Sunday Picture Potluck (and a Few Important Words)

I call them clothespin birds because of the way they sit, tails facing some one way, some the other.


This young lady was posing by the poster in the NCAC lobby during the intermission of a recent concert. It reminds me that the musical is coming up soon, and here I'm going to shamelessly lift from Norma Neve's NCAC event calendar to make sure all the details are right:

July 31, August 7, 14, 2010 at 8 pm
August 1, 8 at 2 pm & 8 pm
My Fair Lady – Northport Theatre Company

Sponsored by Easling Construction, Leland, Marty Easling; Jes Asmussen & Colleen Cooper; Larkin Insurance, Dan White; Leelanau Enterprise, Alan & Debra Campbell; Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, The Haase Radu Group; Sherwood Manufacturing Corporation, the Woods family

This Lerner and Loewe classical Broadway musical comes to Northport with a huge cast, full orchestra and sparkling sets. It is the story of the remarkable transformation of Eliza Doolittle (Catherine Hall) a Cockney flower girl, into an elegant, stylish socialite by Professor Henry Higgins. His success is highlighted in the phrase, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!” The charming dialogue, spectacular music, and colorful costumes promise a stellar production under the direction of theatre veteran, Ann Murphy Bloomquist, orchestra conductor, Doug Scripps, and a talented cast, starring Fred Szczepanski as Professor Higgins and Alan Woods as Col. Pickering.

Tickets: $20 adults, $5 for children from preschool through grade 12; also available at www.northportcac.org, at the door prior to a performance, and the NCAC office (M-F 10-2). Northport students are free.


Here's an important reminder: When you pull over on the side of the road so that a barefoot or sandaled family member can jump out to take a picture of beautiful Michigan scenery, watch the road for traffic and the ground for poison ivy! Look before you step!


Hungry? Sunday morning? I'm still at home while posting this, but doesn't this picture of Eat Spot muffins and scones set your mouth to watering?

It Was Another Busy Summer Friday in Northport

Sarah had to share riding space with lavender and purple coneflowers on our way to Northport Friday morning. The sun was glaring bright down in the harbor.

Besides stops at the farm market and for a dog run north of town (picture those two activities to yourself, or refresh your memory by looking at other postings), there was cleaning and organizing to do at the bookstore. On event day, the guest author gets the table all to himself.


But surprise! (There are always surprises in a bookstore.) We had an unexpected visitor from the U.P., singer-songwriter-author Carl Behrend, bringing books and CDs (“Great Lakes Fisherman” is the song that breaks my heart), quite ready and willing to hold an impromptu signing right then and there.


The hours sped by. Soon it was time for the scheduled poet’s visit. Here he is with darling little granddaughter, Ava.


And here he is with a new group of admirers.


There’s always a joker in every crowd (Steve is a good sport; he won’t mind this), but we fooled this one by serving mint tea and nonalcoholic punch.


Poet Todd Mercer came from way the other side of Traverse City.


As an added bonus, he brought me copies of the new Dunes Review. It’s here in Northport, and it’s gorgeous! There are also a couple poems in it by Benjamin Busch, who will be here next Thursday with Anne-Marie Oomen.

Three overnight guests joined us later at the farm—that is, Sarah and I joined David and everyone else when we finally got home—but by that time my picture-taking urge had completely died away, so you’ll just have to imagine our sunny, breezy, convivial evening. Hint: kick off your mental picture with plenty of smoked fish and fresh garden produce—and yes, wine, too.

Northport Poet Emerges from Closet: David and Pamela Grath Claim Responsibility

For years—he has lived here fulltime since 1978--no one around Northport knew that Al Bona was a poet; his neighbors and other local residents knew him only as a retired banker. (He was actually retired from the presidency of a small family-owned savings and loan association in Illinois, and that’s a whole story in itself, but I’ll leave it for him to tell another time.) But when he and my husband, artist David Grath, became friends, Al gradually began to share with David and me a few of his poems, and both of us were impressed by the originality of his voice and the lyrical clarity of his thoughts. Encouraged by our response, Bona let us into more and more of this very important but previously hidden part of his life.

Finally, we decided to “expose” him publicly.

In 1999 David had an art gallery at 102 Nagonaba (later my bookstore site, currently Sally Coohon’s Dolls and More). David and I invited friends, borrowed folding chairs, fixed refreshments and introduced Al Bona and his poetry to the assembled crowd. After that, for Al, there was no turning back. Submitting poems to the Dunes Review literary magazine came next, and in December 2002 Bona’s “Prince, Let Go That Foolishness” was published, with subsequent issues of the Dunes Review carrying more of the Northport writer’s work.

Finally Bruce Balas of Omena, a.k.a. Dog Ears Books bookstore angel, thought Al’s poems should be published in book form and pursued the possibility with Dan Stewart of Omena, who designs and publishes books under the name The Old Scott Farm. Together Al and David chose one of David’s paintings for the cover of the book. And now at last Al Bona’s inaugural volume, Sand, is being offered to the public of Leelanau and beyond. “As it gets closer and closer to publication,” Al said recently, “I’m starting to get excited.”

David and I are excited, of course, but the excitement has extended beyond the borders of Leelanau County. Here, in part, is what some other outstanding poets of northern Michigan have to say of Bona’s poetry:

"Al Bona’s poems are born in the regions of history, politics, philosophy and war, but come to fruition in the plain country of human frailty and hard questions. From Catullus to Ginsburg, he is fearless in subject matter, practiced in compassion, sharp of wit.”
– Anne-Marie Oomen, Un-Coded Woman and American Map

“On subjects as diverse as Eastern and Western classics, literary greats and political figures, aging ... in war zones and pastoral places, Bona is the humane reporter. He’s the witness determined to leave an honest record.... These poems considered together come across as benedictory blessings notable for a lack of self-pity.”
– Todd Mercer, Box of Echoes

“Al Bona’s poems record a life of travel, feeling, books, military service, good food, friends and a certain ruddy political outlook. In much the same way he studies the prairie crab apple with its beautiful ordinariness, he has taken all of this living into his sand roughened hands, turned it over, and found a kind of sweet-sour essence.”
– Holly Wren Spaulding, The Grass Impossibly

Uh-oh. David and I can't take all the credit, can we? We have to share it with Bruce Balas, Dan Stewart, Anne-Marie Oomen, Todd Mercer, Holly Wren Spaulding, all the folks at Dunes Review and everyone else who has recognized Al Bona's talent as a poet. Oh, well. Okay. Bona Fan Club United!

The launch party for Sand will take place at Dog Ears Books,106 Waukazoo Street in Northport, on Friday, July 16, from 4-6 p.m. Come one, come all! This is something to celebrate! And you will not want to miss the opportunity to buy Al's book and have it signed by the poet himself.

All Sarah and Lake Michigan

My first plan this morning was to do a photo potluck—all kinds of little odds and ends from the past couple of weeks, along with some interesting links people have shared with me. Then Sarah and I went to Peterson Park. We had a wonderful time. And I asked myself which my handful of readers and viewers would prefer, miscellany or Sarah. The answer seemed clear. Was I wrong?

Shaking My Head to Clear the Fog

We had a couple of foggy, misty mornings early last week, but it’s the mist in my brain that I troubles me some days. There is so much going on in the summer! The busy, full days race by so quickly! But it’s important to keep track of each day, and sometimes of each hour, when you’re in business rather than on vacation. My vacation time will come in another season. For now I must keep track of book orders, of author events, of out-of-town visitors, of when the gardens were last watered and how low we have gotten on clean towels and underwear (excuse me!), to mention only a few of the more important items.

But I find time to read. I need to make time to read. If I don’t read myself to sleep, the fog in my brain will start churning and roiling, and if I don’t take half an hour between dinner and bedtime to put my feet up a book in my hands, I’ll be too tired to read at bedtime. Books, whether fiction or nonfiction, easy or difficult, happy or sad, are my escape. They are my travel to other worlds. So bear with me today, because I’m just back from Georgia, and I was there in the 1970s, so it was travel through time as well as space.

There were times when the prose in Praying for Sheetrock seemed almost too literary, poetic and imaginative. Melissa Fay Greene wasn’t there, was she? Didn’t she only put the story together many years later, by interviewing people who had been there? So how does she know how everyone looked, how the place looked and smelled and sounded? Whenever these thoughts intruded on my reading, however, I would think about the book stripped of its detailed, evocative descriptions, and I could not wish it different.

Curled and perfumed teenagers arrived from the far reaches of the county, from the cabins and trailers in the woods, like moths attracted to high-wattage lights. Young men had stood burning in showers till their shoulders seemed to swell and then had worked bare-chested, draped with a towel, ironing their dress shirts on kitchen tables. Their mothers had talked while the sons had ironed and buttoned and tucked themselves in, paying their mothers no mind....

This story of many peoples’ lives is like life itself. At times a heroic note is sounded, then a tragic passage follows, and often there is dissonance. No two people have exactly the same memories or feelings. Forms of corruption are wiped out, and other, new forms appear. Meanwhile, amid the confusion and complexity, as the author notes, the ordinary, simple aspects of daily life go on.

Northerners can only ever see the South with outsiders’ eyes. The view this book gives the outsider is at least close-up and personal.

I shake my head to clear it of fog and heat and turn to focus on Friday’s launch of Al Bona’s book of poetry, Sand. Actually, my focus has already been there for several weeks, whenever the fog has lifted.

Cats and Bees, Poems and Trees, and the Flowers that Wouldn’t Be Kept Out

Okay, you'll quickly see that it’s the same cat in both pictures, but I’m posting both pictures because the Cat People have been muttering about all the dogs and horses on this blog and how cats have been neglected. True! And this is a very special cat, too. It is a marmalade cat. Did you know there was such a thing?


This cat’s name happens to be Marmalade. Reading Temple Grandin this past winter, I first came across the term, used casually, as if everyone knew it, another common cat color designation like tiger, calico or tortoiseshell, and more recently, watching a video on “Treasures of the National Trust” (gorgeous old homes in England), I learned that Winston Churchill himself had a marmalade cat. According to Temple Grandin, these cats are genetically disposed to be both highly social and highly fearful, an unusual combination, “which explains a lot of things,” according to the friends of mine who share a house with this particular Marmalade. Does it explain her desire to eat flowers? That we don’t know.


The basswood tree by our front porch is still humming with bees, but I have not been able to photograph any bees at work. They seem to be staying busy higher up in the tree, where the tiny, inconspicuous flowers opened earlier. But bees, I try to tell them, the flowers are open on the bottom branches now, too! They’re not listening. They'll have to find it out for themselves.


Bees in the lavender were more obliging—or should the credit go to the lavender, for not growing to tree height?



The big news this week, though, is Al Bona’s book launch party on Friday. The launch of a first book is exciting for any writer. For a poet, long a “secret” poet, who lived most of his life never dreaming of going public with his literary labors, it may be hard to believe. Al says he’s “starting to get excited.” The rest of us involved in this production (the book) and event (the party) are feeling our thrill-o-meters rising by the hour. The official hours of the party are 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, and I may have to close briefly sometime between three and four (but probably not for the full hour) to make sure everything is ready. Be there!!! Meanwhile, here’s a short poem of Al’s (not with his indentations, which I can’t manage on Blogger) to whet your appetite:

Something Hard

I wanted to give them the gift of trees
a touch of butterflies
an intimate knowledge of prairie weeds
vervain, mustard, iron
sounds of owls

I tried to give them all that I have
a trace that winds the hill
a carved step in a granite wall
something hard to do
Hard to do

And a few more flowers, just because they are so very beautiful--

More Sunday Pictures

The shot above was taken from inside Kampgrounds Kreamery, the cafe section of the beautifully remodeled old Willowbrook on Mill Street in Northport. My latte was beside me, the view peaceful.

Do not look for world soccer results on this site. Do not (today) even look for results from the Ladies Day sailboat race out of Northport. Neither do I have a philosophical thought in my head this second Sunday in July. I'm not feeling wordy. I've posted one still and a video earlier, along with other images on my photoblog, but here are a few more Sunday morning shots from Northport and out in the country. Feel free to add your own words.

Morning Has Broken, and I'm Singing Cat Stevens

Summer Days Bring Plenty of Variety

Run for Sarah, then Farmers Market for me. Good to see so many people selling and buying delicious local food, customers carrying away their hauls in everything from cloth bags to woven baskets. My Friday routine these days includes bringing a cooler to town to keep my fruits and vegetables happy until the end of the day.



I had a surprise visit from an artist from Sedona, Arizona. Xandi’s mother summers in Northport and had supplied me with some of the artist’s beautiful notecards, produced from her original work. They are bright, beautiful and lots of fun, I’m happy to have them in the bookstore, and it was good to meet the artist in person.

Later at home, relaxing with family was the order of the day. The grandchildren and their mom and I picked black raspberries for our ice cream dessert, but I was too busy having a good time to take a lot of pictures, even of Sarah’s great joy in having boys to play with! She did not want them to leave this morning! Of course, neither did we, but it so good to have them here, and today I’ll be thinking of them having fun in the U.P. on their way home to Minnesota.

What Are the Odds?

In the morning, I again picked up the book Praying for Sheetrock, by Melissa Fay Greene, the story about how a 50-year reign of corruption in one Georgia community was finally brought to a close by the late arrival of the Civil Rights era. I’m not very far into the book but found it absorbing from the first page.

So okay, now I reach page 68 and am introduced to the local newspaper, the Darien News. Darien is the only town in McIntosh County. I read about how the publisher of the newspaper took it upon himself to document and expose “clip joints” along Highway 17, tourist traps that enticed Yankees in with pecans, drew them into “friendly” but illegal little games of chance and relieved many of their entire vacation budget or their whole retirement savings. I think about the Georgia that has won my heart in the last ten years, the roadside pecans and boiled peanuts I’ve bought, mom-&-pop restaurants where we enjoyed good Southern cooking, and I’m glad we were traveling Highway 19 south in the first decade of the 21st century, rather than Highway 17 thirty years earlier.

But that’s not my story today. Later, at my bookstore, a woman brought in a box of books to leave for trade credit, and in the box was a 12-page booklet called “Marshes of Glynn: Sidney Lanier in Brunswick,” by Mary Miller. The cover image, a view out over a coastal salt marsh caught my eye, as it reminded me of the sawgrass Gulf coast of Florida. I opened the booklet and saw the words “Printed at The Darien News.” What is the likelihood of that, do you think? I don’t know that I’ve ever before heard of Darien, Georgia, and now two books have brought it to my attention in the same day.

The little booklet contains the text of Sidney Lanier’s poem, “The Marshes of Glynn,” illustrated with black-and-white photographs—live oaks, salt marsh and the sea—and sketches the story of “Georgia’s Greatest Poet” (as the historical marker in one photograph identifies him). Lanier lived from 1842 to 1881, dying of the tuberculosis he contracted as a prisoner during the Civil War. Though he married, wrote novels, played the flute and tried many different lines of work, “Poverty and ill health were his greatest concerns.” His poetry sounds stilted to the modern ear:

O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,
While the riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long did shine
Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine....

Still, he was a poet, he played the flute, he loved the coastal salt marsh, and I wouldn’t mind looking up Brunswick sometime to see if “Lanier’s oak” still stands, dripping with Spanish moss.

Here in northern Michigan, the basswood trees in our old farmyard hummed all evening long. Few of the tiny, sweet-smelling flowers are open, but the bees are already ready and eager.