It Was a Good Day From Mornin' 'til Night

These pictures may give some weak notion of how beautiful Saturday, October 16, was in Northport, Michigan, but you really had to be there to feel it all over your skin and clear through to your bones. Lately every day has seemed like the most beautiful day I've ever seen. My enthusiasm runneth over. There's been a little anxiety, too, though, I must admit, with one big day after another this month.

So as I hurried down Nagonaba with the check for the driver, not having talked to her for several weeks and worrying that she might have forgotten our date (Bertie, forgive me! How could I have doubted you?) the sight of the Abraham's Carriage Service horse trailer made my heart jump with gladness. And there, behind the trailer, were the horses! Big, black, beautiful Percherons! And there was the wagonette, all decorated for fall! And it was a perfect fall Saturday!



What is a festival without horses? Some people may be able to imagine it, but it's hard for me. This is the second year I've been responsible for bringing the horses to town--I guess since it was my idea to begin with--and while last year I was relieved that it didn't rain, this year the driver and I were thrilled that the weather was absolutely perfect. Of the many pictures I took of the horses, here are probably enough to satisfy most blog readers. If you want more, say so. I have more. They do tend to be repetitious, however, as almost all were snapped as the horses were coming down Waukazoo Street past Dog Ears Books.



Here is a happy crowd of people, Northporters and their houseguests, enjoying the ride through town.



What is a festival without music? Again, unthinkable! I can't believe we didn't have the band last year!


Band member Steve Gilbreath gives most of the credit for the little Oompah Band to Karen Schulte, the new minister at Trinity Congregational Church. Here are Karen, Steve and other members of this fine little ensemble. Weather was warm enough that a fire wasn't really necessary under the shelter, but it added greatly to the ambience. Some of the band members are already talking about next year, and I don't see how we can even think of having a Fall Festival without them. In fact, adding one major theme element a year seems like a good way to have the festival grow naturally.





After running up the street to snap a few shots of the band, I was inspired to pull a rocking chair out onto the sidewalk, where I only had a chance to sit for maybe five minutes, but doesn't it look lazy and inviting? The music carried very well down Waukazoo, so by leaving the front door open I could hear it inside the bookstore. Sarah was a little sad that we had to go back in. She liked the sidewalk position better for watching the world go by and greeting everyone as they approached the bookstore.

After the band concert, the horses were still clip-clopping through the village for another hour, and after the horses left there were still a few strollers and shoppers not yet ready to call it a day. We had company waiting for us back at home, so Sarah and I couldn't stay too much past five o'clock, but what a beautiful day it was, all day. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, perfect day! I was so happy to be in Northport! I wish we had horses and bands every weekend!



I need to get a report from someone else on Haunted Lighthouse. I'm sure it was a huge success this weekend, also. We and our company did get to the Northport Promise Chicken Dinner this afternoon--too late for the music (we couldn't resist a fall color tour down to Sleeping Bear, photos of which will be up in a day or two) but not too late for a delicious dinner. Satisfied. That's how we all felt about this perfect fall weekend. Satisfied.

We Are Getting Completely Spoiled

A few clouds in the morning sky? It wasn't long before they parted and vanished, leaving clear blue from horizon to horizon.


Yes, another gorgeous morning here Up North! They just keep coming, one right after another.


No one is complaining. I’m certainly not! Tomorrow is the Fall Festival day, which means chiefly to me (though there are also specials at village eateries, and I should not slight the Oompah Band, which will begin their free outdoor concert at 2 o’clock, bless their hearts!) that the horses are coming to Northport again!


On my camera’s internal memory—not on the removable memory chip—are a couple of pictures from October 2009 of the team pulling the beautiful, shiny black, fall-decorated wagonette full of happy people through the village of Northport. I wanted to put at least one of those photographs on the blog today, and I did find the cable that connects (or would connect) the camera directly to the laptop. But—the instructions with the cable say that certain software must first be installed, and I couldn’t find the software.

So, no horse pictures today. Only fall sunshine and color. You’ll have to come to town tomorrow to see the horses for yourself—or wait and hope I get some good pictures of them this year on the removable chip. That’s my plan.

The Other Fall Colors

The color yellow shouted to me happily this morning and would not leave me alone. It was everywhere. I didn’t mind a bit, since yellow is a color that always makes me happy.

The word ‘yellow’ probably doesn’t appear in as many book titles as ‘red’ or ‘black’ or ‘white’ or even ‘blue.’ (Languages that have only two color words sort into dark and light; languages with three color words give red its own name. Blue? Metaphorical for users of English.) The first yellow-mention title that came to my mind was A Little Yellow Dog, by Walter Mosley, the first Easy Rawlins story I came across. Then, jumping genres and ages, I thought of the yellow house on New Dollar Street where the Moffats lived. That’s The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes, of course. And Vincent van Gogh lived in the yellow house in Arles. But those are houses, not books.


So I started looking for more titles and quickly found...

Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis
The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O’Brian
The Yellow Fairy Book, by Andrew Lang
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, by Michael Dorris
Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
The Yellow House Mystery, by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Novel on Yellow Paper, by Stevie Smith

Obviously, this is the tip of an iceberg. Any favorites of yours belong on this list?


Fall is full of color, really a much more colorful season than summer, which can be as monotone in its green as winter in white, except for flowers. Autumn leaves command most of our attention, but fall has its own flowers, too, and I am loving my asters more than ever this year.


When I look closer, I see that the same asters that dance in the breeze are also a lunchroom for bees and caterpillars.

Any (and Every) Which Way

Where am I headed? What direction should I take today? Land or shore? Mist or sun?



And are these real Canada geese? I thought it was remarkable that they stood so still in the field.


Then, on down another road, I saw a man setting decoys out in a freshly harvested cornfield. Oh. Not real geese. That explains it.


Another choice to be made! Okay, let's go to Northport and Dog Ears Books. This is a choice? Yes, and I make it anew each day.

Town is looking good. What a great place to be!




Tune in again soon for an answer to the burning question, "Why did Louis XIV love Molière so much?" This is what you've been wondering lately, isn't it?

“Sedentary Adventurism in Need of a Subject”

That's a phrase from a new essay by Benjamin Busch, which you can read or listen to online if you missed it yesterday on NPR. Here's a bit more of the lead-in to Ben's take on the distance between war game videos and actual combat:

When I was a boy, I was given plastic army men. I arranged them in the sandbox behind our house, and I killed them. I voiced their commands and made the sounds of their suffering. I imagined their war — and I controlled it. But I lost those magical powers as a Marine in Iraq.

It was my good fortune to have Benjamin Busch as a visiting writer to Dog Ears Books in 2010. Those who missed him this past summer will catch up with him, I'm sure, as this talented essayist makes his mark.

Still, in Retrospect, Overwhelmed and Gratified

The event on Saturday, October 9, was planned to be two hours long, from 6 to 8 p.m., but people began arriving as early as 5 p.m. Some had mistaken the time, while others simply hoped that the guest of honor would also arrive early so that they could purchase a book, have him sign it and get on to dinner in Leland or Traverse City or get back home to the televised MSU/UM game. An entirely different crowd came late--after the game--and stayed later. Never have I heard the words “football game” so often in such a short space of time! (When worrying about possible conflicts, football had never entered my sports-naive mind. Live and learn!) So basically, Saturday’s became a marathon four-hour book signing at Dog Ears Books, but it all turned our great. Wish you all could have been with us!


Margaret Bell of Circa Estate Winery had planned to be with us to pour wine, but the winery was short one staff person on Saturday, and with the glorious perfection of this year’s fall weather they were jammed to the rafters over on Horn Road, as everywhere else, and Margaret couldn’t get away, hence David Grath’s fulfillment of the role of emergency bookstore sommelier. Bless the versatile artist’s heart! Interesting and delightful hors d’oeuvres (the most surprising to our guests were the miniature boiled blue potatoes stuffed with cream cheese) came from Northport caterer David Chrobak.


So we had food and wine and books for the early birds, but they had to wait for the guest of honor. Dean Robb arrived precisely on the stroke of six o’clock, not a minute before or after. (How’d he do that?) I went right to work selling books, Dean went to work signing, David went to work pouring wine, and none of us had much time for a break before 8:30 when things slowed down, and even then it was nine o’clock before we put the party to bed, closing the door at last and turning out the lights. Other people undoubtedly took more and better photographs than I managed to get, unable to get far from my post behind the counter to capture other perspectives.




By any measure, though, it was a highly successful event. I could not have asked for more beautiful weather. Then--numbers of people attending, books sold, refreshments consumed, happy faces and compliments galore—it was everything I wanted it to be, and I’ll be reliving the event for a long time to come. People came from Leland, Suttons Bay, Cedar and Traverse City, as well as Northport, among them a handful who had never been in the bookstore before. So many hugs, so much laughter!

Author of the Dean Robb: An Unlikely Radical and Dean’s youngest son, Matthew Robb, called from Detroit halfway through the evening, a call planned earlier in the day, and the only glitch of the whole evening as far as I’m aware was our not being able to get the speaker phone working so that everyone in the room could hear Matt’s voice. (We should have had a second dry run after one brief, elusive success earlier in the day.) Still, his father relayed the other side of the conversation, and when he read aloud Matt’s introduction to the book, a moving tribute from son to father, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.


“How do you think it went? Are you happy with it?” Dean asked me around 8:30, a trifle anxiously. We had sold two cases of books and broken into the third. He asked if this was customary (“about what you usually do?”), and when I told him that a more usual number of books sold at a signing was between five and 15 (this is all new to him) he began to realize that it had been no ordinary bookstore evening.

There were many people who contributed to the success of Saturday’s event. I haven’t even mentioned yet Dean’s wife Cindy and everything she did with arrangements in the weeks ahead of time, none of which even begins to touch on all she did along the way while Dean and Matt were working on the book. Dean’s wife and son will understand, though, when I say that it was Dean himself people turned out to honor. His life, his career, his passion, his dedication to civil rights and to defending and fighting for what he believes in all make him a legend in Leelanau and beyond. So basically, I can’t claim a lot of credit for Saturday night. You want a successful event? Host a legend!

Dean, Cindy, Matt—thank you all from the bottom of my heart for granting me the privilege of throwing a party that meant so much to so many people. It was an honor and a joy, and I’ll never forget it.

Postscript to the evening: A Northport friend returning from Mackinac had driven through crowds at the Apple Festival in Charlevoix, crowds in Petoskey and Traverse City, and as he approached little Northport he was thinking how dark and quiet it would be. Then he turned onto Waukazoo Street and saw cars and people and lights! Surprised, he saw there was some kind of party in the bookstore! “I just had to stop and see what was going on. It looked so great!” Well, it felt great to hear that. It all felt great. What a night!

Wind or No Wind, Saturday Is Here!

Where did the wind come from? After a string of clear, still days, it took me a couple of minutes to identify the sound (please don’t tell me I’m imagining it), but peering out a dark window I could still see the stars. The sky is still clear. It’s just a windy morning. Okay.




Those dreams when you forgot to study for an exam? Neglected to learn your lines and the curtain is going up? Can’t find the room you’re supposed to teach in? Besides the wind, a dream of that kind woke me in the dark, but there’s no need to go into the silly details, because no failures of that kind are going to mar the bookstore event today. I’ll get all the furniture arranged, and the caterer and the wine will arrive in plenty of time, and everything will be fine. After all, the books came yesterday. Yes! The books arrived twenty-six or –seven hours ahead of the scheduled event, and that was a big relief. They look great, too.



So let the wind blow. The sun will shine, and it will be a beautiful day. These images, however, are from the last two quieter, calmer mornings, when the wind and I were taking life a lot easier (and as I was selecting them this morning, I couldn't stop thinking that Sharon will know exactly where each photograph was taken). I’m getting a lot of use out of my camera battery recharger this season, and you haven’t seen the half of it. There will also be bookstore pictures and book talk, along with all the "local color."

P.S. Before you go outdoors this morning, check this out. You can keep track of the Sleeping Bear's activities by e-mail. And does that little produce stand look familiar? (Susan, there's no prize for identifying it.)