Outdoors, Indoors (reprise)

Indoors I'm transfixed by Doug Stanton's new book, Horse Soldiers. Outdoors, it's living things that hold me spellbound--a grackle exploring the creek, forget-me-nots blooming in the grass, a horse feeling its oats.

BBQ Report

The sun did not come out, but the crowds did, and the raves were unanimous. "I'm a convert!" one man was overheard to say. Many thumbs-up signs were given by those who didn't want to talk with their mouths full.

Reminder: It's "Drive-Thru" in name only! You have to walk in!
Correction from my post earlier today: The first business day is this Friday, and from then on through the season the Drive-Thru BBQ will be open seven days a week.

Here are the guys to thank:

Grill-master George Twine--


and owner Bruce Viger--

Give them a hand for this new success, and come often to enjoy their offerings! I'm not sure of the street address, but the BBQ is just south of Dog Ears Books and the Painted Horse Gallery, and we're at 106 Waukazoo.

Be Prepared to Walk!

It’s called Drive-Thru BBQ, and today from 5-8 p.m. is the open house, with Saturday the first day of regular business--but out-of-towners, beware!!! It’s only called “Drive-Thru.” You can’t really. There is no driveway and no take-out window! You have to park on the street or in a parking lot (across the street or down by the harbor), walk up and go inside to place your order. (Hint: Park down by the harbor, walk up to get your ribs or chicken or pulled pork or whatever, and walk back down with your take-out meal to enjoy it by the water. That’s what I’d do if I were visiting Northport for the day. Of course, if you have a big group and are ordering lots of food you may just want to settle in at the on-site picnic tables on Waukazoo Street.) So why’s it called Drive-Thru? Well, that’s restaurateur Bruce Viger’s story to tell. I’ll simply predict that everyone will be happy with the lunch and dinner options to be offered this season by Bruce and grill-master George Twine. Still having a problem with the name? Remember, people, this is Northport, home of the dog parade, famous for a light-hearted, fun-loving take on life.

David stayed at the bookstore with Sarah while I walked up Nagonaba Street late this morning to Bethany Lutheran Church, where the church ladies were hosting their annual salad luncheon. One of the first to arrive, I got there in time to see all the salad bowls and plates piled high and beautiful and to have first pick of everything for my take-out lunch. I was so excited by the food, in fact, and so hungry that I almost left without taking a picture and had to backtrack to get this one.


And now I’m looking at two different books, wondering which one to open and start reading while waiting for the UPS truck to bring my latest order. When that box arrives, there won’t be any question of what to read, as it should contain Doug Stanton’s new book, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.

In my dreams last night, I was back at Western Michigan University. This time as an instructor rather than a student, I was on the bottom rung of the faculty and not surprised to be given a very basic office--not much more than bare walls, a desk and a chair. After making myself at comfortable in this office as possible, I went out to do errands and returned to find a man had taken possession of my desk, leaving me no place for me to sit except on a milk crate by the side of the desk! I felt like a dog! He then told me I had to give exams the very next class period. I had not written my exams yet. “And no essay questions,” he added. “But I always give essay questions! I want my students to think!” I protested. Changing the subject, he asked me what books I’d been reading lately, and I couldn’t remember any of the titles. Back in my car, I picked up one of the books I thought I’d finished to see what it was called and realized I was only halfway through it. Just then, behind the building, a huge cruise ship pulled up at a dock. Go figure! Unaccountably, it appeared that WMU was now on the shore of Lake Michigan instead of a hundred miles inland. The ship had come from Mackinac Island (which was also in Lake Michigan, just offshore), and some faculty who were also summer shopkeepers disembarked, all excited about merchandise they’d been able to get for free from gift shops on the island from shopkeepers there turning over their inventory for the season. I was dubious, as the jewelry all looked like last year’s fads, nothing anyone would want to buy this year.

In the wake of that dream, I feel fortunate to be a bookseller and not a hawker of costume jewelry. I’m also happy not to have to write any “objective” philosophy exam questions today.

Another Week in May

Leelanau Township cherry orchards are slowly coming into bloom. Most, in fact, are only beginning: this shot is another from those old, gnarly, early-blossoming trees that unfurled for my camera last week. I believe the last of the snow is gone. At least, the patches I’ve been watching have disappeared. Anyone else know where winter is yet lingering?

Yesterday morning early I finished the last pages of The Gift of Rain, and before bedtime I had read all of Michael J. Fox’s memoir, Lucky Man. Today one of my nephews, at my request, e-mailed me a recent philosophy paper he wrote on nihilism. I don’t think he’s falling for it. Myself, I have never been less tempted. Too many beautiful people, dogs, trees, flowers, books, etc., etc.

All day today, comings and goings next door! Concrete dry, tables in place—will a garden suddenly appear? a picket fence? Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow from 5-8 p.m. is the open house for the new BBQ establishment, and Saturday the place will be officially open for the season. Another leap forward in the Waukazoo Revival! Woody Palmer, Painted Horse Gallery owner, is so impressed by all the activity in town that he's thinking of having the gallery open for Memorial Day weekend.

Life is good in Leelanau today.

Flowers For My Mother

Luckily, Sarah and I made time for an outdoor adventure late yesterday, while the sun was shining, sky blue, air warm and still and humming with the buzzing of bees in the orchard. Finding these rows of old trees in full bloom, I was reminded of the year my father decided that he and my mother should come up for a visit during cherry blossom time. Bruce took care of the bookstore that day while my parents and I drove all over the county, from top to bottom, touring blossoms. So, with that in mind, I dedicate these images to my mother for Mother’s Day. Wish you were here, Mothe! Although our weather for the weekend has now turned cold and grey again….




Yesterday’s detour from the orchards down into the secret wooded valley was cut short when a coyote appeared on the path. Sarah was lagging behind just then, sniffing something back on the ridge. The coyote and I looked at each other, then, by mutual agreement, decided to depart in opposite directions, and Sarah had no idea of the encounter she had so narrowly missed. I didn’t think she needed the meeting.

Out in the open, the trees are at the pointillist stage, leaf buds beginning to open, a blush of green visible from a distance.

The willows are particularly beautiful this year. Here is one not far from the Happy Hour, a fountain of raining gold, reminding me of a tree I only remember from a story my parents told. In Aberdeen, South Dakota, where I was born, my parents planted a willow tree in the yard of my first home, a little grey bungalow. All the neighbors told them a willow would not survive there. Was it still there when we visited Aberdeen the year I was 16? I don’t remember. Is it still there now? I like to think that it is, that there is something of us remaining in South Dakota.

Gearing Up

Spring seemed late in getting underway, even for those of us who spent the longest, coldest weeks of winter elsewhere, far from snow and ice, but it’s making up for lost time now. Like a fresh, green horse not content to trot, the season has broken into full gallop. The speed of the succession of wildflowers in the woods takes my breath away. How can our memory-laden minds keep pace with so much newness? Can you see, in this picture of blooming pussywillow catkins, the snow shovel in the background?

Waukazoo Revival, as I like to call it (one aspect of what I like to call the Northport Renaissance—feel free to spread these slogans around), has also shifted into a higher gear. Next door, at the new BBQ spot, the day arrived, the long-awaited Day of the Pour!





Tulips and jonquils of every variety are honking their horns in the May sunshine, but they are not telling you to drive faster. They’re suggesting you park that car and stroll at a leisurely pace, all around town, along the creek, down to the harbor. Take a good book with you. I’m a third of the way through The Gift of Rain and hoping Bruce will cover for me on the day the library book club (Wednesday, May 27) meets so I can join their discussion.

P.S. My apologies to the bookseller in Micanopy, Florida, whose business name I had misspelled in a January post (now corrected). That bookstore, well worth a visit, is O. Briskey Books.

Village Wilds

Sensation Series: A Little Game

‘Sensation,’ not ‘sensational,’ please note. I’m not thinking of Gothic novels or vampires. Take the basic idea of a series, such as 2,4,6,8,10, but instead of numerical intervals, use a general group of sensations, such as rich, smooth & mellow. Build a series within this group, using the general categories fruit, vegetable, wind instrument, string instrument, I formulate a more specific series: avocado, eggplant, French horn, cello. (Do you accept eggplant as a vegetable? If not, substitute.) The germ for this idea came from an acting book I read for a class long ago, in which the writer of the book suggested thinking of a character to be played as a vegetable, and he suggested Juliet’s nurse might be thought of as an eggplant.

Suppose instead of rich, smooth & mellow, one began with piquant, light. Then the general categories might yield as specifics sugar peas, lemon, piccolo, lute. If each series were continued with an oil, the RSM series might include olive oil, the PL series grapeseed oil. How might each series continue with a flower? A dog breed (or just an animal?) A poet or novelist? The possibilities of this game are endless. With more than one player, the possibilities for argument are endless, too, so play at your own risk.

It is a rainy day. I cannot complain. After all the dry weeks in Florida, where drought-stricken pastures seemed they would ignite if looked at too long or too hard, the damp green of Michigan spring is a relief. And what better book to begin today than The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng?

Ramblings, Nothing More

Sun filters through a layer of thin and insubstantial clouds, with possible rain in the forecast for later in the day. Tonight is Northport School’s annual spring concert. (Admission is free.) I’ve been reading a secondhand account of William James and John Dewey in a book called Four Philosophies, by J. Donald Butler, pragmatism being the fourth one considered, following naturalism, idealism and realism. “Pragmatism works for me.” How’s that for a bumper sticker? One only a philosopher could love, I’m sure.

Not only in the orchards and wilds, but on town ground, too, spring’s blooms are bursting forth, while out at Krikat Farm yesterday it appeared a riding lesson was in progress.




Let me fill in now with more from Robert Grudin’s Time and the Art of Living:

How will we, five or ten or twenty years hence, look back on present time? Most probably, with envy and regret. We will envy the younger self who could, relatively speaking, do so much, and we will regret that it did not do more. We will wonder why, given youth and health and broad reaches of time, we learned so little, loved so little, risked so little; how so much time could have drained so immemorially down the sink of routine and distraction. Yet these regrets, however specifically realistic they are, ignore the broader continuity, which dictates that the confines of a single moment can hold all the dimensions and potentialities of time, and that the crucial decisions and opportunities are always before us, no less now than in the past, no less in the future than now.

And

The past is like the body of time, the future like its soul. Our sense of the past is voluminous, corporeal, complex; but our sense of the future should hold innocently and simply, like a stellar spectrum, the full quality of our spirit and will.

Very Bergsonian, to my ear.

Temporal Parallax

Long, long ago, when some big high school assignment was given that would require months of research (something like Northport’s senior project requirement), one of the first impossibly large topics I grabbed at was that of time. (In the end, the topic I chose was language, another impossibly large topic but one that prefigured, by many years, my doctoral dissertation.) Time, the sea in which we live, has always had a grip on my imagination. Not, of course, vice versa: it is ever-present but elusive. We are in it and of it and yet cannot grasp it.

A friend has been reading arguments in physics over whether or not time “exists.” Some say yes, some say no. My feeling here is that the question is wrong—or, should I say, ill-formed?

One of my favorite movies is “Back to the Future.” Another is “Groundhog Day,” another “Slaughterhouse Five.” Three very different imaginative treatments of time as traversable simultaneity. I am Bergsonian, and for me time travel can only be science fiction. And yet, since our minds are not bound to the moment but much more often, in Heidegger’s terms, lingering or leaping ahead, in another sense we are always traveling back and forth in our element.

This morning I was reading Robert Grudin again. His book, Time and the Art of Living, is written in a staid, flat-footed, academic style (that is only an observation, not a criticism), through which his mined insights glow like uncovered jewels. Opening the book at random this windy, overcast morning, I found a paragraph asking the reader to imagine possessing what Grudin called ‘temporal parallax,’ the ability to experience time from two separate moments, in the way our binocular vision allows us to merge what our two eyes see into one three-dimensional image. It strikes me that this is one way of expressing the point of a short story I wrote Sunday morning, a story rich to bursting with meaning for me (if no one else) but one in which, I must admit, nothing “happens.” The omniscient narrator is possessed of temporal parallax, and it is in that vision of joined moments, one from youth, the other from middle age, that the meaning resides. Grudin remarks that

Visions of this sort are impossible for us in the body, which demands that we view time as if through monocles. Less so in the mind’s eye which can, through memory, reason and imagination, reconstruct the missing dimensions of phenomena.

My story began with a memory. Reason, working through imagination to construct the temporal merging, gave me a new understanding. It is very mysterious, this business of writing and how one can say things not previously understood and, in saying, come to understand them. To foresee the cherries in the blossoms not yet open, to recall the blossoms in the bowl of fruit, all of it merged into one vision—that is what’s on my mind this morning. The image at the top of the post is from yesterday.