Point of View: Mary’s File

I liked what the woman in one of our papers the other day said she was thankful for: the moon (I would say especially the moon the way it has been the past few nights), the stars, the sun, of course, and air, water, fire, and a roof over your head.

Keep it simple is what I gather she’s saying. Love your neighbor as yourself and cultivate your garden. Speaking of which, Mary asked me what we should do with ours now that the calendar says winter’s approaching. “Put a blanket on it and when you take it off there will be growth in the spring, Ben,” I said. (We had seen “Being There” on TV the night before.)

She, who is keenly sensitive to the news, and who suffers because of it, has begun a file for me of stories attesting to the resilience of the human spirit.

One was of a bookseller in Islamabad who has, I think, the largest bookstore in the world, or one of the largest. Chomsky sells there, so do books on atheism and the Qur’an. In other words, he has, in a part of the world that we’ve come to think of as extremely close-minded, a catholic audience. 

Another best seller there is “Fallen Leaves,” by Will Durant, whose histories I’ve faithfully read, making me potentially knowledgeable up to the Napoleonic period, when the Durants left off.

Ahmad Saeed, the owner, told of elderly men coming in, offering to pay for books they’d stolen when they were children. “His late father, Saeed Jan Qureshi, would have been amused: He had always regarded book theft by children as an investment in a future where people still read, and thus become his customers.”  

“Fallen Leaves” struck a chord with me, of course, because I’ve been raking them, though there are fewer than there used to be because we’ve been culling the trees. My sister-in-law, who’d come for Thanksgiving, saw me raking and wondered why I didn’t get a blower. No, simpler (and quieter) is best, though I must admit I sigh when I see the village leaf-suckers plying their way along the streets of Sag Harbor (and when I look across the street at the house that now sits on what had been our leaf repository for years and years). A fellow carts them away now after I rake them, for a reasonable fee.

Another of the stories Mary clipped had to do with the owner of the Hummus Bar, Kobi Tzafrir, in Kfar Vitkin, a small village near the Mediterranean Sea, who wants Arabs and Israelis to reconnect over his hummus plates, which he’s offering at a 50-percent discount if they will sit together. “Give Chickpeas  a Chance” was the headline in The Daily Mail’s story.

There were also a number of stories here this week that had to do with cultivating the garden of hope and with loving your neighbor — not only in Sag Harbor, where people raised money for the family of a young athlete, Nick Kruel, who’d undergone open heart surgery, but in Lesbos, where Doug Kuntz and a group inspired by his photographs (which deserve to be in a national publication such as National Geographic) are now helping Syrian refugees, and in Malawi, as well, where a local teacher, Kryn Olson, wants to build five school libraries to hold books donated and collected here.

Mary’s file is growing.