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When you don’t see it coming

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Jackie McMahon’s engaging new murder mystery came at me from an unexpected source: DC’s first romance bookstore.

Installment #13 in my series on the region’s independent bookshops.

One of the things I love about independent bookshops is that you’ll invariably find a staff member who knows and loves their specific collection of books. You can walk in clueless and, with the skillful guidance of staff, come out delighted that you found an insightful biography, a well-crafted novel, or an engaging and entertaining murder mystery.

Which is exactly what happened recently in my quest to visit all 30 of the DC region’s independent bookstores.

Truth be told, Friends to Lovers—the DC area’s only romance book store—wasn’t high on my list. I wasn’t sure I could find a work of real interest. Yet I explored their website before heading to Old Town in Alexandria on a beautiful summer day and found a few promising leads.

I shouldn’t have worried.

The sign and cozy storefront let me know that while the genre might be outside my normal choices, I was among fellow bibliophiles. On a Thursday morning the store was busy with three or four generations of readers checking out the selections. I looked through parts of the store, perused the helpful “staff picks” section, but was still getting my bearings amidst the unfamiliar titles and writers.

A friendly staff person saw my disorientation and walked over to see if she could be helpful.

I explained my independent bookstore project (“Oh, how fun!”) and then admitted that I didn’t read romance novels so I was worried about being able to find something I would feel good about purchasing. “Not to worry” said Andi, as she showed me the “Romance Adjacent” section to get me started. Then I mentioned I had seen a detective mystery offering on the website, and that might be a possibility.

“I have a great one for you,” she said. “It is brand new and the romance aspect is applied with a light touch.” Which is how I came to read a delightful murder mystery set in 1930s London featuring a club of successful mystery writers. I left Friends to Lovers Bookstore with great appreciation for Andi and all the hardworking staff at independent bookshops along with anticipation that led me to quickly jump into this new mystery.

The Cloak and Dagger Club (2026) by Jackie McMahon introduces us to the smart, up-and-coming detective heroine Lucy Hubbard. Her first mystery has been published to strong sales and glowing reviews and she finds herself swept up in the literary world of Britain’s best-known detective novelist, Horace Hazelmoor, President of The Cloak and Dagger Club. She attends her first meeting in the Marie Antoinette Suite at The Ritz Hotel and is dazzled by the assembled talent of the writers. However, when her former fiancé, Frank Murray—a rising star in Britain’s detective fiction scene—comes through the door with Horace she is slightly unnerved and works to keep their former relationship secret from the others. She also struggles to keep her feelings for Frank in check as the novel progresses.

Horace, who is bombastic and a bully, has too much to drink and quickly throws everyone off stride by starting an argument with one of the club members. A fight ensues and Horace is carried to his room at the hotel to sleep it off. Two days later, after the hotel staff has not heard from him, Horace is found dead, stabbed in the back. Frank, who was threatening to overtake Horace as Britain’s favorite crime writer, is the prime suspect. Lucy has convinced herself that she no longer has feelings for her childhood friend turned former lover, but she knows that he could never have killed Horace. Since who knows better how to unravel a crime than a mystery writer, she and Frank begin their own side investigation to find the real murderer.

McMahon’s debut novel introduces the reader to an intriguing cast of characters. Besides Horace, Frank, and Lucy we meet Graham, the former Scotland Yard detective turned mystery writer and his secretary Jonathan. The Countess Andrassy, whose husband is a drunkard and whose past is a bit cloudy. Christine Wong writes mysteries about a loveable vicar in a small English village, a subject that doesn’t appear to fit her personality. Sergeant Badgers provides Frank with tidbits about police work to help him make his books more realistic. The shifty Inspector Naughton seems to know Graham from his earlier life and cannot be trusted. Marcel Bettencourt is the faithful attendant of the club at the Ritz.

Each of them has a secret they don’t want the others to learn. The puzzle that is devised is clever, and McMahon’s writing is sharp and easy to digest. The romance aspect is very evident, yet lightly applied and fitting within the story. As in any good piece of detective fiction, the reader turns page after page, continuing to read late into the night.

Interspersed among the chapters are short snippets from the works of each of the members of the club. These both introduce us to the fictional detectives each writer has created and help the story progress. In one of these snippets—from Hazelmoor’s Carlyle Bragington’s series—Horace has his hero tell how one kills a powerful adversary.

“There’s only one way to kill the powerful, Sergeant.

A cloud of grey smoke trickled out of Bragington’s mouth and danced toward the ceiling, seductive like a lover. ‘When they don’t see it coming.'”

When I walked into Friends to Lovers, I’ll admit that I didn’t see a novel evoking the Golden Age of British mystery writing in my future. However, McMahon has created characters and a story we can enjoy, believe, and care about in spite of preconceived notions of what will interest us. The Cloak and Dagger Club is a worthy debut, and a fitting introduction to me not only of a talented writer, but of the unexpected joys of Friends to Lovers.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash

Observations from . . . July 2026

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This summary of the July posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter brings the good news—scientifically proven, no less—that those who read more books live longer.

Candice walked into my writing studio/study the other day and asked “are these all your ‘to be read‘ books?”

Her tone was somewhere between shocked and incredulous. She was referring to the stacks of books I’ve placed on the only flat space left in the room: the lower end of the bed frame.

I admitted that yes, this was my TBR pile, but omitted the fact that she’d missed the ones on the table next to my desk, the two shelves of books downstairs, and the box of murder mysteries on the floor under the table. My niece Brittany, who visited us recently, had a similar reaction when she walked into the room. Her exact words were, I believe, “My God, I’ve walked into Granddaddy’s house.”

This seems like a perfectly reasonable TBR pile to me

Especially after my mother died, Daddy’s house featured stacks of books on every available free space. So yes, I’ve become my father.

But I now have a perfect response to the questions and the gaping mouths. Yale University has made the scientific case that people who read books live longer. Not magazines or newspapers. Not e-books. Good, old fashioned books! The findings concluded that someone who read for more than 3.5 hours a week was around 20 per cent less likely to die over the twelve years of the study than someone who read nothing.

“Reading books tends to involve two cognitive processes that could create a survival advantage,” the scientists propose. “First, it promotes ‘deep reading,’ which is a slow, immersive process; this cognitive engagement occurs as the reader draws connections to other parts of the material, finds applications to the outside world, and asks questions about the content presented. Cognitive engagement may explain why vocabulary, reasoning, concentration, and critical thinking skills are improved by exposure to books. Second, books can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence, which are cognitive processes that can lead to greater survival. Better health behaviors and reduced stress may explain this process.”

When I told Candice, she responded, “Well, you should live forever.” More on that in a moment.

The study estimated a lifespan that lasts two years longer, on average, for book readers. Daddy lived to be almost 91, reading until the end, so that seems to be a good age to shoot for.

After finishing my tour of the 30 independent bookshops in the DC area I might take a little sabbatical from book-buying. At least for a few weeks. But I don’t buy all the ones I have now, so the pile may still grow. Some are gifts. Some come from authors or publishers. Some are on loan. Some I exchange at the various little free libraries in our neighborhood. Some, I’m convinced, appear like magic.

I hope that you’re getting in lots of beach reading (or its equivalent) this month. Much of what I wrote about in the July MORE TO COME posts came out of the books I read. Let’s jump in and see what observations arose from reading and taking the slow—but perhaps longer—lane of life.

READER FAVORITES

Despite Candice’s assertion that I have enough books to live forever, that’s not going to happen. You know the line about death and taxes. It just so happens that two of the top posts in terms of reader views from July related to loss, yes, but also to lives well lived.

My father often said that growing old is not for wimps. I used to think he was talking about the physical aches and pains that come with the years. But earlier this month I was reading under a shade tree in downtown Takoma Park when I suddenly found myself crying. Instead of cranky knees and sore backs, Daddy may have had in mind the spiritual and emotional pains that come when we lose those who are such a part of our daily lives. In that moment the passage of time and the difficult journeys we all navigate were what came to mind. That and a grieving on our 250th anniversary for a country that seems ready to abandon its better angels to the forces of greed, anger, and hatred.

  • A life of gentleness, generosity, gratefulness, and grace is a remembrance of Douglas Roller, a former colleague and dear family friend who passed away earlier this month. Doug and his late wife Tidge were some of the first people to welcome us to Staunton when we moved to that Shenandoah Valley community as newlyweds in 1983. We miss them both deeply.
  • Be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday was written after Candice and I attended a celebration of the life of Elizabeth Fisher late last month. We were both friends with this brilliant woman who was Professor Emerita and the long-time Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at The George Washington University. However various ties—including their work together on the healing ministry and a mutual fondness for long conversations over leisurely lunches—meant that Candice and Elizabeth had a special bond.

Growing old is not for the faint of heart.

THE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE TOUR ROLLS ON

Bold Fork Books

July was the month I picked up the pace in visiting shops on my list of the Washington region’s 30 independent bookstores and writing posts on these unique places and the treasures I discovered. As I wrote about each visit I began to number the installments in this series so I could remember where I was on the path. Here’s what arrived in July.

  • Installment #8: A tale of hope and struggle—Laila Lalami’s debut novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits takes us into the hopes and fears of modern Morocco with subtlety and grace. I bought the book at Bol, a worker-owned cafe, bookstore, and event space in the Brookland neighborhood of DC.
  • Installment #10: Nothing is as before—Yiyun Li’s memoir of loss is disquieting, challenging, and honest. From an emotional standpoint Things in Nature Merely Grow, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner for Memoir, is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. I found this treasure at Washington’s only Chinese-English bilingual bookshop: JF Books.
  • Installment #12: Trading complexity for the easier path of nostalgia and remembrance—Charles King’s fascinating Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams touches on both ancient and current challenges of cities and societies trying to balance everyday collisions that spark real genius with the stresses of cultural differences. Laurel Leaf—a collaborative, women-owned shop in the heart of Takoma Park—was where I discovered this book about a city I visited 20 years ago this month.

Reading challenges and independent bookshops: A mid-year update from early July is already out-of-date. As of today, here are the seven independent bookshops I’ve yet to visit in 2026:

As you can see above, my friends The Rev. Sarah Taylor Miller and Bob Witten joined the DJB bookshop tour this month at Alexandria’s Old Town Books and Capitol Hill Books respectively. My friend and former colleague Tom Mayes is introducing me to Solid State Books in August. Let me know if you’d like to meet up for a bookshop visit and a coffee/lunch at one of these remaining stores.

One challenge down, two to go was my post to celebrate the conclusion of the 2026 Reading Challenge of the Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, MT. It was a great way to push me to broaden my horizons. And my regular From the bookshelf: June 2026 post provides short summaries of the book reviews from last month.

THE KITCHEN SINK

My editor is on vacation this week (again!) so I apologize for the length of this post. I’ll just throw in everything else with short blurbs and encourage you to search for the ones that pique your interest.

  • Why not?—Building a robust sense of the common good comes about in part by asking ourselves tough questions.
  • Emptying the drafts folder—Short takes on topics delightful, powerful, destructive and dumb. Yes, Greenwatergate falls into the latter category.

COMMENTS I LOVED

Several Brilliant Readers added comments to this month’s posts, either on the website or via emails. Here are three that I really loved.

Regarding One challenge down, two to go:

“Thank you, Chapter One, for creating this challenge that forces us out of our comfort zones.”

Margit Williams

Regarding Nothing is as before:

“I really enjoyed reading your write-up. It beautifully captures both the spirit of JF Books and the importance of independent bookstores in bringing communities together. We are honored to be part of your journey in the DC region.”

Calvin Yu, JF Books

Regarding A life of gentleness, generosity, gratefulness, and grace:

“Thank you so much for this memory of Doug. Every word is true. Staunton lost two originals with Doug and Tidge’s passing.”

Jim Hanger

DON’T POSTPONE JOY

Thanks, as always, for reading. Your friendship, support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love; thirst for wonder; undertake some mindful, transformative walking every day. Recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, public servants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

But also keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. Take time to dawdle and dream. Let yourself be bewildered!

Leave enough empty space to feel and experience life. Those gaps are where the magic begins. When times get rough, let your memories wander back to some wonderful place with remembrances of family and friends. But don’t be too hard on yourself if a few of the facts slip. Just get the poetry right.

Be comfortable in the mystery. Seek the uplifting spirit that leads to a life of grace and wonder.

Grace to help us remember that we can do hard things. “Grace to never sell yourself short; Grace to risk something big for something good; and Grace to remember the world is now too dangerous for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love . . .”

Wonder to help us remember that “we are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. And bash into some joy along the way.

Life is finite . . . love is not.

Try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

For the June 2026 summary, click here.

You can subscribe to MORE TO COME by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right-hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

Photo of beach reading by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Trading complexity for the easier path of nostalgia and remembrance

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Charles King’s fascinating history of Odessa touches on both ancient and current challenges of cities and societies trying to balance everyday collisions that spark real genius with the stresses of cultural differences.

Installment #12 in my series on the region’s independent bookshops.

Twenty years ago this month I was on the Sea Cloud sailing the Black Sea with National Trust Tours. It was a lifetime ago in so many ways. One of the most memorable stops we made was in Odessa, the port city in Ukraine with a brief yet fascinating history that continues to unfold every day.

Odessa has been on my mind a great deal since February 23, 2022, when Russia invaded a peaceful country without provocation. Unbelievably that war still continues, in large measure because of the tenacity and fight of the Ukrainian people. So when I walked into a small shop in downtown Takoma Park earlier this year and found what is essentially a biography of the city, I felt it was another treasure discovered as a result of my year-long quest to visit all the Washington region’s independent bookshops.

Laurel Leaf is a collaborative, women-owned shop in the heart of Takoma Park. It features a collection of plants, used books, and vintage mid-century modern furniture and decor. As highlighted in a Washingtonian magazine feature, the store is a partnership between Orly Keiner of HouseMouse Books and Vintage, Heather Rowe of Cheeky’s Vintage, and Agnes Traynor of Indigro Plant Design.

“It was striking to me how similar our vision was,” says Keiner. “When I talked to Agnes, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a first floor boutique, and it could be really integrated, plants and books?’ And then I would talk to Heather and we would have the same conversation: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do the vintage and the books?’ ”

Laurel Leaf (photo credit: Beck Rowe for Washingtonian Magazine)

On several visits to the store (it is located next to my favorite coffee shop) I have always found a well-curated set of books sure to interest the discerning reader, with titles from history, biography, sci-fi, and more. Most books are slightly used and the interested shopper can often find one or more that cry out from the shelf to be read. The staff is eager to help, and the furniture and plants that make up the inventory set the stage for what promises to be a delightful experience.

It was on one such visit that I came across a book by a writer whose most recent work on “the desperate lives and troubled times” that made Handel’s Messiah had me wanting more. And I was delighted to find that in an earlier book that same writer had explored the history of a place that had captivated me on that long-ago tour.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2011) by Charles King is the story of one of Europe’s most intriguing cities and its “descent into the heart of darkness” during the Holocaust. We discover that unlike many cities in the region, Odessa is relatively young, founded three years after Washington, DC. A wide range of fortune seekers, freedom fighters, Russian bureaucrats, traders, merchants, tavern keepers, poets, writers, and journalists came together to make up the mix of residents in one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities. With scholarly insight, wide-ranging biographical subjects, and crisp writing, King introduces us to the people who came together to shape the dream for a great seaport on the Black Sea, but who also put the city in a perpetual balance between greatness and suicide.

In King’s skillful hands we learn that Odessa’s founding was largely led by Catherine the Great and her personal and political partner Grigory Potemkin (the source of the derisory label “Potemkin villages”) after the area was conquered in a war with the Ottoman Empire. Growing up in the Age of Enlightenment, Odessa initially thrived as a haven for Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, Greeks, Italians, and others seeking fortune and adventure, a mix which did much to shape its future. The duc de Richelieu, member of the great family of French nobles, accelerated the growth of the city after Catherine’s death when Tsar Alexander named him city administrator, a position with wide ranging powers. Within a few years Richelieu had “built a theatre and public schools, including a gymnasium for merchants’ sons, a relative novelty in an empire where education was still a privilege of the upper classes.” A library, printing press, and landscaped parks and streets quickly followed.

Statue of Duc de Richelieu in Odessa (via Wikimedia)

But in 1812 a deadly epidemic swept through the port city, setting in motion a storyline we see again and again, one that could quickly swing from growth and prosperity to large scale death and destruction. This time it came from disease. Later it would come from war, pogroms, and ethnic violence. Over the course of almost 300 pages we learn about Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel, Zionist renegade Vladimir Jabotinsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, along with other writers, artists, and geniuses who helped shape Odessa both physically and in popular culture. The plagues common to seaports certainly had an impact on the city, but King makes the strong case that the mass murder of Jews carried out by Romanian occupation forces during the Second World War—where at least 220,000 Jews were killed and one of the least-known episodes of the Holocaust—essentially emptied Odessa of its Jewish population that had done so much to support its vitality and growth through the decades.

Part III of the book is a short but important exploration of the role of nostalgia and remembrance in Odessa’s story.

“Odessa was not quite a blank slate at the end of the Second World War, but it was something close: a city denuded of a major ethnic and religious community and with much of the rest of its population hunkering in cellars or dispersed to outlying towns and villages. The city was still reeling from artillery hits, aerial bombing, partisan raids, and the ravaging of its Jewish core . . . Barely 200,000 people remained in teh city city, perhaps a third of its prewar population.”

The end of Jewish Odessa produced a diaspora that helped fuel an understanding of the city based on nostalgia and remembrance. In a striking comparison, King writes that “Odessa became revered as the Soviet Union’s imaginary Mississippi Delta, a remarkable incubator for music and dreamy nostalgia, yet also a place whose creative power really became evident once people managed to escape it.” The imaginary city began to outshine the real one, fueled in part by the Soviet narrative of resistance.

Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, Odessa’s story was shaped by selective memories from its past. King wants the reader to understand that Odessa’s real history is fascinating: the story of a city that managed to create a local culture “woven from uneasiness, a way of living that may hold lessons about the creative and destructive power of being in-between.” I would welcome knowing more of King’s thoughts on Odessa in light of the last five years of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Odessa Opera House from before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (By Alexey Savchenko on Unsplash)

In reading King’s book, I discovered so much more about the city that captured my imagination twenty years ago. Odessa has been described as “an elegy for a vibrant, multicultural city as well as a celebration of the survival of Odessa’s dream in a diaspora reaching all the way to Israel and the United States.” The story is even more fascinating than I imagined.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Potemkin or Odessa Stairs from between 1890 and 1900 via Wikimedia.

Whitewashing history won’t make America great

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The whitewashing and bulldozing of our history seeks to serve the vision of a small group of powerful people. “We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”

In a career that has extended over more than 50 years I have worked with a wide variety of individuals and organizations to save the buildings, landscapes, monuments, and neighborhoods that help tell America’s story. Historic preservation was not only a profession but a personal passion to connect people in thriving, sustainable, and vibrant communities. The underpinning of much of that work is the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) which became law in 1966, less than a decade before I joined the field. Often misunderstood, NHPA was passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson “primarily to acknowledge the importance of protecting our nation’s heritage from rampant federal development.” 

As it has done with other institutions, scholars, and citizens working to protect America’s history and tell a more complete and complex story about our past, the Trump administration is now attacking the National Historic Preservation Act.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson—as she often does—takes our disparate and messy news feed and weaves it into a coherent narrative about what is really at stake. In her July 25, 2026 Letters from an American post she tackles the administration’s attempt to whitewash history with a proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act.

“Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to ‘take into account’ what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites . . .

Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. [Greg] Werkheiser told Treisman: ‘What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.’”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation—where I have been a member since 1975, worked for almost half of my career, and remain a financial supporter—called out the most disturbing aspects of these proposed changes. Proposals to end public comment, allow federal agencies to move forward with plans that damage America’s historic architecture, remove all cultural landscape features such as the Grand Canyon from consideration as historic properties and more are inconsistent with the National Historic Preservation Act and would violate the Council’s own rules and procedures. As we have seen with other reports and regulatory changes from this administration, the proposals are also internally inconsistent and riddled with errors, likely to cause enormous regulatory confusion, chaos, and unnecessary expense.

Richardson’s entire post is worth your time. For the conclusion she states—in clear and direct language—what these changes to an obscure (to some) federal law means:

“What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.”

The whitewashing of history has been a recurring topic in my writing. Monuments and historic places help carry forward the story of America, and our stories tell what we choose to believe. The dispiriting upheavals we are seeing today would be completely disorienting if we hadn’t seen similar challenges before. Racial injustice, the whitewashing of history, book banning, our gun fetish, misogyny, homegrown terrorism, fake news, religious intolerance, the marginalization of LGBTQ communities, oligarch-favoring government, and more are all part of our past and present.

Too many people want to ignore this part of our nation’s history.

So much of what we are experiencing comes down to money and power, just as it did with the Southern slaveowners and the Gilded Age oligarchs of the 19th and 20th centuries. Seeing others as unequal is the price that must be paid in order for those who feel threatened by democracy to maintain their grip on power. They reject the fundamental American ideal of equality. 

Nesrine Malik has written about the myths we believe that subvert freedom. Many of these myths are behind the drive to whitewash and bulldoze our history and culture. These myths “work hard to prevent change from happening. They are powerful. But they are not all-powerful.” The strength of the myths is not in facts, but in the narratives, so it is impossible to fight fake facts with other facts. What is needed, Malik asserts, are new stories that are not just the correction of old stories, but are visions that assert that “for societies to evolve, an old order must change.”

The fight for a fuller understanding of our history, for the preservation of those places that help us acknowledge our past, and for democracy and justice never ends. As Anand Giridharadas reminds us, “We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Eisenhower Executive Office Building via Wikimedia

One challenge down, two to go

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I’ve now completed the 2026 Reading Challenge from Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, MT. Here’s my report.

Reading, it is said, broadens your horizons. But you have to work at times to free yourself from the rut of turning to the same genre of books or stable of authors year after year. To break that mold I set myself three reading-related undertakings for 2026:

My friend and Brilliant Reader Margit had loaned me a young adult novel from her native Hungary early in the year. Inside she had slipped a note and a piece of paper that had the look and feel of an old library card. Instead it was a Reading Challenge 2026 list from Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton, near where she visits a family home.

I was immediately hooked and I’ve now completed the delightful and mind-expanding tasks of the Chapter One Reading Challenge. Here’s the final report (with links to the book reviews on MORE TO COME):

1 – A book you’ve picked based on the cover

2 – A book with a screen adaptation

3 – A book that makes you think, “WTF?”

4 – A book about a skill/trade/craft

  • The Baseball 100 (2021) by Joe Posnanski (what’s more skillful than playing a child’s game)

5 – Wild card/unusual pick

6 – A work in translation

7 – A collection of poetry

8 – A book published in the year you were born

9 – An essay collection

10 – A book recommended by a friend/buddy

Chapter One Book Store bills itself as the Bitterroot book source since 1974

Chapter One Owners

“Chapter One Book Store has been a literary and community resource for Bitterroot Valley residents and visitors since 1974. Owned by Mara, Marisa, and Katrina, we offer a place for customers to explore our shelves of new and used books, learn about local events and chat about the daily happenings in our valley and world. Our mission at Chapter One is to provide a space for all to explore their passions, discover new ones and share them with others. Visit us in the heart of Hamilton at Main and 3rd.”

Thanks to Margit and all the folks at Chapter One for widening my horizons!

Speaking of horizons . . . to put us all in the mood for a future visit to Chapter One, the Bitterroot Valley, and Big Sky Country, let’s celebrate with a few great songs about Montana.

Many commentators call John Denver‘s Wild Montana Skies the quintessential Montana song. It has the added benefit of featuring Emmylou Harris on backing vocals.

Montana Melody by LeGrand Harvey was actually adopted as the Official State Ballad by the Montana legislature.

For something a bit different, Rox in the Box by The Decemberists is about the mining community in Butte, Montana. Here’s a live version from NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series.

And we’ll end with the beautiful singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith‘s Midnight in Missoula. We still miss her.

One challenge down, two to go!

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos of Chapter One Book Store from the shop’s website

Sometimes the answer is right under your nose

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I found another treasure in Donna Leon’s canon of Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries literally right across the street from my house.

Installment #11 in my series on the region’s independent bookshops.

Twenty-nine was the number of independent DC-region bookshops I settled upon in my quest to explore them all this year. But after walking across the Silver Spring Metro Plaza hundreds of times it finally dawned on me that the small book/record shop literally across the street from my house—Mojomala: Books, Records & Cool Stuff—was not just a fly-by-night pop-up. Their inventory is as extensive, interesting, and intriguing as several of the other small stores in my list, and they’ve been around since December of 2023. So, now I have a nice round 30 bookshops to visit in 2026!

Opening day at Mojomala (credit: Mojomala)

Michael Abate is the owner of Mojomala and the one you’ll generally find behind the counter. A family-run, independent book and record shop in downtown Silver Spring, Mojomala first opened as an online store in 2021. Two years later they moved into a brick-and-mortar shop at the current location in the Silver Spring Metro Plaza, steps from the metro station, the popular Silver Branch brewery, and—as I’ve said—the Brown’s old home place.

A Patch article from 2023 adds a bit of history to the shop’s story.

“After starting out as an online-only business two years ago, Mojomala moved into the Analog Market on Gist Avenue in Silver Spring in July 2022.

After more than a year housed at the Analog Market, Abate then decided to seek a new location for the shop closer to the downtown area. He had always planned to open a standalone shop, and working with the Analog Market was seen as the first step toward that goal.

‘We see Silver Spring as a cultural destination and would love folks to see us as a start- or end-point of their visit to the area,’ Abate said. ‘In terms of the look and feel of the space, I was inspired by some of the book stores and record shops we visited in Berlin and Paris. We see the store as a boutique that highlights some of our offerings while having the full inventory available online at Mojomala.com.'”

Mojomala is a friendly, inviting and curated space for collectors and casual consumers alike offering used, new and vintage items ranging from books, records, CDs, DVDs, magazines, comics, games, toys and apparel. I can attest that there are usually patrons checking through the sale items outside, or visiting inside the store looking for that forgotten treasure.

And about that funny name.

As Michael tells the story on the store’s website, Mojomala (pronounced “moe-joe-mah-lah“) is “a combination of my oldest daughter Madeleine Olivia (the ‘MO’), our youngest daughter Josie (the ‘JO’), my name (the ‘MA’) and my wife Laura’s name (the ‘LA.’). We wanted a name that could mean anything and everything.”

Sometimes—just like a detective—the simplest place to look is right under one’s nose. And that’s what I did on a recent visit. I found not only my 30th local independent bookshop but also a large collection of mysteries among the book offerings . . . which is how I came to read another Donna Leon Commissario Brunetti classic.

Fatal Remedies (1999) by Donna Leon is the eighth in what is now a 33-installment series about Commissario Guido Brunetti, the Venetian detective whose “clothing marked him as Italian,” the “cadence of his speech announced he was Venetian,” while his “eyes were all policeman.” This book begins, as they often do, with a late night call alerting Brunetti to trouble in the city. A sudden act of vandalism has brought police to the scene of the crime—a travel agency with a shattered window—and Brunetti soon learns that the culprit who may be arrested is a member of his family.

The agency is targeted, he discovers, because of possible involvement in sex tourism and pedophilia. The press learns soon enough of Brunetti’s delicate situation, other officers in the force who do not like the Commissario are circling, and his difficult superior has been pressuring him to solve a daring robbery with a link to a suspicious accidental death. Such things in Italy always suggest possible Mafia involvement. It is a thorny and winding path that Brunetti must follow to get to the ultimate truth.

After having read the first, second, eleventh and thirty-third and most recent installments of the series, I knew what to expect. Once again we encounter the cast of characters who make up Brunetti’s life: his vain and pompous superior, Giuseppe Patta; his fellow policeman, Detective Sargent Lorenzo Vianello; the ever-resourceful secretary Elettra Zorzi, a woman of “endless and instinctive deceit” who always finds a way to get the information Brunetti needs as long as he isn’t too squeamish about her methods; the medical examiner Ettore Rizzardi; Paola Falier, Brunetti’s wife and a university lecturer in English Literature who is a delightful and loving foil for her husband; Paola’s father and Brunetti’s father-in-law, the wealthy and connected Orazio Falier; and his children Raffaele and Chiara. Signorina Elettra plays a major role in Fatal Remedies, as her computer skills and ability to use her sources to uncover critical information moves the investigation forward.

For fans of Leon’s work—and I count myself among them—the mystery usually plays second fiddle to the characters and relationships, and that was true in this case. The setting in Venice draws many of us in. The decent, erudite Venetian detectives are clearly crime solvers the reader can actually like. The stories are complex but not overly so. In Fatal Remedies we see Leon—and by extension Brunetti—grappling with moral issues where what is “just” is not always clear.

Fatal Remedies was an unexpected treasure discovered—as is the case with the truth in so many detective stories—right under my nose.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Leonardo Yip on Unsplash

Nothing is as before

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Yiyun Li’s memoir of loss is difficult, challenging, and honest. It was one of the treasures I found at Washington’s JF Books.

Installment #10 in my series on the region’s independent bookshops.

One of my hopes in visiting all 30 of Washington’s independent bookshops was to find stories and writers that expanded my worldview, challenged my preconceived notions, and introduced me to authors who had important things to say that I may have been missing.

Washington’s JF Books did all of that and more.

Located in Dupont Circle, this small storefront invites the reader into an independent bilingual bookstore rooted in Shanghai since 1997 and part of the nation’s capitol since opening here in September of 2024. As the only Chinese-English bookstore in the city and as a nonprofit, JF Books . . .

“. . . [is] committed to intellectual freedom, diversity, and critical thought. Our shelves feature a curated selection of Chinese-language books from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as English titles focused on China and Asia studies.”

JF Books grew out of Jifeng Bookstore. As the store’s About Us page on the website details, this institution has always been more than just a bookstore.

“For two decades, it was a cornerstone of China’s intellectual landscape. With eight branches at its peak, Jifeng fostered a love of reading and critical thinking through meticulously curated selections in social sciences and humanities, alongside vibrant cultural events. Lectures, forums, readings, and independent documentary screenings pulsed with intellectual energy, drawing in over hundreds of thousands of attendees in its final five years. However, Jifeng’s commitment to open dialogue clashed with a tightening grip on free expression. When told in advance of its fate of having to close on Jan. 31, 2018, it held a 283-day long countdown, accompanied by rich cultural events.”

Jifeng Bookstore found a new home in Washington with its new name, JF Books. It is a continuation of a legacy. Chinese-language social science and humanities books remain a cornerstone of the shop. But as I discovered on my recent visit, JF Books also showcases English-language works exploring China and Asia and celebrating the voices of Asian-Americans.

The very helpful staff directed me to the English language titles on my visit and provided guidance on books that might be of interest. It was a slim memoir that first drew my attention. A finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the 2026 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, I was taken by the book’s review in the New York Times: “Strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.”

Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) by Yiyun Li is one of the most difficult, unsettling, and yet moving books I have ever read. “There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” After that straightforward, painful opening, Li continues in austere and unsparing prose through what one reviewer correctly names a meditation on living and radical acceptance. From the abyss. “The death of a child realigns time and space,” she notes. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.” Yet life grows alongside the scars. Children die and parents go on living.

Li is not looking for an end point to her sorrow. She is not looking to “get over it.” And she is most certainly not interested in thoughts from friends, acquaintances, or even strangers who say they “understand” her pain, those who make themselves the center of the message, remember their own losses, and provide advice on how to overcome grief from their own triumphant experience. She reminds all of us that grief cheapened by cliché is often purely for the consolers themselves.

“I am not a grieving mother,” she writes. “I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.”

Throughout this short, powerful work, Yiyun Li is an “astute and unsentimental writer and observer.” She faces the facts, which are “the harshest and the hardest part of life” because unalterable facts bring with them some order and logic. One fact that resurfaces throughout the book is Li’s difficult relationship with her own mother. It certainly impacts how she relates to her own children and with life. When a couple of mothers ask if they could tell their children—Vincent’s peers—that he had died in an accident, she writes that “not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.” She is speaking from experience.

This book, which she has written for James after producing an earlier, different type of book after Vincent dies, is not designed to “provide the easy satisfaction of fulfillment, inspiration, and transformation.” It is not that type of book. In the past Li has quoted Montaigne: “To philosophize is to learn to die.” Now she knows that there are other variations:

“To philosophize is to learn to live with deaths. | To philosophize is to learn to live with those deaths until one dies. | To philosophize is what one can do while living in an abyss—not lost, but found.”

With a book that has garnered this much acclaim, one can find a wide variety of reviews. One of the most meaningful from my reading was by Siqi Li on the Literary Mama website. Writing as a parent and specifically a mother, Li notes that while she is drawn by the book’s title, she’s also “deeply unsettled by the unimaginable tragedy of Li’s loss.” Every parent who reads this book wants to ask the question that should not be asked. In her beautiful and nuanced review, produced after a trip to Taipei, where she had visited the dormant volcano, Seven Star Mountain, Siqi Li writes,

“But through her words again, I see her presence as a mother, ‘holding on to everything and nothing that is called now and now and now and now,’ and I recognize that her spirit is already in me. It is the spirit of stubborn maternal instincts, of [Hawaiian] goddess Pele’s lava streams, penetrating the vast lands and splitting open every crack, exposing our vulnerabilities with force, heat, light, and truthfulness. This is what I think the title means: nature does not bother waiting for the wound to close before growing again. Like the silver grass in the wind on top of the Seven Star Mountain, life grows alongside the scar, with fear, with suffering—and Li lets us see it: the rustling bamboo, the dancing butterflies and chafer beetles. We fear, we suffer, and still, we live, because things in nature merely grow.”

At the end of this profoundly moving book—difficult, yes, but also deeply meaningful and illuminating—Yiyun Li tells her readers about a note she receives from a colleague who had a student who died from suicide. Her friend had been asked to speak at his service and she shares lines from a German poem that she intends to read.

“There are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.”

Li’s world, still once before, is stiller now. “Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.” Li said “I love you” to both of her children many times. And that, too, is a fact.

Yiyun Li’s words are not comforting, but they open a way of approaching life and death and life with honesty. Things in nature merely grow until it’s time for them to die.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of darkness and light via Unsplash.

Why not?

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Building, or rebuilding, a robust sense of the common good comes about in part by asking ourselves tough questions about the way we live.

Several years after a friend moved to Canada I asked how they were doing.

“One of the great, bittersweet things about Montreal is that, if you had asked me when I was a child what I thought the U.S. might be like by the time I was middle-aged . . . I would have said something quite like this (minus the French): a society which is broadly middle-class, science-based, forward-looking; with some racism, but nowhere near what the U.S. had when I was a child; with good healthcare, strong public safety, good environmental commitments, and a robust sense of the common good. And that would have been a hopeful vision, and a possible one. To see it realized here, just twenty miles over the border, and to know that the U.S. has chosen something quite different, is almost incomprehensible to me.”

As a child I would have seen much the same prospects for the U.S. But as I listen to what passes for political and rational thought today, my vision for what’s possible in the short term—as we move from one era to another—is not always optimistic.

RECOGNITION

It is helpful to be reminded of what we’ve lost as a country and how we might go about reclaiming the best of ourselves. Sometimes those reminders can come from an outside perspective, such as that provided by my friend. At other times writers help us make the necessary first step of recognition.

A recent post in The American Pamphleteer entitled The Most Underrated Freedom in America provides another perspective. The writer suggests that we did not give up basic freedoms by legislation or force. “These were quieter losses: ways of thinking, speaking and living that slowly became socially dangerous, morally suspect or simply too uncomfortable to practice.” Things like:

  • the freedom to say, “I don’t know;”
  • the freedom to disagree with your own side;
  • the freedom to walk away from outrage;
  • the freedom to forgive trespasses.

They suggest that somewhere along the line we learned that saying “I don’t know” is “to risk looking weak, uninformed or unprepared.” We wear our certainty as social armor. To say “I don’t know” used to be called humility, something we see very rarely in today’s political and even social discourse. They also write that we have confused outrage with caring and action.

As my friend in Montreal recognized, there are other ways to live. Other choices we can make.

INTENTIONALITY

While recognition of the problem is a necessary first step, intentionality is just as important. We all must take our own personal steps to help heal a broken nation.

I was reading Jane Bertch’s engaging memoir when the post on freedoms lost—and our ability to regain them—landed in my inbox. Both reminded me of an earlier book by my friend Janet Hulstrand that seeks to “demystify” the French. Janet captured wonderful life lessons from her observations about the country she’s come to love as a visitor and resident for more than 40 years.

Bertch’s memoir and Janet’s guide led me to agree with a number of the ways in which the French have decided to live their lives. And while neither writer tries to force the reader to accept that the French way is necessarily better, both made me stop to seriously consider why we do what we do. Why do we speak with such certainty? The French love to argue, but both writers noted they do so without an outrage that cuts off friendship. Why have we forgotten how to forgive?

Why not take an approach to living that, upon reflection, seems not only perfectly reasonable, but better for us, for our communities, and for our planet? The following came to mind as I read Janet’s “demystifying” manual:

  • Why not greet each and every person with a kind word (bonjour) and leave them with a cheerful au revoir (until we see each other again)?
  • Why not throw out our assumptions that everyone is just like us? 
  • Why not treat strangers as we would want to be treated?
  • Why not expect and support beauty in both our civic spaces and life?
  • Why not lower our voice instead of speaking at a decibel level that ensures that everyone within 100 feet hears our conversation and that often gives the impression that we are angry? (My wife is raising her eyebrows right about now.)
  • Why not take our time? What’s the rush?
  • Why not, instead of being self-absorbed or all wrapped up in what we do or always being correct, work on simply being interesting?

This last one comes out of the chapter in Janet’s book entitled “The Importance of Being Interesting,” and she begins it with this short story.

“Years ago, a friend of mine had a dalliance with a Frenchwoman. When they went their separate ways, neither of them was truly terribly upset—it was a casual affair, and it was over. But she did make certain to tell him before going on her way, that to her, he and his friends were ‘not interesting.’ (‘I know many peoples who are more interesting zan you!’ were her precise words.)”

Janet goes into some depth about the ways and whys of being interesting, noting that the French have a general respect “for education, for intellect, and for the importance of learning how to think rationally.” They don’t talk about their work and tie their self-esteem up in their jobs. Instead, they build on the philosophy courses that are a staple of all French high school curricula in order to produce “enlightened citizens capable of intelligent criticism.”

The reflections on the freedoms we surrendered culturally, one small concession at a time, struck me as choices we have made without thinking and perhaps out of fear. In the process these choices have made us less interesting. Perhaps we surrendered them “because certainty feels safer than doubt. Loyalty fells safer than independence. Outrage feels more righteous than seeking the truth. Condemnation feels more powerful than mercy.”

But these are freedoms we can reclaim, if each of us are intentional about the way we live.

  • Why not say “I don’t know enough yet?”
  • Why not tell our allies when they are wrong?
  • Why not refuse to react to every feed filled with fury?
  • Why not hold people accountable without insisting that they remain forever trapped inside the worst thing they have done?

These are not inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things.

“A free society requires people who can think without permission, dissent without terror, pause without shame and forgive without surrendering their judgment.

Political freedom cannot survive for long without that kind of inner freedom. Perhaps that’s why recovering it matters now.”

Why not begin to see each other as fellow travelers along life’s very short highway? Why not keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable? Take time to dawdle and dream? Let yourself be bewildered?

Why not love your neighbor as yourself?

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo from Unsplash

A life of gentleness, generosity, gratefulness, and grace

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A former colleague, dear friend, and godfather to our daughter Claire passed away earlier this month. Rest in Peace, Douglas Roller.

It was March of 1983. The board of Historic Staunton Foundation hosted a party as part of my interview process as a candidate for the position of HSF’s Executive Director. Having just flown in from Atlanta I suddenly had to meet, remember, and have meaningful interactions with all these new people! Memory generally fails on what exactly happened but one remembrance from that evening and the next day’s interview has remained with me through the years.

Doug Roller, an architect and lifelong citizen of this unique and thriving Shenandoah Valley community, was so welcoming, thoughtful, and excited about the city and its preservation possibilities. I’ve never forgotten that first impression. His warm introduction made me feel immediately at home and among like-minded friends. I’ve thought of that often and—when I’m most in the moment—try to provide the same type of embrace when meeting people coming into new and different circumstances.

I was fortunate to be offered the job and smart enough to accept it. Doug and I worked together through the years and that feeling of being in synch was solidified. Doug was the rare individual who could move from being the boss, as my board chair, to then working with me as a colleague on the staff in our architectural position, but he did it with great skill. I’m sure I have forgotten how much I learned from Doug about Staunton’s history and architecture, but what I’ve never forgotten is the depth of his love for that wonderful community and his sense of public service to ensure that it has a great future. Doug’s knowledge of history and architecture, creative spirit, and passion for place have all been evident since we first met, and those qualities have inspired me in so many ways through the years.

Douglas Roller passed away earlier this week. He was preceded in death just six months earlier on December 23rd by his brilliant, funny, impulsive, and clear-headed wife Helena “Tidge” Wetzel Roller. All four of the Browns saw Doug and Tidge last Thanksgiving in Staunton, a visit we will always cherish. We miss them both so very much.

All the Browns with Doug (l) and Tidge (r) Roller, Thanksgiving weekend 2025

Katie wrote a long and loving post about her father on her Facebook page where I learned so much about Doug’s past as well as his spirit.

“His childhood was an improbable mixture. Born to Paul and Florence (Dundas) Roller in Staunton, Virginia on Saint Nicholas Day in 1939, Doug was a true Virginia gentleman from the start. He had so many wonderful memories of his early childhood. As a young child his Dundas grandparents’ house was the first private home in Augusta County to have electricity, and Doug was fascinated by the giant bank of batteries (batteries!) that the house men would take into town to exchange for charged ones. Some memories were gentler than others. He recalled how effortlessly and brilliantly his father (a classically-trained musician, like most of the Rollers) played the violin even when falling-down drunk. He remembered riding in the backseat of his father’s Lincoln Zephyr with its bulletproof glass partition—when it was closed, he was in his own private world . . .

His childhood went from one extreme to another as he and his beloved mother ended up on their own when he was only nine. After losing his father, he and his mother lived with various relatives for a time before moving to the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind when she became a houseparent. He was the only child in his friend group who was both hearing and sighted. He gave vivid descriptions of the incredibly long and terrifyingly dark spiral tunnel slides which served as fire escapes for the blind. He learned to skate very fast with his eyes closed. His American Sign Language skills served him well for the rest of his life.”

I had never heard the story of the time at VSDB, but I was aware of Doug’s architectural training and background.

“Doug studied architecture at the University of Virginia and was a Jefferson Fellow. He lived on both the Lawn and the Range (like many in his family before and since) before attending Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts to ‘test his vocation for the ministry.’ Doug always said the church should be quite thankful that he got over that.

After getting seminary out of his system, he headed off to England with his bride Helena ‘Tidge’ Wetzel Roller in tow, studying at the Institute for the Study of Worship and Religious Architecture at the University of Birmingham (England), all set to become the greatest church architect of the twentieth century. He eventually got over that, too—his words again. He and Tidge then took off to drive all over Europe in a Volkswagen Camper van while photographing and sketching every cathedral within hundreds of miles. He returned with a graduate degree in theological architecture, two black cats . . . and the best surprise of his life: baby daughter Helena ‘Lennie’ Dundas Roller.”

Doug went to work with T.J. Collins and Sons architects in Staunton while he immersed himself in life and work at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, in helping found Historic Staunton Foundation, in playing an active role in the restoration of HSF’s first project at the Sears House, and in the city’s lively arts scene. Oak Grove Theatre—a long-time part of Staunton arts—was a big part of Doug’s life and legacy. A community theater in more than name, Oak Grove was founded by legendary Staunton residents Fletcher and Margaret Collins (parents of Dr. Francis Collins) in 1954 and Doug held leadership positions in the theatre in addition to acting in countless productions, often alongside Tidge.

Legendary Oak Grovers Doug Roller (r) with Charles Culbertson (l) and Terry Southerington

We saw all of this as we came to know and love Doug and Tidge during our 15 years in Staunton. More than just a professional peer and colleague, Doug also stepped up to serve as Claire’s godfather when our twins were born. Candice and I had wanted to choose friends who exemplified the spiritual qualities we hoped to pass along to our children, and Doug—a lifelong Episcopalian with a deep love for the church and its traditions—more than filled that role. Claire always appreciated Doug’s kind remembrances through the years and I haven’t forgotten them either. We all treasure the lasting bond Doug and the other godparents have made with our children. With Doug’s passing and the earlier death of John Lane, two of those mentors are no longer with us.

Lundy and Ellen Pentz, Andrew, John Lane, Candice and David, Mary Beth Langley, Claire, Katharine Brown, and Doug Roller (l-r). Godparents with the twins on their baptismal day on May 30, 1993.

My father often said that growing old is not for wimps. I used to think he was talking about the physical aches and pains that come with the years. But earlier this week I was reading under a shade tree in downtown Takoma Park when I suddenly found myself crying. Instead of cranky knees and sore backs, Daddy may have had in mind the spiritual and emotional pains that come when we lose those who are such a part of our daily lives. In that moment the passage of time and the difficult journeys we all navigate—as was true in the honest and painful memoir I was reading—was what came to mind. Doug’s passing. Remembrances of Tidge and other recent personal losses. Grieving on our 250th anniversary for a country that seems ready to abandon its better angels to the forces of greed, anger, and hatred.

Yes, growing old is not for the faint of heart.

But just as joy is a wonderful first act of insurrection against tyranny, joy in having known those we admire and love as well as joy in looking forward based on remembrance of lives well-lived is key to navigating a world where we do not understand but nonetheless believe. Speaking at another funeral from the past year, the Rev. Frank Wade spoke of how the antidote to the loss of life is more life, embracing life to the fullest. Living with a sense of humor, a positive outlook, acceptance, gratefulness, an open heart, a thirst for learning, a sense of wonder, extraordinary patience, faith, courage, energy, grace. 

Many of those traits are apt descriptions for Doug.

I am so grateful for my decades of friendship with Doug and Tidge Roller. I count myself lucky to have crossed paths with both of them. They also raised three wonderful children, and we have stayed in touch and built our own relationships with that generation. Our family treasures the years we knew Doug and Tidge, and with their passing our love goes out to their eldest daughter Lennie, their two twins Katie and Eric, and all the family.

Given Doug’s love for English cathedrals, this version of the classic hymn Lord of All Hopefulness from the Choir of King’s College Cambridge is a fitting coda.

Rest in peace, my dear friend.

More to come . . .

DJB

Images from Staunton, VA. Doug Roller’s fingerprints were all over the city, from the Sears House (HSF’s first project) to downtown, to the arts scene. His legacy in this Shenandoah Valley community is wide and lasting.

I love the pithy proverb: Volume 12

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The most recent in my series of aphorisms that have captured my attention.

I’ve long been a fan of the pithy proverb—a quote or bit of advice that contains truth in 20 words or less. The New York Times reports that “social media is an aphorism machine” but my love for the short and to-the-point adage is much more old school, coming from my Grandmother Brown who was known to say things such as: “The graveyard is full of people who thought the world couldn’t get along without them.”

Grandmother and Granddaddy Brown’s wedding picture

I admit I might have heard that particular one when she thought I was getting too big for my britches. Grandmother, who passed away in January of 1981, was definitely not a social media influencer, although her life had a great impact on mine.

Seven years ago I began showcasing these pithy proverbs in a feature entitled More to Consider. After using the fifth year to highlight some personal favorites, I have returned to my regular habit of collecting new ones and posting them in summaries twice a year. * So, as one of my favorites instructs us . . .

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

Mary Oliver

HOPE, JOY, BELIEF . . . AND FEET

One of my mentors is the Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade, and back in 2021 I was reading some of Frank’s writings on hope and joy. And belief. And feet. As we step into what we see as reality we too often lose the reality of a generous, more imaginative, more joyful perspective. Perhaps our hope can be regained when we ground it in our natal memory.

Hope needs to lead to action, however, if we want it to be more than a feel good placebo. Which is where belief and feet come into play. We have to believe in a better future, a better world. Frank suggests that hope is “hearing the music of the future; belief is dancing to it.” 

Frank, like my grandmother, is his own aphorism machine!

We often like to think of a world without injustice in the abstract. But Frank sets the record straight.

“I want something for my head. Instead, I am given something for my feet. Not a thing to understand, but a way to live.”

Over the past six months I have highlighted several sayings that helped me understand why hope, joy, belief, and action are so important to living into the life we are meant to live. I’ll begin with a writer who suggests that the simple act of winding the clock (or whatever the twenty-first century equivalent is) is an act of hope and anticipation.

“Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

E.B. White

A comedian and a historian both suggest that we have more agency to change the world than we often realize.

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”    

Robin Williams

“To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Howard Zinn

Pope Leo XIV quotes St. Augustine about the importance of making sure that our actions begin with self-examination and commitment—there are those feet again—while Father Richard Rohr casts sainthood in a different light than what we often hear in church.

“If we want to change the times, if we want the world to live in peace, we must begin with ourselves” 

Pope Leo XIV quoting St. Augustine

“Saints are those who wake up while in this world, instead of waiting for the next one.”

Richard Rohr

And I’ll give Frank the last word in this section, as he brings belief to life.

“With the tragic events of Holy Week and the similarly tragic events in the news, it is important to remember that our faith does not explain the world. It guides us through a world we cannot understand.”

The Rev. Dr. Francis Wade

KINDNESS, COMMUNITY, LOVE

Many of my teachers and mentors push us to think differently about reality and what’s true. Historian and activist Rebecca Solnit turns our perception about wealth on its head.

“What if we imagined wealth as consisting of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to clean air and water, to good food produced without abuse of labor or nature?”

Rebecca Solnit

Lao Tzu and Martin Luther King, Jr. both ask us to think about love with a wider perspective.

“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”

Lao Tzu

“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Father Rohr reminds us that forgiveness is at the heart of love. Oscar Wilde has another (ahem) take on forgiveness.

“Without forgiveness the logic of victimhood and perpetrator rules instead of the illogic of love.” 

Richard Rohr

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” 

Oscar Wilde

OTHER WORDS OF WISDOM

And finally, I included words of wisdom found from a wide variety of teachers, beginning with one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever known. Then Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us of how we truly understand the world: we face it with awe and wonder.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

Leonardo da Vinci

“The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Timothy Snyder and Carl Jung remind us of the dangers of individuals and governments who lie to get us to believe their version of reality, even when the lie is easily disproved (e.g., see Greenwatergate).

“Be alert to the use of the words ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism.’ Be alive to the fatal notions of ‘emergency’ and ‘exception.’ Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny

“A lie would make no sense unless the truth was felt to be dangerous.”

Carl Jung

Quaker activist Parker J. Palmer ventures into the “don’t get too big for your britches” territory that my grandmother also favored.

“Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.”

Parker J. Palmer quoting his father

I’ll give the last word to Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorites. Solnit always likes to remind us, often through the use of great images, that history does not follow a linear path. And there is always more history to come.

“Cause and effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”

Rebecca Solnit

“We are always in one way or another in the middle of the story.”

Rebecca Solnit

More to come . . .

DJB

* After the initial More to Consider post pulling together the first group highlighted, I brought out Volume 2: A plethora of pithy proverbs followed with Volume 3: A profusion of pithy proverbs and Volume 4: A plentitude of pithy proverbs. I finally turned to the Super Bowl system (minus the pretentious Roman numerals) with I love the pithy proverb — Volume 5, Volume 6, Volume 7, Volume 8, and Volume 9. For Volume 10, I highlighted some personal favorites from the first nine editions. Then I returned last year to post new ones in Volume 11. Beginning in July of 2026, I’m going to feature a year full of important quotes about America, in honor of our 250th anniversary (and in hope that by thinking about the ideals that formed us, we can return to a path leading towards a more perfect union.)

Photo of proverbs from Pixabay