I just finished reading an interesting and sometimes confounding new book by Bruce Fisher. Fisher is the well known Artvoice writer and local commentator who is also of founding director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at Buffalo State College. Fisher grew up in rural Western New York and left the area for several years to work in Chicago as a journalist before returning to Buffalo. The full name of the book is Border Land: Essays From the US-Canadian Divide. The historic etching of the old Niagara Falls lighthouse on the cover ties it to the Buffalo area but don’t let that fool you. While the book is intimately tied to the place of Western New York and nearby Canada it covers much more as well. It is wide ranging, covering Fisher’s experiences in Chicago’s heady 70’s political scene, Indian tribal rituals in the west, and even Pacific battles in WWII, geology, among other themes. Ultimately the book ties Buffalo and its Canadian border to the world at large.
I describe the book as confounding but don’t take that as a negative. With no real explanation or synopsis on the jacket – no quick cheat sheet to let me know what I was in for, it became a book that seemed to evolve as I read on. To me the book is about the passage of time and about the meaning of place. It is about compromise and the way things get to be how they are. It gives this message without hitting you over the head with the answers to questions raised. The book is mostly an autobiographical series of essays organized in chapters. Each could stand on its own as a short story but they are loosely related and often refer back and forth. The tone of the book can be taken as nostalgic on its surface but at a deeper level it is shattering the idea that we can hold onto the past and must take the present as an imperfect amalgamation of what went before and the present – at least that is what I took from it.
Taken as a whole the book is a love story about lives lived and being lived. It makes a great case for why we should embrace the messiness that gets our society where it is. We don’t always make the right decisions but we do need to make them. One line from the book stuck with me: “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good.” As I read through the chapters I could see this as a basic theme that could be applied over and over. Perfect is so rare that we risk passing up what is good in its pursuit. One of the chapters near the end of the book titled “Being Cold in Buffalo” is a great example of this. You could look at this chapter as the obligatory Buffalo winter story. But it is actually a refreshing break from the shallow winters found in other Buffalo themed books such as “Buffalo Gal” and “Buffalo Lockjaw. The chapter describes perfectly the full range of emotions a typical Buffalonian can pass through in a winter day and they are not all lovely. Is Buffalo perfect? Certainly not but, it is good even in the dead of winter. Read the book, see if you don’t come away with a much deeper appreciation for that good and how it got that way.