Heading Back North, Day 1

The van was all packed the day before. Sarah and I were up and out early, visiting with Ida and Weiser on the bridge at sunrise. I made coffee but not breakfast, waiting for David to be ready for that, and sat down with Kevin Jackson’s wiggy book, Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities, a series of essays on ‘paratexts.’ Huh? Oh, you know, written parts of a book that are not the book, per se—titles, dedications, prefaces, and the like. Pretty funny and just right for a morning before a long road trip when I didn’t think I would be able to concentrate sufficiently on the history of ideas.

As we left Aripeka, honeysuckle was blooming, Weiser and Ida lying by the side of Fiddler Lane, Carl and Mrs. Carl going into the Community Club. Bye-bye!



The sky was blue, drawing us north along Hwy. 19. In the median, some wonderfully bright, deep pink flower was blooming in blankets, but I’m not good at identifying small flowers at 55 mph. Dianthus?



Except for a brief lunch atop at Perry, Florida, we stayed on the move all day—no stopping to look at wildflowers or photograph buildings (though there was some great ones) or saunter along Main Streets or scour flea markets (none open on Wednesday)—and rolled through northern Florida and the beautiful Georgia countryside. What a great road! The only departure from it was due to a wrong turn (and honestly, I did not miss the right road on purpose!), which took us through the towns of Sasser, Dawson and Parrott before cutting cross-country on a couple of two-lane roads to get back to our divided highway. It all worked out great. The towns we saw were worth the detour (I’d like to go back to Parrott someday to explore on foot with my camera), and the roads were all smooth as silk.

It’s unusual for us to cover 400 miles in a day, but that’s what we did, stopping for the night in Thomaston, Georgia, where David headed for the showers, and I went out to forage for dinner. Jackpot! Greek take-out!

How close to a perfect road day can a person ask for? Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, here we come!

Cats for Kathie

A friend of mine loves my dog but has to remind me sometimes (though I had have had and loved several cats in my life)that other people love their cats, too. Here are a few pictures I collected for Kathie. The first two are Aripeka cats; the third is from a mural in New Port Richey.

A Brainful (Running Over?)

Thought for the day:

MSU won #2 place in college basketball for the entire nation! Yea, green! You’re our team!

Last days in Aripeka:

Varnish is drying on paintings. Ten boxes of books are packed. Strong winds have been tearing at the coast for 24 hours and are still at it, and the furnace came on a couple times during the night. We will leave before the cold front, so it’s time to pack up the warm-weather garments of a fairly contented winter and prepare to re-enter the zone of real winter, because while the calendar says spring, the TV screen last night showed flurries in Detroit, and we’re going farther north than that.

For all these weeks, turning off Hwy 19 onto Aripeka Road has reminded me, every time, of turning off M-22 onto Setterbo Road in Leelanau County. It’s a slowing down, leaving behind the hustle-bustle world and re-entering the quiet, green world of home. Won’t Sarah be surprised to see the farm again? I can hardly believe it myself!

What I Will Miss

Sunrise over Hammock Creek…sunset over the Gulf of Mexico… flight of herons…the mystery of tide coming in and going out…Carl Norfleet’s friendly face and greeting…visits from Weiser and Ida…having all the time in the world to read and write…espresso at Paesano’s…gyros in Tarpon Springs…meeting people and pets at the dog park…the warmth of the sun…bright colors...long, restful views over the sawgrass….



A Serious Reading Recommendation:

The History of European Liberalism, by Guido de Ruggiero, translated by R. G. Collingwood. Oxford University Press,1927; Beacon press paperback, 1959.

My thoughts on this book began as an e-mail to my son. Ian, I know you read the blog (even though you don’t like the word ‘blog’), so I hope you won’t object to sharing, with people you don’t even know, what is still, first and foremost, a letter to you, since it has always been a joy to me that you and I share these interests, even though we often disagree.

I bought my paperback copy of The History of European Liberalism back in February, I think, at Poe House Books in Crystal River, but somehow other acquisitions from Poe House and elsewhere claimed my attention first, and as acquisitions have continued through the season, It was only Sunday morning, sorting and meditating on packing all the many books I've bought, that this one came to have its turn with me. After a walk with Sarah, cup of fresh coffee in hand, I sat down on the front porch and began to read the translator's preface. Well! You know the feeling on the first or second page of a book when you become so excited you can hardly bear to sit still and read the sentences in order?

Liberalism, as Professor de Ruggiero understands it, begins with the recognition that men, do what we will, are free; that a man's acts are his own, spring from his own personality, and cannot be coerced. But this freedom is not possessed at birth; it is acquired by degrees as a man enters into the self-conscious possession of his personality through a life of discipline and moral progress. The aim of Liberalism is to assist the individual to discipline himself and achieve his own moral progress; renouncing the two opposite errors of forcing upon him a development for which he is inwardly unprepared, and leaving him alone, depriving him of that aid to progress which a political system, wisely designed and wisely administered, can give.

You see what I mean? Collingwood's preface is only two pages, the second page not even full, and yet he commands attention with this distillation of the essence of de Ruggiero's thesis. Then the translator, following the author, poses the crucial question, whether political freedom is

…destined to disappear, crushed between the opposing tyrannies of the majority and the minority, or has it the strength to outlive its opponents?

Such a question, posed in such a way, is not one I can resist. The recent political history of our own country--here I detour from exposition of the book in question to my own personal opinion--not excluding the nominally Democratic administration of Bill Clinton (and that’s how I think about that), enlarged the protected interests of a tyrannical minority, those with the greatest financial power. Voices today most fearful of Obama are afraid that his administration will bring about a shift to a tyranny of the majority under socialism. I do not share the fear. President Obama is neither foolish nor ignorant. Socialism has had its trial and has failed, as he well knows. But so has laissez-faire capitalism, government by financial might, been tried and found wanting, as he also sees. To fear one danger is no reason to run into the arms of another, equally great. The disguise of the false dilemma is shallow, but the trap is cunningly laid by our own minds, yielding so easily to the temptation to divide the world into binary oppositions.

I do have hope that we Americans, as a people, under a wise leader, are beginning to see our way through and past simplistic fallacies. But what a breath of fresh air to come upon this book, now, at this time! It was over 90 years ago that de Ruggiero saw true Liberalism not as a weak compromise between the two positions he identifies as tyrannies (which we might call laissez-faire and socialism) but as the only possible ground for true political freedom, the path avoiding the pitfalls of both extremes.

Seduced next by the table of contents, my eye running down the list of chapter headings, I saw, almost at the end of the book, “The Crisis of Liberalism,” broken down into economic and political aspects. Handily (for a reader who begins at the wrong end of the book), the author begins this section with a recap of the development European Liberalism, one form was based on land, the other on industry. Land-based liberalism, he argues, is threatened when industry takes precedence over agriculture, diminishing the importance of land. Landowners then

…lose their character as a disinterested and governing general class; their sense of autonomy and their power of criticism diminish; and the idea of power takes in their minds the place of the idea of freedom.

Added to this diminution of importance, agriculture itself, in becoming “industrialized,” demotes land to the status of personal property, something to be bought and sold, an investment less profitable than other forms because the returns are so much slower. With the coming of general industrialization and the industrialization of agriculture, the reciprocal bond between man and the land is broken. Land belongs to this man or that man, until such time as it may be relinquished for cash, but the man no longer belongs to the land. In becoming mere personal property. Reduced to mere personal property,

…land has become entirely detached from the personality of the landlord, with which it was once indissolubly united; it has consequently lost that peculiar force which it owed to a life spent in constant and unremitting contact with the soil.

Land—nature, natural resources, the earth--can make no legal or political claims on its own behalf. When the welfare of land is divorced from the interests of the landowner and the laborers in the field, land is no longer wealth to be protected but merely a means to wealth. And as other avenues are faster and surer, it is no wonder that little prestige attaches to farming.

The democratization of landed property, which de Ruggiero says began with the French Revolution, has also meant smaller pieces of property coming to be held by many more individuals, diffusing the any kind of unified political base among landowners. Without denying that there are good results, also, when the number of small landholders increases, de Ruggiero presents the downside of the shift:

If properties are too small, their owners’ minds turn to other preoccupations, professions, or employments, and the cultivation of the land becomes a subsidiary occupation. In this way they lose interest in all essentially agricultural problems, and bring with them into public life an outlook formed by the experiences and demands of their chief occupation. An excessive economic subdivision of the land pulverizes it politically; it becomes less and less able to resist the aggressive forces of industry and finance, acting through great concentrated masses, and usurping, even in mainly agricultural countries, a disproportionate share of public power.

Note that here again a false dilemma has been sidestepped. It is not a matter of small versus large landholders. The small farmer has not enough land to meet his needs, and legions of small farmers who make their living “off the farm” (to use the modern phrase) develop off-farm values or, at least, find themselves too weak individually to shape public policy, while “agribusiness,” with its enormous holdings, treats land like a factory, a capital investment to be maximized, large size purchased at such a price leaving no room for values other than those of the marketplace. The issue cannot, therefore, be large vs. small. Neither is abolishing private ownership a solution, as de Ruggiero makes clear. Such a move, it seems, would constitute a regression to slavery if human beings were tied to the land, and if they were not tied, no bond would be re-established in the absence of individual ownership.

Since writing that much, I have gone back to the beginning and am now engrossed by the section devoted to the history of the development of natural rights, so I won’t get into the problems de Ruggiero sees for Liberalism in industrialization and will resist the temptation to start quoting long passages from the beginning of the book.

In writing The History of European Liberalism, an admirably clear overview and synthesis, Guido de Ruggiero did not pretend to offer prescriptions for resolving the crisis of Liberalism, but 90 years after the publication of his book, we know what has happened in the interim, and his historical analysis can help to see the crisis of our own time in historical and context.

Moving Toward Departure

Yes, it's that time, the time of obsessing over boxes and dreaming of the road. The other night I dreamed we had to get three vehicles back to Michigan with only two drivers, so you see I am using 'dream' in the general, not romantic, sense of the word. Then, re boxes: Boxes are one thing, and shipping boxes quite another. To pack books (we have acquired books, no surprise, and many of them are heavy), banana boxes will not do (too heavy), and to ship books liquor boxes (marked as holding glass containers) won't get past the postmaster's eye. --Not that we have liquor boxes lying around the house, understand, but liquor and beer and wine boxes are so sturdy and such good sizes, not to mention easily obtainable, that the temptation is great. But no! Resolutely--and yet somewhat hopelessly, too, because we’ve been on this quest before--we start haunting the backs of stores in search for appropriate cardboard treasure. Yesterday we were outraged to come around the corner of a shopping mall and see bundles of compacted, flattened boxes on pallets! How could they?

Last week was a year since Donnie died, he whose house we have occupied this winter, with his two old dogs as frequent visitors. A small group gathered on the bridge to toss long-stemmed roses into the outgoing tide at sunset, and dear little doggie Ida plunged in to swim after the roses. We’ll miss Ida and Weiser. We like to think they may miss us a bit—and little Saripeka, too.

Sarah's World and Ours

While David has been ducking in and out of the world of John Updike short stories and I inhabiting Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (a cheerier place than it sounds, especially as compared to Chancery), while we follow economic news and forecasts, what fills little Sarah’s doggie mind? When she goes to the window and whines in a certain way, we know that Weiser or Ida or both are outside, waiting for her. And when we drive to the dog park, she knows when we’re getting close, and her excitement fills the car. We think of the dog park as exercise and socializing for Sarah. To her it’s just life. As far as we can tell, she takes every day and every hour just as it comes.




It’s doubtful that Sarah is yearning for Michigan, but when I took her outside last night and looked up at the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, clear after recent thunderstorm of the night before, to see Orion in the southwest, I was seeing it over our old Leelanau barn. Soon!

Meanwhile, I’m cramming in all the reading I can before we go back home where obligations of home, bookstore and community will fill the days. Jane Austen in Boca, by Paula Marantz Cohen, is a lark I heartily recommend. You don’t have to be Jewish or retired or living in Florida to enjoy it. Having read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice enriches the reading of Cohen’s book, but I’m sure it would be entertaining even without the literary background.

As for Dickens, we met one of his Bleak House characters here in Florida just the other day--they exist in real life, his people!--but I do think that novel should have had a different title. I’ve avoided it for years, due to nothing more than its name (and have my friend Marilyn to thank for bringing it to my reluctant attention this winter), so how delightful to find myself charmed rather than depressed by the reading! The plot twists and coincidences, along with multiple tangled narrative threads connecting the cast of characters, have something in them of soap opera—but oh, the language, the descriptions of persons and places! Very satisfying, very satisfying!

P.S. I have just read in today’s newspaper that Hernando County is considering handing over its presently public libraries to a private, for-profit company. The company says it can save the county $500,000, maintaining current hours, and would hire back most current employees. So where would the savings come from? How would the private company make its profit? Obviously, employees would be hired back at lower salaries. Perhaps they would no longer have benefits. Would library patrons be required to pay a membership fee? Borrowing fees to take books home? Service fees to use computers? Columnist Dan Dewitt ends his piece by observing that “this is the kind of compromise we’re forced to make when we decide we hate taxes more than we love democracy.” Ocean ports, prisons, schools, libraries—what next? I suppose this is more of what libertarians consider ‘freedom.’ I would love to hear the reflections of Charles Dickens on all of this. Perhaps he would wax eloquent on the myth of progress.

Wordless and Modified

Libraries and Bookstores

Aripeka, Florida, a sport fishing community since the 1930’s and a fishing village possibly as long as a thousand years ago, straddles the county line between Hernando County to the north and Pasco to the south. The post office and Baptist church are south of the line and both bridges over Hammock Creek, while Carl Norfleet’s store is north of the line and between the two bridges, leaving only the Community Club, a nursery business, and the Chief Aripeka RV Park not only north of the county line and creek but way down a narrow, winding road through the sawgrass from the rest of the village.

All that, besides being part of a partial description of this place, is to say once again that we have been staying, technically speaking, in Hernando County, which also contains Weeki Wachee, the place we stayed during our last Florida getaway, three years back, and so it seemed only natural for me to renew my membership in the Hernando County library system and to get back in the groove of going to the West Hernando branch there in Weeki Wachee. It’s familiar, my “home” library in Florida, and I feel comfortable there. The availability of shady parking places (for Sarah) is important, too. The other Spring Hill branch, a larger library, was landscaped in such a way that none of the trees cast shade on the parking lot, and it’s too far to drive to the main library in Brooksville, the county seat, on a regular basis.

More recently, however, we’ve begun an acquaintance with the Pasco County library system. We began with the Friends of New Port Richey Library used book sale. The sale was smaller than we’d anticipated, but the people were friendly, and the sale was held outdoors (in the shade) between the library and City Hall, down the street from Christina’s Family Restaurant, where we breakfasted beforehand on homemade bagels fresh from the oven, so it was an all-round satisfying event for us. Now finally, on the recommendation of Carl Norfleet here in Aripeka, we have found our way to the library in Hudson—not an obvious destination, as Hudson is not really a “place” these days, except on the map. That is, there is no downtown, only an old cemetery at the northeast corner of the intersection of Hwy. 19 and Hudson Avenue, off the highway to the east a warren of medical offices and facilities and gated communities, with less pretentious neighborhoods lying between the highway and the Gulf. The library, though—wow!

First thing we noticed with approval were all the trees left standing in the parking area, providing many shady spaces. The architecture impressed David: he loved it immediately. As we were getting our bearings inside, I spotted a notice on the desk near the entrance offering translation services to anyone needing them. If my memory is correct on this, more than a dozen languages were listed. The children’s area looked very inviting and had its own circulation desk and librarians, and there was lots of comfortable seating throughout the building, even an area off the lobby with restrooms, drink machines and more comfortable chairs.

As a bookseller, I have never considered myself in competition with libraries (though I sometimes envy librarians their salaries and benefits), and as a reader I patronize both libraries and bookstores. When I’ve bought and enjoyed a book new to me, I’m likely to visit the library to look for other titles by the author. This accounts for all the Paula Fox works in my “Read in 2009” list. Or I may try out a new author first with a library book and then set out to buy more books by that author, as I have done with Walter Mosley and Farley Mowat. Other people probably approach libraries and bookstores differently, but I usually look on library shelves for something specific I’ve already got in mind, while I enter a bookstore as if it’s a potluck, a treasure trove, to be gleaned for wonderful surprises unknown to me before my hand touches the books.

When we go to independent bookstores, we always tell the owners that we have a bookstore, too. That’s not so much to elicit the offer of a discount (though dealers in used books usually offer this courtesy to one another) as it is to say, We know how it is. We know the joys and sorrows, perks and frustrations. We have a life like yours! Isn’t it great? It’s often an occasion to trade stories. In libraries I appreciate the convenience of wireless connections, David loves to browse magazines, and we both count on libraries as sources of practical local information, but our expectations of libraries are very different from our expectations of bookstores. We don’t expect to connect to anyone on a personal level in the library, whereas in a bookstore that same lack of connection makes the experience less than fully satisfying or meaningful, regardless of how many books we buy. For some people, would expectations of library vs. bookstore be just the opposite of ours?

When we visited Aripeka from Weeki Wachee three years ago, there was the beginning of a little volunteer-run library. It was officially open only one day a week, but if you went down the street and knocked on the librarian’s door—and if the librarian was home!--she would let you in at other times. There was no checkout system: patrons carried away the books they wanted and brought them back when they were done with them. This year there is no sign of life at the small cement-block building. I suppose that, like Carl, other Aripeka residents are in love with the big Hudson library and don’t see much reason to try to “compete” with it.

But wait! This story would not be complete without mention of the boxes outside Norfleet’s store. People leave things there: books, shoes, clothes, videos, grapefruits, oranges. You take what you can use. If you have something useful and don’t want to keep it in your life, you leave it in the box for someone else. It’s a simple system, and it’s all potluck (no special orders), but for what it is, it seems to work pretty well.



A note on my “Read in 2009” list: For a while I had the list set up to show only the ten most recently added books. Now it shows all titles. My rule for this list is that I have to have read the whole book before I can add it, so a couple mentioned in earlier posts, books I haven’t finished yet, aren’t yet listed.

Books, Dogs, Fairs

It's spring! Trees, vines and shrubs are bursting into bloom! This one has the gaudy, manically cheerful colors of many homes and businesses here in Florida. Visiting manatee in the creek (below) is subtle in color, graceful in motion.



Ever on the alert for any book title with the word ‘dog’ in it, and continuing my research into young adult novels, the other day I landed on The Boy Who Spoke Dog, by Clay Morgan. What a gem! Once again, of course, I am biased: the main dog character is a border collie! I found myself laughing again and again while reading passages describing this dog’s behavior:

The little dog backed away. She did this in the way Jack had seen many of the Border collies do. They kept their heads low to the ground and their eyes on the sheep. The little Border collie kept looking back and forth between Jack and the stick. She seemed to be willing him to go to the stick.

Each time Jack throws the stick for the dog, the dog brings it partway to him but won’t come all the way.

“Bring it closer,” Jack said.
But the little dog just backed away from it again.

Personal prejudice aside, the expression tour de force is not inappropriate to describe this book. People who love dogs will recognize the truth on every page and say, “Yes, yes, yes!” laughing with tears in their eyes. As for those readers who just don’t get it about dogs, if they can be persuaded to read this book, they may gain some inkling of what all the fuss is about.

David read Round Ireland With a Fridge and loved every page of it. Now I tell him he’ll love The Boy Who Spoke Dog, too.

On the subject of dogs, our Wednesday visit to the dog park was interesting. As often happens, Sarah found a “best friend of the day,” one perfectly matched to her play style and energy level. After Sheba left, however, Sarah had to make do with the social opportunities remaining, and one of the dogs unfortunately took a need to dominate a little too far. Sarah loves to wrestle and doesn’t mind being rolled over and having her ears chewed lightly: she’ll give the same in return and love it, play-barking and play-growling. But this other dog’s growling lacked the playful sound, and its attacks, while stopping well short of bloodshed, were freaking out other owners, who one by one took their dogs away, finally leaving only Sarah and the conquistadora.

Now as I say, Sarah’s a tomboy and a roughneck, but she does not like to fight. When hostilities break out, she quickly distances herself, as if to say, “Not interested! None of my business!” In the case of this particular hostile dog, whose only potential target was now Sarah, Sarah wisely did the dog equivalent of folding her arms across her chest and turning her back, refusing to be engaged in that manner. The other dog kept trying to pick a fight, and Sarah kept declining to be interested, making a fight impossible. I was so happy watching my dog, keeping herself out of trouble, wise beyond her years! David was proud of her, too.

Seriously? Our work? David finished a large painting the other evening, and I think I’ve found a solution to the narrative voice problem that was plaguing me. It’s unusual, but I really think it will work. So far, so good, for a while, but now I'm over the hump and into the woods again. Slogging on but doubting I'll achieve my goal of a complete first draft by the time we return to Michigan.

We went to a book sale last Friday in Floral City and afterwards took in the Citrus County Fair in Inverness. My fair dinner, jambalaya, was a great success--very generous portion and hearty eating. I was probably guided in this choice by thinking of friends and relatives in New Orleans this week.



These little porkers sharing a last kiss were not as sad as the hog who wouldn't stop squealing and trying to climb out of his pen, as if he knew what Fate held in store for him.



The comforting aspect of fairs is how little they change over the years. David and I enjoyed the crowds of young people and reminisced about the St. Joseph County Fair in Centerville, Michigan, and the 100-meter Ferris wheel in the Tuileries in Paris.

St. Paddy and ‘Saiorse’

Never one to resist a travel book, I couldn’t help picking up Round Ireland With a Fridge. But how silly! I put it down again. Really! Then picked it up a second time to read the dust jacket notes. Who was this Tony Hawks, and what was his story, anyway? Well, for starters he’s an Englishman, not an Irishman. Okay, a travel book by someone touring a country not his own is no novelty. But a travel memoir by a man who hitch-hiked the whole way around the Emerald Isle with a refrigerator in tow, just to win a hundred-pound bet? Now that’s different. And undeniably silly. One observation that haunts the pages is: “A totally purposeless idea, but a damn fine one.” And it must be said that Hawks pulls off the trip and the book with style.

To win the bet, he had to hitchhike the circumference of Ireland, Northern Ireland excluded, within a month. To make up for the excluded area (he did nip over the border a couple of times), he had to get himself and the fridge to two designated islands, one off the north and one off the south coast. No stipulation was made as to the size of the refrigerator, so Tony wisely bought the smallest he could find (its price exceeded that of the wager), one he could pull on a “trolley” (what we Yanks would call a furniture dolly) and the size most likely to fit into the back seat of a small car.

I’m not going to reveal details of this hilarious odyssey. There was a lot of time spent in pubs, but Tony saw a lot of the Irish countryside, too, including a few famous sites. He met people, made friends, had laughs. This book could as easily be shelved with humor as with travel. Need I say more?

A bit more. My point for St. Patrick’s Day is that along the way some blokes in a pub decide that the refrigerator needs a name, and the name given it is ‘Saiorse,’ Gaelic for ‘freedom.’ And on the day Saiorse Molloy (the naming took place in Mat Molloy’s pub) was named, Tony Hawks visited the focal point of the small town of Westport, dominated by a statue of no other than St. Patrick. “The words beneath him,” Tony remarks, “made interesting reading.” The inscription:

I AM PATRICK
A SINNER MOST UNLEARNED
THE LEAST OF ALL THE FAITHFUL
AND UTTERLY DESPISED BY ALL

Wouldn’t “the least of all the faithful” be bowled over by a modern St. Patrick’s Day? The parade in so German an American city as Cincinnati goes on for hours!

Ireland gives me hope. After a long history of Troubles, the Irish have turned toward peace. It gives me hope for other trouble spots the world over. Peace and saiorse: not incompatible but a necessary conjunction.

Florida Views, Book and Michigan News

Spring has arrived in time for our final weeks here on the Gulf before returning to Michigan. Recent sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular, and the space shuttle take-off, which we watched from the North Fork bridge, was nothing less than fabulous. (“Nice launch!” one five-year-old said over and over in admiration and approval, as he waved good-by to the astronauts. The next morning people are still saying, “Hey, how’s it goin’? Great launch, wudnit?”) I must report, with a small twinge of regret, that we watched the launch without cameras, but it’s only a small twinge, because being there and seeing it were something we won’t soon forget.



Minor delights did catch my eye in the past few days when I was camera-ready: an old-fashioned pinball machine on a café wall; the juxtaposition of painted and live plants at the entrance to a gallery; a green palmetto floating down a salt creek looking like some kind of sailing vegetable porcupine. Too bad I can’t send the smell of the ocean or the feel of the breeze. I gorge on the sights, smells, sounds and textures of the world around me.



My book binge has not abated, either. Having read Paula Fox’s memoir, Borrowed Finery before reading her YA novels Monkey Island and The Village By the Sea added another background layer to fiction. In each, the coldness and unpredictability of the author’s mother, combined with her father’s weakness and absence, both of which repeatedly put young Paula at risk, are explained and overcome, translated and transformed. I realize now that I have handled books of hers before and that she is a Newbery winner, though I had not read any of her books before Borrowed Finery. So many avenues to discovery! How fortunate that there is not a single road one must either take or miss entirely!

The difference between Fox’s childhood and these two novels is that the literary protagonists have in the background two loving parents, though the mother and father in Monkey Island find themselves unable, for a time, to care for their child. I was reminded of Melanie Klein’s Love, Hate and Reparation (the title of the American edition, Love and Hate, omitted the most important aspect of the theory), in which the famed psychiatrist argued that all of us endlessly recreate and rewrite childhood hurts in an effort to make events come out differently. We seek, in other words, to undo the hurt. This is not to say that Fox’s stories are only interesting from a psychiatric standpoint. Far from it. She has a light and lovely genius for capturing a look or feeling in completely original but transparent language, and the adult reader (this one, anyway) inhabits the world of the girl Emma in the one book and the boy Clay in the other, perceiving the behavior of adults and the complexity of situations and emotions from the child’s perspective, as undoubtedly young readers would, also. It is a dangerous world Emma and Clay encounter, and Fox does not shy away from presenting the dangers, but we never feel dragged through slime. Human beings can be frightening, true. There are also those who are kind. And as the protagonists learn both these truths, they grow in appreciation for life’s ambiguity and contradictions, as did Paula Fox herself. Neither do they miss occasions for happiness along the difficult way. These stories are highly imaginative as well as real and honest and also redemptive. Great combination.

One thing I have to say in my defense (if I need one) for burying my nose in so many books is that my reading has been very eclectic and intentionally so. I may sometimes read two or three books in a row that come from the same shelf , so to speak, but then I make sure the next one is something entirely different. So after two YA novels, I turned next to, of all things, a book on business. It was much more than that, though.

True to Our Roots: Fermenting a Business Revolution, by Paul Dolan (president, Fetzer Vineyards), is as much about leadership and agriculture and wine and ethics and interpersonal communication and community and the good, meaningful life as it is about business. Are you interested in organic farming? In community decision-making? In how teams can function to achieve insight and excellence rather than stagnation and compromise? All this is covered in True to Our Roots, with an explanation at the end of the wine-making process, to boot. Makes me eager to get back to northern Michigan and visit the wineries in my neighborhood to see what they’ve been up to lately.

News from northern Michigan from Michael Sheehan is that this year’s Senior Spelling Bee will take place on Friday, May 1st, 1:00 p.m., at the Gilbert Lodge on Long Lake Road. See the TC senior website or Michael’s own for more details.

Another contest for a different age group is the annual Anne-Marie Oomen High School Poetry prize contest sponsored by the Dunes Review. Any high school student from the area south of the Mackinac Bridge and north of U.S. Highway 10 is eligible to enter. Poems (up to three) should be e-mailed to dunesreview@yahoo.com. Names should not appear on poems but should be included in a cover letter, along with name, contact information, poem titles, short bio and name of high school. The contest rules specify “no rhyming verse, please.” I wish the contest organizers had left style up to the poets, but rules is rules, kids. Does that mean they’re made to be broken? Not if you want to win a contest, I guess.

We saw Saturday’s sunset from Jenkins Creek and its afterglow from the road leading through Hernando Beach and back to Aripeka.