A Fistful of Collars

I have mentioned elsewhere my campaign to boost circulation at my local (coastal) library. Libraries perform such an important public service. And, in my opinion, librarians are — leaving aside the “ssshhh!!” they would send my way when I was a much younger and noisier patron — perhaps the friendliest, most helpful, public servants I have ever met. They deserve our support.

I have my selfish reasons too. During my youth (5-19), I read everywhere and all the time. When I started college I rarely walked across campus from point A to point B without a book held open between my hands. (Come to think of it, my books and I were not too much different from present-day college students and their smartphones. People would even tease me. “Watch where you’re going!”) My public library was my sole source of books in those years so every couple of weeks I would head over to the library, drop off a stack of 10 or 12 read books (whatever happened to be the maximum number of items I had been allowed to borrow), find another 10-12 to read, present my library card, and return home with at least one book already open on my lap. If I happened to be sick and staying at home (a frequent event during those years), I expected my Mom to take my books back to the library and return with new ones. So I can’t imagine a childhood without one or two stacks of library books next to my bed.

Of course, whenever I take the time to visit a library these days, all of this comes back to me. Walking into a library feels like walking into a gift shop where every gift is FREEEE! Somewhere in my head a 14-year-old is exalting, “Is today my birthday? Is all this for me???” And yet, I can’t help feeling overwhelmed these days when I visit a public library. Each shelf is loaded with more gifts than I can possibly open. I also know that if I take even one book home, I’ll be lucky if I can give it more than 20 minutes of my attention each day. And since I’m only on the coast for a couple of days, there’s another hurdle. Will I be able to finish and return my borrowings before they come due? Why didn’t anyone ever warn me that growing up would be so emotionally complicated?

My last visit to the coastal library was typical. I saw a book, A Fistful of Collars, in the Mystery section that featured a beautifully illustrated cover. As I gazed at the cover, I gradually realized that I was looking over the shoulders of a dog and a man sitting side-by-side in a dark movie theater. The image on the movie screen revealed a cowboy, guns strapped to his waist, feet well apart in the open doorway of a saloon. Looking up at the top of the cover, I read, “A Chet and Bernie Mystery”. The bottom assures me that the author, Spencer Quinn, is the “New York Times Bestselling Author of DOG ON IT”. This was getting better and better. A cowboy western, with a dog+man detective team, plus two can’t-miss puns on the front cover. =) I checked the number of pages (309), where this book fell in the Chet and Bernie Mystery series (5th; I hadn’t read any of the others, but the library didn’t have the earlier books), and my calendar (I would be coming back to the coast the following week). Everything fit. I took the book straight to the checkout station.

OK, I’ll say it. If you’ve waded through the last 4 paragraphs, you’re no doubt wondering when the “book review” will begin. Sorry. I don’t do book reviews. I write posts because they help me remember the books I’ve read, the life I’ve led and the life I am leading. I’ll just say this. If you like the idea of a dog and a detective, read this book. Why?

The book is told entirely from the dog’s (Chet’s) point of view. And that’s where the humor comes from. Have I ever mentioned that I like to anthropomorphize everything? I’ll pick up an object (or a dog or cat) and speak the words that I want it to say. I might even respond to what they just said in order to create a conversation, or I might offer a few words of my own as an analysis of the object’s/dog’s/cat’s inner world. We share our world with things that observe, wish to communicate, but have “thoughts” of their own. I felt right at home reading a dog-generated monologue (indeed, he tends to ramble on like a stand-up comedian). Does a dog ever get distracted, have trouble recalling a name or event, or find the idioms that humans rely on impenetrable? You bet. And that just made me love Chet that much more. Here are a few words from early in the book that do absolutely nothing to advance the plot…

“Curiosity killed the cat?” Bernie said. “Never bought into that, myself.”

Then we had something in common; a lot, in fact, and finding more all the time. Once we even howled at the moon together. What a night that was! Too bad about those bikers, of course. Back to the curiosity killing the cat thing. I’d never really understood it, curiosity being a puzzler. But it’s always nice to have a takeaway — that’s one of Bernie’s beliefs – and my takeaway was that curiosity must be a good thing.

p. 76, “A Fistful of Collars” by Spencer Quinn, Atria Books, NY, 2012

Only a few sentences. An aside, really. Do dog storytellers do asides? Of course! I just wish I could have read this aloud to you.

But, not to worry. Chet may be easily distracted, but his job is staying by Bernie’s side, and reporting on everything that happens. He will even tell you who did the dirty deed.

The Housekeepers

I wasn’t looking for a book to read, or even a book to shove towards my wife (hands down, the real reader in our house!), but we both wound up Alex Hay’s The Housekeepers, a hardcover book borrowed from our local library, and I have to say that it has been one of my most enjoyable reads of 2024. So how did this come about?

First, as you might have noticed from other recent posts, I’ve become entangled in at two monthly book clubs. Between those reading assignments, 30-40 daily emails, and several weekly magazines (all but one of which have been stashed unread for the last two years in email folders), you might assume that I am quite a reader. But that’s not me at all. I’m too busy looking at words over here and words over there to finish any particular item. Worse still, contemplating all of the unread items I have stashed away has begun to shrivel my soul. What should I do? Start a self-kindness meditation practice? Or, just toss the piles of unread materials?

Worse still, my wife provides a daily reminder of my inadequacies. Each day she hauls out her iPad several times and reads the same book. She starts at the breakfast table. This followed by several reading sessions during the day that I haven’t tracked. Finally, she wraps up her day with one last reading session, head on her pillow, body tucked under the covers, the iPad’s glow lighting her pretty face. If this weren’t enough, periodically she sighs, “I don’t have any books on my iPad.”

She sets a perfect example of how to read, but it hasn’t given me the shove I need. I’m lucky if I can finish one book each month. This is where the The Housekeepers stands apart. It was the exception that proved the rule. Once I got into it, I lugged it everywhere with me, eager to find out what happened next. I think I may have even finished it in two weeks! A personal record as far as recent reading history is concerned.

Dog Dish of Doom

Dog Dish of Doom by E.J. Copperman was the second book that I finished in this summer’s quest to boost book circulation at my local coastal library. However, unlike my previous effort, Copperman’s name was unfamiliar to me and a small leap of faith was required in choosing this book for the next leg of my reading journey.

Luckily, I was helped out by whoever had thoughtfully shelved the book, most likely, my librarian. She (they?) had gone to the trouble of taking the book out of its standard spot in the stacks, mounting it instead on its own platform where its title and cover art — a drawing of a black dog sitting proudly next to a black dog dish and two white dog bones — could not be missed by anyone taking a quick walk through the library’s Mystery section. Not adverse to judging a book by its cover, I immediately recognized myself as a member of the target audience and I flipped the cover open so that I could read the inside of the dust jacket. Instantly satisfied, I tucked the book under my arm and headed straight to the circulation desk.

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

I recently heard someone say that the funding your local library branch receives is based on its circulation numbers. The more books that go in and out out, the more money the branch receives. I don’t know if this is exactly true, but it started me thinking about my reading habits.

My “vacation” house of approx. 25 years is located in a tiny town on the north Oregon coast and one of the town’s most precious attributes is its public branch library. The library building is not large, but that is irrelevant. Townspeople love their branch library. They support it through financial contributions, and also through book donations for the annual book sale. The staff are so friendly and helpful, I don’t have words to describe them. And while the library’s holdings are small, every time I pause to look at a shelf, I’m impressed by the selection of titles. There is a great deal there to explore.

But, strange to say, while I have checked out many of the library’s DVD movies, and have been a longtime user of their computers and internet systems, I doubt that I have checked out more than 5 books in 3 decades. My reading habits are no small part of the problem. When I open a book, I tend to read it in small chunks. My usual diet is 5-10 pages a day, so it will take me weeks, and often months, to finish the average book. Plus, there was the nature of our visits to our vacation house (infrequent, brief) to consider. I had to ask myself not just when I would finish a book, but also when I might return it (the book having followed me back to Portland), and how much I would have to pay in overdue fines.

Nevertheless, my affection for our little branch library is strong. The idea of supporting it simply by checking out books to read greatly appealed to me. And, because I recently retired, I fantasized that I might spend more time on the coast, find a way to settle down and read for longer stretches, and finish books without any fear of the dreaded overdue fines.

What the Gents Read – 2022

Joining a book club has changed my reading habits. For the past few years I have been drowning in email. Whether the email came a messages from friends, former employers, or organizations that I had (or had not) supported financially, or in the form of bills, receipts, and newspaper and magazine subscriptions, I was getting clobbered. I tried redirecting the email flood into various folders, but the number of unread emails in my inbox just kept growing and growing.

At the same time, unread (and read, but unprocessed) documents began to pile up in my office. Vertically. Horizontally. I was awash in paper that should have been read, processed, and either stored properly or discarded. But stacks just grew and grew because there was always an unspecified “later” when I would finally do whatever needed to be done with all of these documents.

Then I began attending the “gents” book club. We met every month so I naturally felt obliged to finish one entire book every month. It doesn’t sound like much, but it has stretched me to the limit, and writing about these books has been impossible until now. What follows are my most abbreviated thoughts on the books that the club chose for me in 2022:

True Confessional

I have to confess. I’ve been watching a lot more TV than I used to. Mind you, I used to watch almost none at all (“none” means I’m ignoring temporary addictions such as once-a-week FC Barcelona soccer games, every-2-year Olympic competitions, and the occasional series that might appear on a Friday or Saturday night) so to say “I’ve been watching a lot more” still doesn’t mean a lot of time spent in front of the TV, but I can feel the change.

Some reasons I started to change my TV watching habits were we had stopped going out to eat, stopped going to concerts and movies, and I had stopped having to prep for the next day’s classes. In short, I started watching more when the pandemic and my retirement kicked in. For over a year or more my wife and I set up dinner trays in front of the TV and loyally watch an episode of Jeopardy or Bones before going on with our evenings.

Another confession. When Bones first hit the airwaves, I would have to leave the TV room when the blood-soaked skulls and squishy organs would come out. Even when we resumed watching TV over dinner my wife would regularly call out “Don’t look!” as a warning to me and I would quickly turn my head, or squeeze my eyes shut, until she gave the all-clear. But repeated exposure builds tolerance. Now I watch the gore and squish as I shovel in my food, and I think “It’s all fake, right? Say, this quiche she made is terrific!”

I suspect that watching other murder mysteries also helped me cultivate tolerance. Most of these shows were broadcast by our public broadcasting station: Inspector Lewis, Professor T, Sherlock, Shakespeare and Hathaway, and many, many more. One of my favorites has been Midsomer Murders. It doesn’t dwell on corpses the way that Bones does. Instead, it focuses on the actual act of murder itself, and I must say with some admiration, the manifold ways that Midsomer residents meet their ends is mind-boggling. Oh my!

My Book Club – Year #1

The book club I joined last spring isn’t “mine”. It celebrated its 20th anniversary last summer, and several of the original members attended the party. I am simply the latest addition to its ranks. And I’ve been trying, month by month, to figure out what it means to me, whether I like the books that are chosen (which I feel duty-bound to read, but which most definitely do not want to buy), and whether I feel like I “belong” and am benefiting from the experience.

To start this tale with my first appearance at the club’s monthly meetings in March 2022, wouldn’t do justice to the full story. My friend and neighbor for the past 32 years, Dick L., invited me to join the book club 5, maybe even 7, years ago. I begged off then. “Too busy with work. Come again when I retire.” Little did I know what that might mean.

My last days of teaching college chemistry arrived in May, 2021. Aside from continuing requests for letters of recommendation, I was finished. My grades had all been submitted. I had no summer students under my wing. After I cleaned up my office, I would be a Free Man, free to go on long bike rides, to bounce my grandchildren on my knee, to reacquaint myself with the my long neglected flute and recorders, maybe to travel, certainly to read. Except for one thing. Covid-19. By March 2020 I didn’t go anywhere without a mask. My meditation groups all met online, not in person. Dinners out, movies, concerts, college events, even getting together with friends – all these activities had vanished and who could say when they might ever return? Aside from weekly shopping trips, my wife and I stayed at home, available only to our children and grandchildren.

And then, at the beginning of 2022, Dick came calling. His email asked, “Would you still be interested in joining our book club?” I will skip the weeks of Q&A around the group’s Covid-19 precautions that followed. By the 2nd Wednesday of March, 2022, I was ready to make my first masked appearance, but I couldn’t eat dinner with a mask on and so off went the mask. We subsequently met online once or twice when Covid levels were high, and outside when the warmer weather permitted, but otherwise, once a month 7-10 “mature” men of a certain age (I’m one of the younger ones) gather around someone’s dinner table for roughly 2 hours to eat, to discuss what we have read, and to choose a book for the following month.

I have yet to host a dinner. Every 2nd Wednesday of the month, when the clock has ticked 4:00 pm I have had to race over to the local New Seasons to buy a bottle of wine, a salad, and some kind of small side dish that I hope will please a few people. Minutes later, my bike parked in our basement, I am flying through our house, looking for the book-of-the-month (which will usually lie closed throughout our discussion), a Covid mask, my phone and wallet and reading glasses, and a bag in which to stuff everything. Just before joining Dick for our journey to the house of our club host (Dick and I drive together), I kiss my wife as I head towards our back door, silently reminding myself that this is the only dinner that she and I will not share this month (so why do I feel like I am abandoning her?), and trying not to interpret her few words of farewell as disapproval (the notion that I might be returning with God-knows-what virus inside me is all too clear, even if it isn’t expressed).

Or, maybe, a trace of resentment. She is the far and away the Champion Reader in our family. She has reliably finished several books every month, all of the years that I have known her, whereas I have usually struggled to read more than 5 or 10 pages a day. It doesn’t make any sense that I am in a Book Club and not her. And now that she has endured several of my lively descriptions of our monthly meetings, she is also asking, Why do I remain in the Club? And that is a question that I can’t answer yet.

The “gents” (that’s how I refer to the others) are all nice folks. Ready to greet one another with a smile, and to insert a personal, usually humorous, anecdote into the discussion. I’m always well-fed and some of the gents can make magic happen in their kitchens. But the discussions themselves? I took virtually no English courses in college, and high school English was mainly designed, or so it seemed, to help students with basic reading and writing skills. So I feel like I come to the gents without any personal experiences that might inform me of what a book discussion should be like, what takeaways/rewards I should look for, and what kinds of topics and statements should be avoided.

Which isn’t entirely true. For over nearly 15 years I have been meeting periodically with a group of zen meditaters, women and men, to discuss books, poetry, teachings, and articles. My experience there is completely different. We rarely cover more than a few hundred words (if that) in any of our discussions so it can take us a year to read and discuss a smallish book. The obvious point of our discussion, although never expressed, is to gain personal insight into whatever topic we are reading about, and to open our hearts to one another in the present moment as we seek mutual understanding. And, finally, there’s never any food.

Let Go? Hold On?

This blog fell into my Lost Baggage zone a couple of years back. From 2007-18 I had obsessively recorded some thoughts and recollections on every book I read and even some important life experiences and memories.

Then, beginning in summer 2019, I began putting my attention elsewhere. I produced only 4 posts over the past three years. The birth of my granddaughter and my daughter’s childhood encounter with Morse Code, both made it online. So did some thoughts on two books that I had started, but never finished, One Hundred Years of Solitude and How To Watch Soccer. But those efforts hardly registered in my conscious (confession: I had to look all of them up just now to see what, if anything, I had contributed to this blog). Mist and Mold was slowly turning into the internet equivalent of lost baggage, maybe appearing from time to time on someone’s web browser, but mostly accumulating dust on a file server somewhere, forgotten, ignored. (An aside – My inactivity never raised any questions at WP’s marketing office. I regularly receive emails advertising blog-related opportunities.)

How to explain my apparent lack of interest in this previously satisfying journal? Encounters with unsatisfying books, unexpected demands from family and work, all of these played a role. Surprisingly, so did my encounters with some very good books, ones that I finished, loved, but still haven’t written up. Can the emotions inspired by the good writing of others be a cause of writer’s block? Yes. Definitely.

Whatever obstacles had stood in my way through 2019, things took a quick turn for the worse in early 2020 when COVID-19 came along. Like many employers, mine moved directly from “wait-and-see” to “run for the hills!” without warning. Suddenly all of my time was being spent in moving my courses online mid-semester. Even when the semester had ended, I needed to continue planning for fall and helping my colleagues plan too. (My responsibility to them stemmed from the fact that I had made the unfortunate mistake of choosing the 2019-2020 academic year to become department chair and division chair.) COVID-related duties had become a tidal wave that I couldn’t outrun. So, after spending hours every day stuck in front of a keyboard and computer screen, I sure as heck wasn’t going to try and unwind by spending a few more hours there.

But I finally retired a year ago. Old projects like Mist and Mold are getting dusted off and reevaluated. Do I still have an interest in keeping a journal? And what about the books I have read since 2018. Do I write about them or do I just let them go?

Dear Buddha, You have taught us that clinging is a source of suffering (dukkha). Help me to understand my clinging. Is it my merely my sense of duty to my blog, to the stack of already-read books in my office? Or is it something deeper? Is it my self-image that I am clinging to?

I don’t have an answer yet, but maybe one will emerge as I go along. For now I’ll live my life. Write. Or not. And pay attention to whatever happens.

Learning Morse Code

This isn’t a story about me. For what it’s worth, I think I started learning Morse Code when my older brother showed me a paperback book he owned that described all of the things that every Boy Scout needed to know. We dotted and dashed a few letters back and forth, and after a few days, forgot about it. But a few years later, when I was 12 or so, I got serious about learning the Code so that I could get my ham radio license (Novice, 5 wpm followed by Advanced, 13 wpm, WA6AGU). There were many, many hours spent listening to tapes provided by the Lockheed Employees Radio Club.

No, this is actually a story about one of my daughter’s childhood adventures in learning. This particular one was triggered by the spelling homework that her 4th/5th grade teacher, Ms. T, used to assign. Ms. T was a great teacher and a memorable personality in her own right. One of her phrases, “the squeaky boy gets the wheel”, has lived on in our family’s memory for two decades, and we always felt very lucky that our daughter grew up in Ms. T’s classroom. But, back to the Morse Code. Here’s my daughter telling of the story …

Ms. T had a whole bunch of different ways you could complete the weekly spelling assignment. We had 5-10 words assigned and we had to practice them, but “practice” could mean write backwards in a mirror, write in bubble letters, write in macaroni, etc. She had a whole posterboard of choices. At some point Mom (and/or I) decided this was insufficiently challenging so we got permission to introduce Morse code into the mix. I have a feeling Ms. T had trouble grading my submissions, but perhaps she just assumed they were correct.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for poor Ms. T? Each week receiving a stack of pages from 4th and 5th grades, some covered in neat rows of words, others covered in macaroni, some words spelled forwards, others written backwards (words and letters! and maybe in macaroni), and then one page titled:

_ _    _ . _ _

. . .    . _ _ .    .    . _ . .     . _ . .    . .    _ .     _ _ .

. _ _    _ _ _    . _ .    _ . .    . . .

My daughter is now a teacher herself. Each semester she stands (or goes online) in front of very large quantity of university science students and introduces them to the mysteries of chemistry (not Morse code). Her creativity never ceases to amaze me. The legacy of great teachers like Ms. T is, and has always been, seeding the fields for the next generation of great teachers.

How to Watch Soccer

Here’s something that you probably know already about the game called ‘soccer’. The rest of the world calls it ‘football’.

Which raises an obvious question. Why does a book by a famous Netherlands soccer star/coach use ‘soccer’ in its title instead of ‘football’? Was he only planning to sell the book in America? Perhaps he was thinking, “If I put ‘soccer’ in the title, I can fly below the radar because no one that I know will ever notice/read the book.”

This was my first disappointing book choice of summer (“One Hundred Years…” would come weeks later). Foolish me for not paying sufficiently close attention to the kind of question raised above. Also, foolish me for not noticing that the only cover blurb touting the book came from “Kinkus Reviews”. Seriously? the publisher couldn’t find even one person willing to allow themselves to be quoted by name as liking the book?

Sigh. I wasn’t paying attention. At least 75% of my family are huge soccer fans. We watch La Liga games week after week every season. Plus, the book had a really appealing front cover. The title, “HOW TO WATCH …” in huge block caps. And a captivating photo of the author, Ruud Gullit, winner of the Ballon d’Or in 1987. Gullit’s arms are crossed in confusion. He’s using his left hand to hold his mouth shut. His left eyebrow is raised skyward. Clearly, he’s suffering some kind of internal anguish. The play on the field upsets him greatly, and he needs very much to tell someone why.

I must have guessed right because, turning the book over, I read (in more block caps), “An opinionated master class in the art and science of “reading” a match.” Obviously, I was exactly the kind of self-aware reader this book was meant for. So I carried the book to the cashier, took $$$ out of my pocket, slipped the book under my arm, and a few days later, I began to read.

‘Began’ is the operative word. I didn’t quite make it through one-third of the book. It turns out, “HOW TO WATCH…” isn’t about learning to “watch” at all. Rather, it’s a collection of Gullit’s opinions on what makes one player, one strategy of play, one club, one national team, more successful than another. His opinions are periodically backed up by references to games I haven’t seen, or if I have, games that I certainly can’t bring to mind. A more apt title would have been, “How I think soccer should be played” or “Why I think some teams win and others lose”. But I wouldn’t have bought either of those.

I’m tempted to take the book over to the next Timbers game and see if I can slip it into some fan’s back pocket as they walk past.