Holiday Weekend Saturday Miscellany

Today is the famous Northport Fish Boil! Noon to 6 p.m., but my advice is not to wait until 5:45 p.m. to get there.

My sister and brother-in-law are very content with their accommodations at Krikat Farm, just south of Northport. Deborah is thrilled by the horses, and she and Joe are both happy there’s plenty of room for their dogs to be off-leash. Little Bosco and now-big Sarah played here in our farmyard for over four hours straight, and Bosco never tired. Old Hersey, the dignified patriarch, kept his distance but did come on the sunset walk with women and other dogs.

Elsewhere, our grandchildren are waking up this morning on Mackinac Island. Will they be as excited by all the horses as I was last September? Is the sun as bright on the island as it already is here in Leelanau? I hope so!

Finally, against all odds, I not only finished that Swedish mystery novel (soon to be reviewed) but have forged ahead into the third (Indonesia) section of EAT, PRAY, LOVE. Obviously the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, was in comfortable financial circumstances to be able to devote a full year to her spiritual quest, but I wouldn’t call her spoiled. After all, she not only “got a book out of it,” but a very well-written, highly entertaining and even, at times, inspiring book. Is it worth reading? Only if you enjoy travel books and good writing…and love to laugh and think…and suspect that thinking a bit less and being more present in the moment would make you a happier, kinder, all-around better person.

What's the spiderweb all about? Reminding myself to see at least one new thing every day, I'm often captivated by the ephemeral, the things that may not be here to be seen tomorrow. I'm here now. That's my mantra.

Summer, While It Lasts

The horizon must have been ringing like a bell from the riotous living at our house recently! Our younger grandsons have been in Leelanau this week, and last night a former VERY good buddy of the six-year-old grandson was on hand, along with his mom and dad, Charlie and Barb, publishers of EDIBLE GRANDE TRAVERSE, making for a combination best-friends reunion and adult food-talk fest. Grownups enjoyed different varieties of Leelanau wines throughout the evening, while children glugged down apple juice. Burgers and fresh sweet corn and green salad, following cheese and smoked fish, filled everyone up so that only small pieces of blueberry pie and apricot-cherry upside-down cake were requested, and only Spencer and his dad asked for and finished their Moomer's Mr. Monkey Tail ice cream (banana flavor with chocolate and peanuts, and isn’t the name wonderful?). When parents sent boys out to yell in the meadow (rather than directly into our ears), Sarah was more than happy to romp along with them.

With all the company fun, along with usual bookstore hours (Bruce took the whole day for me on Monday so I could stay home and pit cherries), I can hardly believe I’ve been getting some reading done, too, but THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO has been holding me spellbound. One night, holding the paperback ARC over my head in bed, I fell asleep and dropped it on my face half a dozen times before finally giving up for the night. Nearing the end now, I’ll write about it before another full week goes by—but probably not sooner, as my sister and husband arrive tomorrow. Leelanau summer is winding up with a loud hurrah!

Town, Books

Our grandchildren arrive today! The drought is over, the storms have passed, the humidity is gone—everything is perfect for their Leelanau week.

Thinking about their coming, I took time this morning to walk around town with Sarah, trying to see Northport with new eyes. For the first time, I visited the Visitor Center, down by the harbor, and talked to the greeter there, a woman I’d never met before. The building is airy and attractive, with lots of maps and informational brochures. I invited Shelley to visit the bookstore and gallery sometime, offering her a personal tour of my Waukazoo Street domain. It’s always surprising to meet someone in Northport (especially, in this case, someone who lives in our same general country neighborhood) who is still a stranger to me.










In the marina, one party of vacationers was using the boat ramp to launch a motorboat, while someone else was tidying up a handsome motor yacht, moored against the north breakwall, doing some of the perennial little jobs always needing to be done on a boat. The sailboats in their slips sparkled, the smaller ones bobbing in the breeze.






Over on the other side of the marina, I thought at first that there was a hymn sing going on, but my second thought (I’ll check this later with Susan Cordes when she stops in) was that it might be the church pig roast scheduled for today.

Back across Mill Street from Barb’s Bakery was Keith Ashley’s beautiful three-tone vintage automobile. This is one of its three colors.








Off and on during the day yesterday, between customer purchases and while browsers were busy browsing, I read through, in pieces, EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER, by Anne Fadiman. Often hilarious, sometimes poignant, always seeming to be pointing right at me, this book had me yelping with happy laughter. Young Anne’s introduction to literature was using her father’s hardcover books as building blocks. The Fadiman family, Anne notes--father, mother, sister and brother--were a pack of compulsive proof-readers. Finally combining their respective libraries was a significant milestone in her marriage to George, and the best birthday surprise he ever gave her was a trip to a used bookstore in the Hudson River Valley. Every page struck me as so quotable that my desire swelled until I wanted to quote THE WHOLE BOOK—which of course would rather lose the point of quoting, as one of my philosophy professors in Cincinnati pointed out to another, the second of whom had underlined about eighty percent of his text of Descartes’ SEARCH FOR A METHOD. But I digress.

Let me choose an obviously self-serving favorite group of sentences from Fadiman’s Chapter “Secondhand Prose.”

“Then I saw it: a weather-beaten little shop, perched on such a declivitous slope that it looked in danger of sliding into the Hudson River, with a faded blue sign over the door that said BOOKSTORE. Inside were an unkempt desk, a maze of out-of-plumb shelves, a flurry of dust motes, and 300,000 used books.

“Seven hours later, we emerged from the Riverrun Bookshop carrying nineteen pounds of books….”

Anne and George clearly excel in the art of browsing. Not for them the hands in pockets, wary suspicion and comments along the lines of, “All we need is more books!” It is for the Annes and Georges that I have good, strong boxes on hand. Each George, each Anne, may only visit once a year, but they and I, “literary gluttons,” as Fadiman calls us, recognize and understand and even love each other. --Oh, I cannot stop! I must quote at least one more passage!

“And when the eighteenth-century London bookseller James Lackington was a young man, his wife sent him out on Christmas Eve with half a crown—all they had—to buy Christmas dinner. He passed an old bookshop and returned with Young’s NIGHT THOUGHTS in his pocket and no turkey under his arm. ‘I think I have acted wisely,’ he told his famished wife, ‘for had I bought a dinner we should have eaten it tomorrow, and the pleasure would have been soon over, but should we live fifty years longer, we shall have the NIGHT THOUGHTS to feast upon.’”

A sensible man? Or already fated to be a dreamy bookseller?

The literary glutton in me is tempted to hoard EX LIBRIS for the rest of my life, while the hard-headed bookseller in me hisses, “Sell it!” The grateful person I remind myself to be more often, however, knows that this particular book must be a gift to Bruce, the bookstore angel, who loves not only books but the genre “books on books” better than anyone I know.

IN THE NEWS: Our friend Susan Ager's last column appears in today's DETROIT FREE PRESS. Susan took the proffered buy-out but is calling her transition an "indefinite sabbatical" rather than retirement. She says she wants to be a "better friend and a better person," and, while unsure exactly what the future holds for her (there's reality for all of us!), she is keeping busy at present answering notes and e-mails from well-wishers. We'll miss her in the paper. We'll hope to see more of her around Northport. Job well done, Susan!

Time, As It Flows

PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST, by Jonah Lehrer, has a beautiful cover, and the title, as well, says, “Pick me up!” I did and was not disappointed. Turned first to the chapter on Proust, pleased to find Henri Bergson included in the story. Lehrer writes beautifully and tells the story well. Proust was keenly alive to the unreliability of memory, a truth confirmed by recent neuroscience, wherein studies have shown “that memory obeys nothing but itself,” mutating with each occurrence of remembering. “This is what Proust knew: the past is never past. As long as we are alive, our memories remain wonderfully volatile.” (A glass-half-empty person would say “horribly volatile,” I’m sure. Lehrer, like Proust, accepts and exults in reality on its own terms.) Next I read about Virginia Woolf and the illusory, slippery self (the problem of personal identity), the self that invents itself out of its own sensations, attention binding the moments together, and then Paul Cezanne, the anti-impressionist, not content with light but intent also on leaving room for and somehow inviting the viewer’s mind’s interpretation, giving us, “in the same static canvas, the beginning and the end of our sight."

I might have gone on to think and read further in a Proustian or Woolfian direction, but, by chance, the next book I picked up was Rilke’s LETTERS ON CEZANNE (written to his wife from the rue Cassette in Paris), and out of that coincidence an intention formed: after reading several letters, I looked in the case holding the art books for THE WORLD OF CEZANNE, a Time-Life volume. So, immersed in Cezanne, I was yesterday. Having dinner with three painters in the evening seemed more than appropriate. Life is too wonderful to spend it obsessing about dust bunnies. One of the painters (not David but a guest) commented that painters in Italy were probably sitting around their dinner tables moaning, "Oh, why are we not in Leelanau, with its beautiful, incomparable light?"

This morning, awake early in the dark, I got up to read, continuing with the PRAY section of Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT, PRAY, LOVE, until, for some reason, that book inspired me not to wait until sunrise to get outdoors with my dog. We were out by 6:20 (not as dark outside as it had looked from inside the house), and the sun hadn’t cleared the trees until long after we got back home an hour later. I didn’t take a camera. Just wanted to be there. Today’s images are from other recent mornings.

Downpour yesterday afternoon, another this morning. The drought has definitely broken. Fall is in the air, but temperatures still warm, and with lake water warmed up, there’s lots of good swimming yet ahead for vacationers.

Reprieve, Probably

Some news is so sad that it’s hard to share. That’s why I held back some of my pictures from the dog parade, the ones of the colorful float with the very sad sign announcing that this, the 14th, would be the LAST Northport Dog Parade! After a heart-to-heart talk with the organizer, David Chrobak, I was hopeful. Today, in the Leelanau Enterprise, came a letter from David saying that, if all the people who have volunteered to help actually step up to the plate, the dog parade WILL go on again next year. David needs people to carry banners and balloons between groups of dogs, both to add color to the parade and to keep the dogs from bunching up into one big, too-fast-paced, unruly pack, racing for the finish. Call or write or e-mail David at the Old Mill Pond Inn to volunteer your services. Keep Northport on the map! http://www.oldmillpondinn.com/

Monday Miscellany

Enjoying Aldo Leopold’s SAND COUNTY ALMANAC over breakfast, after a long cross-country ramble with Sarah, I smiled at how his observations fit with the terrain my dog and I cover on a daily basis. When he writes “that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa,” I see in mind’s eye the rotting tree trunk in the early morning deep shade, turned soft and porous as damp sponge, holding its tree shape for the time being only because nothing has yet fallen on it or torn chunks from it. On another page is this avowal: “I love all trees but I am in love with pines.” Did he, I wonder, love box elder? I cannot love box elder. Pines, of course. Birches. Apple trees. Beeches. I am in love with beech trees…. But here are words to warm my heart: “We classify ourselves into vocations, each of which either wields some particular tool, or sells it, or repairs it, or sharpens it, or dispenses advice on how to do so; by such division of labors we avoid responsibility for the misuse of any tool save our own. But there is one vocation—philosophy—which knows that all men, by what they think about and wish for, in effect wield all tools. It knows that men thus determine, by their manner of thinking and wishing, whether it is worth while to wield any.”

Later in the day Pearl Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH came up in conversation with two different bookstore customers, and I tried to recall which American novel it was that gave me something of the same feeling of historical scope and tragedy. Perhaps Conrad Richter’s THE AWAKENING LAND trilogy. Then Stephanie told me she had just finished GONE WITH THE WIND for the first time (has not yet seen the movie) and loved everything but the ending (“They should have been together!”) and I remembered that that’s how I kept feeling about the husband and wife in THE GOOD EARTH, that surely he would have to fall in love with the beauty of her soul, with her devotion to him, all her hard labor on behalf of their family. I call the story a tragedy because he never did. And because, in the end, his sons had no feeling whatsoever for the land he had sacrificed so much to accumulate.

Marilyn and I had a good catch-up session in the middle of the afternoon, beginning with my telling her about Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH, a book I picked up with a certain degree of skepticism. Reading did away with doubt. I’m ready for the change: “If you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do—stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.” My Sarah: happy, eager, relaxed, alert, comfortable—bien dans sa eau. My dog cannot exactly be my guru, but she can serve as my exemplar.

After dinner (a delicious, cool, rainy evening making our warm porch lights all the more satisfying), I forged ahead with the second (PRAY: India) section of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-seller, EAT, PRAY, LOVE. I had laughed myself through the EAT section (Italy) last winter and then somehow got sidetracked by an avalanche of other books.

It’s been a light-hearted literary day, a grazing at the smorgasbord table as time permitted, time also permitting a long dog walk, hanging out laundry, sweeping of floors, conversation with friends, appreciation for the downpour that slowed my drive home, and dinner on the porch with David. That laundry on the line is dripping wet now, but it will dry in tomorrow sunshine, and all the softer and sweeter for its soaking.

Third Saturday in August, Leelanau

At the fly-in and pancake breakfast at Woolsey Airport on Saturday morning, I took a lot of pictures. For me, one of the best parts of the fly-in is seeing the planes arrive. From the south, they fly past and beyond the field and turn, making their descent and approach from the north. Then, on the ground at the southern end of the north-south runway, they turn and taxi back, turning again to park, some by the road, others at the west end of the shorter, east-west runway. (If I’ve gotten any of this wrong, I’m sure someone will correct me!) It’s exciting to hear and see them—engines, colors, motion. The air in late August has that delicious, ever-so-slight crisp edge, and the grass is wet with dew.






Besides the planes, there is a car show, pretty informal but full of beautiful, shiny convertibles, hot rods and collector vehicles of all sorts. There are a few dogs on leashes (Sarah one of them), lots of kids, even a horse or two. (The horses are working, as was one of the dogs.) Of course, there are pancakes and sausages and syrup and cherries and coffee, tee-shirts and caps, and there is the BAND!!! I couldn’t stay to hear the band or see the Coast Guard helicopter arrive, and the soccer team was still setting up tables when I finished my breakfast, but the crowd was already huge. It couldn’t have been a better morning.



Then after a day in bookstore and gallery, when afternoon came to an end, David and I went to Peshawbestown for the traditional pow-wow, which we usually attend but which, for a variety of reasons, we had missed for the last three years. I don’t take pictures at pow-wow. There are parts of the ritual during which people are requested not to take photographs, other times when it is permissible. The wooded setting and colorful regalia and frolicking children are beautiful. Taking photographs simply isn’t the way I want to go to pow-wow. All I want is to be there, as fully as possible, not trying to do anything at all. It’s good to meet friends, to appreciate how children have grown, to honor elders and see new little ones, to eat frybread and corn soup or wild rice soup, to admire the dancing, and to feel the drums. To be permeated by the drums. As the sun sets and the colors are retired, it’s good to leave with what I call “that pow-wow feeling.” Years ago, feeling I was too tired in late August to drag myself to yet another event, I made the effort anyway and discovered that pow-wow renews me. The feeling isn’t something I want to analyze or try to explain, even to myself. It’s enough to come home with it.

Coming home, around that big, sweeping curve of Jelinek Road above Lake Michigan, we saw the white tents and lights set up on the hill for the Conservancy picnic and auction. They too were enjoying the most desirable weather possible.

It was a very good day. Was there a full moon later? We were fast asleep!

One Reader's Break Is--

Skies are blue, corn is ripe, and I’m coming off a fiction binge (tucked into wee morning and after-dark hours), ready to take it easier for a night or two with an old memoir, and the one that came to hand was TALES OF A WAYWARD INN, by Frank Case, published in 1938. Three chapters in, already I’m enchanted. Case opens by saying that other people have used his stories for years to their own profit, and now he figures it’s time for him to cash in on them himself, but he does wonder what his professional writer friends will think. --Maybe what he himself feels when amateurs want to horn in on his hotel gig. Sinclair Lewis, he said, once proposed going into the hotel business with him. Case responded by telling Lewis that “’in the space of ten minutes, I can set down on paper suggestions enough to keep two men busy for days. If your idea of hotel-keeping would be to sit upstairs in a suite and jot down ideas while I ran myself into a lather downstairs trying to execute them, I wouldn’t enjoy it. I want to be the jotter-down myself and let others do the lather.’” Lewis, he reports, backed away graciously from his partnership proposal.

Before the Algonquin, Case got his hotel feet wet at Taylor’s Hotel in Jersey City, where a sign on the back door read “NO DESERVING POOR TURNED HUNGRY FROM THIS DOOR,” but Case muses, “I always thought Owen put in the word ‘deserving’ for euphony, for rhythm, because he didn’t care a hoot whether a man was deserving or not and certainly never asked him any questions about it.” Anyone who asked for food got fed, whether or not they could pay. Hard to imagine that today, but I'm sure it was rare even 100 years ago.

According to Case, he was responsible for the name of the legendary Algonquin, as the man who hired him had planned to call it the Puritan and had to be persuaded otherwise. Can you imagine witty repartee among writers at the Puritan Round Table? A downright contradiction in terms! Dorothy Parker wouldn’t have set foot in the door.

His hotel attracted actors and writers, he says, because those were the people he liked best. Many of the names of many of the actors and writers he mentions would draw blank looks from college students. Rex Beach? Florence Easton? Buffalo Bill?

The past before one’s birth can be such a peaceful time to visit, all its quarrels and troubles long laid to rest. This, not fiction, is what I consider escape reading.

Tomorrow morning is the Fly-In from 8 to 11 at Woolsey Airport, north of Northport, and tomorrow evening is pow-wow in Peshawbestown, off Stallman Road. The waters of Grand Traverse Bay (seen here from a hill south of Suttons Bay) are bluer than blue as we head into the second half of August, wrapping up summer for another year.

Épuisée, Moi

Never do I recall reading a mystery with as many hairpin turns and switchbacks as L’AIGUILLE CREUSE, by Maurice Leblanc! Who is who? What do the mysterious clues mean? Then to arrive at the last page and have the feeling of still hanging over a cliff--? Exciting but exhausting. I haven’t the strength left to write more. Would love to see the movie, though.

Nearer home, life is more tranquil:

"Indiana Bones" -- 14th Northport Dog Parade

The morning rainclouds cleared off in time, leaving behind a cool breeze for comfort. All the dogs had their day today in our little town.







Sarah the busy book dog was a fascinated spectator: