I hate Thursdays.

They mean the week is nearly over, and I’m never prepared. These stories are due Friday mornings, so the pressure is really on. How can I give up doing this every week?

Time to clean that up. Those are printouts of final stories, rough drafts with corrections and verse. One milk crate for each. Well, now two for each.

And the journals I keep at home?

I just put #27 atop the stack.

It is a harmless obsession, I think. My hands and mind are kept occupied. Data and feelings are recorded for… for what?

Doesn’t matter. It is what it is.

One good thing about this particular Thursday is the sun. It is the first I’ve seen in two weeks. Though still partly cloudy, I did get to see a sunrise—although not from the horizon.

But rather through a gap in the clouds just above the horizon. I’m glad the sun hasn’t moved too far south yet. Sunny days ahead mean I’ll see sunrises for a while yet.

And I had wondrous dreams last night. Good sleeps and real dreams lately. I wonder why?

In one dream, I’d misplaced the manuscripts for two stories somewhere in a vast university library. Not unlike work, where if I set something down, it can immediately disappear, become invisible, among the millions of books and papers everywhere around the building. I panicked and was frantically searching. I knew I had a copy on my laptop, but these had numerous additions and corrections. I hurried from room to room, through halls and up stairways. Near the entrance, I ran into a professorial man who made a demand.

“I want my dollar fifty and rubber band back!”

Really!

My dream self took the demand seriously, and I headed off in search of the two items. How hard could it be to find a rubber band in a library?

Then I sort of awoke, and rationality told me that I hadn’t lost any manuscripts. That the laptop in the real world held plenty of stories started and unfinished—as well as this week’s, which I am writing here. There was a profound sense of relief that the lost manuscripts and the rubber band/$1.50 concern were in some other dimension.

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October 1st. Tuesday. Rain is pattering outside the bedroom window in the dark. It has rained every day since the equinox—and a few days before. After a very dry summer which ended with a drought of a month’s duration, there has been slow steady chill rain every day. It is just after 6. The sun now rises just after 7. But I won’t see it.

I had a good sleep. I dreamed of old books. Very old. I was on a tour but had ended up with a librarian who had guided the tour. We were in an old castle library. Alone but for another book lover. We were studying three ancient tomes for clues and arcane information.

“Where can I find more books like these?”

We were in the north of England.

“Fouldera,” she replied sagely.

“How far is that?”

“A thousand miles.”

“What is a thousand miles from Yorkshire?” I wondered, looking at the three small tomes laid before us.

The dream ended with awakening, and I didn’t try to return to it.

I remember the night filled with happy dreams and no discomfort.

I finally closed the windows a few days ago. Most of the house had been open since early August—nearly 2 months. I closed them against the damp and not the cold.

So, I have missed all the sunrises in my window upon the world. I won’t see tomorrow’s either, according to the phone. Perhaps Thursday. Likely Friday. Will it still be on view? Or will it have moved into the still leafy forest until the next equinox? March 2025.

Pete Rose died over the weekend. The Hit King of baseball. (He would answer his phone “Hit King” apparently.) As a kid, I followed his career closely. The late 60s and early 70s were a period of low batting averages. Carl Yastremski won the American League batting title with a .301 average in 1968. Not many players hit over .300 in those times. Home runs were scarce as well.

Growing up in Buffalo, New York, there was no Major League team to follow. My battery-operated transistor radio couldn’t pick up any games. (Occasionally, I got a couple of innings from Cleveland late at night before the signal faded.) To be a baseball fan then, I relied on the morning newspaper and the printed box scores of yesterday’s games. There was a baseball game on TV on Saturday. “The Game of the Week.”

And baseball cards. I loved to collect and trade and organize and memorize baseball cards.

Rose, “Charlie Hustle”, played from 1963 to 1986. That covers most of my childhood and all my young adult life. I didn’t really like him because he played for The Big Red Machine, and I was a Dodgers fan. But over the years, I had to respect his success and longevity.

His records:

Major League records:

• Most career at-bats – 14,053
• Most career plate appearances – 15,890
• Most career hits – 4,256
• Most career singles – 3,215
• Most career times on base – 5,929
• Most career outs – 10,328
• Most career games played – 3,562
• Most career winning games played – 1,972
• Only player to play at least 500 games at five different positions – 1B (939), LF (671), 3B (634), 2B (628), RF (595)
• Most career runs by a switch hitter – 2,165
• Most career doubles by a switch hitter – 746
• Most career walks by a switch hitter – 1,566
• Most career total bases by a switch hitter – 5,752
• Most seasons of 200 or more hits – 10 (shared)
• Most consecutive seasons of 100 or more hits – 23
• Most consecutive seasons with 600 or more at-bats – 13 (1968–1980) (shared)
• Most seasons with 600 at-bats – 17
• Most seasons with 150 or more games played – 17
• Most seasons with 100 or more games played – 23

National League records:

• Most years played – 24
• Most consecutive years played – 24
• Most career runs – 2,165
• Most career doubles – 746
• Most career games with 5 or more hits – 10
• Modern (post-1900) NL record for longest consecutive-game hitting streak NL – 44
• Modern record for most hitting streaks of 20 or more consecutive games – 7

Kris Kristofferson passed away as well. I have a more personal recollection of him. He attended a couple of Seatrain concerts when the group was recording in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He’d come backstage, and my brother introduced us. I was just a kid. He was nice enough, but was there for music business stuff.

Certainly my primary recollection was “Me and Bobbie Magee”—about him and Janis Joplin hitchhiking. My brother had a relationship with Janis, and she’d interrupt phone calls home from an extension wherever they were.

“Jimmie! Where are you?! Get up here?!”

Kris was a Rhodes Scholar and helicopter pilot among his later music and acting careers.

One of my favorite films is Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Kristofferson played The Kid. Bob Dylan also acted in the film.

Rose was signing autographs at a show the day before he passed.

More and more names I recognize appear in the obituaries…

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Now Ernest and I are driving down to the Gaithersburg store. It is chilly and raining. I haven’t visited for a while. I don’t know why. Inertia. And there are no overt problems that need my attention. The management and crew down there are excellent and only need occasional tweaks.

There are just so many projects pending. I know I should just tackle one at a time and work through the list. Easier said than done.

But I am caught up pretty well on books that need my attention. Except for the cartloads in Annika’s room. And about 8-10 very ancient dusty carts hiding up behind Books by the Foot. And the pallets of collectibles with my name on them. And the rare book library we bought in 2021 and hasn’t been touched—all 10,000 of them. And…

We need two more vans. I’m not having any luck selling the big truck. Nor the 1997 Dodge van. They both run fine, but their time has come.

Then there are the projects at home. I’ve completed a lot, but there’s still plenty to do. A few of the curtains have been hung. I’m not sure it is a good idea. They make the place feel dark and smaller. I guess curtain pulls to hold them open will help.

My designer picked up the rest. She also saw some William Morris bed linens at Home Goods, which I could not resist.

That’s a lot of new cotton at my house!

Pippin, my Jack Russell, is a bit better. He’s not coughing as much, and the coughing is shallower. He has a lot more energy and is running again. The vet I went to for a second opinion may have made a big difference by trying allergy medication on him.

Then there’s the possibility of a new bookstore.

Crazy?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I have all the symptoms.

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Coming back from the Gaithersburg store. Cold and rainy. Spray flies up from behind every vehicle on the Interstate.

I’m grumpy. There are just too many moving parts. I can’t keep up with all of them.

I especially can’t keep up with the things I don’t like doing.

Inspections are pretty high on the list. The store looked great. And it is performing well. But something bothered me. Many of the shelves were only half full. Especially the paperbacks. Their back room had about 150 boxes waiting to be priced. That’s not a good equation. If a bookstore doesn’t get fresh stock, it will stagnate. The customers—especially regulars—will get bored. Sales will slump. If it gets bad enough, people will stay away, and winning them back will be difficult.

Sigh…

I shouldn’t be doing this.

Sigh…

The romance and glory of being a book mogul.

The phone says it is not raining. I’m not crying either. All the droplets appearing on the windshield after the wiper swishes by must mean something.

Sigh…

I don’t want to do this anymore.

But I can’t walk away. Too many strings attached.

I just want to play with books. But only fun books.

Last weekend, I had more “kill” sections to go through. These were mostly antiquarian and all, considered at one time, collectible. Many were priced at hundreds of dollars. Some over 1000. Some higher.

That meant every book needed an individual inspection. It was slow going. And often tedious.

There were 40 or 50 antiquarian medical and psychological studies from the Gach collection.

It was hard work—mentally and physically. But I got through them.

I went to see America last Sunday.

(Yes, for the second time in two weeks. I bought tickets months ago, and maybe forgot I’d already ordered one show when a second was announced.)

This time, my older son joined me. The tickets I got came with a “Meet & Greet” and free t-shirts. Band founder Dewey Bunnell chatted with about ten of us one at a time prior to the show. I told him about my brother and Seatrain.

“That’s the group George Martin produced just before he produced us!”

The show was great.

The living links to the past get fewer and fewer.

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Throughout the rain every day, I did force myself to go out and do some gardening—mostly planting and transplanting.

I put in about 100 lady’s slippers, red trillium, turk’s cap lilies, trout lilies, black-eyed susans and prairie trillium.

Though the rain was pattering on my back, I stuck to it. There’s not much time left—especially for transplanting. Once things die back, you can find them to transplant!

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Larry dropped some autographed books he was excited about.

Paul Newman, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Donald Trump.

They didn’t excite me much. Even the two Dodger signed books don’t thrill as they once would have.

More interesting were these Clark Ashton Smith drawings.

Smith was one of “the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft”, though some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy writer and critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that “nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse.” Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle, and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft’s death in 1937. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.

The drawings would be better if they could be identified as Lovecraft monsters… any ideas?

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I’ve been watching the Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It is loosely based on The Silmarillion. It’s not great, but I’m hooked. A starving man will consume lesser fare if that is all that is available to him.

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We put up a marble wall at the Frederick bookstore.

Marble paper, that is.

And the renovation of the poster and map portfolios there has begun. I’d had no idea they were so stagnant.

They will only get better and better.

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And now it’s time to continue the Balkan journey.

Here’s much of what I experienced in Latvia.

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Latvia

It was the penultimate marathon drive day to Riga. The trip was 186 miles from eastern Lithuania to western Latvia.

Here are the mileages for the entire journey:

Copenhagen to Berlin—286 miles
Berlin to Poznan—180 miles
Poznan to Warsaw—190 miles
Warsaw to Vilnius—311 miles. 2 nights
Vilnius to Riga—186 miles 2 nights
Riga to Tallinn—193 miles 2 nights
Tallinn to Helsinki—nautical miles
Helsinki to Stockholm—nautical miles
Stockholm to home—air miles

After the last long drive from Riga to Tallinn, it was ferries. Tallinn to Helsinki. Helsinki to Stockholm.

The border crossing into Latvia had the decaying vestiges of a Soviet-era checkpoint. We just flew through on the highway.

Soon after, we made a “comfort stop” at a snack shop affiliated with a gas station. There was time to kill while the toilet line got shorter very slowly. I decided to check out the Latvian sweet or salty offerings. It was fun to try to figure out what things were when I couldn’t understand a single word of the ingredients. These countries are very English savvy, however. English is part of the curriculum in all the Scandinavian countries from an early age. We were told the television often plays movies and kids’ shows in English. I picked out a half dozen interesting things. The funniest was Happy Krapatka. Turns out they were a soft but crispy wafer stuffed with little pods of peanut butter in a grid on the thin tan sheets.

The lunch stop was at a countryside hotel resort. I wasn’t hungry, so I headed out back to where they had a large field with paths and gardens. There were numerous boulders set into the gardens. Each stone had an emotion.

I began to feel the spirit of stones in this country. I googled, and they have a few parks that have iconic natural stones. There’s magic in stones and forests in this part of the world. Trolls turn to stones if they’re caught outside when the sun comes according to Tolkien. I’m sure that’s rooted in folklore. They even have some parks for magic stones. The Kaleval is the Latvian version of the Kalevala.

In the center of the walking paths—maybe 7 acres—there was a round paved area with brush piles in the middle. They must have bonfires sometimes.

A big wooden windmill dominated the area.

After I’d explored the park, I sat at a picnic table. It was a beautiful cool sunny day. There was time to kill, and I was alone, so I wrote.

Under a Latvian Cherry Tree

August looms outside of Riga
Lunch is at a park like hotel off the highway
A little orchard of various fruits
Flowerbeds with fading blossoms
At the head of most beds is a boulder
A sign identifies each
The Stone of Harmony
Power
Love
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Revival
Latvia names some stones
I can understand and agree
Stones can be living things
Homes to spirits and ancient memory
A picnic table rests in the shade
of a cherry tree
Its trunk mottled with gray green lichens
and emerald moss
Cool as a spring afternoon
this place is for the people of the north

From there, we continued north and west.

The next stop was a palace. Rundale. Built in the mid-18th century, it is a grand Baroque building with vast formal gardens behind it.

While I have visited so many similar palaces all over Europe, this was unique for its remoteness.

Odd. Just this week I came across a book about Rundale here at the Wonder Book warehouse.

We toured the inside of the winter wing. (The royal family would live in one half of the place in summer, the other in winter.) The winter rooms had huge wood fired ceramic stoves in them. You can see one in the corner of this library.

All the stoves were maintained by servants with access behind the walls so royals wouldn’t have to see the wood and ashes being brought in and out.

We were given a little free time to walk through the gardens. I had just enough time to make a beeline to the maze at the far end before returning to the bus.

Then it was on to Riga.

We arrived with plenty of daylight. It is always a mess to get the room key cards handed out. This time I was first. I headed up and then right back down. I’d searched for restaurants and found a nice looking highly rated one call the Melnie Muki (Black Monks.) There was an Uber waiting when I got out of the lobby. Three women I sort of knew raced out and asked if they could share the ride downtown.

Why not?

They also decided to join me for dinner. It was so tedious. Some people just exude dreariness. One of the women was like that. A droning voice. She was on a budget and ordered a bread basket—really. 3 Euros. The other two weren’t much better. I tried to make the best of things. I had a potato pancake with smoked salmon on garlic herb sauce appetizer and black ravioli with poached salmon, trout caviar, sweet cream sauce and piccolini cheese. Both were wonderful new tastes. I tried not to look at the person next to me eating bread and butter. After, we went our separate ways at my insistence. I made my way through the city and back across the river to the hotel.

When we’d first arrived, I’d been intrigued by a very old wooden house abandoned and decaying behind the hotel.

Golden Home

Once warm and dry,
this golden home is dead
In the yard are hostas
lilies off the valley
Ghosts of gardens
Glass skyscrapers cast shade
Northeast west and south
Children played in this yard
Dinner made in the wooden home
Soon it will be destroyed
Gone like the memory of families who lived there
But the ghosts have not left yet
I could feel them each time I passed
Birthdays in the back yard
Laundry hung. Kitchen gardens planted

I found myself visiting the home (from outside the fence) each time I returned to the hotel. It was as if it wanted to be seen and appreciated in this its final times with the modern world racing round it and soon to make it no more.

I imagine even the families’ memories are no more.

The next morning, we were off early with a local guide. He was in his 40s or early 50s, I think. A history teacher or professor. During the day we spent with him, he told of his life as a child and youth under Soviet domination. It was a gray life.

History tells us the Nazi and Soviet eras were pretty much the same.

Ask someone who lived through them both what was the difference, and the reply is, “The flag.”

But the Holocaust in Latvia was especially brutal. Nearly the entire Jewish population of the country was eliminated.

Biķernieki forest is the biggest mass murder site during the Holocaust in Latvia with two memorial territories spanning over 80,000 square metres (860,000 sq ft) with 55 marked burial sites with around 20,000 victims still buried in total.

The Germans also executed many Russian prisoners as well as Jews from other parts of Europe. The Romani were especially targeted and brought here for their Final Solution.

When the Soviets took over again, it was the German prisoners who were targeted for execution.

The country had a brief flowering of culture and independence prior to World War 1. Our guide took us to the Art Nouveau neighborhoods. It seems a kind of anomaly, but Riga is filled with Art Nouveau buildings. I’ll let you explore the many highlights yourself. Some of the most striking examples designed by Mikhail Eisentstien (father of Sergei—filmmaker Battleship Potemkin, etc.)

His work can be fanciful and macabre.

Imagine blocks of buildings like this…

We toured the rest of the city and then were set loose. The guide had pointed to a huge building across the river.

“The National Library.”

Naturally, I headed there, though the walk was a couple miles. The entrance wasn’t clearly marked, and I worried it might not be open, but eventually, after a complete circumlocution of the vast edifice, I found my way in.

As with so many modern libraries, one wonders where the books are. In this building, they was a huge “installation.” Kind of a Books by the Foot designer’s fantasy of random books behind glass many tall stories high.

What does it mean? Books are obsolete? Superfluous?

There were some bookish exhibits in the vast building, but mostly the place was filled with “air.”

The city was extremely beautiful.

For my second Riga dinner, I returned to Melnie Muki.

Drunk monk beef and venison goulash with coffee and beer. The entry beef cheeks with mashed potatoes, asparagus and red wine sauce.

Fabulous.

The next morning, we headed up the Baltic coast to Estonia.