Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Morning Is Breaking More Gently

This morning I heard robins near the house. Pretty-pretty-pretty, they seem to boast proudly. Sparrows trill in the popple grove, crows call raucously from a distance, the heart-lifting sound of a sandhill crane comes from far overhead, and the woods rings with sounds of the busy cleanup crew, woodpeckers in dead and dying trees. 

Spring’s arrival varies from year to year and can be quite teasing with its advances and retreats. We may yet have another blizzard. But if we do have a big snow in April, as I used to tell the Artist, “It will be a spring blizzard!” And sooner or later the seasonal page will be turned for good, and there will be only memories with which to answer the inevitable Up North spring question, “How was your winter?”

Mornings are easier and more pleasant with less cold wind and more birdsong as Sunny Juliet with her nose, I with my eyes, both of us with our ears explore a morning world that never grows stale. No two mornings –no two moments! -- are ever identical.

Reading her morning newspaper

I’ll keep this short today. One bookish thing on my mind is the idea of a ‘page-turner.’ You know, a book you can’t stop reading until the end. It strikes me now (and I have not taken time to develop this thought) that page-turners are of at least two different sorts. Some are consumables: That kind of page-turner is like a deep tub of popcorn at a movie theatre, a near-mindless reading binge. Such books serve a purpose in our lives. They provide a day’s distraction and relief. Tomorrow we will be ready to face our own life situations again. 

The second kind of page-turner is a life-changer, or at least a mind- or heart-changer, as well as a page-turner. We find ourselves totally immersed in a new world, seeing life through freshly opened eyes. Even familiar elements encountered in such a book evoke a new surge of love from us. We can’t stop reading because we are spellbound, enchanted.

 

Those in the second group are likely to burrow into our lives for good, as precious as old friends of whom we never tire. At least, that’s how I see things this morning on the eve of the Ides of March. How about you? And what's going on in your neck of the woods?

Will there be more? Stay tuned!

For what I learned in a very, very important new film, tap here. For a comforting soup, winter or summer, tap here. Thank you for sharing links with anything you find worth sharing.

Bogged Down

That pond on Alpers Road

 

 …Northwest Indiana’s Kankakee was an extensive swamp-marsh of more than 500,000 acres on a sandy dune outwash plain, in retrospect [emphasis added] called “one of the great freshwater wetland ecosystems of the world….” 

 

      The Kankakee River snaked its 250-mile way through the swamp in two thousand twists and bends, a slow absorbent river punctuated with bayous and edged by riverine forests.

 

-      Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis (Scribner, 2022)

 

When I was a girl growing up on the Illinois prairie in the 1950s, the term ‘wetland’ was not part of our Midwestern vocabulary, and my fascination with any ‘swamp’-like area that caught my eye was not generally shared by family or friends, but our postwar neighborhood outside the city limits of Joliet, Illinois, was filling in with houses on every 40-ft. lot, and while I appreciated -- for their expansive views of sunset and thunderstorms -- fields of soybeans or corn (in alternating years) across the road from my parents’ older home on the westernmost street of the subdivision, it was wildness I craved. 

What we called “the slough,” down the street, was semi-wild but also stinky and, sadly, forbidden – though if it hadn’t been stinky, its water except in flood barely moving and topped with scum and patches of iridescent oil, I’m sure the prohibition would not have been nearly as effective. As it was, however, most of my hunger for wild wetlands had to be satisfied with sightings from car and train windows. 

Every autumn our mother would take us along on expeditions to gather cattails, milkweed pods and bittersweet for indoor fall arrangements (cattails, common as they are in my northern Michigan life, still hold dreamlike associations for me), and on a long train ride to Florida one spring, unable to stop gazing out the window at the romantic scenery flowing by, I made up a story, mile by mile, to accompany the moving panorama, peopling every hummock with strange, dangerous characters that my sister told me years later had given her nightmares.

 

A memorable high school biology field trip involved wading in a creek and discovering and collecting caddisfly larvae, but visits to the Kankakee River were an annual occasion for years, with church choir picnics held at the river shack as they called it, belonging to the choir director and his wife. I didn’t know then that the original 250-mile river had once boasted 2,000 “twists and bends” before, beginning in 1902, being dredged and channeled into straight-line segments, such that its length was reduced to 90 miles. I had no idea the Kankakee Marsh, before its trees had been felled and land drained for farmland, had once been called “the Everglades of the North.” Stop and think for a moment: reduced from 250 to 90 miles in length, stripped of its trees (“oaks, walnuts, elms, sycamores”), and natural flood-absorbing marshes filled in to become farm fields.

 

My strongest memory of the river that flowed past the shack was the sucking, silty, clayey mud that had to be slogged through to reach water deep enough for swimming. When we climbed the ladder to the floating raft, our legs were coated up over the knees in that clinging mud. The water was thick and brown, too, and at the time, and given my age then, I never wondered if the river might once have been different. Now, bit by bit, parcel by parcel, efforts are underway to restore at least pieces of the once extensive wildlife area. Read this to learn more.

In Leelanau

“It is, of course, possible to love a swamp,” writes Proulx, recalling a larch swamp in Vermont that she loved in her early years. And while the fen and bog sections of her book have more to do with peatland destruction, it is the section on swamps that whispers more seductively to my personal experience. Swamp is sometimes a transition zone between higher land and fen or bog, the key difference being that swampland supports trees. There are trees in the Everglades and in the waterlogged wilds along the Suwanee River in Florida, and there are wetlands in northern Michigan where the Artist and I found beavers at work, spied cardinal flower in bloom, or hushed to watch a heron stalking fish or a raccoon washing its hands -- or where a friend and I waded slowly, reverently, into a wonderland of sunlight filtering down through the branches of yet-leafless trees where grassy hummocks held blooming lady’s-slippers as far as our wondering eyes could see. 

 

Scandinavia and Canada are rich in bogs. Proulx tells us that the word ‘muskeg’ comes from Algonkian and Ojibway words, ‘maskek’ and ‘mashkig.’

 

Fen peat forms in groundwater locations where reeds, sedges, cattails, rushes and bog beans grow in mineral soils. The plants around the edge and in the water grow, then perish, season after season, gradually filling up the fen with partially decayed vegetable matter that over thousands of years [emphasis added] becomes fen peat. 

 

-      Proulx, ibid. 

 

In the Yoop

On Saturday evening I pulled a comfort book from the shelf at home (for there are comfort books just as there is comfort food – surely, as a reader, you have favorite comfort books of your own?), Lovely Is the Lee, by the same Robert Gibbings whose Coming Down the Seine I so recently enjoyed, and only a few miles inland from Galway, Gibbings is exploring moorland and bogs, where “Black bullocks munch the heather” and “Wild geese rise from the bog.” The year is 1945, and the old ways are still practiced. Turf, Gibbings tells us, 

 

…is cut with a slane, a narrow spade with an ear at right angles to the blade so that two sides of the sod are cut at the same time from the stepped face of the bog. Each newly cut sod is like a large brick, dark and oily.

 

-      Gibbings, Robert, Lovely Is the Lee (Dutton, 1945

 

An experienced slanesman could cut four tons of raw turf in a single day, which then had to be spread to dry, stacked, and finally thatched with straw “against the weather.” Gibbings, as does Proulx, notes that much material culture of previous ages is uncovered in the cutting of bog turf: bronze and obsidian implements, wooden dishes, canoes and paddles, clothing made from wool, skin, or leather. 

 

The title for today’s post came to me, however, in addition to my reading, by way of a figure of speech. We say we are “bogged down” when we are stuck, as in mire, unable to move forward. The Cambridge dictionary gives examples as examples using the expression “Let’s not get bogged down with individual complaints” and “Try not to get too bogged down in the details.” A related figure of speech is “swamped,” meaning overwhelmed, as if one is flooded. There is also the Slough of Despond, which Proulx mentions, from the classic Pilgrim’s Progress. All felt appropriate in this shortest month of the year.

Because February is a difficult month for me, with day-by-day anniversaries of the Artist’s final weeks of hospitalizations and surgeries, the emotional gamut we ran from confident hope to his final days, his last birthday. Images and sentences and remembered feelings from that time swamp my dreams and solitary hours. I don’t want to say I am permanently bogged down, only that --- what? I don’t want to profane it by trying to put it into words.

 

As you know, though, I have a dog, and there is no crawling into a hole and playing dead when one has a dog. No, the dog has to go outdoors, and so the dog momma has to get dressed and go out, too, and this discipline my companion imposes on me is a life-saver. 

 

"Let's get the day started!"

Following springlike days, we had a heavy, wet snow that quickly became slush, only to harden to cement when the temperature dropped. Then the temperature dropped further, and more snow came overnight Friday, this time the light, fluffy stuff beloved of cross-country skiers. Single-digit wind chill. And Sunny Juliet discovered something new in her Michigan world: ice on our little no-name creek. She tried it, but it was not strong enough to hold her weight. Luckily, the creek is shallow. Only her feet got wet. And the dog momma didn’t want to stay outdoors for an hour in the cold wind, anyway.

Sunny exploring frozen creek...

...where she broke through the ice

And yet we went out again in the afternoon and again the next morning and again the following day, morning and afternoon, because this is our life, and it’s what we do. We wake up and get on our feet and go out into the world.

And now, did I write myself out of the swamp? Or was it my HappyLight that did the trick? The patches of blue sky and beautiful cumulus clouds we had before grey skies returned? Or my lovely little companion, always so happy be outdoors with me, whatever the weather, always full of energy and enthusiasm even when I might be short on both? Maybe all of those contributed to an afternoon happier than the dark morning had been. There is no way we can live two different lives at the same time, in some kind of sci-fi controlled experiment, and know for certain which is preferable or better or more true. One life, each moment of it a gift to do with as we will….

She says, "Be happy! We have each other!"

Snowbound!

Early Saturday afternoon, 1/13/24

Winter has finally arrived in northern Michigan. Almost halfway through January, we are having the weather that many years has landed on us as early as November – cold winds, snow squalls, heavy accumulation and blowing and drifting. Lots of horizontal snowing, Friday from the south, Saturday from the north, Sunday morning from the west, as far as I can tell. Everyone, in villages and countryside, is praying we don’t lose electrical power. The power company was busy clearing trees away this past fall, but those of us in the country, on wells and without generators, took the precaution ahead of the storm of filling large containers with water, because this is not our first rodeo.

Snowy Juliet

Sunny Juliet loves the snow and doesn’t seem to mind the cold wind. She will often put her nose and paws to work to unearth (unsnow?) hidden treasure, which could be – and has been more than once -- a mouse nest or a deer leg. I’m relieved when it’s only a windfall apple.

What's under here?

An apple!

You might guess that, besides water, I am prepared with plenty of books for a snowbound siege. On the serious end of things, I’m halfway through Angus Deaton’s Economics in America and should finish it soon, though it isn’t the book I expected. Rather than a unified treatise on how the American economy is put together and how it works overall, the book is a compilation of various shorter pieces written by the Scottish author (who is at now Princeton now and has lived in the U.S. for a couple of decades) over a long period of time, updated and introduced for this volume. There is a lot in it about economic inequality (as well as what he calls “relational” inequality), with closer looks at American health care costs and retirement finances, all of which he is able to contrast with those overseas, usually in the U.K. and Europe. So far my favorite observation is this one: 

 

Chicago economics gave us a healthy respect for markets, as well as a previously underdeveloped skepticism about the idea that government can do better, but it left economics with too little regard for the defects of markets and what they can and cannot do. Not everything should be traded. The profession bought too far into the idea that money is everything and that everything can be measured in money. Philosophers have never accepted that money is the sole measure of good, or that only individuals matter and society does not, and economists have spent too little time reading and listening to them.

 

It isn’t often that anyone outside academic philosophy thinks that philosophers deserve a listen, so thank you, Angus! Here’s another bit in the discussion of Chicago economics and Milton Friedman that I found thought-provoking: 

 

Friedman dismissed much of inequality as natural; some people like to work hard and get rich, while others prefer to enjoy their leisure. Some like to save and build up fortunes for their heirs, while others are more concerned with their own immediate enjoyment. Any attempt to diminish this sort of inequality would penalize virtue and reward vice. 

 

A couple of thoughts come to mind here. 

Hard work does not necessarily lead to riches. My maternal grandparents were some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known, and I know people today, younger than I am, who labor intensively for hours no rich person would ever consider and who will never be rich. Sometimes their hard work is a choice, while other times it is not choice but necessity. There are plenty of people who work hard, do not get rich, and have little leisure. Friedman’s dismissal (if Deaton has summarized it fairly, and I have no reason to think otherwise) is an oversimplified false dilemma. Life is not that either/or.

For those among the not-rich, whether hard workers or otherwise, if they have chosen a way of life that does not involve hard work and are content with not being wealthy, why should this be seen as “vice”? And why is working to accumulate wealth, apart from other life goals, to be considered “virtuous”?

 

Economics fascinates me. I have never understood people who hold strong political views, many of them based on economic policies, who have never themselves explored the subject of economics but rest content with a chosen ideology.

 

My snowbound reading, however, is not all so serious. My own home bookshelves turned up a children’s book I don’t remember ever reading, The Trolley Car Family, by Eleanor Clymer and illustrated by Ursula Koering. Published by David McKay, with a copyright date by the author of 1947, The Trolley Car Family opens with Mr. Jefferson, grouchy next-door neighbor of the Parker family. Mr. Jefferson has to hitch up his horse and wagon in the middle of the night to deliver milk while the rest of the neighborhood is still asleep, and when he comes home to try to sleep, the Parker children are always making noise. 

 

Mr. Parker is a motorman on a street car, and (unlike Mr. Jefferson) he loves his job. Complications arise when the trolley company decides it is going to transition from trolleys to buses. Buses! 

 

“Always hated the durned things,” said Mr. Parker. “They won’t stay on a track. You never know what they’ll do, careening all over the street. Now with a street car, you know where you are. But with these buses, the cars are all the time swooping in and out around you. I don’t like it.”

 

“I don’t blame him,” said Mrs. Parker. “I never did like to see a man do something he didn’t like.” 

 

Things take what looks like a temporary turn for the better. When Mr. Parker is able to buy his old street car and rent a piece of land five miles from town, and Mr. Jefferson offers the use of his horse and wagon to get the street car from the end of the line to the rented land. The Parkers invite Mr. Jefferson to come along, and he obtains vacation time to do so.

Everyone is happy except for reminders that this summer idyll is not a permanent solution. Sally, the oldest Parker child, reads the writing on the wall.

 

…The boys could hardly wait to be grown up. They were going to do such wonderful things! But Sally had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be so easy. When you were little, you thought that grownups could do whatever they liked. But lying there in the twilight, listening to their voices, she knew that they couldn’t.

 

Pa and Mr. Jefferson just wanted to stay out here, milking the cows, or weeding the garden. But Mr. Jefferson had to go back to his job, and Pa would have to find a job soon, and they would all have to go back to town and leave this nice place. And Ma knew that Pa liked farming, and felt sorry that he would have to stop. But they couldn’t do as they liked. They had to think of the children. The children had to go to school, and have meals and clothes. So the grownups had to work.

 

Sally felt like waking the boys up and telling them what she had discovered. But she knew it wouldn’t be any use. They were too young. 

 

Of course, this is a book for children, a mostly happy book, where all ends charmingly for everyone, so I managed to enjoy it without thinking too much about Earl Butz coming along with his “Get big or get out!” policy for small farmers, but what a coincidence that a bit of this mid-century children’s book should echo some of my thoughts while reading Angus Deaton on economics….

I have also started Eagle Drums, by Nasugraq Rainey Hopson, and want to get back to Henry Van Dyke’s Little Rivers, and then there is a beautiful little antique volume I received as a Christmas present, Le marquis de Grignan, a book about Madame de Sévigne’s grandson by Frédéric Masson. 

– Oh, oh, oh!!! And it’s about time I start re-reading Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, too! Plenty to occupy me for as long as this winter storm lasts!

Watching from indoors...

...with my girl by my side.