able to recall a name, Genova assures readers in her new nonfiction book, is not a sign of dementia. It happens to 20-year-olds as well as 80-year-olds. Older people simply worry about it more. 

Remember is an easy read and a quick one. Whatever your age, and whether or not you worry about your memory, it’s worth learning what helps us remember, what gets in the way, and what we can do to keep memory as sharp as possible as we get older. Pay attention, the author tells us at the beginning. (“Stop, look, and listen,” I think to myself, remembering the lesson about crossing streets that I was made to repeat over and over when young.) You can’t remember that to which you have not paid attention. I particularly like this piece of advice, since I decided years ago that paying attention is my #1 job in life. There are other pieces of advice. Sleep, exercise, a healthy diet—all the things that are in general good for our physical health are also good for preserving our memories. Alcohol is a culprit, better avoided. Caffeine in moderation and not too close to bedtime. 

***

Then there was One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, a hard book to read, not for the difficulty of the writing but for its subject matter. Still, the urgency of El Akkad’s book is such that I believe every American should read it now. Because, as he says --

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

- Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025)

That will be one day. What about today? Where do you and I stand today? 

Detail from book cover

I did, finally, finish As I Lay Dying. Faulkner will never be my favorite writer, but reading one of his famous works was a duty I could not neglect forever.

Big Life, Little Life; or, Macro, Micro

“Big Life, Little Life” is the title I gave to my most recently filled volume of journal writing. “Macro/Micro” are the terms used by Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse on their Saturday Coffee Klatch videos. For those of us fortunate enough to live far from war and famine, the contrast is often stark between happiness in our personal lives and the agony we feel over our country’s disintegration and its role in world suffering. My parents were spared this, I have thought so often. My (late) husband was spared this.

Recently I had my annual Medicare wellness visit. Am I depressed? No, I can’t say that I am depressed, because my personal life is fulfilling. When I wake up in the middle of the night, however, I often wake into rather than out of nightmare, as I remember what is happening in my country and in the world. Anxiety? Yes, on a daily basis. You are not alone, I was told. “Ninety-nine point nine percent” of her patients are anxious about the country and the world, she told me. And we are the lucky ones! We did not send our children off in the morning only to have a bomb drop on their school and kill them. We are not handcuffed and shackled and herded from one “detainment center” to another, treated worse than American pet owners would ever treat their dogs and cats. We are not starving. Why are we anxious, and what do we fear—if not the theft of our souls? And the death of freedom and the actual deaths of innocent human beings, our brothers and sisters?

What can we do? First, we must speak up. Then -- what practical, doable action have you found that you can take in your community?

Here and now, though...

...Tree Guy and I are putting a life together. This is quite an unexpected late-life gift, as we see it, and Sunny Juliet, who is part of it, may not “count her blessings” in quite the same way, but she loves being part of a pack and having a home and people to play with her and provide her with special treats. She is a lucky dog, and Tree Guy and I are a couple of lucky humans.

Again!

 

Sunday, 1/25/26: Another sunny January day!

We had another sunny day on Sunday. Sunshine again, for the third time this month!

Thursday--sunshine again!

On Thursday’s sunshine (sunny day #4), I locked up my shop just before noon, leaving a sign on the door telling anyone who might wander by that they could find me down on the corner to the south, where I stood with a group I call “the stalwarts.” They were a much larger group back in the summer, before the thermometer took a dive and the larger segment of Northport’s population took off for Arizona, Florida, and other points south, but nine or ten or eleven of them still get out there on Thursdays for half an hour or so, standing where they are most visible to drivers coming down the hill and turning left onto Waukazoo Street, and I decided it was time for me to join them.

 

I was sure I had posterboard somewhere, either at home or in the storage area behind my shop, but it stubbornly refused to reveal itself, so my sign was black felt marker on the raggedy top of a cardboard file box—not as big as it might have been and nowhere near as “professional” in appearance, but I justified the look by assuring myself that no one could mistake me for a “paid demonstrator.” 

 

(Does anyone really believe that there are paid demonstrators against ICE in American villages and towns and even large cities, Minneapolis or any other? I know the people who turn out for these events! They are my friends, my family, my neighbors! But I guess the same people who think it’s okay for right-wingers to carry assault weapons to demonstrations  and even kill people (do your own online search if you don't remember the names) but wrong for an ICE nurse from a VA hospital to carry, holstered not drawn, a gun he had a legal permit to carry—those people will clearly swallow any blatant lie or absurd argument in the world, as long as it comes from the “leaders” they follow blindly.)

 

Winter. Snow. COLD! Although even a sunny day without wind is darn cold when the temperatures are in the single digits, there are important reasons for not huddling indoors full-time, e.g., meaningful gathering of people aiming to protect democracy, e.g., getting a dog out for regular exercise.

Very COLD week!

Is a "warm-up" coming?

Thought-Stopping

A friend of mine who had trouble with anxiety was taught a method of overcoming it called “thought stopping.” When an anxiety-provoking thought or image comes into your mind, you say aloud, “Stop!” and then visualize something calm and beautiful, replacing a negative with a positive image. Some people have good results; however, the method is of very limited or no value for others, particularly anyone with OCD. By attempting to block the thought rather than dealing with it, the thought itself develops resistance to your resistance, studies have shown. Despite occasional temporary relief, you may be strengthening the fear you are trying to avoid by stuffing it into a closet. (See alternatives here.)

The other day another friend sent me a link for another kind of thought stopping, the kind that seeks not to conquer chronic fears but to avoid critical thinking, i.e., to avoid questioning whatever orthodoxy someone has accepted, to silence one's own doubt. The man who posts on Instagram under the name “epistemiccrisis” (great name!) says he was “born into” the MAGA culture and learned ways to avoid questioning the ideology by reaching for handy mind control techniques. Thought stopping, as epistemiccrisis explains it in this ideological world, holds questions and doubt at bay with phrases that short-circuit critical thinking and keep believers comfortable. One such phrase is “Fake news!” The phrases are used as shields to block a person's own intrusive thoughts but can also be used to block information from other sources that could lead to doubt.

One phrase that epistemiccrisis doesn't mention (please excuse me for not spelling it out completely) is “Tr__p Derangement Syndrome,” commonly shortened to TDS. Confronted with any unpleasant fact about the current president, his followers block thoughtful doubts with the catch-phrase, “TDS!” (That is supposed to imply that the person criticizing the president or simply bringing up an unpleasant fact about him is completely unhinged on the subject of the president, not that the president himself is unhinged or deranged, which would make much more sense.) A true-believing follower might follow up the thought-stopping accusation by asking the person who has criticized or brought up the unpleasant fact, “Are you off your meds?” 

You will notice that this method of avoiding critical thinking also has the general effect of shutting down discussion by sideswiping anyone with a different perspective, sending the clear signal that no challenge to the received orthodoxy will be received by the blocked mind.

Recent Reading

Ah, but we still have books! Not only my own interests but semipopular demand has determined me to enlarge my offerings of classic philosophy writings. Notice also Mary Webb’s novel, Precious Bane, for which I am an evangelist. Escape to the quiet world of Shropshire, back when plows were drawn by livestock and the Saturday market was as good as a county fair. Don’t worry, though. There is plenty of conflict and drama in the story; it isn’t all sweetness and light. Simply one of the Western world’s great books, too long overlooked.

The story told in journalist Martin Sixsmith’s work of nonfiction pictured above was partially familiar to me from the film version, “Philomena,” starring Judy Dench and Steve Coogan. While the movie focused on the mother searching for the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, however, the book follows the life of the child from birth to death and also delves deeply into political struggles within Ireland (between Church and government), as well as in the United States, where the adopted Irish child grows to be a successful lawyer working for the RNC on (of all things!) redistricting, so book and film are complementary, and I recommend both. 

This Week Up North

 

Despite single-digit temperatures and subzero wind chills, Leelanau bodies of water are not yet covered with ice. Looking past the mountains of snow that hide most of the Northport Youth Sailing School buildings, you can see the blue water of Grand Traverse Bay. How long will that be the case? How soon will ice boating and ice fishing be possible on Lake Leelanau? Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

Blue water in Grand Traverse Bay is still visible.

Reading, Talking, and Islands of Light

Sunny Juliet’s biggest winter thrill may be finding deer bones left behind by coyotes, but when she has enjoyed one for a day or two and her momma surreptitiously bags it and spirits it away, she makes do with any old bone, because however marrow- and flesh-free the bone, it has plenty of chewing left in it. 

Sunny! Her very name speaks light.

Reading for distraction

 

A good friend told me she is currently reading a book of ecclesiastical history by a 4^th-century scholar! Feeling like an incredible lightweight, I admitted to her that I had laid aside The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which I was inspired to read after reading the novel Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet, to re-read, for the -nth time, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a book I know practically by heart. I told her I was “distracting myself from real-life lies and murder.” She replied with a confession of her own—that over the past two weeks she has re-read, for the fifth or sixth time each, six of the seven Harry Potter books! “Distractions,” she noted, “are intellectual life savers.” That made me feel better. 

 

 

Serious reading

 

Besides casual bedtime reading of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (quite the hothead, as well as a marvelously gifted artist and craftsman), I've gotten started this week on a couple of other serious and more contemporary books—books of our own time, that is—one of those, Jamie Raskin’s Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Here is the stunning opening paragraph in the preface to Raskin’s book:

 

In the week between December 31, 2020, and January 6, 2021, my family suffered two impossible traumas: the shattering death by suicide of my beloved twenty-five-year-old son, Tommy, and the violent mob insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left several people dead, more than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers wounded and injured, hundreds of people (including several in our family) fleeing for their lives, and the nation shaken to its core. Although Tommy’s death and the January 6 insurrection were cosmically distinct and independent events, they were thoroughly intertwined in my experience and my psyche. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to disentangle and understand them to restore coherence to the world they ravaged. 

 

January 6, 2021, was Rep. Raskin’s first day back in the House following the death of his son only a week before. Probably still in shock, he did not fear for his life while traveling to the Rayburn Building, despite threatening crowds and gestures from people in those crowds. The important procedure of the day was counting and certifying votes from all 50 states to insure the peaceful transfer of power, a procedure that had never in our nation’s history been sidetracked or prevented from occurring, and the Congressman was going to do the job he had sworn an oath to do. 

 

When the mob breached the Capitol and members of Congress had to leave their Chamber for safety, Raskin says he felt “curiosity, anger, resolve,” but no fear, because for him the worst had already happened. His son had died. Reliving January 6 in the present tense, he continues,

 

But I am still in the land of the living, and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He is occupying my heart and filling my chest with oxygen. He is showing me the way to some kind of safety.

 

My beautiful son is giving me courage as we flee the U.S. Capitol Building for our lives.

 

My trauma, my wound, has now become my shield of defense and my path of escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight. 

 

 

Giving up on a book

 

I got this far in a draft on Friday and returned that night to Cellini but finally set him aside in disgust, 159 pages in, heartily sick of the man. I don’t even want to quote him but will only say that after so many pages of boasting and a temper that erupted time after time into violence, even murder, it was his behavior at an overnight lodging place that revealed the man’s essential pettiness. Greatly talented, obviously, but thin-skinned, vindictive and petty in the extreme. 

 

Here's the incident: Cellini and a friend are traveling and stop at an inn to stay overnight. The innkeeper wants payment for the room in advance rather than in the morning, and Cellini is incensed. He finally pays and is pleased to find a clean, spacious room with new beds and immaculate linens, but his sense of outrage persists. He contemplates killing the innkeeper, as one possibility. He considers slaughtering the innkeeper’s horses. At last he hits on the expedient of destroying the beds and linens—and is inordinately pleased with himself as he continues on his way! A mean, cowardly, and completely inexcusable “revenge” for something that was not even unreasonable in the first place—being asked to pay for a room before occupying it! 

No, I do not want to spend any more time with this horrid, vile little man! I will keep the book in my home library only because it was, as a used book with illustrations by Dali, one of the first gifts I ever gave the Artist in my own life, and I keep it for the inscription, not for the content. I only hope my Artist never read it and only looked at the Dali art.

On second thought, maybe I will tear out and keep only the inscription page and ditch the book. What do you think?

 

 

Avoiding difficult subjects

 

The news this past week has been heartbreaking, enraging, and terrifying. As I see it, nothing less than the soul of our country is at stake, and yet there are people who think we should remain silent on politics when we disagree in order to keep family and community “peace.” Why, they ask, do we have to let one subject, i.e., politics, completely overtake our lives and relationships? Why can’t we simply talk about other things and avoid politics?

 

From where I stand, this means avoiding a subject that is on my mind every single day. It wasn’t always so, and my thoughts still free-range over a vast number of subjects, but right there in the forefront, these days, is the struggle for my country’s soul.

 

Thinking about not-talking-about-it, here are a couple historical scenes I try to imagine. 

 

Picture family members or friends during the period of the American Revolution. Now imagine them split between those supporting the Declaration of Independence and those remaining loyal to the King of England and then trying to avoid politics in order to enjoy one another’s company and conversation. Can you see that working?

 

Or think of Americans with intertwined lives but opposing politics during the Civil War, a family or community riven by that conflict. Imagine a supporter of the Union, an abolitionist, asked to “avoid politics” in order to maintain a cordial, loving, ongoing daily relationship with a member of the Confederacy, perhaps even a slaveholder.

 

Imagine someone in either of these situations, in either of these time periods, saying something like, “Can’t we just have a nice Thanksgiving dinner and talk about other things?” People whose lives have not—yet!—been touched personally will think my examples are far-fetched and exaggerated, but I don't think so.

 

Pretend there’s no elephant standing between us in the living room? Pretend that your vision of the future (or a future you are unwittingly helping to create) is not my vision of earthly hell? Pretend that your political allies are not trying to wipe me and mine off the face of the earth?

 

Heartbreak. Rage. Fear. Stuff all that down and pretend it isn't there? How on earth?

 

Taking breaks

Happy news: NJ's is open again.

Since last fall, I have been in a different kind of discussion, an ongoing conversation that is for me an island of sunlight in this dark, violent winter of our national discontent. It is a conversation without limits, meandering from the weather and what each of us had for dinner to literature, through history, and beyond. We share stories from our childhoods and younger years, talk of our families and other people we have known who were important to us. We speak of death and grief. No topic is too trivial or too grand or too puzzling or too silly. And yet we touch on politics and current (outrageous) events infrequently and usually only briefly.

 

There are two reasons why politics is not a larger part of this ongoing conversation. The first reason is that we don’t need to argue about it. We are in agreement. The second is that we don’t need to let that dark cloud come between us and happiness. When you have an island of light in your life, the last thing you want to do is trigger a power outage. 

 

This is not avoidance. It’s taking a break, it’s recharging, it’s drawing and giving strength. See the difference?

A welcome morning sunrise

It's all in here: the sublime, silly, dangerous, petty, too cute for words, and a shed tear.

December 2, 2025

My banner photograph today is of the copper beech tree in Northport, brought from England long ago by a member of the Thomas family and still flourishing today. In which season is this venerable tree at its loveliest? I can’t decide but took the photograph above with my Samsung android phone one December morning, a little after 10 a.m., and to my eye it looked magnificent.

  

Ogden Nash

I don’t think it’s belittling his gift to call Ogden Nash a versifier. My discovery of Nash came in a volume called Parents Keep Out! on the shelves in my hometown library children’s room, and how could any kid resist a book with that name? What fun to memorize Nash’s poems, from two-liners to those of many stanzas! 

Here is probably the shortest verse Ogden Nash ever wrote. It’s called “Fleas,” and the entire poem is as follows:

Adam

Had ‘em.

Imagine my shock, however, to see that the site “All Poetry,” in analyzing the verse, refers to this clever couplet as a “witty quatrain”! Quatrain? A four-line stanza? Obviously not! Witty, yes. Quatrain, no.

Here is another two-line Nash poem, a favorite of my father’s and one of the earliest that I knew by heart without even trying:

God in his wisdom made the fly

And then forgot to tell us why.

One of my longer favorites was “Very Like a Whale,” which I leave you to look up for yourself by following this link—and then see if you can stop from reading more and more Ogden Nash verse. Fair warning: It is addictive.

Why do I drag in these humorous poems instead of some more ethereal ode to trees? Because Nash himself took off on Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” following Kilmer’s first two-line stanza with a second of his own:

 

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

 

Silly? Yes. Corny? Yes. But also irresistibly memorable, especially to a child discovering mockery of sacred literary cows for the first time.

 

Get Off of Your Cloud!

My son told me a couple years ago, “The cloud is just someone else’s bigger computer,” and with my initial skeptical aversion to cloud storage thus vindicated, I have continued to buy, read, and hold onto printed, bound books; to write letters and send them through the mail in stamped envelopes (treasuring written replies); and to store my digital files only on my own devices. (Note to self: Need a couple more flash drives, memory sticks, whatever they're called.) Here were my initial arguments against relying on the so-called cloud, i.e., “someone else’s computer,” somewhere else --

 

Ø How do I know the cloud won’t crash? 

Ø How do I know my data (i.e., my precious image and text files) will remain unchanged, uncorrupted, and accessible by me—and only by me?

Ø Finally, after reading about the massive amounts of water and power necessary to maintain those so-called clouds, and the dreadful 24/7 noise the data banks put out, why would I want to park in someone else’s backyard something I don’t want in my own? Better, I believe, to buy extra camera cards and additional flash drives and keep them in a safe place at home. 

If those arguments didn’t convince you, how about this one: Many people believe that massive data centers, currently touted for AI, are a bigger financial bubble than the country has ever yet seen. It all boils down to extractive industry and good old entropy. Most of the spending on the AI bubble, as is true of your beloved cloud storage, is not “virtual,” but very, very physical. Real estate. Buildings. Hardware. Electricity. Water. Now add to the deterioration of the surrounding physical environment and the rapid deterioration of electronic chips a super-scary degradation--the deterioration of information (“intelligence”?) gathered and synthesized as LLMs (Large Language Models) are put through post-training “learning.” 

Word of the day: sycophantic. Look it up. So-called artificial intelligence degrades rapidly the more it “learns” from what human beings say online. Garbage in, garbage out. Bullshit in, bullshit out. When put through post-training, AI becomes an obsequious flatterer rather than a knowledgeable advisor!

If you don’t understand how something is made, you should not invest in it. (Think cryptocurrency.) In the case of generative AI, the more you know about it, the less likely you are to invest. Seriously, watch and listen, because others are investing for you—your government, your money managers—and you cannot afford not to know what's going on. Has your community been asked to make room for a data center? Sooner or later, one will be proposed near you, so prepare yourself now with information.

Fonts and Politics???

Do you recognize the font I use on this blog? It's called Bookman Old Style, and I like both the name and the look, being a bookseller and always having been partial to serifs (particularly adnate serifs), those little extras that seem so graceful and generous. Do you see them as unnecessary furbelows? Consider:

Bookman Old Style example: AI

Helvetica example: AI

Which one is clearer to you? To my eye, the capital letter I without a serif looks like a small L or even the number 1. With a serif, there is no such confusion. And, as I say, I have always simply found serif fonts graceful and generous in appearance, overall more attractive, although many people see the matter differently and consider the sans serif fonts easier to read, cleaner, and more modern. 

One thing that would never have occurred to me would have been that a switch to a san serif font signaled some kind of political agenda, but leave it to Republicans to suspect liberalism's vile fingerprints on anything done by a Democratic administration, and so it isn't as unbelievable as it should be that Marco Rubio, current Secretary of State, has declared Anthony Blinken's switch to the simpler Calibri font a symptom of wokism and, somehow, “another wasteful DEIA program.” Good lord, it's almost enough to make me renounce serifs for life! But no, not quite. This insanity cannot last forever. For now, however, Rubio is reinstating the Times New Roman font “to restore decorum and professionalism” to the State Department. 

Ha! Wouldn't that be nice? To see “decorum and professionalism” again in our nation's capitol? (Why do I think that will take more than a change of typeface?) For now, who can tell me how eliminating serifs was more costly than restoring them will be? How petty can anyone be?

Just another red herring, folks. Another little brushfire to add to the giant smokescreen....

Turning Toward the Sun

No, not yet. It will be eleven more days before days begin to grow longer, and yet I'm sure I heard on the radio that yesterday was the year's earliest sunset and that tonight the sun will set marginally later. Can that be? Did I only imagine it? And will it matter, anyway, if clouds keep us covered? 

For me, though, every morning is a Sunny morning, come rain or come shine, and I know you want to see her, too, so here's the dog girl!

Her ears were blowing in the cold, cold wind!

Indoors, cozy and photogenic

We Lost a Most Memorable Northporter

It was a shock to learn on Monday evening that David Chrobak had died only that afternoon. My last relaxed visit with David (I'm not counting sidewalk chats outside the post office) was in his front yard one evening this past summer, and somewhere I have a photo taken from the yard, looking through hanging prisms and flowers to the Willowbrook Inn, but where can it be? Here, anyway, and much better, is a photo of David himself. The occasion was the 21st anniversary of my bookstore, which David on the cake he baked and decorated called “a love story.” David loved Northport, and Northport loved him back. There will never be another like him. David, we miss you already!

David Chrobak, Northport, MI, June 2014