Diving Into July

A different day: June image

Without a literal dive, I submerged myself in the silky waters of Lake Michigan for the second time this summer when I took Sunday off to go to the beach with my two younger sisters visiting from Illinois. There was a haze in the air and families clustered in temporary vacation-day encampments on the beach where Bohemian Road (C.R. 669) ends at Good Harbor. Despite all the people, however, there was enough space between groups that the beach didn’t feel crowded. No one was loud, the few dogs with their families were well behaved, and the whole vibe of the day was happy and peaceful. 

 

After time in the water, I stretched out on a beach towel between my sisters, the three of us chatting idly on and off, sometimes entirely quiet. I had left both my dog and my phone at home. So peaceful! 

Beyond the crowds, from my sister's phone...

Every once in a while my mind wanted to zip back to work or ahead to check the calendar, and each time I took a deep breath and told myself, Don’t move. Be here now. I didn’t even have a book with me on the beach (although one of those big umbrellas would make reading on the beach feasible, if someone had more than a couple hours of summer vacation). Later I realized that Sunday's beach interlude was probably the most relaxed I’ve been since Christmas Day 2021 in Dos Cabezas with the Artist and our dog, eating and napping and watching movies all day, just the three of us….

 

With possible rain in Monday's forecast and a morning that began with heavily overcast skies, I decided not to take a second day off. My sisters voiced no objections. They always enjoy exploring in my bookstore, as well as going farther afield in Northport (the Pennington Collection is one of their favorite shopping stops), and this year they had lunch at Around the Corner, bringing me a quinoa burger that I was still enjoying, bite by tasty bite, at noon on Wednesday.

Until we meet again!

It was too bad my sisters had to start back to Illinois Tuesday morning, because that evening was the first of four Tuesday evenings in July at the Willowbrook featuring Michigan authors, a series put together by the Leelanau Township Friends of the Library and named for its initiator, the late Suzanne Rose Kraynak. For this first 2024 event, a presentation in memory of Nancy Giles, I was not only selling books for author Don Lystra but also interviewing him about writing in general and about his new novel, Searching for Van Gogh. We enjoyed our onstage conversation, and the audience seemed to enjoy it, also. I must say I love having other people do all the setup, so different from events in my bookstore, and everyone does a beautiful job at the Willowbrook.

 

These days at my bookstore on Waukazoo Street, I’m gradually digging out from under the latest tsunami of used books to land in my shop and trying not to think about the thousands yet to be moved before summer’s end. It’s only July, after all, so right now my focus is on books already in Northport -- although many terrific new books are coming out, too, these days -- every week, it seems -- and I am eagerly awaiting delivery of more copies of Jim Olson's People of the Dune, so popular I had to back-order when my supply ran out.

Used cookbook section is FULL!

And, surprise! Classic Isaac Asimov paperbacks --

Fiction, poetry,

and books for your outdoor adventures.

At home, with all the rain we’ve had, grass is ready to be mowed again, gardens need weeding and edging, and always there are those pesky, invading autumn olives to be checked and rooted out. Sunny and I will restart our agility sessions with Coach Mike on Monday. I’ve had a couple of new editing jobs, too, so life is busy. It's a good thing that summer days are long.

These raspberries don't pick themselves, either!

Someone Is Two Years Old Today

First picture I saw of her

First time I met her

Sunny Juliet is two years old today, Monday, the 18^th day of December, and she is not suffering from the “terrible twos” at all -- that is, I am not suffering terrible twos with her. The little crybaby puppy (“Tiny Girl”) and teen barker (“Naughty Girl”) has settled down considerably. She still barks on occasion (often public occasions I would rather did not include barking), but in general the challenging, demanding, willful, opinionated puppy has become a pretty grownup dog girl and a delightful companion.

Naughtiest thing she ever did (when about a year old) 

Summer tennis ball play in the yard

(Does that video work???)

Sunny and I are staying in Michigan all winter this year -- quite possibly from now on; time will tell -- and that’s fine. Although without canine encouragement, it’s unlikely that I would be going out for early morning walks every cold winter day, starting before the sun has crested the wooded horizon and regardless of how hard the wind is blowing, she needs it, so we do it, and it’s good for both of us. Fresh air! Exercise! Cold doesn’t faze the little girl, and she loves snow!

Last year in Arizona snow

First big Michigan snow for Sunny

Sunny is accustomed to my daily routine, always ready for more time outdoors when afternoon brings us back together after my work day. She will never learn to read books, and I will never have her keen nose for invisible trails in the grass, but Sunny is patient with my morning and evening reading, and I make sure we have ample time outdoors. Learning to be patient has been good for Sunny, and time outdoors is always good for me. Voilà! We both gain and enjoy each other more when we give each other time and space to indulge our respective gifts and loves.

Happy birthday, little girl! The momma loves you!

Sunny wants more snow!

From the Fringes -- Grateful

At some point in the life of this blog – and I can’t tell you the exact date when it began – I began to refer to him as “the Artist” rather than as “my husband” or by name, following a kind of minor tradition among bloggers, who often use first-letter capitalized common nouns to stand in for the names of steady partners who play a part in their stories. My point today is that until he died in early March 2022, I was married to an artist whom I called the Artist, because in my life he was the one who counted.

 

His studio and gallery, in the same building as my bookstore, had a separate entrance, but a doorless doorway connected my bookstore to his space. Nevertheless, on busy summer days, with people coming and going for hours through our respective domains, both of us living days brimful of talk and laughter with friends and strangers, along with sales of books and paintings, we might not see each other until day’s end, when at last we had time to share accounts of what had transpired in our side-by-side but separate realms. Both in those physical spaces and in our lives beyond Waukazoo Street, his art world and my book world intersected and overlapped and enriched our life together year after year. In this bookstore blog I called him the Artist. His name was David Grath.

 

The late years of our winter life (“seasonal retirement”), from 2016 to 2021, were different from summers in a Michigan tourist region. In a small rental cabin in a ghost town in the mountains of southeast Arizona we lived, as he described it to friends, “joined at the hip,” or, “in each other’s pockets.” Each of us had a corner of the cabin for reading and writing and thinking. Beyond that, the kitchen area was pretty much mine to arrange and reign over, while he was guardian and ruler of the television (with an antenna on the roof, several stations came in clearly) and DVD player, their remote controls a complete mystery to me, but we were within physical reach of each other more often than not. 

Early days in Arizona ...

... when our spaces were yet spare.

Summers, we drove separate cars to work. Having me on hand next door to answer questions of visitors to his gallery, he was free to take leave whenever the spirit moved him – to visit artist friends in their studios; to take the slow “county cruises” he loved, soaking in the landscape for future work; to attend to little jobs that needed doing back at home. My summer days were spent on Waukazoo Street; his were there and elsewhere. 

Out on the town -- Willcox, AZ

Again, Arizona winters were different. With a single car between us, it was a rare day when one left the cabin without the other. Instead, almost always, after I returned from a long morning ramble on foot with one dog or the other (we only ever had one at a time, but two figured in those years of cabin life), he and I, usually with dog, would set out on the road, armed with water and snacks, books and notebooks and sketchpads. We might have a destination in mind when we left home base, but those days were always revisable, each one an improvisation. There were forays up to Tucson or into Santa Cruz County to see friends, as well as expeditions north to Safford on a favorite mountain road; the majority of our explorations, however, took place in Cochise County, our home base. The second year I worried that it would be old hat for the Artist, no longer an adventure, that he--not in love with Cochise County as I was--would find our surroundings boring. One winter after another went by, though, and we never exhausted the possibilities. Never got to Ramsey Canyon or King Ranch, for instance. Besides revisiting favorite places more than once (Faraway Ranch, for instance, in the Chiricahua National Monument; Turkey Creek Road; Whitewater Draw), we kept discovering unfamiliar and exciting places easily reached on day trips: a shortcut across the Sulphur Springs Valley or a back road to Bisbee, a new coffee house or junk shop or shady stretches of the San Pedro River that held running water.

Of course, our life together had not always been divided between Michigan and Arizona. Years earlier, before and following a spate of Florida winters (Weeki Wachee first, then Aripeka), we had stayed put, first in Leland, later in our old farmhouse between Leland and Northport. One year, snowed in for a week in Leland, we would walk “downtown” every day: Main Street, only two blocks from our house, had everything we needed--post office, bank, the Early Bird for coffee, the Merc for groceries, and the library on the other side of the bridge. Earlier still had been the Kalamazoo years. After we moved to the Leelanau Township farmhouse in 2001, winter was more challenging, but we still managed even when the power was out – once for four days. Our stove and fireplace worked on propane, and we had candles and oil lamps. “This is how old Joe and his wife lived,” he observed one of those cold, snowy evenings. Winters meant adventure at home.

 

But life with the Artist had always been an adventure. Short on money in Kalamazoo (“I’m tired of being poor,” my son complained, and my husband told him, “We’re not poor, we’re just broke”), we visited flea markets and thrift shops and had wonderful, far-ranging conversations over endless cups of coffee, our untethered imaginations reaching far beyond our physical surroundings. For every day of life constrained by finances, we had years of dream lives in which we created a combination tea shop and bookstore in Kalamazoo; raised shallots and rabbits in Leelanau County; lived part-time in Montreal; and furnished a pied-à-terre in Paris with finds from the Marché aux Puces de St.-Ouen. We never stayed in the cheapest U.P. or Wisconsin motel room without redesigning and refurnishing it in our combined imaginations, in case we were ever “on the lam” (don’t ask me for what!) and had to live in that one room. We “wrote” screenplays during car trips or, again, over coffee – that is, talked our way through the films as we invented them, committing nothing to paper but having a wonderful time envisioning the development of our stories on the big screen.

 

The artist’s life is not an easy one, nor is the bookseller’s life a road to riches, but the two of us were never in it for the money. For years I carried in my purse a tiny strip of paper from a fortune cookie (opened in spring of 1987) that read, “Your path is arduous but will be amply rewarded.” A forecast fulfilled: My path has been amply rewarded. (And yes, there were also arduous times.) My love and I made a rich life together, and my life alone continues to be enriched by what he brought to it, as chance encounters reveal more and more memorable stories people share with me about conversations they remember having with David. He had a gift for making memorable moments and hours.

 

Harlan Hubbard wrote of his life with Anna that they lived “on the fringe of society.” While Grath life cannot be compared to Hubbard life, in many ways ours also was lived on the fringes. Michigan, after all, is not either Coast. (“By the time an idea gets here from one of the Coasts, it’s worn so thin you can see right through it.” Someone I know quoted that to me. I have no idea who said it first.) My artist husband was not shy about saying that he wanted to create beautiful work. (To make art that shocked was never his aim.) I have written no books but have been faithful to this modest blog since fall of 2007. Far from the world’s power centers of art and commerce, we pursued work that felt valuable to us.

 

Well, now comes an unexpected postscript to the Artist’s life: The French translator of Jim Harrison’s work has unearthed two screenplay treatments, written in 1977, by David Grath & Jim Harrison, and the English pages have been translated and will appear in a new “omnibus” edition of Jim’s work from an imprint of Éditions Gallimard in Paris, the tentative release date November 2024. How thrilled the Artist would be! He had such a good time writing those treatments with Jim (neither ever sold, let alone produced), and to think they will be in a book published in Paris – he would be over the moon!

 

So that’s my news from Northport today. – No, one more piece of news, this one very local: Not only on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but every Saturday in December, from 3 to 6 p.m., there will be horse-drawn wagon rides through the village. The horses are Clydesdales, the wagon bright red and festively decorated, so December Saturdays in Northport will be wonderful days for residents and visitors alike.

 

And yet one more (last?) note. I’ve been writing Books in Northport since September 2007. If you enjoyed this post and have friends who might appreciate it, also, please share a link. Comments here are always welcome, too. Thank you for your support – for my blog and for my bookstore!

 

And Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Window on Waukazoo Street

Now, WHAT was that new subject I had in mind? (Ah, yes! “Work and Play”!!!)

Smoke from distant fires --

A few disparate items had been tumbling around in my head, and for a few moments they seemed to come together under a topic heading. What was that heading, though, and what were the thoughts I hoped to connect? I’ll just start tapping away while waiting for a return phone call or e-mail and see if anything thoughts fly back….

 

-- I’ve got it! I’ve got it! (So I went back and added it into today’s post’s subject heading.) Work and Play!!! That will, I hope, tie together some thoughts on dogs, art, me, women in general, jobs, and business. The return e-mail came, too, so everything is back on track for the moment. Remember, though, that the moment is always fleeting....

 

 

Work and Play: Dogs

 

Sunny Juliet is an Australian shepherd, and many friends assumed (and still do) that her breed is the only explanation needed for her demanding puppyhood, but Sunny was something else! Yet, “She needs a job,” people kept telling me. 

The idea that herding dogs “need a job” has entered the general American consciousness and is wisdom now repeated even by people who have no dogs of any breed. But practically perfect Sarah, hybrid border-Aussie, was “something else” in the opposite direction of Sunny, laid back and easy going almost from the day she came home with us at four months of age. Peasy, that beautiful Aussie boy with his tragic issues, learned quickly and was compliant in ordinary matters; his problems flashed out as unforeseeable exceptions. Sunny Juliet? I have never had such an opinionated dog in my life! She has settled down hugely in the past year, however, and we now live together in harmony most of the time.

 

Sunny loves to be outdoors. She loves to go rambling with me, exploring the world, and she loves to play, chasing tennis balls or a Frisbee or a stick or anything else I throw for her. We have yet to get back to the agility lessons, but she remembers “Jump!” and “Tunnel!” and does them beautifully on command. 

 

The question is, does Sunny need a job? That is, does she need sheep or cattle or, at the very least, a flock of ducks to move around? 

 

Here’s my answer: What Sunny needs -- probably what any herding dog needs and no doubt what most dogs need – is mental stimulation combined with physical exertion. 

It doesn’t matter at all to Sunny if she “accomplishes" anything or not by chasing a tennis ball (or jumping a hurdle). Her little mind goes on high alert when she sees me preparing to launch the ball, and she readies her muscles to spring, run, and catch -- or run, chase, and retrieve. Which way will the ball go? Where can she interrupt its trajectory? Will there be a bounce first, or will she catch it in flight? This is more than a game to her. It is an opportunity to use her skills, and she loves it. Her eyes tell the story. If she were herding sheep, the same mental calculations and decisions about speed and direction would come into play. “Into play” = working. 

 

You see my point? I absolutely believe that herding dogs do not differentiate work from play. They love activity and problem-solving, and they seem to love doing things with their humans. Right now Sunny is lying at my feet, waiting patiently for something to happen, some move on my part that gives her a reason to follow me curiously wherever I might go next. 

 

 

Work and Play: Art

 

Marsh marigolds, just because.

Many years ago, a guitarist in my life noted, “Other people work. Musicians play.” We do use those words. (“I have to go to work in the morning.” “Our band is playing at Music in the Park.”) And yet a musician, every bit as much as a carpenter or a nurse, has to learn and practice to acquire skills and keep them sharp. 

 

Is it society’s failure to value musicians and other artists sufficiently that their work is seen as play? Or is seeing art as play a good thing, reminding the rest of us to find joy in our daily lives?

 

“How long did it take you to paint that?” someone would ask the Artist from time to time, and he would answer, “My whole life,” and when we were in the car, slowly driving our favorite county back roads, he was always “working,” in that he was taking in the colors and lines and shapes and richness of the land. When sitting quietly, he might be thinking through an idea for a painting, but when standing at the easel, he would tell me, “You can talk to me. I’m painting, not thinking.”

Photograph of David Grath by David Brigham

 

Work and Play: Me

 

Someone at the recycling center north of Northport saw me the other day and asked, “What are you doing now that you’re not doing?” I was nonplussed. “Not doing”? It’s true that I took six months of seasonal retirement (maybe for the last time!), but I’m certainly doing plenty now! Cleaning and organizing my house after having to empty out the Artist’s studio last fall before I left; getting my yard and gardens in order; preparing to open my bookstore for the season – and that’s only a general outline, with none of the myriad details. 

And now we have a couple more cold nights coming....

Do I differentiate between work and play, or am I more like a herding dog, needing physical and mental activity but not separating it into work/play categories? That’s my question here.

 

Cleaning is definitely work. I won’t say that no thought and planning goes into it or that there’s no satisfaction in seeing the fruits of my labor, but I only engage in it as a necessity. Yard and garden tasks are different. Definitely work (my muscles make sure I get that straight!), but my outdoor projects are ones I choose, not burdens imposed on me, and even mowing grass is work I enjoy. 

I will be open as soon as possible -- but when? When the Fates allow!

My bookstore is chosen work, too (though not the cleaning part: that’s imposed by entropy, a fact of life). No one would start a bookstore and run it for thirty years without a love of books, and my bookstore is a world I have created over time, but it’s certainly more than play. I’m not “playing store.” Bookselling is my livelihood. 

 

Robert Gray wrote a piece recently in the e-mailed book business newsletter, “Shelf Awareness,” about how annoyed he gets when anyone thinks booksellers just sit around and play with their cats all day. You can follow this link and look for the last article in the issue if you’re interested in what what else he had to say. 

 

 

Work and Play: Women

 

I’ve often noticed that women tend to characterize their experiments and trials in the fields of arts and crafts or gardening as “playing around,” in situations where a man would never use such language. Do women (in general) take their activities less seriously than men? Are men (in general) more concerned with having their activities respected? Is “playing around” – with ideas, concepts, designs, arrangements – a belittling and overly modest way of speaking, or does it connote a joyful, playful, open approach to life?

Just because I love them!

 

Work and Play: Jobs and Business

 

A job, even when a necessity, can be chosen work, and a business had better be chosen if the business owner is going to be happy in it!

 

While either jobs or business can involve pleasure and even love, though, they generally need to be taken seriously, and I’d say this is especially true of a business. A job you can quit. Give notice, turn in your keys, and hit the road. Closing and then dismantling or selling a business isn’t so simple. It's more like giving up a home. – And before I am besieged with questions, No, I am not thinking of closing or selling my bookstore! I’m just thinking of ways that a starting a business and keeping it going are a pretty serious commitment.

 

 

So what is my ‘play’?

 

If my business is my work, and this blog is related to my work (sometimes very peripherally, I admit), and if the outdoor jobs I love are work (albeit happily chosen), and since I don’t play bridge or softball, do I not play at all? That would be pretty pitiful, wouldn’t it? 

 

Walking in the woods with Sunny, exploring and observing the natural world, my country drives and photography –all those I experience as play, so much so that I often feel as if I’m “playing hooky” from all work that awaits me in my house and my bookstore. 

 

But no – you know what? Learning and appreciating the natural world is something I feel a joyful obligation to do -- as if it is, more than anything else, my life’s most important work. My way of practicing gratitude for the gift of the world. So I guess, in the way I approach life, I’m quite a bit like Sunny Juliet!

 

Informational Postscript: You wouldn’t guess from the foregoing that I am in the middle of an infrastructure disaster at home, a combination electrical/plumbing crisis. If my bookstore isn’t open on Friday, as I’d hoped, this is the reason. Wish me luck, send good vibes, don’t ask questions! My plate is full enough as it is! Thanks --

Fleeting May! These blossoms are already gone!

 

Reading For Pleasure

 

Do you read for pleasure? For work? For information? 

 

Information, of course, as we all realize, is of many sorts and sought for many reasons. (Egad! Don’t I just sound like that boring sister, Mary, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? Forgive me, please!) For example, friend and I were puzzling over the research findings of the newest Nobel Prize winners in quantum physics, that of “entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated," but a sentence my friend read to me from the New York Times over the breakfast table (she is visiting from Ann Arbor for a couple of days) only increased our bafflement: 

Measuring one of a widely separated pair of particles could instantaneously change the results of measuring the other particle, even if it was light-years away. 

 

"So," I asked, "are the changes in the particles or only in the measurements?" We quickly leapt to the uncertainty principle, which I have always liked because it points to limits of human knowledge, and I like the principle for its reminders that human understanding of the universe, however much it expands, will always remain partial, but my question remained unanswered. I can phrase it another way: Are we learning more about particles or more about measurement? 

 

If you follow the link above, you’ll see further links to what we might call (awkwardly, I admit) sub-subjects, and the one that caught my eye asked, “Does colour exist when no one is watching?” Unfortunately, the diagrams that might have answered that question (did they?) were accompanied by text in Swedish. I was reminded, though, of conversations with my beloved husband, the Artist affirming to me more than once that color exists only in the presence of light – as what philosophers call a “secondary quality,” something partly in the object and partly in our own perception. I always asked, though I knew the answer, if I couldn't turn the lights on very fast! and catch color waking up.

 

I will never be a quantum physicist.

 

Physicists and physicians, engineers and programmers need information for their work, but an author writing historical fiction also reads for information related to her work, though the work is very different in kind. She is recreating a whole world, not exploring the world of today. And writers of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, dystopic narratives, etc.) create imaginary worlds, but they also need to be grounded in whatever natural, physical, and social sciences give plausibility to their imagined worlds. Presumably, those scientists and novelists are doing work they live and so find pleasure in the reading they do for information. 

Others of us are just plain curious. I read history and economics not professionally but because I crave understanding. Why are things the way they are? How did they get to be the way they are? My larger point – one of them, at least – is that reading for pleasure does not have to be only easy reading, and by no means does reading pleasure have to be limited to fiction. 

 

Here, for example, is part of a preface to a book on geology:

 

This work attempts to hold a position between textbooks and books of light reading. The formal textbook would not suit the class of readers addressed. The style of light reading would have been unworthy of the theme, and would not have supplied the substantial information here intended….

 

The method of treatment is simple. The reader begins with the familiar objects at his very door. His observations are extended to the field, the lake, the torrent, the valley, and the mountain. They widen over the continent until all the striking phenomena of the surface have been surveyed. Occasionally, trains of reasoning suggested by the facts are followed out until the outlines of geological theories emerge. The course of observation and reasoning then penetrates beneath the surface … striking fossils … nebular theory … retrospect and reflection … a relish may be stimulated ….

 

-      Alexander Winchell, Walks and Talks in the Geological Field (1886)

 

Only a few days before this book came into my hands, a geology student from Grand Rapids had visited my bookstore and found a few useful textbooks on her subject. What I wished I’d had for her, though, were some of the books on geology that, for me, stimulate relish and speak directly to the fascination so many of us find in rocks and landforms:

 

Bass, Rick. Oil Notes (1995)

Leveson, David. A Sense of the Earth (1971)

Pettijohn, F. J. Memoirs of an Unrepentant Field Geologist (1987)

 

I’ll add to that –

 

Lopez, Barry. Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape (2006)

 

All these books deal with material all too often presented in dry textbook style for people originally drawn to the subject, drawn outdoors, and drawn to pick up rocks and climb mountains by beauty and mystery, while these books are definitely to be read for and with pleasure.

David Grath in Texas Canyon

Note: This post could be taken as an extension of the previous post on reading subjectively. So, not a critic and not a quantum physicist!

Summer Life, Leelanau (Mine, That Is)

 

Dear Friends,

 

When people ask how my summer is going, I say, “It’s a blur.” In September, when they ask how it was, I have said for years, “It was a blur,” so I am repeating myself shamelessly, but that single word captures the feeling so concisely that my answer admits of no improvement. 

 

Summer does, however, slow down on my days off. Days off! What a concept! 

 

For years I kept my bookstore open seven days a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Ah, but I was younger then, for one thing. For another, many of us discovered in the COVID-19 year of 2020 how much more human we felt when we weren’t pushing ourselves to be “productive” every single day. 

 

We still work hard, those of us Up North with what are still largely seasonal businesses, and it isn’t always easy balancing the demands of business with maintaining our homes and gardens and social lives, but homes and their outdoor settings and time with visiting friends and family, as well as relaxing with life partners and pets – all these precious aspects of life have moved up on the priority list since the experiences of 2020. So if you miss me on Sunday or Monday, I’m sorry, but I’ll be back Tuesday morning, with the door open.

 

I do love my summer days at home! And after recharging with a day or two of mowing grass and hanging laundry out on the line and playing with my dog and helping the Artist with barn chores, I love going back to my bookstore! 

 

Reading Report

 

9     92.  Lively, Penelope. DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES: A MEMOIR (nonfiction)

9   93.  Shoemaker, Sarah. MR. ROCHESTER (fiction)

Only two books added to my Books Read 2021 list this past week, and one was a re-read. That was Sarah Shoemaker’s brilliant novel, Mr. Rochester, which I had not re-read for a while and which captivated me all over again. So good!!! I can’t understand why there was not a bidding war among publishers to determine who would have the rights to this novel, and I am amazed that there is not yet a film version in production, although the book came out in 2017. Whether or not you have read Jane Eyre, if you have not read Mr. Rochester, make time this summer!

 

I lingered voluptuously over Mr. Rochester, stretching it out over several nights and mornings, but read quickly through Penelope Lively’s memoir, Dancing Fish and Ammonites, thinking as I read that this is a memoir more for writers than for the general public. Writers are all too often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” and while most find the question maddening and unanswerable, Lively’s memoir does a good job of explaining it in the case of her own work. 

 

 

What’s Happening in Northport Report

 

Almost all the usual events are back on in Northport this year, except for the Fly-In/Pancake Breakfast in August and Leelanau UnCaged in September, both cancelled but due to return in 2022.

 

There were fireworks for the 4^th of July, with a reading of the Declaration of Independence that morning on the post office steps, and we will have, once again, dog parade in August! The 2021 theme is "2021: A Space Pawdyssey" (coincidental, what with the Virgin Galactic flight, eh?) and I’ll have more details coming up soon.

 

The library author series is back, also, and this Tuesday will be author Cari Noga. Her presentation will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Northport Arts Association Building on 3^rd Street (a roomier venue than the library), and I will be on hand to sell books following her talk – books she will happily sign for those making purchases. 

 

Meanwhile, that same evening back at David Grath’s gallery on Waukazoo Street, an old friend of the Artist from Kalamazoo, James Burkett and another musician friend of his, will give a free concert, beginning (I think) at 7 p.m. 

 

Yes, it is a conflict – for the Artist and me -- but that is summer, folks. Wednesdays the Jeff Hass Trio performs at the Union on Waukazoo Street, and Friday nights are Music in the Park, and there is not a single day or evening of any summer week without something going on. – Which reminds me that tonight, Monday the 12^th, there is an opening at Pier Wright’s gallery on Mill Street from 6 to 9 p.m. We hope to be there. Maybe we’ll see you?

 

 

Peasy Report

 

Peasy absolutely loves our Sundays together, all three of us working and playing outdoors all day, maybe going for a ride in the early evening, and seeing a dog’s happiness is a bond-strengthening joy for the dog’s human companions. Plus, Peasy let me clip three toenails on Sunday morning! Three!

 

Here’s another day-at-home dog note: When I pick raspberries, little Pea accompanies me and picks a few for himself, pulling one berry at a time off the canes with his lips, just as my dog before Sarah used to do. (Many, many years ago the Artist and I had another fruit-eating dog. In fact, Barkis would eat anything -- even lemons -- but raw smelt. There he drew the line.) 

Sadly, Peasy is not such a cute, funny boy when I drop a clothespin on the ground. Clothespins are triggers for him, for some reason, and they bring out his inner Mr. Hyde. Confrontation! So I have now added to our regular lessons periods of Sit and Stay while I drop a clothespin and pick it up, over and over.

And so, as sand through the hourglass, are the days and the dogs of our lives….