What Do You Think You Will Remember?

My desk in December

When we arrived at our ghost town hideaway for the winter, I made notes on the route we’d taken west and the places we had stayed: Kalamazoo, MI; Springfield, IL; Sedalia, MO; Wellington, KS; Dalhart, TX; Alamagordo, NM; and finally here, Dos Cabezas, AZ, 15 miles southeast of Willcox, AZ, and about 25 beautiful, winding miles west of the Chiricahua National Monument. The first page of the same composition book was already taken up with lists of things to pack (one list for the humans, another for the dog), and it was only on our second morning in the ghost town that I began keeping a sketchy narrative history of our season here. Back then, happy to be settling in for a few months under a sunny sky filled with wintering sandhill cranes, I had no idea that my notebook would become, in time a plague journal!

I always read a lot of books during our Arizona winters … write letters … blog about my reading and about our Cochise County adventures and explorations. It just happened that this year, for the first time, I also began keeping a journal. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would be recording historic events; I merely wanted to fix everyday small details on paper. Because those little everyday details, the stuff of short-term memory, are easily lost as days slip into the past, and my time here is precious to me. I want to be able to hold the days in my hand as it were, and look at them again and again when I am far from these mountains and this desert. 

Winter morning

So most of my mornings began, starting in December, with a session of journal-writing. The weather (no, it isn’t boring), social engagements, personal happenings (getting keys to the mailbox is a big deal to me), daily errands, and descriptions of surroundings flowed from my pen, along with re-emerging childhood memories and a few observations of the current national political scene. Quite a lot about hearing coyotes, through the night and in early, still-dark morning. A few notes on books read.

In short, nothing particularly earth-shaking. And that’s how it went, week after week.

… Sandhill crane count … first visit to the Smile4Jesus Thrift Shop … tales of my husband’s new friend in Willcox, the one I call the Born-Again Bear … brief accounts of dreams (very few remembered long enough to write down) … walks and hikes with neighbors.… 

There were only a few words on the impeachment, although I thought it would never end … and very little on presidential campaigns, debates, caucuses, as I tried to keep attention on politics to a minimum … much more on my volunteer mornings at the library bookstore and the elementary school in Willcox. Of course, the political issues bled in from time to time, from impeachment to debates to caucuses to the State of the Union, because that was the news, nonstop, on the radio and television, but I tried to keep my attention locally focussed, as much as possible, escaping from the news to the outdoors.

People I love found their way onto the pages. One of my sisters was in Mexico for two weeks. The other went through the pain of losing an old dog. We spent February 15-17 in Tucson and anticipated a return in March. The Artist had a birthday. Then in late February, my former husband, the father of my only child, was moved (after only three days) from hospital to hospice, where he died a week later, and my son and I began spending daily time together on the phone. 

In the larger world, a few of the Democratic hopefuls began to drop out of the race for candidacy, but too many yet remained, and far from business and home responsibilities in Michigan as I was, I found the world crowding in, events racing along, piling on top of each other without time to catch a breath. In many ways, the world seemed all present, minute by minute. 

Yet only on March 10 did coronavirus come into my journal, when I noted that the Tucson Festival of Books, scheduled for March 14-15, had been cancelled the day before, adding at the bottom of that page: “Politics and coronavirus — our world today.” Two days later, March 12, I recorded that the president had announced, the evening previous, a ban on travelers from Europe, Ireland and the U.K. excluded. We began hearing daily about the terrible situation in Italy. COVID-19, the virus was now called. Less than two weeks ago. And yet now, March 20 as I am composing these thoughts, just past the spring equinox — such a short time since we were first told to stock our pantries for a possible two-week emergency quarantine — almost all universities and public schools are closed, churches have stopped holding services, restaurants all over the United States are open for take-out only, grocery store shelves are near-empty in key aisles (paper products, soaps and cleaning products, the dairy case), and more and more Americans, even those not yet on “lockdown,” are “sheltering in place,” even if they have not put themselves under “self-quarantine.” That is our national language now. 

Still, though all of us are affected, each of us is experiencing these days of isolation differently. We are spread out across a very large country, and while some friends find themselves alone, far from family and close friends, others see their households expanding with schoolchildren and college-age sons and daughters home all day. I lost my volunteer jobs, but many other people have lost paying jobs, jobs they needed for basic food and shelter. “Lucky” ones see their savings “evaporating before our very eyes,” while the homeless appear at intersections, holding up cardboard signs. No one can hope to remain unaffected, from the most expendable part-time hourly wage worker to the most pampered trust fund baby whose investment portfolios has plummeting in value.

Here’s another personal note, this one I know shared by many — the strange realization that, simply because of our ages, the Artist and I are in a “vulnerable” group, members of an “at-risk” category. It was already strange enough just trying to get it through our heads that we are no longer young — hell, no longer middle-aged! — we still can’t fully believe that! — and now we are also particularly “at risk”?

For me, personally, there is the added strange feeling of being disconnected, physically, from the world that has been mine for almost 27 years, i.e., the world of books. I am not, after all, in my Northport bookstore, weighing the question of whether to entirely for the duration of the crisis or stay open to process phone and mail orders, make sales through the front door (or deliver books to local customers), and gratefully accept whatever help my little community might offer, along with doing what I might do to help the community. I’m not there. Instead of being “on the front lines,” as it were, I only read each day in Shelf Awareness what is happening with other bookstores around the country. So peculiar and unsettling! My feeling must be something like what my sister felt when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans just after she had moved away, that feeling of I should be there! Then added to that the uncertainty of not knowing if we will even be back in early May as planned — if that will be possible at all. 

That’s part of my story. Everyone else has a story, too, quite different from mine. The general point I’m making is that each of us is having a unique subjective experience of these times, which means that together we will have a staggering number of stories, coming from myriad different vantage points, looking through lenses offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives. 

So, are you keeping a “plague” journal? Years from now, what will you remember? What is strangely ordinary about this time for you? In what ways does the crisis seem real or unreal? What other times of crisis does it call to your mind? How is it unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced? 

What books are you reading, and what kinds of meals do you find yourself putting together? Are you able to get outdoors for fresh air and exercise? Do you listen or watch or in some way follow news compulsively, every waking minute, or do you ration what you let into your consciousness each day? Do you sleep through the night or lie awake? If you sleep, what do you dream? If awake, what are your thoughts? How do you seek out comfort, and what gives you comfort?

With how many other people are you “sheltering in place,” and how is that going? Are you spending more time on the phone, calling and texting, or on your computer, e-mailing and following friends’ posts on social media? Do you feel more or less connected to those you love? Differently connected?

What is the best and worst aspect of this time for you? I should add so far to that previous question, shouldn’t I? Because we don’t know yet what will be the best and worst in the days and weeks ahead.

When I look at my own handwritten journal and see that I only used the word ‘coronavirus’ there for the first time ten days ago, I can hardly believe my eyes, but there it is on the page, although subjectively, right now, it feels like at least a full month that we have been obsessed with this news, every waking minute, to the exclusion of almost all else. I know I heard the news from China before March 10, but at that point, as the absence of it in my journal illustrates, the danger must have seemed very remote, a foreign problem only. That’s how fast everything has been happening.

Friends, I see some of your posts on Facebook, but those “news feeds” will be superseded overnight, you know, by whatever comes next, and even a year from now we will have a hard time remembering exactly when and now the pandemic (another frequently occurring word these days) first touched us personally. And besides, as long as you are “sheltering in place,” wouldn’t you like to use some of your time to make a lasting record for yourself and those who come after you? In all human lives, there are watershed events, some personal, others part of a national or world-historic fabric, and this is one of those times that will stand out whenever, in future, we look back on our lives. If you don’t see yourself as a writer, maybe you can keep a scrapbook or a photo album or make a quilt of “plague times.” We don’t have to be greedy opportunists to find opportunity in crisis. 

What stories will you have to tell years from now?

We each see the world from our own little corner....

To Stretch It Out and Make It Last

If you’re a reader (any why would you be looking at this blog if you’re not?), you probably have had the experience of not wanting a book to end, of wanting to stretch it out to last as long as possible. Many years ago, I had the experience memorably, to the -nth degree, with George Feifer’s Moscow Farewell. I read the book one summer while living out in the country (Barry County, Michigan), where I had that year, conveniently for more than one purpose, an ambitious vegetable garden. The closer I got to the end of the book, the more tightly I rationed my reading, the fewer pages I let myself read at one sitting, until finally I was reading only one page at a time and then going out to the garden to weed and hoe or water or harvest. There might have been a few dishes washed, too, before I gave in again to temptation and picked up the book. But you know what I mean? I could not bear to come to the last page — although ultimately, of course, that’s just what came to pass.

One thing I'm doing at present to stretch out my reading is turning to cookbooks. Those particular books inspire me to launch into baking and cooking projects, which not only help pass the time but give us something to look forward to when we sit down to the table. 

Another technique I've often used for making books last is to have several going at the same time. Say, one in each room of the house. Here in our ghost town cabin, we do not have multiple rooms, but we do have areas, so there are books on bookshelves and tables and next to the bed and sometimes left on chairs, and however long the coronavirus pandemic lasts, we are in no danger of running out of reading material. For one thing, we don’t just read — we also re-read. And by the by, I know not everyone does that, but I’ll never understand how someone can love a book and not want to revisit it, spend time again with characters who became friends during the first reading and re-experience vicariously their lives, whether historical or fictional. Also, re-reading a book is like re-watching a movie, in that one always notices something previously missed.

Sometimes I read a book more quickly than I’d really like, as I did with Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights. That was because the publisher had sent me an advance reading copy, and I wanted to write up a review for this blog. And let me say right here that Joshua’s book comes out in June, so please consider placing an advance order for it with your favorite local bookstore, because bookstores, like every other business in these days of pandemic, are hungry for revenue, struggling to hang on, and worrying about how long they’ll be able to do so, and while I haven’t read anything yet about authors’ worries, they too must be wondering nervously about their book sales in this strange year of 2020. 

Here's another book I read more quickly than I would have otherwise -- because when I was still in the opening pages, I told my sister about it and promised to send it to her as soon as I finished, and I didn't want to make her wait too long. How to Catch a Frog: And Other Stories of Family, Love, Dysfunction, Survival, and DYI, a memoir by Heather Ross, held me enthralled. While her childhood was anything but idyllic (cold and hunger were frequent housemates), and while Ross does not gloss over the difficulties, she tells her story with deep love for poor, rural Vermont, and there is little self-pity in her tales, even when she includes in her list of ways she has learned to multitask “sobbing and driving.” At least, I think that was in the Ross book, not in the Barbara Kingsolver book of essays I was re-reading almost simultaneously…. Anyway, those of you readers who also knit and sew and engage in crafts will find a kindred spirit in Heather Ross for other reasons besides her writing, for her entrepreneurial work in fabric design preceded her career as a writer. And if you're smart, you'll ration your reading to, say, a chapter at a time and make the book last as long as possible. Her illustrations are charming, as you can see from these endpapers:

So, yes, getting around finally to making books last, my subject for the day, yes, I am re-reading Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson, and I’m taking my time with it. I had been reading another Arizona writer, Charles Bowden; however, brilliant and incisive and detailed and evocative as his writing is, I needed a break from his bleak, grim, harsh view of la frontera land around me. (Bowden was a journalist, did a lot of crime writing for his newspaper, and he was a hard drinker. Alcohol + immersion in crime = dark view of world. Or maybe it was simply his nature. Who knows? Jim Harrison nailed it when he called Bowden “America’s most alarming writer,” and Jim’s essay using that phrase gave the name to a new book about Charles Bowden, which I will read, eventually, just as I will eventually finish reading Bowden’s Blue Desert, but the world is bleak and grim and harsh enough right now, so I’m taking a break from Bowden.) Kingsolver’s Tucson is friendlier, even when she is attacked in her own home at knifepoint, an incident she disposes of, in passing, with a single sentence:

…Wariness of strangers I learned the hard way. When I was new to the city, I let a man into my house one hot afternoon because he seemed in dire need of a drink of water; when I turned from the kitchen sink I found sharpened steel pressed against my belly. And so I know, I know. But I cultivate suspicion with as much difficulty as I force tomatoes to grow in the drought-stricken hardpan of my strange backyard.

- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

My sister would like this book, too, especially the first essay (from which the collection takes name), in which the author tells of inadvertently bringing home a hermit crab with shells she collected on a beach vacation in Caribbean. My sister did the same thing this past winter, returning to the cold Midwest from not-so-cold coastal Florida and finding she had unknowingly acquired a new pet.

(And here’s another coincidence: Barbara Kingsolver writes, “I know, I know,” and in the Ross memoir, one of the most touching moments comes when Jane, her aunt, embraces the young girl and murmurs sympathetically, “I know, I know.” Sometimes people angrily respond to this with “You don’t know!” but both Kingsolver and Ross’s aunt had been there, you see. That was the point.)

An ARC I got from Wayne State University Press, like the Kingsolver essays, is another book I’m stretching out, but for different reasons. Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming, by Emita Brady Hill, is a collection of oral histories of women from my northern Michigan home, and since I know the majority of women personally, picking up the book is like sitting down with friends and listening to their stories: I can hear their voices as I read the words on the page. Out here in the Southwest at present, so far from the Great Lakes, and hungry for the voices of Michigan friends (though also very happy to be near Arizona friends, whom I will miss in turn, come summer), I want to make this book last as long as possible. Also, Emita Hill and the first woman in her book, dear Julia Brabanec, are scheduled to be my first Thursday Evening Author guests, and right now, with all of life and commerce, including the book world, hanging in such uncertainty, I can only hope we will be able to get together in June as planned. So, a few pages at a time….

Then there is reading in bed. 

In December 2019, when we first began the winter’s nighttime reading aloud in bed, the Artist and I picked up a book we’d enjoyed before, My Life in France, by Alex Prud’homme and Julia Child. It was Julia’s life, of course, as I’m sure you know, and her irrepressible personality comes through every chapter. Also, the Artist and I love Paris, as did Julia, so we love picturing the scenes she describes and laughing with delight (and occasionally tears in our eyes) over the situations of her French life with her own beloved husband. Re-reading this delightful book was anything but “old hat” to us.

Somehow, though, we fell away from reading aloud for a while, and when we got back to it we tried something else (and I forget now what that was), but when one of the books I gave the Artist for his birthday was The Silent Traveller in Paris, by Chiang Lee, that’s the one he wanted me to read aloud at night, and we are currently having a wonderful time with it. Some nights we read a single chapter, sometimes two, and sometimes only a few pages. It doesn’t matter. It’s all very satisfying to us both. I have read many, though probably not all, of Chiang Lee’s books, and I love every one I’ve read. His illustrations add to the charm of all his silent traveling accounts.

When I sense I am losing my audience, though, I suggest we stop for the night, and I pick up something else with which to read myself to sleep. Right now it’s Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang, by David Philipps. I don’t need to explain that choice, do I?

How about you? What are you reading these crazy days? Do you re-read favorite books? Do you try to stretch out books you’re enjoying to make them last longer? Please tell me, because there are too many days I walk out to an empty mailbox, making these online connections all the more precious! 

Yesterday was cold and windy and rainy here in the mountains, not at all a day inviting long walks. Sarah and I did walk to the mailbox, however, and — lo and behold! Oh, joy, the mailbox was not empty! There was a book I’d ordered through Alibris from a seller in California, one that ought to hold me for a while, don’t you think?

“You Never Know.” No, We Really Don’t.

My volunteer tutoring job having been suspended by concerns over the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent school closing, I looked forward all the more to Monday morning at the Friendly Bookstore, my remaining volunteer gig — at least for now. Run by the Friends of the Library (that’s the Elsie S. Hogan Community Library in Willcox, the Friendly is the only bookstore in Willcox, and so it has been a big part of our winters here since 2015. But should I go to work at all? Bearing in mind the current recommended six-foot social distance rule, I felt safe enough behind the bookstore counter to enjoy my three-hour stretch.

How many times over the years have I remarked that a bookstore could exist if it offered only history and mystery? The Friendly is very oriented toward both, and especially toward Arizona and Southwest history. Plus a very large selection of children's books -- and it's important to keep those kids both entertained and learning during all the school closings right now. We also offer honey, supplied to us by a beekeeper down in the southern part of Cochise County, and people come quite a distance to buy it. In fact, some days I sell more honey than books.

When the Artist and I are back at work in northern Michigan and getting ready for another day in bookstore and gallery in the village of Northport, we often wonder who will come into our establishments that day and what kind of conversations we will have. There is no predicting what any particular day will bring, and part of our pleasure at the end of each summer day is sharing stories of our respective encounters, as well as the occasional unexpected big sale. We meet so many interesting people!

I haven’t spent enough time working at the Friendly (this is my first season) to recognize a lot of repeat bookstore customers, but one man who has been in three or four times on Monday mornings is a reader of history, and there was a five-volume of Toynbee I would have liked to sell him, but he already had that work at home — and anyway, he felt Toynbee’s history was too whitewashed, too official, or, as he put it, “high school history, when what you want is college history.” That led me to ask (because staring at me over the counter, on shelves opposite, were several volumes of Bruce Catton’s Civil War series) if he had ever read Bruce Catton. He had not. I said Catton was probably best known for his work on the Civil War but had also written a very readable and not at all “whitewashed” history of the state of Michigan. Another man walked in about then and perked up at the reference to Michigan, saying he was from Michigan himself.

The Artist was on hand, and from Bruce Catton the conversation quickly moved on to where the new browser was from in Michigan. Well, he lived in two places, downstate and the Upper Peninsula, and he had an orchard in the U.P. Oh, where? West of Newberry. He grows apples, pears, and cherries, and his is the northernmost cherry orchard in Michigan. Yes, we know that area well. We have spent a lot of time in Grand Marais. Were we familiar with Jim Harrison? Yes, he was a friend of ours. Well, this man had attended a memorial gathering in Tucson for Jim, and a couple years before that he had attended a memorial gathering for Charles Bowden, at which Jim was the first speaker. Talk veered back to the U.P., via the life of Jim Harrison and his love of good food, and there we were, the three of us, mentally traveling old M-28, which prompted the Artist to ask the Yooper orchardist if he remembered Rashid’s grocery on the south side of M-28 between Newberry and Seney. Of course he did! His orchard is only about a mile from there! And as if all that weren’t enough, Jerry Bishop also speaks French and has travelled in the south of France!

There had been no way to anticipate this Friendly meeting, and it reminded me of what we say so often in the summer back in Michigan, marveling at the unexpected individuals who show up at our places of business in Northport: “You never know!” What will a day bring? We never know. We certainly would have been unable to predict on Monday morning, leaving our winter cabin for Willcox, that we would meet someone familiar with Rashid’s Grocery on M-28 and who had heard Jim Harrison speak at Charles Bowden’s memorial and who had also traveled in France and was himself a French speaker!

At the present historical juncture, the phrase “You never know” sounds a more sombre note, not only for us but for the whole world, but we do have our own personal and specific concerns. Will we be able to return to Northport as planned in May? What will be happening across the country by then? Questions closer at hand arise, too, one of them being, Will the Friendly Bookstore be open next week? Yes, we have a good supply of reading material at home (much of it from the Friendly, in fact), but if this volunteer job vanishes, also, I will miss my encounters with local and visiting readers in Willcox, just as I already miss my Wednesday morning tutoring sessions with little readers at the elementary school.

The truth is, though, that we never know, in the best of times, in the most ordinary of circumstances, what will happen in our lives from one day to the next. There is no guarantee that the future will be like the past. All the more reason, I suppose, that I am enjoying so much one of my Monday purchases from the little bookstore where I worked for three hours that day: How to Catch a Frog, by Heather Ross. And when I’ve finished reading that book and have wrapped it up to mail to my sister, who will love it, too, I’ll get back to Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson, and Wild Horse Country, by David Philipps, and after our evening movie, the Artist and I will snuggle down under the covers and I’ll read aloud another chapter of Chiang Lee’s The Silent Traveller in Paris, and we’ll be grateful to have had one more day together, this one under the Arizona sun, in Friendly surroundings, regardless of what the future brings.

Postscript to the nervous: We have ordered another propane delivery, gassed up the car, and have plenty of groceries and paper products, as well as paper, pens, stamps, and books in the house. We are prepared to do a lot of staying home, and you can see my first "home ground" adventure (with Sarah) here. 

We All Have Our Worries

Storm gathers

When I learned last Monday that the Tucson Festival of Books had been cancelled, following the pull-out of a hundred rationally (at this time) flight-phobic authors who were to have been featured guests, I was disappointed. The Artist was relieved. He was worried about my presence in those big crowds, even though the book fair is an outdoor event. That was Monday. On Friday I got word that my part-time job as a volunteer reading tutor at Willcox Elementary School had also been suspended. School is on spring break this week, but even if the students go back next week we tutors won’t be there, and I’ll miss the little kids, but given the age of our tutor pool and added vulnerabilities of some of us, I have to admit that precautions are only sensible.

Note that I don’t ask if my readers have kept abreast of developments in the coronavirus story, since there is little else on the news these days as the number of reported cases and the number of countries with cases continues to rise. Events cancelled, schools closed or closing, everyone avoiding crowds, until it becomes difficult to imagine anyone, sick or not, who will remain unaffected financially. Not everyone — not even all office workers — can work from home. Many will not be needed if their places of employment are closed. Retail and restaurant employees, bus and cab and Uber drivers, actors and musicians (Broadway dark!), and domestic service workers. For many people, not working means no income.

Suddenly we have a whole new vocabulary, and self-quarantine is a star in that list, with Americans admonished not to panic, not to hoard, but to make sure they have enough food and other supplies on hand to get through two weeks of isolation, if need be. Paper products, hand sanitizer, and soap are vanishing from store shelves.

But why do I write these things that everyone who’s not in a coma has heard hundreds of times a day by now? Young or old, working or not, there is no one in the world without a corona virus-related worry list. Will it bring us together in resolve and commonsense, or will it fuel fear of the Other? I wonder.  

Although I’m more than one decade (never mind how many) older than I can quite believe, it did not occur to me immediately that I was part of a “vulnerable” group, simply by virtue of my age. Then there is what one doctor diagnosed as “cold asthma,” an affliction that had become terrible during Michigan winters but something I am able to forget (and then gratefully realize I have been forgetting) out here in the Arizona sun. Besides that, the younger and stronger, even if I were among that group, are in danger themselves — the danger of transmitting the virus to older and weaker friends, relatives, and strangers.

Darkness moves in

Even when neighbors gather, there are no “large crowds” in a ghost town, but people here still have their worries. Surgeries postponed, ongoing cancer treatments, auto-immune issues, necessary travel, falling stock values, lost earned income. No one is untouched.

For myself, I admit the worries were slow in coming, but they have arrived now. Will we be able to leave the ghost town on our scheduled departure date and reach Michigan again safely? What will virus statistics look like a month and a half from now? Will I be able to re-open my bookstore on schedule? Proceed with my Thursday Evening Author events? Will I have any customers — any income — at all? In time, of course, the crisis will pass, but how much time? Every independent bookstore exists on a narrow margin, hanging on, when possible at all, by its metaphorical fingernails through seasons and years of financial drought, and an artist’s earnings are similarly uncertain.

One ray of hope comes more as optimistic speculation than confident prediction, and that’s the idea that as spring proceeds and warmer weather arrives, the virus will die down. In childhood, when I begged my mother for something I desperately wanted (say, a kitten or a puppy), the parental reply I most dreaded was “We’ll see.” There was cause for joy in “Yes,” and “No” could be argued against, but the dreaded “We’ll see” left me hanging in limbo, especially when my mother added, as she usually did, “Keep pestering me about it, and the answer will be no!” Hope with no certainty: that was the torment of “We’ll see.” But “We’ll see,” I’ve learned as an adult, is the human condition.

Should worst come to worst in the high desert, should the Artist and I be compelled to remain within the confines of our rented cabin walls and the immediate outdoors surrounding, we will be able to stretch our food supply to the requisite two weeks. Maybe, however, ordering another delivery of propane would be prudent. One thing is certain: we have enough reading material to last out a quarantine period. We’ll never exhaust books-not-yet-read, and if we did, we are both happy re-readers of our favorites. 

The other night, in fact, for some reason I pulled from the shelf Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson, and re-reading those essays last night and this morning has been sheer delight. May I say, very good medicine -- something we all need right now. 

What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. 

Indeed. For all the slings and arrows life aims at us, who would be anything else than living and choose anywhere in the Universe to live other than on this brown, green, tan, black, red, yellow, blue, and beautiful earth? The worries of the present historical moment, however, are very real. If you have friends or family members working in health care in areas that the virus has reached, you know it's worse than what we hear on the news. So please, be very careful out there, friends. I won't tell you what measures you take. You already know.

Book Review: MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

…It wasn't that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed….

She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to…. 

She was again dating an older man….

This is the Pru we meet in the opening chapter of Joshua Henkin’s new novel, Morningside Heights: Keeping family close to her heart, surprised by her own commitment to her religion, dating an older man. Pru remains basically herself as the years pass: she marries a different older man, keeps kosher almost as a reflex, and is lives devoted not only to her husband and daughter but also to her husband’s son from an earlier marriage. Life, however, throws her a lot of curve balls, and Pru and other characters must reassess their values and beliefs over and over.

Pru Steiner, graduate student, and Spence (born Shulem) Robin, her professor of English literature, will marry. Before they do, though, we learn of Spence’s son, Arlo (Zackheim), and Linda Zackheim, briefly his wife. In the sanctuary of their own marriage, Pru and Spence’s daughter is born, and we follow Sarah, also, to adulthood, as we follow Pru and Spence, Arlo and Linda, switching tracks frequently, the tracks sometimes coinciding, sometimes diverging, sometimes reversing. In time we come to know Ginny and Rafe, who become essential to Spence and Pru, and much later Walter appears. Growing in complexity — and in confusion for some — the family has overflowed blood boundaries.

As has become more the rule than the exception for novels in our time, Morningside Heights does not proceed in strict chronological order. We are introduced to Pru and Spence at their first meeting, but not long after that find ourselves spending as much time in the past as in the novel’s ongoing present — a structure that must have once been revolutionary and confusing to readers of fiction (as well as to movie-goers), but one now so standard that it excites little if any dismay. We follow the characters easily back and forth in nonlinear time, as authors use this structural device to reveal events that shaped relationships as well as each individual and his or her place in the dynamics of an ensemble. 

It might be said that Morningside Heights is a New York novel, and certainly the city remains the center of the universe for its characters, even when they find themselves in Washington, D.C., or as far away as Los Angeles or Portland. Thus the streets, parks, and boroughs will play a role for any reader who has ever called New York home. But familiarity with the city — or with Jewish traditions — is not at all necessary to immersion in the story, since it is basically the story of a marriage and a family. Just don’t expect to find a family you can label “happy” or “unhappy,” “successful” or “dysfunctional.” Henkin is too alive to the limitations and inevitable confusions of human beings, as well as to life’s complexities, surprises, and unintended consequences, to oversimplify or categorize the Robin-Steiner-Zackheim family. 

In the early chapters, I almost had the feeling I was reading something from the mid-20th century, perhaps a book written by Herman Wouk (which is not necessarily a negative for me, as I recall vividly the story of Marjorie Morningstar and its effect on me when I read it in the 1960s), and perhaps there is something of Wouk’s influence in Henkin’s style, but the structure and contemporary issues keep Morningside Heights from feeling “retro” for long. The character of the professor, writing his lectures out longhand for his secretary to transcribe, is as true to our time as the dyslexic digital startup success or his half-sister the medical student who shepherds their father and her mother through a drug trial everyone hopes will reverse the professor’s Alzheimer’s disease. 

While the author takes Pru’s point of view perhaps more often than he does that of any other character, father-son, brother-sister, and wife-caregiver relationships are all sensitively explored. And Henkin deftly avoids giving any character the “upper hand” for long — or ever the “last word” on right and wrong. No, as much as several of them, individually and  more than once, feel they are showing up at least one perhaps-temporary opponent, all are necessarily making their decisions, as we all must, on partial knowledge of the past and present and near-complete ignorance of the future.

Henkin seduced me gently into his created world, so gently that I was in over my head before I knew it and sorry, eventually, to arrive at the last page. 

Marriage, parenthood, growing older — none of it is ever “what we signed up for.” We jump or are thrown in, and what we make of it all is up to us. A novel like Morningside Heights reminds us that we’re all in the same boat, and that can help us feel less alone.

Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

NY: Pantheon Books

304pp

$27.95 hardcover

Change of publication date: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Morningside Heights will not be released until June of 2021, when we all hope the world will be in better shape.

Report From the Field #2: Book Stop, Tucson

I'm calling this report #2 only because it never occurred to me before to label my visits to other people’s bookstores as field reports. How many posts have I written on indie bookstores, not only in Michigan but between Michigan and Florida and then from Michigan to Arizona and back, in the 12-1/2 years of Books in Northport? I’m not going to go back and count, but it’s one of the things I do during my months of “seasonal retirement” when I’m away from my own bookstore in Northport, Michigan. 

When the Artist and I go to Tucson, venturing 100 miles west on expressway from our winter rental cabin, because we do it so rarely we always have an agenda; however, we never accomplish much of the items on our list, and the most recent day trip was no exception. New exhibit at the art museum, a couple of bookstores, a new Chinese restaurant, and maybe the camera shop, if time permitted: Those were our goals. Result: We got to one bookstore. But the bookstore was all I hoped it would be, as you will see if you bear with me until we get to that part of the story. First, though, I’m very sorry not to have more photographs of the early part of the day, because after deciding to circle around more of the city and take the Speedway exit, we were seduced by one that came before, as it sounded like it would take us more quickly to 4th Avenue. It did not. We found 4th Avenue easily and enjoyed cruising north on it through South Tucson, where brightly painted buildings, murals, and colorful tiles reminded me of my trip a couple years ago to the Yucatan. So beautiful and exciting! Another time I’ll employ my camera, but sometimes it just feels more important to be in the moment, not worrying about capturing the present for future rumination. And I was loving 4th Avenue!

Just as it seemed we must be nearing our goal, however, we were unceremoniously dumped off 4th Avenue and hurried onto the new and “improved” Broadway, a wide, swooping road that will no doubt be great for high-speed traffic (for those who want that) when it’s finished. At present, however, it is not finished, so we were not only routed way off our desired path but stuck for what seemed ages in stop-and-go-and-stop traffic, which is never any fun at all.

Finally getting off the nightmare road and into what felt like a reasonable grid of streets, we somehow found ourselves caught up in the University of Arizona campus — which, in case you are not familiar with it, is an enormous campus — so that finally coming out on Speedway Boulevard, a long, busy street often avoided by locals but one that serves very well to orient us country mice, was a huge relief. From there we found the end of 4th Avenue we wanted and persevered until arriving, at long last, at the 100N block. 

At last!

Tip to other visitors to Tucson: If you’re looking for the Book Stop on 4th Avenue, or for Antigone Books (which we will visit on another field trip), take the Speedway exit. From Speedway you’ll turn south (right) and have an easy time locating the bookstores. 

[Speedway Boulevard: 1st degree of relief…  

4th Avenue North: 2nd degree of relief…  

Parking space around the corner from Book Stop: complete relief!]

My camera work inside the bookstore was hurried, at best. I wanted to look at books! But you can probably see from these quick shots that the Book Stop was exactly the kind of bookstore I had been hoping to find.

Tina, the proprietor, was quietly welcoming, friendly and helpful without being in the least overbearing or hovering. Like her bookstore, she was just right. I found five books to buy that day, took a few pictures, shared with Tina my own bookstore connection, and received information from her about the store’s buying and trade policies. I also told her how much effort had gone into our getting to her store, and it was she who recommended the Speedway exit (so you have it from a local and don’t have to take my word alone for it).

Thank you, Tina!

In its own way, 4th Avenue North is as colorful as the stretch south of Broadway, but in a different way. It has no dominant ethnic tone but more of a 1960s hippie dream quality, as perhaps you can see from these photos I snapped from the car window. 

We will be returning to Tucson next week, when I will attend the mammoth Festival of Books on the UA campus with a friend. The plan is that her husband will drop us off for the day. Hooray! We won’t have to drive or park -- or dodge around bicycles and streetcars! 

Streetcars, really, on 4th Avenue!

So that will be another travel adventure and field report from the world of books, Southwest style, coming up soon.