Closeup, Farther Away, Back Home Again

“You left the dog out!” 

 

No, I did not forget about Sunny Juliet, and she certainly did not spend the night outdoors! When Sunny is outside, I am outside with her, and when I am indoors, my little companion is with me there, too. But it’s true that there was not a single image of her in my last blog post, so mea culpa! Although Sunny is not a bookstore dog (Naughty Barker that she is), she is very much the dog of my heart and life and blog. So here is my dog girl, back again by popular request.

 

More around the home place

 

‘Tis the season of golden yellow, everywhere I look – forsythia, daffodils, and now—at last—the first dandelions! 

Buds are appearing on trees and shrubs, and all three of my peonies have emerged from their winter sleep. I saw my first blooming Dutchman’s breeches of the season on Saturday morning and cowslips, a.k.a., marsh marigolds, on Sunday afternoon.  

When the weather warms up (again: it had warmed once or twice but cooled down again almost immediately) and stays that way, at last, I’ll get busy cleaning my front porch. The Artist and I always lived on that porch from late spring to early fall. Though it isn’t the same without him, I’m still glad to have it, and Sunny likes it, too. But this weekend there was a different agenda in effect at my place: A neighbor teen came to help me fill an industrial-sized dumpster with trash to be hauled away. “Big job,” I texted a friend, and she texted back, “Not big—huge!” She was right. One of the dangers of rural acreage is the accumulation of stuff no longer useful, but I can now report significant progress on the cleanup, thanks to my helper’s young muscles and ability to heave heavy items over the dumpster wall.

After all that work, I tried to take a nap in the afternoon, but Sunny had other ideas, so we went for a little ride up to Northport by way of the back roads, which is where I saw the marsh marigolds—and thank you, Sunny Juliet, for not letting me sleep the day away!

 

 

Reading at home

 

I finished James A. Stimson’s historical novel, King Noanett, set in colonial America during the time of the English Civil War. The story was a blend, I would say, of adventure, history, and melodrama. The ending was particularly melodramatic, but I’m not going to give it away.

 

Friday night I began reading a novel by a Northport friend, Karen Mulvahill’s The Lost Woman, and came to the last page of that book early Sunday evening. One of the novel’s characters, Nicole, “lost herself” due to a series of difficult life events that took place during the World War II Occupation of Paris, and now, as an older woman, she has persuaded an art historian to help her recover paintings stolen from her parents’ gallery by the Nazis. Robert, the art historian, has his own issues—whether his secret dabbling has any artistic merit at all, as well as how he feels about clients who regard art as a financial investment—and he also has difficulties with relationships. As Nicole and Robert’s lives intersect, secrets involving other people come to light, helping both Nicole and Robert resolve feelings they have carried as burdens for years.

 

Mulvahill’s research is solid and also, I’m happy to say, woven seamlessly into her story. We don’t know at first how all the characters are connected to each other, but the author has her narrative threads well in hand and brings them together in a satisfying finish. 

 

Karen and I are having a little bit of trouble trying to figure out how I can acquire copies of her book at wholesale price to offer in my shop, the complication being that her publisher is in England, and the books printed and distributed, at present, only through the online behemoth. But don’t ask about it! When we find a solution, I will let you know!

 

 

Waking in the middle of the night

 

Waking not from but to a nightmare. 

 

    Try to imagine…

 

If Jimmy Carter had roared like a maniac dictator and danced around a lectern during a rally; 

 

If Bill Clinton had invited Bill Gates to head a newly created government department and fire as many career workers as possible in the fields of education, health, science, etc.;

 

If Barack Obama had taken the oath of office without placing his hand on the Bible;

 

If Joe Biden had planned a military parade costing tens of millions of dollars for his own birthday celebration, while looking to cut services to citizens and cut taxes for billionaires;

 

If any Democratic president had ever had people abducted off the streets or out of their homes and transported to a foreign gulag without benefit of due process!

 

The latest, most pitiful thing I have seen was the current president of the United States, asked by an interviewer if he is obligated to follow the rulings of the Supreme Court and to obey the Constitution, responding, “I don’t know.” –What was that oath of office again?

 

Well, he still has his supporters (where do they get their news?), but he has royally ticked off Catholics around the world for posting an AI image of himself as pope, and Lutheran bishops in this country have come together with an official statement calling him a ”danger” to religion in America. Sadly, he is not the only danger to our country, since almost the entire Republican Party has been body-snatched by the Project 2025 crowd….

A couple of facts:

Less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as trans. Nonbinary is a real thing, though not the statistical norm. Information is readily available for those not afraid to educate themselves. You might begin here. 

As for crimes, the Biden Administration never had an “open border,” and as for fentynal coming into the country at our southern border, 80% of people arrested with the illegal drug are American citizens. Immigration is not a primary factor in illegal drugs entering the country, says the Cato Institute. See more information here. 

Issues of gender and immigration, however, are guaranteed to stir fear and are intentionally used by the Republican Party to activate their base. (Immigrants have been a convenient political diversion and punching bag for as long as our country has been in existence.) Meanwhile, far-reaching dangers are pushed to the margins by sensationalism: 

Married women who have changed their names, although citizens all their lives, will have a much harder time voting; cuts are being made daily to government programs that benefit and protect veterans, children, and elderly Americans; the American military is being turned into an offensive force, rather than simply defending our country; the richest men in the world will, if they get their way—and under the current administration, who can doubt they will get their way?—benefit from mammoth tax cuts, burdens of those cuts falling on the majority of non-wealthy Americans; the president is planning a parade on his birthday that will cost tens of millions of dollars, at the same time that he posts an AI-generated image of himself on social media as POPE; and our poor, politically battered though materially wealthy country, once a beacon of liberty around the world, has become a pariah state. THESE ARE REAL AND PRESENT DANGERS!

So by all means, MAGA folks, focus your attention on foreign drug dealers and trans Americans, and let the autocrats steal our freedom and destroy the common good while you're looking the other way, if that’s what you want. I only ask you to please open your eyes and see clearly just what you are doing! 

 

 

At the same time—

 

Take a deep breath! Ordinary life in the hinterlands goes on. New books appear, old ones bob to the surface, spring wildflowers appear, work demands attention at home and in Northport, and the days grow longer and lighter and, although erratically, gradually warmer. Today is Monday, and I planted radish and chard seeds, while blissfully innocent (ignorant?) dog girls and boys continue to have fun. Bless their hearts!!!

Spring is here, and if you're reading this, you're alive! So happy cinco de mayo, friends!

Quiet, Rainy Day Meanderings

Bubbling in the pot

One of my resolutions for 2020 was to make my rhubarb chutney closer to the time of cutting the rhubarb, rather than waiting until fall to dig it out of the freezer, and Tuesday was the day. (I started to type “Saturday was the day.” Why did Tuesday feel like Saturday? I can’t tell you.) First batch now neatly in jars, second batch will follow on another day at home. Because I did stay home on today-Tuesday-that-felt-like-Saturday. Home with rain on the roof, fire in the fireplace, dog stretched out close to the hearth. Being at home has become a habit, and one to which, for now, I cling. 

Daisies that seemed to float in the sea of tall grass are looking bewildered today, not lifting their faces to the sun but gazing confusedly in all directions. The grass is equally confused and discouraged, bending this way, drooping that way. Only the jewelweed maintains its posture, and its leaves hold forth raindrops like offered pearls.

This morning I finished my reading of The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, by Garry Wills, and the impression I formed halfway through the book was only strengthened by the remaining chapters. Wills shocked me with the realization of how much the Kennedy presidency presaged that of Donald Trump: disdain for experts and professionals; placement of yes-men and toadies in important positions; exaggerations, lies, and coverups; attempts to manipulate the press, whenever possible; impatience with normal channels of procedure; decision by impulse and instinct rather than knowledge and reflection; intolerance of disagreement; and, always, first and foremost, overwhelming concern for personal image. The big difference was that the Kennedy family and in-group were more successful at manipulating and controlling their presidential image than the current president has been.

Democratic Party? Republican Party? Philosophy and ideology ride in the back backseat when demagoguery is at the wheel.

No one goes into the presidency prepared. (In that respect, it is like parenthood.) While wise presidents make it their business to learn on the job, as quickly as they can, one who enters office as if he has, by winning an election, conquered the country and become its reigning prince does not recognize that being chief executive is a job and that the job carries duties and responsibilities. He sees only his privileges and his authority over others. It is a quasi-solipsistic L’état c’est moi state of mind. Has anyone with that perspective ever wakened from his dream of absolute power? Wills aptly notes that such power does more than corrupt: it self-destructs. 

***

To shift topics rather abruptly and radically, another realization that’s been on my mind in the past few days has to do with the collegiality of bookselling. The very word ‘collegial’ calls up the Ivory Tower, the quadrangular greensward, and men and women in medieval gowns and mortarboards, a world in which I did spend a few years. What I realize now, however, is that not only is bookselling very much a collegial line of work – I believe it to be a more collegial world than that of acadème. 

Because a bookstore is a business venture, one outside the bookselling world might be excused for thinking that bookstore owners would regard each other primarily as competition. In general, I have not found that to be the case. Other than the online behemoth who wants to put all others out of business (all retailers, not just bookstores), we booksellers applaud one another’s successes. We want to see all indie bookstores, not just ours, flourish. We see each other and treat each other not as competitors but as colleagues. 

In the Ivory Tower of the academic world, such collegiality is the ideal, but I saw something very different on the inside. It may have been otherwise fifty years ago, but nowadays, when colleges and universities are being pushed more and more into a “business” model, each department is in competition with all other departments, and each faculty member not yet tenured (tenure much rarer these days than formerly, with adjunct instructor positions replacing tenure track positions, as adjuncts are so much cheaper) in competition with every other faculty member and wannabe-hired, making for a rather cutthroat world. Harsh. Catty. Unkind. Unforgiving. Pretty depressing.

In contrast, we booksellers know from the start that we will never have guaranteed tenure. We will never have a guaranteed salary or benefits. We went into this with our eyes open, we’re on our own, we know it from the get-go – and so we recognize other booksellers as being in the same fragile, easily swamped kind of boat, and when our boats get close enough, we salute each other with encouraging smiles. “Hey! Still sailing? Great!” 

So I have no regrets about the world I have chosen. None of us is seeking world domination. Each her or his own little bit, and we’re happy to share the pie.

Stealing Time to Garden and to Read – and to Think About Horses

Morning light and dew

Stealing Away to the Woods, Too

My gardening time on Friday morning was not really stolen: I earned it by getting up and outdoors at 6 a.m. Digging, planting, watering, mulching, weeding – everything that seemed like overwhelming burdens to my morning-wakeful-in-bed mind turned out to be leisurely, rewarding, meditative activities out in the soft June morning air. “Morning has broken/like the first morning” is the beginning of a song that often comes to my mind on these occasions. It restoreth my soul.

Gardening and reading could be combined, I suppose, if one were to wear a headset and listen to a recorded book, but when I’m outdoors in the morning I want to hear the birds, just as when I read I want to hold and feel the book. There was no time to steal for reading during most of the day at the bookstore. Time to sell books, yes, and time for conversations with friends old and new, messages to leave and retrieve, even a few sallies out into the sunshine, on errands, while David sat in the bookstore, but it wasn’t until after 4:30 on Friday that I had a chance to pick up a book, and I chose was Search Party: Stories of Rescue, by Valerie Trueblood. 

Quite honestly, I began reading “The Mouse” because it was one of the shorter stories in the book, something I thought I might be able to finish before closing time if not interrupted. Naturally, I was interrupted (and that was fine, too, because it’s what I’m here for), but I knew I had my own copy of the book at home and could get back to the story later. In “The Mouse” we meet aging literary critic Lindenbaum and his much younger wife, Sofya, a poet of Russian emigre parents whose own personality or childhood experiences or a combination of the two made her a “difficult” adult. Lindenbaum’s household includes

...pets, birds as well as dogs, and even white mice for a number of years until the short life span of the mouse began to wear on him.

A single mouse appears on the following page. In a flashback to her childhood, we see the girl Sofya locked in a closet by her parents, when on the other side, visible to the child through the crack beneath the door

...a mouse appeared on the red wool and sat up to stroke its whispers, not briskly as a mouse normally does but feebly and dreamily. She felt a rush of pity for it. But was it more than pity? Was it love? The feeling swelled past the mouse – past the fir on its chest made pink by the sun on the rug, the flimsy hands curved, even without a thumb, in the ballet position arrondi, as she knew from forced months at the barre – and on, to things a mouse must know, must live for, passageways, smells, and its own kind, and from there to things unknown to it because it had to be a mouse, a world of things going on somewhere, everywhere with nothing to rule them.

Being plunged so thoroughly into a mouse’s world and just as suddenly pulled out of it again is dizzying. This is not the central incident, but now, re-reading this story I am wondering about its connection to Sofya’s relationship to the convicted accomplice in the assault that resulted in Lindenbaum’s death. Whether or not there is a connection is not for me to say. I will say that this story, slightly over eight pages long, is perfect.

Friday evening David and I were both too tired for yard work, and things were looking orderly enough that we gave ourselves the evening off. I was happy to stretch out on the front porch, by an open window, birds singing to me from the background as I read about John Quincy Adams’ sad presidency.

Corner of snow fence

On Saturday morning I rose an hour earlier -- at this time of year, at the 45^th parallel, the sky at five o’clock in the morning is already lightening to the northeast, and in this morning’s stillness the soft gurgle of our little no-name creek filtered through the willows – and worked on a brief writing project I’ve delayed starting for years, turning next to read the opening chapters of a novel by Maritta Wolff, before going outdoors with Sarah again at six to water gardens and sit quietly with sketchbook, pen and pencils. Crows and chickadees were calling by then, soon joined by robins, then a catbird and an oriole hidden in high foliage in silver maple and popple.

Tomato plants

My gardening this year is so haphazard it hardly merits the name. Tomato plants went into holes dug right in the sod, flakes of last year’s old, spoiled straw snuggled tight up against them, while I found room for squash plants in what used to be a flower garden before being overtaken by grass (plenty of newspaper under more moldy straw flakes put down to give the squash a lead in the competition with the grass) and planted melons in an old wooden box. When the melon vines manifest, I’ll guide them into the squash garden rather than out onto the grass – and hope they cooperate. Hope is the negligent gardener’s most important tool. I should say too that I was inspired this year by Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening, the latest twist (with many new variations) on Ruth Stout’s old no-work method. Found room for a couple of collard plants at the end of the rhubarb, cutting the latter back to make space.

All day Saturday, though, my mind kept turning to New York, where California Chrome would be racing for the last jewel in the Triple Crown, his owners hoping he would be the first horse to win all three races since Affirmed did it 36 years ago. No filly has ever won the Triple Crown, and only three have won the Kentucky Derby, but something tells me that the fabulous Australian horse, Black Caviar, could have taken the Crown. And I hope you followed the link to see how gorgeous she is!

But – then came Saturday evening, with all cameras and attention on one horse in a field of eleven, and that horse did not win, place, or show. Yes, it was disappointing. I was disappointed. Tonalist was my #2 pick, however, and a beautiful colt, with a story all his own, and he ran a great race to win.

More than California Chrome’s loss, I was deeply disappointed in his co-owner’s inappropriate remarks after the race and disappointed in the press for following up Coburn’s angry, unsportsmanlike jabs at other owners for taking what he called “the coward’s way out,” i.e., running horses in the Belmont Stakes that had not had Chrome’s recent grueling campaign in Derby and Preakness. (I'm not putting in a link to that intemperate outburst.) Coburn knew, taking his horse into the Belmont, that other horses in the field would be fresher. If he thought that made it an unfair race, he shouldn’t have had his horse in it. The Derby and Preakness have never been prerequisites for Belmont Stakes entry, but suddenly one angry, disappointed owner thinks they should be, and in my opinion he’s just wrong. It's easy to be gracious in the winner's circle; a sore loser casts a pall over the whole event. Tonalist missed the Derby because of a lung infection – that’s no reason to disqualify him from the Belmont. Each of the three Triple Crown races has always been a stand-alone event. 

Then, with Tonalist’s owner in the winner’s circle, a time and place for joy and congratulations, an interviewer asked Tonalist’s owner, Robert Evans, what he thought of Coburn’s “coward’s way out” accusation. Again, inappropriate! Not the time or place! Evans had no comment. Good for him!

Was it irony or poetic justice? Call it what you will, but the Evans family owned Pleasant Colony, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner that (I always want to say “who” for horses and dogs!) came in third in the 1981 Belmont Stakes, failing to capture the Triple Crown that year. “When Pleasant Colony lost [the 1981 Belmont], silence fell over his famiily’s [Evans] box.” Silence, disappointment, tears, grief are all appropriate. Calling the winner a coward is not. It’s always been very, very difficult for a horse to win the Triple Crown. That’s why it’s such a big deal.

Owners and journalists interested in “saving racing” need to give the winner his due. Trainer Christophe Clement and jockey Joel Rosario deserve congratulations, too.

Gorgeous horse, French trainer, Dominican jockey, owner whose family was disappointed by their horse's finish in the Belmont 34 years ago -- the Tonalist story deserves attention. 

I was so thrown off my feed by the sour-grapes aftermath of the Belmont that I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. Before going to bed I'd read several chapters of a disappointing self-published novel but didn't need more disappointment in one day, so in the wee, dark hours I again turned to The Adams Family. Picking up the story of John Quincy Adams after what I called earlier his "sad presidency," I was happy to learn (maybe some of you already know this, but I'd forgotten if I ever did know) that JQA did, over his son's objections, follow his single term as president with almost two decades in the House of Representatives, and those years turned out to be much more productive and satisfying to him and more important also to the country. He served from 1831 to his death in 1848, and after anti-slavery petitions had so angered Southern representatives that they instituted a "gag" rule, he fought tirelessly for the Constitutional right of any citizen to petition the government. 

I'm glad Tonalist's owner ran him in the Belmont even after illness kept him out of the Kentucky Derby, glad John Quincy Adams set aside his son's opinion that the House of Representatives would be a come-down for a former President, and glad too that I decided to plant some vegetables, after all, even without the time to prepare a proper bed for them. Not, you understand, that I'm comparing myself to either JQA or Tonalist! Just sayin'.

Life in My Book-Lined World

The Adams Family

Any reading life is marked from time to time by unexpected coincidence. I have been reading The Adams Family, by James Truslow Adams (no relation to the others, he says), published in 1930. The book deals with four generations: John Adams, b. 1740, one of America’s Founding Fathers and second President of the United States; his son, John Quincy Adams, b. 1768, our sixth president; JQ's son, Charles Francis Adams, b. 1886, U.S. Minister to England under Lincoln; and finally Henry Adams, who, unlike the three generations before him, never really seemed to “find himself” but who did write The Education of Henry Adams, not at all the book one might expect from its dry title and deserving of its place on Modern Library’s Top 100 books list. 

The descriptions of the first two generations of Adamses (I’m almost more than halfway through the JTA book), both as they describe themselves and as the author and others describe them, are frank and occasionally startling. John was generally seen as jealous and vain, mistrustful to the point of near-paranoia. John Quincy, a skilled diplomat (a quality that did not come down to him from his father), was nevertheless cold, overbearing and harsh. But as much as the personalities of John and John Quincy, I have been fascinated by the picture of American politics during the Revolutionary Period and the first decades of the new country.

Well, now (this is the coincidence) I pick up the current New York Review of Books (June 5, 2014) and find reviewed three new books on the Adams family, one on John Quincy and two focused on his wife, the first a biography, the second her own writings. The last of the three I will definitely have to read!

Not the Book I Expected

Impatiently as I awaited Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit, I admit that I anticipated a funnier book. The first, the title essay, is as funny entertaining now as when I read it online (and David laughed aloud when I read it to him), but the second chapter essay is all about violence against women, worldwide, from rape to murder. Very serious, very well done – not what I’d expected at all, but I couldn’t put the book down without reading it cover to cover. The essay (the chapters are essays, written at different times and collected in this book for the first time) on Virginia Woolf was particularly insightful, lovely and haunting. And “Grandmother Spider”! Well, you know I would be taken by the image of hanging laundry on the line:

To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your own fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

So now I am recommending Men Explain Things to Me and looking forward to reading other books by Rebecca Solnit.

Notes and Reminders

As for Ice Caves of Leelanau, I should note here that every copy I have on hand is spoken for (I won’t have more until July) and I’m not taking any more names for reservations (for fear of having more reservations than books and because I really need to have a few books available for people who walk in the door asking for them), but I have many other wonderful, beautiful, fascinating books worth attention and deserving homes! An entire bookstore full of them!

Also, please don’t forget that Dog Ears will be celebrating its 21^st birthday three weeks early (so as not to conflict with the 4^th of July), on Friday, June 13, with readings by eleven poets from the beautiful new Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry book from New Issues Poetry & Prose in Kalamazoo. Michigan art and poetry in gorgeous anthology published in Michigan – this one is a lifetime keeper, for sure.

Confession (or Resolution, or Warning)

I am carrying out a plan this season to be more selfish. As a child, I was tagged the "selfish one" of the three (I was also the oldest), but in my adult struggle to overcome that quality, I sometimes feel I've gone too far. My business -- and you know I love my bookshop! -- doesn't give me much time off in the summer, and summer (the Up North reward for surviving winter) is also the time when social engagements and yard chores also kick into high gear. So I'm taking a stand: no more summer meetings for me. I have to draw a line somewhere, and that's where I'm drawing it. No more meetings! It's more important for me to set aside time to draw something besides lines....

Georgia Road Trip, January 2003

Yes, you read that subject heading correctly: it was a full decade ago, almost five years before I started this blog, that David and I drove south with our old dog, stopping in many little towns along the way. A couple old photo CDs from that trip surfaced recently, and in response to one of my readers, Bob and Carol’s daughter (who may not even know that her mother told me she, the daughter, missed my road trip posts from other winters), I’ve decided to take one day a week for a while to revisit vacation scenes of years ago. Ready? Let’s go! The year is 2003, and we are making the first of several pilgrimages to Plains, Georgia, home of President Jimmy Carter. Plains is a pretty small town, but for part of the year it is serviced by a short line train from nearby Americus. Here is downtown Plains:

Plains, Georgia

Whenever we go to Plains (most recently in January of 2010), we plan to arrive about midday on Sunday, just in time for a big Sunday Southern dinner at Mom’s Kitchen, a no-frills, cafeteria-style restaurant with some of the best home cooking in the South. Whatever you do, do not miss the sweet potato pie!!! But then, anything you have to eat there will be good. You'll leave clean plates behind....

Mom's Kitchen, Plains, Georgia

Then we visit the Plains Trading Post and walk around the old peanut warehouses. Red clay soil and red bricks—it all makes sense.

Arcade, downtown Plains

Slightly scary old warehouse sign

Nikki had a little trouble on this first trip, and we were terribly worried that she might not even make it out of Plains. What if she died and we had to bury her there? We took pictures of each other with her, and an obliging policewoman took a picture of all three of us. She was an old dog, but she recovered and lasted another four years, bless her heart!

The old pack pauses on the road

President Carter went to high school in this handsome building, now a museum. I would have loved to watch the first Obama inauguration here!

President Jimmy Carter went to high school here

Old Plains High School Auditorium

A short drive through the countryside from Plains takes us to Archery, the little community that was Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home. Here is the house, which is in my favorite Georgia architectural style.

Old Carter home, Archery

And nearby is the store that Carter’s father ran, the store young Jimmy worked in as a boy.

Old country store at Archery

Inside country store

We’re staying home again this winter, but that’s no reason not to do a little armchair traveling. And for follow-up reading, my book recommendation to go with today’s trip is Carter’s engaging memoir, An Hour Before Daylight. It’s a lovely book to read aloud to someone you love on a snowy, cold, Michigan winter night.

[This is the twelve-hundredth post on Books in Northport.]