The “Same” Day Never Is

November 12, 2022, Alamo Township, Kalamazoo County

 

Looking back at old blog posts, I see that any date in any particular year brought very different weather and very different events and thoughts. For example, no previous November 12 in my life was, for me, in any way like this one. The image above is from this morning in Kalamazoo, and below is what greeted us at home in Leelanau Township on November 12, 2019, the day the Artist said we would be leaving earlier from now on to drive to Arizona!

November 12, 2019, Leelanau Township, Leelanau County

This year, also, November 12 was the second leg of my long solo odyssey – well, “solo” with Sunny Juliet as copilot!

Copilot Sunny Juliet

(Do you ever think about words for travel, as I do? For me, as I hear in it the French journée, ‘journey’ seems a day’s travel, whereas ‘odyssey,’ from the travels of Odysseus, I hear as long and challenging, and I also think of my challenging cross-country travel as a ‘trek,’ though I would never consider making it on foot.)

 

Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” brings into focus the same/different aspects of any date on the calendar from year to year. For example, the first airing of the television show “Sesame Street” occurred on November 10, 1969, the birthday of both Martin Luther (1483) and poet Vachel Lindsay (1879). What would Martin Luther have made of Sesame Street? And I was especially struck by the variousness of events on “same” dates by Keillor’s noting that November 9 was the birthday of both Anne Sexton and Carl Sagan but also the infamous anniversary of the horrible German Kristallnacht.

 

Not surprising at all, this difference in “the same,” but I often find the unsurprising as much cause for reflection and wonder as something realized for the first time. 

Where I stayed this past week

I was glad to have loaner wheels while my car was in the shop.

Spending time in a place where I once lived (for many years) also invites notice of change. Kalamazoo was my home from December of 1971 to the fall of 1987, so now, while it is lovely to be with friends and family still here, others are with me in absentia, most notably the Artist, of course, but other friends, also. Ghosts appear everywhere -- including the ghost of my own former, younger self! The past tugs at my sleeve, whispers in my ear, and distracts me from the present with the urgency of Marley’s ghosts! It can be unnerving. Nothing went wrong in Kalamazoo, however, and many things went very, very right, mostly lots of time spent with those I dearly love. And yes, three visits in four days to one of my new favorite bookstores! 

Two more new books from This Is a Bookstore

Still, it felt good to resume my travels, barely ahead of the season’s first Michigan snow, which caught up with me in Amish Indiana, where my copilot was entranced by the sight of horse-drawn buggies on the road. But you will have to imagine those sights, as my copilot can operate neither car nor camera. She just keeps me company, but that's a lot.

Her new outdoor wear makes leash-walking much easier.

On the Road: Bookman’s (not Busman’s) Holiday, Then One for Dogs

In case you had doubts....

The Bookman’s Holiday

 

The first leg of my winter odyssey south and west takes me only as far as Kalamazoo, where many family members and friends make their homes. One friend brought supper for me my first night in the ‘zoo, and in the morning when I picked my son up for breakfast, we went instead to – surprise! – a bookstore. “Do you mind?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would I mind going to a bookstore with my mother?” Okay, it was a stupid question.

 

This is a bookstore is the name of the bookstore where we found ourselves. That really is its name. It’s partnered up with the next door Book Bug, specializing in children’s books, and they share café space. 

When I visit any bookshop for the first time, I pretty much know right away if it’s going to be a memorable experience or just another ho-hum Hallmark moment. And the minute I got inside this is a bookstore I was excited. Who wouldn’t be? I should say, what booklover and bookstore lover wouldn’t be excited by such a place?

 

1) I love their counter!

 

Is this cool, or what?

“What if someone wants to buy one of those books?” I wicked-innocently asked a clerk behind the counter, pointing to the real books holding it up. He said those books were not for sale but that a “reasonable facsimile” could be provided. 

 

Here are some of other aspects of the shop I found to love:

 

2) The books are attractively displayed, categories easily identifiable, and there is an unspoken, silent invitation to venture quickly into the far reaches of the store.

 

3) A few used books, clearly marked as such, are mixed in among the new, and once I realized that I started seeking out the yellow tape on their spines, treasure-hunting.

 

        4) The café invites lingering, in much the way that the bookshelves invite browsing. If I still lived in the ‘zoo, I would be a regular. I can’t give the bagels high marks (my advice is to skip the bagel and go straight for a brownie), but the coffee was excellent.  

 

Nectar of the gods!

5) I overheard a couple of conversations, and the talk was interesting. That to me is another mark of a high-quality bookstore. And of course, at our table, my son and I were having interesting conversation.(Can you doubt it?) Our talk was of writing, as it often is when we get together.

6) Even the restroom was cool!

Doesn't everybody read in the bathroom?

 

Whenever I find myself in a really good bookstore for the first time, it takes a while for my initial giddiness to subside. Quickly I found a used book and bought it -- right away! -- but only after latte and conversation with my son could I could remember the name of a new book I wanted. Yes, they had it. Good! I bought that, too.

 

And okay, I’ll confess, with nary an apology to Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, that I also bought a couple pair of socks, because far be it from me to criticize a bookstore looking to enhance its slim profit margin by selling puzzles, socks, and other sidelines, as long as they are also stocking excellent books! If socks keep bookstores in business, I’m all for socks (particularly cute ones). And I am definitely not one of those people who loudly proclaims "love" of bookstores and leaves empty-handed!

My haul --

 

Holiday for Dogs

 

Sunny, having no choice in the matter, waited patiently in the car while her bookseller dog mom indulged a human love of literature. I told her that her turn would come in the afternoon. Did she believe me? Did she have any idea at all what I was saying?

I think she had doubts.

Our grandson and his wife have a 20-acre piece of property north of Kalamazoo, and grandson’s wife, her mother, and I, each bringing a dog, met there to walk trails in the woods. Motivated by a deep and abiding tick phobia, I wore a stupid-looking hat with a big, floppy brim and tucked the legs of my jeans into my socks. (You wouldn't want to see that image.) The dogs had no such worries. A malamute, an Aussie, and a Boston terrier walked into a bar – I mean, ran into the woods. Sunny’s leaps across the creek, a charming little creek with a sandy bottom, delightful turns, here and there a miniature waterfall, were stunning! If dogs ran steeplechase, she could!

 

The lovely little creek!

There is always so much to see in the woods, and every woods is different. This one had beautiful beech trees, one of the trees I love back in Leelanau County, but also different species, such as shagbark hickory, and I was told the mushrooms, both spring and fall, are plentiful and various. The fungi I saw may not have been edible (I don't know), but they were eye-catching.

Shagbark hickory

 

The dogs’ holiday in the woods, honestly, was as much a holiday for me as was the bookstore visit. The sun was shining! And tomorrow, at last, Election Day will be behind us, as is (finally) Halloween! I will be happy to see the landscape naked again, its human dressing of skeletons and political signs gone for another season.

How are you spending these fabulous, sunny, still unseasonably warm fall days? They are like windfall apples, aren’t they? Or merchants’ lagniappe. Unexpected, extra, delightful, unearned and perhaps undeserved gifts…. 

Dogs having fun!

Hills and Woods, Dogs and Caravans

At times I find myself overcome by a kind of emotional paralysis, as, moving still (physically) through the world, I wonder why. Is it really worth the bother? I felt that way on Saturday, in the late afternoon, coming home from my last bookstore day of the season, but I came home to my dog, and Sunny and I went outdoors to ramble through the sun-dappled woods, beech-gold-and-brown now at the end of October, then home to supper, and I was content for the evening, or as content as is possible for me with life as it is now, life without the Artist. The same tired Why? question waits for me in ambush when I first wake in mornings, but my dog’s presence and a comforting mug of hot coffee push it away. Empty journal pages are ready to be filled, pages of whatever book I’m reading ready to be turned, and in time another day’s light will push away the darkness, and the dog Sunny and I will go outdoors once again.

 

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair will be a lifetime book for me, I’m sure, one I will re-read in coming years, either starting at the beginning of the first book, Sunset Song (as I do with Pride and Prejudice or South of Superior or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) or opening anywhere, to any page, to read with pleasure (as I do Proust or Thoreau). For now, with Gibbon, I’m only almost to the end of the second book, Cloud Howe, for the first time, but it’s all there: the ancient land; thousands of years of struggling, striving humans; the cycle of seasons and all the beauties of the year in turn, returning again and again; farming and mining and industry and their hardships (“the Economy”) and workers always up against it; religion and politics and waves of hope and anger sweeping through the land; and always “the speak” -- gossip, that is -- eyes of neighbors on neighbors. All of life, in other words, the universal in the particular (the only place it can abide), and Gibbon seeing and showing both the horrors and the wonders, sadness and joy of it all.

 

Leelanau hills

Always Chris (who began as Chris Guthrie and was then Chris Tavendale and has now become Chris Colquohoun) liked walking up into the hills, and now she and her minister husband sometimes go together:

 

Robert was walking so fast that Chris for a while could hardly keep up with his stride, then she fell into that and found it easy, the Kaimes was past and above it the path opened out through the ragged fringe of the moor that came peering and sniffling down at Segget as a draggled cat at a dish out of doors, all the countryside begirdled with hills  and their companions the moors that crept and slept and yawned in the sun, watching the Howe at its work below. 

 

-      Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe

 

Isn’t that fine, though? The “ragged fringe of the moor” as “a draggled cat,” sniffing, perhaps at a saucer of milk put out on a stoop? And the hills and moors that “crept and slept and yawned in the sun”? Here on my home peninsula, water in every direction but south, my husband the Artist used to say of the islands offshore that they moved around in the night, and it’s true that the islands’ perceived location from any particular viewer depends on where that viewer stands, so that from one beach they are straight ahead, from another to the left or the right of a person standing onshore. In Cochise County, Arizona, landmark mountains similarly shift about through the landscape and perform the same orienting function there as Leelanau County’s lakes here.

Orienting by bodies of water: Suttons Bay

Orienting by bodies of water: Lake Leelanau Narrows

Blue heron hunting

Here. I am here now, and the fields and orchards and woods have taken on their late fall colors, and the apple harvest is in, and all the villages and county roads are lined with campaign signs, Election Day only a little more than a week off. And “the speak” goes ‘round and ‘round, as always, as locals keep track of one another’s doings and sayings. 

A California couple thinking of moving to Michigan visited the bookstore one day and said they felt drawn to Northport. The husband asked me, “And is this a town where everyone gets along and there are no quarrels?” “There’s no place like that,” I told him, not adding, as I could have, "except in fairy tales." People are people, anywhere they live together. It doesn’t make a place bad, only human. 

 

Chris Colquohoun’s pregnancy becomes “the speak” of Segget, many seeing it as shameful for a minister to “show plain to his parish that he did that kind of thing,” but Chris has lived with “the speak” all her life and doesn’t let it upset her.

 

Most of the gossip Chris heard of or knew, and cared little or nothing, folk were like that, she thought if you’d neither books nor God nor music nor love nor hate as stand-bys, no pillar of cloud to lead your feet, you turned as the folk of farm and toun—to telling scandal of your nearest neighbors, making of them devils and heroes and saints, to brighten your days and give you a thrill. And God knew they were welcome to get one from her, she found herself liking them as never before, kindled to new interest in every known face….

 

One of my favorite old sayings, one that applies both to small-town gossip and huge social tumult, goes like this: “The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.” Life moves on. We are all here now but for a brief moment (Gibbon himself died in his 34th year), and beyond campaign signs, autumn leaves turn and fall, and beyond rancorous voices, day brings chirps of chickadee, cries of crow, a bluejay's objections, and in the night coyotes yelp and howl.

Happy November, friends.

 

Characters Not Like Me

Copy of my mother's well-loved book

It’s wonderful that more and more books are being written by American authors across a wide range of racial and ethnic, ability and gender identities, books in which children who don’t fit the 1950s “Dick and Jane and Sally” mode can recognize themselves, maybe for the first time. I also hope, however, that children who do fit the “Dick and Jane and Sally” mode will explore and enjoy books with characters who come from backgrounds different from their own, because that’s what made the world richer and more complex for me when I was growing up.

 

My mother loved Anne of Green Gables. Anne was an orphan; I was not. Anne was Canadian; I was not. Anne's lifetime came well before mine in history. Anne was red-haired, outgoing, and had an impulsive temper, whereas I was a quiet, brown-haired, painfully shy child, but reading a book that featured a main character so different from myself gave me insights into what it might be like to be a another kind of person, someone whose responses to situations were very unlike my own. 

 

The book Janitor’s Girl, by Frieda Friedman, introduced me to urban apartment living and a family of immigrants in New York City, a neighborhood and characters and living situation nothing like my own suburban life. Again, I lived that urban immigrant life vicariously while reading the book. How dull my childhood would have been if I had read only books with characters whose lives were like mine!

 

The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley, was a favorite book of mine for many years, and there weren’t any girls in it at all. (Funny that girls will read books with a boy as the main character, but boys shy away from books in which the main character is a girl.) A boy and a horse, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island? How would they survive? In my imagination, I lived that story over and over as if it were my own life.

 

I was 12 years old, about Anne’s age, when I read the much more serious The Diary of Anne Frank, and the effect on my heart and mind was profound. A Jewish girl, forced into hiding with her family, their circumstances horribly and unimaginably constrained during the Nazi Occupation of Holland. But there – reading it, I did imagine and was horrified and wanted so much for that little girl to survive and be my friend! These days some people don’t want young people Anne’s age to read her story, and that breaks my heart all over again for her. She wanted to be a writer. She was a writer, young as she was, and although she died, she left her diary for us, the story of a real girl with hopes and dreams and feelings and ambitions. Everyone should read her diary!

 

Mildred Taylor is not all that much older than I am, so she had not yet written her books when I was a schoolgirl, but discovering them in adulthood has opened new worlds to me. The first Taylor novel I read was The Land – again, a book I wish every American would read. Click here for a review that will give you reasons. 

 

My mother loved the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, but only in recent years did I finally read Freckles, astonished to learn that the main character had only one arm! Yet the author hardly dwelled on what the young man lacked: the emphasis was on what he had and could do. Although this author was as popular in her day as J. K. Rowling is in ours, her stories are very different from today’s popular literature for young people. They are unabashedly “wholesome” and sentimental. Still, the freedom and beauty of the natural outdoor settings remains.

 

My friend the author Ellen Airgood has written two books for young people, Prairie Evers and The Education of Ivy Blake. Ivy appears as Prairie’s friend in the first book and takes center stage in the second. Ivy’s mother probably should never have had a child, but we don’t choose our parents, and it is Airgood’s gift to show us Ivy finding her way without ever sugar-coating or sentimentalizing her discoveries or stooping to unbelievable miracles. 

 

Well-written stories of difficult lives and challenging life situations help stretch our imaginations and expand our circle of empathy. They let us travel outside and beyond the limits of our own skins. This is a good thing! 

 

Today – Saturday, October 29^th -- is the last day of my Dog Ears Books 2022 season, but I will keep in touch via this blog throughout my winter seasonal retirement, and my bookstore will re-open in the spring of 2023 for its 30^th anniversary year! Can you believe it? It’s amazing to me.

 

Were there books you read as a young person that opened your eyes to lives very different from your own? What were they? What are you reading now, and what do you look forward to reading over the winter? 

Last day of 2022 season is today!

"We're living on borrowed time." Those were his very words.

Glorious Sunday morning sunlight!

That’s what the cashier at the little grocery store observed to a tourist during their short exchange about our glorious weather of the past weekend, when the “gales of November” that arrived in October backed off for three days, and the sun shone as if there would be no tomorrow. But there was a tomorrow, and then another – Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all glorious with balmy air, glowing fall colors, and clear blue skies. “Locals’ summer,” a phrase I learned only this year, might be expected more reliably in September, but for three consecutive days this month locals and visitors alike gleefully shrugged off jackets and sweaters.

 

“Bother fall housekeeping!” I said aloud impatiently (well, I might have, you know), translating the Mole’s utterance (WITW) from spring to autumn, because when life gives us heavenly days on earth, it would be wrong to spend all those hours indoors. I enjoyed a long walk with my dog, then a bit of botanizing in the meadow with downstate visitors,  and continued my now almost-finished apple harvest. Finally, reluctantly, after putting away some of summer's outdoor furniture, I spent some “indoor” time, preparing apples for applesauce, but spent it on the front porch with the door open, after which Sunny and I had a play session in the yard with tennis balls. 

Come late afternoon, I was ready to collapse on the porch with a book when I saw a text on my phone from good friend Laura, inviting me to enjoy the sunset at Good Harbor with her! I was so tired! But there is never enough time with friends, and “locals’ summer” could end any day now. Besides, how many times have I been on the beach at Lake Michigan this year? (Only once!) So of course I was up for a picnic supper and sunset!

A couple of Northport neighbors had walked farther down the beach for sunset, and as sky colors faded they walked back our way, and we visited a while, luxuriating in the softness of the breeze. Nearby a couple of small children ran in and out of the water. Lake Michigan! After sunset! In late October! Can you believe it?

Monday was an early morning for Sunny and me, our last agility session together until spring, and the day was cloudy, but the colors went on singing, and they sang again in the Tuesday's rain, also, a poignant tune, that, in which I imagined wailing Parisian accordion notes between the falling leaves.

Books Read Since Last Posted List

105.  Cozzens, James Gould. The Just and the Unjust (fiction)

106. Kresge Foundation (various authors). The Culture Keeper: Olayami Dables’ Grand Vision (nonfiction)

107. Wheeler, Jacob. Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World One Child at a Time (nonfiction)

108. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Sunset Song (fiction)

109. Jance, J.A. Partner in Crime (fiction)

110. Gwynne, S.C. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History(nonfiction)

111. Fuselier, David. A Fog on Spirit Island (fiction)

And now --

Sing, colors, leaves, friends, rain or shine! Borrowed time is all we ever have, so let’s make the most of it!

Singin' in the rain