Catsup and Puppies and Books and Flowers

HI, there!!! I'm a better dog every day!!!

What do you call it?

Catsup? Ketchup? Catch-Up! When I was a kid, in our family we said catsup. Just what it was to us. (Red catsup, yellow mustard, green (sweet) pickle relish. No onions. "Onions don't like me," our mother always said.) We never specified tomato catsup, either, just catsup, but one year in Kalamazoo I made something called elderberry catsup, a fantastic counterpoint to fall game dinners in Leelanau County. This year? Maybe a little red elderberry catsup again in my near future! 

Okay, that whole line of what the Artist would have called quacking is going nowhere. I just needed an opening paragraph, so there you go. Take it or leave it. 

 

Puppy Class

We take a lot of stuff to class!

I wrote on June 29 that Sunny Juliet and I were going to our first puppy class the next day, because I hadn’t received an e-mail that would have told me that dogs were not supposed to attend the first session! It was orientation for us “guardians,” as we’re called. Oops! Of the six dogs in the class, one other dog’s owners -- excuse me, guardians -- had also missed the e-mail and brought him, so two rowdy six-month-old pups had to be crated in separate rooms while we humans learned what was ahead for all of us. 

 

This week Sunny and I went to the first real class. One dog and guardian pair hadn’t showed up, so there were only five dogs total, each in a separate lane, all facing the instructor, two of the dogs barkers. I cannot lie and say that Sunny is the class star. Far from it! (Though two of the young dogs or old pups, whatever you want to call them, have already been through an infant class and had a running start, so to speak.) But Sunny did not bark at all!She pulled terribly on her leash, but she didn’t bark! Big progress from where she started out in Arizona, as some of you may recall. By the end of the hour she had even settled down quite a bit, and the instructor assures me we’ll get to the desired “loose leash” in time. “Baby steps,” she said encouragingly. So I was happy and told Sunny over and over what a good girl she was. She is doing very, very well on responding to command words. Good dog!

 

The long drive to way south of Traverse City, an hour in a room full of dogs (the high-ceilinged room seems very full when a couple of the dogs are barking!), and another long ride home again takes a lot out of us both, and then I’m in a hurry to get up to Northport to my bookstore for what remains of the afternoon, SJ quite ready for some quiet crate time. In the evening we will be back together again and happy to play in the yard. And so, yes, day follows day relentlessly, the weeks racing by, summer in full blur-speed --.

 

My Recent Reading

 

There There, by Tommy Orange, was a novel I had to put aside for a few weeks, after reading all but the last 40 or so pages. Orange is a marvelously gifted writer – no doubt about it. Here is a small part of one of my favorite passages:

 

…The drum group played on the first floor – in the community center. You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. High-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song. 

 

Tommy Orange, There There

-    

 

My problem with the novel was not the author’s brilliant writing or his vivid characters or even the gritty urban lives and scenes. It was seeing where it was all going to end and not wanting to get there. What with my husband’s death, memorial gatherings, the ongoing political angst in our country, and never-ending COVID-19 concerns (let’s not even mention Ukraine or monkey pox, shall we?), I chose to postpone reading the final chapters until I felt emotionally able to do so. I will say that, in addition to the quality of the writing, this book is important in that it highlights an urban life lived by many Native Americans today, life that rarely appears in American literature, where it very much belongs. 

 

There were a couple books that I did not read carefully but skimmed through and skipped around, so they are not on my list at all. One of these was Claire Bidwell Smith’s Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. I gave it a look-through because grief as a subject matter always catches my attention these days, but I have not had the experience of anxiety the author says she found so often among her therapy clients and was only somewhat interested in that aspect because I have friends who, although not necessarily grieving, do suffer anxiety. But Smith makes the case that the anxiety component can come from long-ago, unresolved grief, and to me that sounds a little like some of Freud’s theories, in that supporting “evidence” can always be found, once the premise is accepted, while it seems immune to counter-examples. Who has not suffered some past loss – if not death, then something else to grieve? Handy explanation!  I did appreciate the author’s insight that the well-known attitudinal stages popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had to do with people facing their own deaths, not those mourning deaths of loved ones. 

A book of letters from and to the artist Mary Cassatt and her circle of friends I read also selectively, not in its entirety. Some of it interested me, some of it not.

 

I finally read all the way to the last page of The Outlaw of Camargue – mostly for the setting, the Camargue, which I found appealing – though for a while I thought I might not bother. The characters never lived on the pages for me (descriptions of appearance and dress insufficient to make them come alive), the story line was more a thin excuse than a plot, and the defense of royalism left me cold (although heaven knows the Revolution was guilty of violent excess almost right from the beginning), so I set it aside for a while to read the charming God Returns to the Vuelta Abajo, after a couple of nights with Cyrano de Bergerac. The Camargue book is interesting, however, if approached as a travel narrative, so that’s where I have it shelved – in travel and history – though noted as fiction. 

 

Cyrano – oh, my goodness! I have been reliving my own life lately, not only in photographs but also in letters, and after an emotional couple of hours reading from my own archive, how could I help being moved all over again by Cyrano’s story? And I’d forgotten the heartbreaking ending! Oh, heavens! My own love story was much, much happier --. Again, gratitude!

 

The list goes on…. as does the garden....

 

72.      Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (nonfiction)

73.      Mosley, Walter. Down the River Unto the Sea(fiction)

74.      Rostand, Edmond, trans. Brian Hooker. Cyrano de Bergerac (drama)

75.      Orange, Tommy. There There (fiction)

76.      Keiser, Melanie Earle. God Returns to the Vuelta Abajo (fiction)

77.      Sadlier, Anna T. The Outlaw of Camargue (fiction)

We are tested in many ways.

 

Will Sunny be on trial Thursday morning? It will be our first puppy class! Will the other puppies be younger, smaller, and less obstreperous? Will we "pass" the class, or will she be so wild that we'll be kicked out? She’ll be excited, I know, when we enter the big working arena, as her dog mom repeats a calming mantra to herself to calm her nerves!

At least puppy class will give me a break from Widowland, this strange new challenging country I now inhabit. Some widows tell me, “It gets easier,” while one said the third year was worse than the second, and yesterday I was told, “It doesn’t get easier. It gets worse.” Obviously, experiences vary across the widowed population. One woman could not bear to look at old photographs or read old letters, whereas I cannot keep from what are to me precious and tangible evidence of past happiness. 

Evidence. There’s a concept that brings me to larger national events. Hearings proceed on the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and while many Americans are glued to their TVs, just as many (or so it seems) are steadfastly avoiding the unfolding story. I have neither television nor the leisure to watch it nonstop if it were available, but I have tuned in on the radio a couple times in the car and have read news summaries of various days’ presentations. 

I was distressed, though, when one friend said her reason for not watching is that the hearings are a “show trial.” What? The term “show trial” indicates the pretense of a trial (i.e., not a hearing or hearings but an actual staged trial, and a rigged one at that), in which the verdict has been decided beforehand, with evidence often manufactured and confessions of guilt forced. Example: the Stalinist show trials that took place from 1936 to 1938. 

 

The trials were held against Stalin’s political enemies, such as the Trotskyists and those involved with the Right Opposition of the Communist Party. The trials were shams that led to the execution of most defendants. Every surviving member of the Lenin-era part was tried, and almost every important Bolshevik from the Revolution was executed. Over 1,100 delegates to the party congress in 1934 were arrested.  The killings were part of Stalin’s Great Purge, in which opportunists and Bolshevik cadres from the time of the Russian Revolution who could rally opposition to Joseph Stalin were killed. He did so at a time of growing discontent in the 1930s for his mismanagement of the Soviet economy, leading to mass famines during periods of rapid and poorly executed industrialization and farm collectivization.

 

-      https://www.historyonthenet.com/stalin-show-trials-summary

 

My friend did not mention Stalin but pointed to the Watergate hearings, which she finds unproblematic, because “most Americans thought Nixon was guilty.” (If his guilt was assumed beforehand, wouldn’t that have been a “show trial,” if it had been a trial and not a hearing?) The whole point of a hearing is to decide if there is enough evidence to proceed to trial. If the prosecution’s case is weak, perhaps there will be no trial, but if one does take place, the defense at least has a good idea of what it will face in the courtroom. From the little I have heard and read, plenty of evidence that we did not have before (example) has been placed before the public in the January 6 hearings, reams of it now public record. Of course, self-selected segments of the public can choose to avoid looking at the record, lest their opinions be challenged by documented facts....

Then there is … Facebook. Here confusion between hearings and trials reigns supreme, with the addition of those refusing to follow the hearings or dismissing the evidence (without having heard it) objecting to the procedure they do not understand and are not following. Example: One comment on a friend’s Fb thread reads: “This Stalinist inquisition has NO rebuttal or cross examination.” (Ah, there! Someone has brought in Stalin! See above quoted passage and compare and contrast Stalin’s trials to today’s hearings.) Well, it happens that the former president did issue a rebuttal statement, twelve pages, and here it is. Typically, he repeats claims already found to be baseless and attacks the current administration’s record, which is not at issue in the hearings. As to cross-examination, that would take place at trial stage, if criminal charges are brought. 

As Abraham Lincoln might say were he alive, in a larger sense America itself is on trial today. Can a nation conceived and dedicated to equality under law long endure, and are we dedicated to the task of preserving our heritage? 

The Past Catches Up with Me (In Two Parts)

(If only!!! Could not resist this image.)

 “They never did anything with that degree. What a shame!” Oh, yeah?

 

Some people probably think I have always lived in the past: books printed on paper and bound between covers, handwritten correspondence, two-lane roads, and so on. Not to mention (but here I go, doing it) memories! And on that oh-so-postmodern platform called Facebook – Is this a paradox? Life is a paradox! -- I have reconnected with many friends from my graduate school days at the University of Illinois.

 

The latest reconnection, however, came from a surprising and unexpected quarter. A friend back in Leelanau County, Michigan, mentioned in a brief e-mail that he had been in contact with a “a philosophy prof and--as are so many--a professional magician,” Larry Hass. Larry Hass? Could it be the same Larry Hass who completed his Ph.D. work while I was in graduate school in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois? Larry, the Merleau-Ponty scholar, married to Margie, the logician, the couple who hosted the only Super Bowl party I have attended in my life? 

 

It was! Holy cow! Talk about a career change, Larry!

 

Magician Larry Hass onstage

Back in graduate school, we downtrodden students used to peruse the APA’s monthly “Jobs for Philosophers” bulletin every time it came out. At my already advanced age (old enough to have been the mother of a couple of my office-mates), I figured gloomily that the best I could ever hope for would be a series of one-year sabbatical replacements. Two of my cohort have remained in the academic world (Larry and Margie were a year or so ahead), but others in that group have taken diverse paths --one a lawyer, another with his own IT company, a third a prize-winning winemaker, and so on. Now, from the cohort ahead of us, a magician! I figure this gives new meaning to “Jobs for Philosophers”!

 

Actually, when I was still in graduate school I thought there would be an interesting book in real-life JFPs. Some of my early examples of people who studied philosophy for shorter or longer periods of time and ended up in very different fields included: filmmaker Errol Morris, who also worked for a while as a private detective, as you’ll see if you follow the link; warlord Charles Taylor of Liberia, not to be confused with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, please; and comedian Steve Martin. And, of course, not to be immodest, how about bookseller moi? My magician friend and I agree that neither of us regrets our time spent in graduate school or the degrees we earned. We feel fortunate to have had that experience, both the agony and the occasional ecstasy of it.

 

 

“There is no shortcut to a long relationship.” 

 

There. I have quoted myself. It’s what I said to someone long ago who expressed a wish to have a relationship like the one the Artist and I had. 

Our love affair, the Artist's and mine, spanned nearly 47 years, and there were many, many complications and difficulties along the way. It was certainly not all moonlight and roses, especially for the first decade and a half. There was a long stretch when we thought we had lost each other forever. And when we made the decision to give each other -- and ourselves! -- another chance, the issues that had brought us to grief before remained to be worked through, and the working-through was not always easy, let alone idyllic. That second honeymoon period was, however, because of our deep love for each other and because we were finally ready to start growing up, more heavenly than hellish, and the heavenly portion grew richer as the years went by. 

 

Growing up is something I’ve been thinking about in terms of long relationships, too. The Artist always said that living me was like living with a 10-year-old girl, and I would tell him that living with him was like living with a 14-year-old boy. Neither of us wanted to be, ourselves, or wanted the other to be, completely grown up. Where would the fun be in that? We both loved each other's (often unleashed) inner child, and it was lovely to act like kids together, singing silly songs in the car on road trips, for instance, and generally sharing our enthusiasms with each other. The aspects of being not grown-up that had been terrible pitfalls for us in our first decade together were what we had to leave behind in order to go on together.

 

One reason I’m dwelling these days on the subjects of long relationships and growing up, other than reliving my happy marriage and missing my husband, is that I have a very young puppy. And oh, the trials of puppyhood! This little girl is very lively, willful, and challenging, and there have been days when I have felt overwhelmed, even at times discouraged. But I keep renewing my personal pledge to guide her to maturity as a good dog, one with whom I can grow old, and in the past couple of days I have seen noticeable progress.

Thinking about giving me backtalk

 

One of Sunny Juliet’s most annoying habits and one that made me very sad was the way she would bark at strangers. Men, women, children – bark! bark! bark! So I’ve been working on that by taking her to different places and feeding her treats when anyone appeared, telling her “No barking” and “Good dog!” And I can now report that it is paying off at last. As of yesterday, I don’t even have to provide a steady stream of treats! She went into the office at the tire shop with me and didn’t bark when another customer came in. I took her into the library, and she did not bark at the librarian. Today at the coffee shop, she didn’t bark at all, at anyone, not even the delivery person carrying huge boxes up the sidewalk to the front door. I tell her “Sit,” and she sits, “Down,” and she lies down. She doesn’t stay seated or prone, but she’s only a puppy, and when I repeat the command, she obeys again. She is maturing, and we are both learning patience with each other. 

I know the road ahead in my relationship with Sunny will not be all moonlight and roses, any more than a marriage can be a honeymoon every day. I’m not that naïve! Sunny is getting through her toddler testing period, and then in a while will come her rebellious teen period. But it doesn’t matter. We are bonding, and we’re in it for the long haul. No shortcuts but enormous rewards. And fortunately, there is always an inner puppy remaining in the oldest dog.

A future of Sunny mornings

All Blessings Are Mixed

Sunny Juliet had me at my wits’ end the other day. She can be so naughty! She wants to bite and chew my shoes -- while I am wearing them! -- ditto my blue jeans, ditto table legs and books, if I relax my surveillance for two minutes, and she is a very naughty barker. I’m working hard on the “no barking” business, but it breaks my heart when she barks at some little girl or boy who only wants to be friends with such a cute puppy. And because of what David and I went through with Peasy, I can’t help worrying: Is SJ showing signs of serious temperament problems? 

All moms worry, and dog moms are no exception to the rule. I was cheered and consoled, however, when a friend e-mailed me about what an “asshole” (excuse the term; it’s the one she used) their dog was in his first three years of life (Three years? Lord, preserve me!) When young, he did all the naughty things SJ is doing now. I also looked up “naughty puppy” sites and found that regret is not an uncommon response to the trials of puppy parenthood. 

Of course, in my case, the feelings of being overwhelmed and challenged beyond my limits are exacerbated (exacerbated: one of the Artist’s favorite words) by having lost my beloved life partner, whose generosity and concern for me had helped bring the puppy into my life in the first place. Complicated! What would David think now, if he were here with me and Sunny? Our Sarah was so unbelievably easy that raising and training her did not prepare me for the realities of another, more typical puppy at all!

But no, I do not regret this puppy. Just knowing that Sunny’s “naughtiness” is normal puppy behavior gives me the patience to deal with it lovingly, and we are going to make it, this little pack of two. I don’t know what the road ahead has in store for us, but we will be traveling it together. And please, do not tell me to “take one day at a time”! There is no other way to take life, and don’t think I don’t know it!

Sunny Juliet is a sweet companion and a huge responsibility. She often makes me laugh and sometimes drives me crazy. She eases my loneliness and curtails my freedom.

Everything is a double-edged sword has always been my philosophy of life in a nutshell, which is about all the philosophy people usually want to hear. It’s right there in the words of the marriage ceremony, isn’t it? “For better or for worse.” Or, as Billy Joel put it, “I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times.” Please note that I often had "clever conversation" with the Artist, but we could be just as happy holding hands or looking out the windshield together and saying nothing at all. We didn't have to audition for each other. 

The blessings of life and love carry with them the inevitability of loss and death, and so I thank my lucky stars for my wonderful life and cry over Billy Joel songs while Sunny takes a little nap.

Rules of Thumb

Napping puppy! Break for puppy mom!

My life these days seems to be governed by rules of thumb. Here are a couple of examples I’m finding especially pertinent:

 

o  For each day in a hospital, expect recovery to take a week. Ten days in a hospital, then, make for a ten-week recovery time.

 

o  A puppy can go an hour between eliminations for every month of age, so expect a two-month-old puppy to be able to last two hours from one pee/poop session to the next.

 

Merriam-Webster defines ‘rule of thumb’ this way:

 

(1)       A method of procedure based on experience and common sense;

(2)       A general principle regarded as roughly correct but not intended to be scientifically accurate

 

Apparently there is no evidence linking ‘rule of thumb’ to legal wife-beating in 18^th-century England! 

 

Those words “roughly correct” in the Merriam-Webster definition reminds us that a rule of thumb is not hard and fast. Some patients recover more quickly after hospitalization and surgery, others take longer than the one day/one week rule suggests, and some two-month-old puppies can sleep for five hours at night before waking and needing to go out. There is wide variability in individual cases. Faced with unfamiliar situations, however, as I have been recently, it's helpful to be able to estimate outcomes and adjust expectations somehow, and a rule of thumb gives us a compass, however wobbly, rather than leaving us completely at sea.

 

My analogy above set me to wondering about what kinds of rules of thumb might be applicable to sailors. One I found says, “When in doubt, take the longer tack first.” No doubt sailors will understand what’s meant by that. Here’s another one for deciding how much anchor chain is necessary in a given situation:

 

...So how do you decide what is safe before looking elsewhere to anchor? Traditionally you use the scope – a multiple of the water depth to determine the length of anchor chain you’ll need to use. The RYA suggest a scope of at least 4:1, others say you need 7:1 but in crowded anchorages 3:1 is quite common.

 

A moment’s thought, however, tells you that a static rule of thumb in an environment that can significantly change in different conditions will not sufficiently account for the main forces acting on your boat, namely the wind and the tidal stream....

 

Given that reminder that a static rule of thumb is not sufficient in every situation, sailors will want to read the entire article!

Sunny Juliet taking a brief rest break from outside tomboy play

A kind friend and neighbor (I have wonderful neighbors here in Dos Cabezas, AZ!) did the driving yesterday on my commute to see the Artist in the hospital in Chandler, up southeast of Phoenix, and that same friend and neighbor puppy-sat with Sunny for over three hours so “dog parents” David and Pamela could have a good, long visit in the hospital. Back home in the evening, it was early night-night for me here in the ghost town. Missing my life partner, I chose one of his favorite books, The Count of Monte Cristo, for my bedtime reading but never got beyond the first page. In fact, I had to read the first sentence over several times to get it to sink in.

 

 

On February 24, 1815, the watchtower at Marseilles signaled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. 

 

-      Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

 

Would you have been able to name that novel, given the first line?

 

Speaking of the Artist, his birthday is tomorrow, 2/21, and I would be happy to convey birthday wishes to him from far-off friends. Just leave a note in a comment here, and I will read him what you write. Thanks!

Okay, I found the picture I really wanted! Both were taken on the porch at Source of Coffee, in Willcox, AZ, but I love David's laughter in the one below. Now, if only I could remember who he was talking to that day!

THIS IS MY GUY!

Holiday Weekend "Made in Michigan"

Every time I look at a weather forecast for the holiday weekend, the result is different, so I’m throwing up my hands and taking a wait-and-see attitude. What we get is what we’ll get. Thursday has been lovely.


Lake Superior Month (June) at Dog Ears Books was a lot of fun, and I still have books, puzzles and CDs in stock from the U.P. Now for July, thanks to artist Kristin Hurlin from Glen Arbor, I have some new made-in-Michigan items from much nearer home. Hurlin’s single notecards are being offered individually for $3.50 or in a pack of eight for $20, with all 8-packs featuring four different designs except the one that has two tree-designed cards (Balsam fir and white pine), the trees being a new project she has just started. (One of Hurlin’s original paintings, from which the cards are printed, sometimes takes as long as long as a month to finish.) There is also a beautiful coloring and activity book, illustrated by Hurlin, that features Michigan fruits, showing flowers and cross-section drawings and plants as they grow on typical fruit farms. It makes me happy to have such beautiful items to display in my bookstore, and the card rack definitly needed filling out. Now with Kristin’s and Ellie Golden’s artistic work added to my modest photograph notecards, there’s lots of color and variety.

There was a young newbie in Northport today, a Sheltie pup named Laddie, adopted from "down Cedar way" and moved up to our neck of the woods for the summer. I'd call him Sarah's new friend, and it's true that they are interested in each other and have no ill will, but neither have they quite made up their minds about the relationship, either. Scroll back up, though, and see again how cute Laddie is posing near the doorstop dog! I don't think Sarah will be able to resist this adorable Michigan pup for long, do you?