A Sense of Place

Wherever we may roam, from the familiar surroundings of home to the alluring paths of foreign shores, a sense of place always accompanies us. Whether it's a place we occupy at any given moment, or one we long ago left behind, we're mindful of our surroundings and their impact on us. When we find ourselves in an agreeable place, we often exalt in the here and now, enjoying the visual and other sensory impressions. If a locale imperils us, though, we may shudder at its sights and sounds and smells. Sometimes we may experience both at once. 

        In a city, for instance, we often relish the exhilarating sights—the bold buildings and dynamic scale of the place, the ambition, the vitality, the style. The sheer sense of being in a place that pulses with the rhythm of possibility excites us. And yet, a city can also besiege us with its dangers, heightening our survival instincts.

        One October some years ago when my brother Chris was still living in the Bronx, he joined my wife and me, along with our two young sons, on a haunted hayride near our home in the suburbs north of New York City. Masked figures jumped screaming from behind trees, some wielding "bloodied" knives in menacing poses, as our hay wagon passed. "Gee, this is great," Chris said rather wryly, "we don't have anything like this in the Bronx." His irony reminded me that, as a native of the Bronx who had been away from the City for far longer than I had ever lived there, my innate "street smarts" kick in whenever I return. Many others though, are quite at ease in the City, at home in their most familiar place. Whether sitting on the stoop enjoying the vibe of the neighborhood, going about their daily lives, or lazing in a park nearby, the din of the nearby traffic is the soundtrack of the place. For them, autumn in New York with its fall foliage, food carts, ice rinks, street fairs, and festive anticipation of the coming holidays is the place to be. 

        

        My awareness of my surroundings when I'm at home in the suburbs is different, of course, from when I'm in the city. At home, I know no greater serenity than sitting on the grampa bench in our flower garden amid abundant blooms and chittering birds, a new growth woods at my back. By mid-autumn, the  astilbe and coneflowers, the yarrow and salvia, coral bells and bee balm and phlox have all gone dormant, while a host of hardy zinnias, dahlias, and marigolds wave their colors defiantly in the air. Soon what leaves are left will be blazing, a palette of reds and orange and yellow. It's a place where my soul is at peace, even if all is not right with the world beyond.

              Wondrously, even on this late October afternoon the temperature climbs near 80° and a balmy breeze drifts by. I sit and watch tired leaves tumble to the ground while the birds who will winter over fatten on the seed and suet on offer at the feeders. As I walk back to the house, the leaves crunch and swoosh underfoot. It's autumn here, in this place, after all. 

 

                                        Of Time and Books

Margaret Renkl in a recent op-ed in the New York Times writes that “a bookcase will always represent time itself,” noting how the bookshelves in her home reveal much of who she, her husband, and their children were at various stages of their lives. I look around at the bookshelves in the home I’ve shared with my wife for forty-seven years and realize just how true that is of us as well.

On shelves in one of our sons’ childhood bedroom are countless books I used to read to David and Liam when they were little boys. Tales of Mother Goose, The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, Clifford the Big Red Dog and Ramona the Brave still populate that space, along with the worlds of Narnia, James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard, and The Cricket in Times Square. The Berenstain Bears and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing are still there, and so are Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Our sons have sometimes read those same books in that same room to their own children in recent years. 

On the top shelf of a bookcase just inside our den is a 10-volume set of The Junior Classics, Popular Edition Illustrated, published in 1938 by P.F. Collier & Son, N.Y. Some years ago, long after our own boys were grown, I bought that set on eBay, a tangible relic of the innumerable hours I’d spent sprawled upon the floor in my childhood adrift in the captivating worlds of fairy tales and fables, myths and legends, animal tales, stories from history, and the alluring cadences of poems for children. I hope to read them to my youngest grandchildren, Alex and Lily, in the years to come.

In the random order of my library, on the shelf below are my books on American history and biography, and below that, books on nature, religion, meditation, and the search for meaning, an ongoing journey in my life. The top shelf of the bookcase to the right of my desk houses my collection of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is, I think, the greatest novel of our time. My Everyman’s Library edition and Folio Society boxed volume of that work are there. Below that is my shelf of books by and about the American master William Faulkner. The next shelf and adjacent ones teem with the many volumes of my Irish collection, books on various periods and aspects of the history, culture, and folkways of Ireland. Prominent among them is my James Joyce collection with its well-thumbed copy of Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated. Perched open on the dictionary stand nearby is my copy of The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, published by the University of Cork. 

On a bottom shelf near my desk is an assortment of books on the craft of writing that continue to challenge and inspire me. A book shelf to the right holds my Harry Potter boxed set, a nod to our granddaughter Chloé so we could talk about Harry’s adventures when we facetimed her in California. Next to that are my books on the life and lyrics of Paul McCartney and my volume of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, 1961-2012. The Autobiography of Mark Twain is another tome alongside. Two shelves are devoted to my Shakespeare collection and to the right of my computer is my two-volume boxed set of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers the various definitions of words down the centuries. Four pages of the 

thirteen-volume original are photographically reproduced on each page of the two-volume set, which is why it came with a Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass in the tidy draw above the books. I recall hours of eyestrain during my graduate school days when I’d hastily peruse the meaning of a word in Shakespeare’s time without using the magnifier. 

            Interspersed throughout my library are various books and anthologies from my forty years as a high school English teacher, many replete with teaching notes and commentaries in the margins. More are boxed in the cabinets below the bookshelves and in the attic. The numerous novels and works of non-fiction I have enjoyed throughout the years crowd the shelves to the left of my desk, along with volumes of poetry I value, especially those by Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost. My Thomas Hardy collection, with its leather-bound Easton Press edition of The Return of the Native sits prominently on a top shelf nearby. I spent a year of my life in the mid-1970s studying Hardy’s novels for my master’s thesis, and they are still among my favorites.

Other books on my shelves are very special to me as well. A 1960 paperback of Moss Hart’s memoir  Act One (a mere 75¢ at the time) enthralled me as the story of a kid from the Bronx who indulged his love of theater and grew to write some of the greatest hits on Broadway. The Grapes of Wrath encapsulates Tom Joad’s struggle for dignity in the midst of poverty and dislocation, but what stands out for me as a striking image is the aura surrounding Tom at the threshold of his home when his mother does not recognize him against the backlight of the setting sun in the doorway. It is an image that operates on so many levels. A Joseph Campbell Companion and his admonition to “Follow your bliss” haver guided me on several paths in my journey, and his conception of myth has brought much insight along the way. William Gibson’s A Mass for the Dead also continues to inspire me long after I first read it, and it prods me still to explore my own family’s journey down through the generations. One other book that has touched me deeply and repeatedly over the years, a dog-eared paperback on a shelf next to my journals, is Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with its meditative wonder at the world around her that teaches me over and over again to see and to appreciate Nature in a new light. She has taught me too that in the process, we see ourselves anew. My prized copy of that book, another leather-bound boxed volume by Easton Press given to me by my colleagues at retirement, is on a shelf in my bookcase on Cape Cod. But that’s another story of many more books with their own histories to tell.

                                                 On Turning Seventy-Five

In the early weeks of January, on a gray and dreary morning in the midst of the mildest winter in years, I turned seventy-five. I remember when that used to sound old. Now it seems just another milestone in a long life of moments worth noting. Along the way, among the restive rhythms of the years I’ve come to recognize that time drives all. We can lament it, rail against it, or embrace it with grace, but we cannot escape the cold resolute torrents of time, as relentless as the waves of the sea. 

I’ve now reached a point where, in the words of Willie Nelson, I’m “well past my halfway in time,” but, as Willie continues, “I still have a lot on my mind.” Anyone over fifty will tell you that the years pass quickly. Yet after seventy, while the nights often trudge along hour by hour, the days are swifter still and the years somehow accumulate faster than most of us can keep up—perhaps because there’s now so much more time to keep track of in the long sweep of memory.

On some mornings when we wake in the fog of sleep, daylight seeping through the blinds, we forget about time and age and decline. Then we turn to get out of bed and that painful shoulder or creaky back or throbbing hip reminds us of the years that have taken their toll. I have far more wrinkles and age spots than ever before. I am slower and achier and much more tired than I used to be. But through the wonders of modern medicine, I’m able to manage my physical ailments, and I realize what a gift the Lord has bestowed on me through these seventy-five years. Every day that I am upright is a blessing in itself. Every day, indeed, is a gift. 

While the years have been kind to me, life also, of course, has had its travails, and I have come along the way to know one of the eternal truths: that life is both an embrace and a letting go. What inestimable love and joy, and yet what loss, I have known through all these years. In the lives and eventual deaths of my grandparents, then my parents, relatives, a sister, and countless friends, I have felt both the boundless exhilaration of love and the deep searing anguish of grief. But in the births of our sons and then of their own children I have seen the depths of that love renewed again across the span of the generations.   

Over the years, while we were busy living our lives, one by one our parents’ generation passed on and then one day we suddenly found that we were the older folks, the senior citizens, the elders. As the seasons inevitably tick on, our time, in turn, will come and we too will take our place in the great scheme of things—but not too soon, I hope, not too soon.

I take some solace at seventy-five in these lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses:

                                           Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;                                                                             Death closes all: but something ere the end,                                                                   Some work of noble note may yet be done . . . .

And as I read these words now I am heartened by the speaker’s wisdom and his grit. There’s a dignity to these lines, a resolve to push on despite the constraints of age and time, to contribute what we still can, to make a difference yet.

The sun is setting as I write this, the twilight, fiery red and tinged with streaks of wispy blue. I look away, but when I look back again the red tint is fading fast, the blue now smudged to gray as the day wanes toward the deepening darkness. Time drives all.  But tomorrow is to be a fine day.

Fading into Mist

 

In Ireland, December 26 is known as St. Stephen's Day, traditionally a time when the Wren Boys would pay a visit. A group of young lads of a townland would disguise themselves and go from house to house in the parish carrying a holly bush on which they perched a wren they had captured and killed. With traditional instruments, they'd dance and sing:

                                    The wren, the wren, the king of all birds                                                                                          St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze;                                                                                     Although he is little, his family is great,                                                                                           So rise up, landlady, and give us a treat.                                                                                                         . . .                                                                                                                                     On with the kettle and down with the pan,                                                                                        And give us a penny to bury the wren.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             This or some regional variation would delight each household as everyone tried to guess the identities of the visitors, who were rewarded with hospitality and coins. In more recent times the wren has been replaced by an effigy of the bird.

        The ritual of the Wren Boys in Ireland is said to have various origins. Perhaps the most popular version is that during penal times, when Catholic rights were restricted, the song of the wren alerted English soldiers to the approach of Irish rebels. The practice of the Wren Boys is an old medieval custom in much of western Europe, however, and is likely of much older beginnings. Another account tells of the wren song spoiling an Irish ambush of Norse invaders in the 8th century. A different story says that the song of the wren betrayed St. Stephen's hiding place to those who were pursuing him. Yet even earlier accounts may be rooted in older, pagan times.

        Like most traditional rural customs in Ireland, the practice of the Wren Boys is fast fading into a misty past as the modern world colors all things anew with its global digital imprint of instant communication. Yet with the coming of such progress we all, I think, have lost another of the few remaining links to our agrarian past. Those of us born and bred in cities had lost that connection to our ancestors' way of life long ago. In our lifetimes most of us have never known what it was to work the soil, grow our own food, tell time by the position of the sun, or make our way home by the moon or stars. We do not know what it was like to live our days never traveling more than a few miles from our homes, or to illuminate the dark by the flicker of candlelight, living attuned truly to the cycle of the seasons, the rhythm of the land. Despite all of the modern conveniences with which our lives are blessed, we have, I fear, lost something irreplaceable.

                                                             Thomas D. Kersting                                                                       December 26, 2022                                                                            

                                    

                                        

                                                                                        

For All That Is And Yet May Be

  

FOR ALL THAT IS AND YET MAY BE

by Thomas D. Kersting

     

               The Japanese have a word for it,                 Let us savor the enchantment of

               the pathos of things,                                    what is. Celebrate the promise of                                                 the sense of how fleeting beauty is,             the day, the yearning of the seedling                                            as they revel in the comeliness                    for the sun. For never will it be                                                     of the cherry blossoms, the Sakura,             the same again.                                                                             so lovely,

               so transient,                                                  In the scent of a new-mown lawn breathe deep,                           so still.                                                          At the swaying of the iris take delight,

                                                                                     In the shade of an elm find peace,

               "Mono no aware," they call it,                      In the fading the day be still. 

               "Muhnó nó áre wuh ray," they say,               

                and all know then to savor such                   In the laughter of a child find joy,

                beauty as befalls us,                                      At the sound of a familiar voice take heart.

                if only for a while.                                        In the love we give and all we have,

                                                                                      for such time that is allotted us,

                For then, in but a breath of time,                  give thanks.

                mere memory remains, its moment            

                having come and gone and left us                For all that is and yet may be,

                wistful for what once was.                            in all its passing splendor,

                                                                                       rejoice.

 Flying Home With Amy Tan

 

 My wife wasn’t talking to me for a few hours, or more accurately, I wasn’t talking to her. Sometimes we’re blessed with the gift of serendipity, a moment of good fortune that falls into our laps like manna from the sky. I had such a moment recently when we were flying home from visiting the kids and grandkids in California. Rushing to load the bags into the car for the ride to the airport, I left my backpack behind. Not the catastrophe it might have been, for our boarding passes were loaded on my phone and our IDs were secure in our wallets. Besides, our son Dave would bring the backpack a few days later when he would be flying east. But both the book I was reading and my phone charger were in that bag. How would I pass the five-and-a half hours flying from San Francisco to New York? I could dive into my library of e-books on my phone but doubted my battery, already down to 60%, would last the journey.

 

        Delta, it turns out, offers an array of in-flight entertainment from HBO, Showtime, Hulu, some network TV series, and a selection of featured movies. While none of them piqued my interest, what did catch my eye was a program that was to captivate me for the next 2,586 miles: a Master Class on writing by Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club.

 

        As my wife dozed in her seat beside me, I flew home with Amy Tan, who regaled me with reminders and new insights to the craft of writing. Her suggestion, for instance, that writers should not do too much research rang true for me as a writer of historical fiction. I recalled having gone down a rabbit hole when trying to date the invention of friction matches in the nineteenth century for my novel about the Irish Famine of the 1840s. Had they been invented yet when my characters lit a fire? I needed to know, and so I spent hours researching one link after another through the history and intricacies of sulfur and safety matches, which were a significant technological advance in their time. But how much of the research would I actually use in my story? Amy Tan’s advice to avoid needless details in research, then, was a timely admonition.

           

        Her recommendation that writers keep a Nature Journal where we sketch what we see and consider its implications for story or essay was intriguing. While I’m not gifted with an artist’s skill, sketching what I observe will no doubt train me to notice details more closely. I liked, too,

Amy Tan’s assertion that every word in a story has a relationship to the rhythm of the next one since I’ve long been attuned to the sounds and rhythms of words in my writing. Her suggestion to break down the revision process to manageable components was also a useful tactic, and her views on the causes of writer’s block and strategies to avoid it were helpful. Finally, her thoughts on knowing how and when to end a story were particularly insightful for both new and seasoned writers.

 

        I’d put Amy Tan on pause every hour or so to snap a shot of the Rockies over Colorado and to share a snack or talk briefly with my wife. But this Master Class so absorbed me through most of the flight that I hadn’t noticed the passing hours as we cut across the sky at nearly 500 mph, 34,000 feet high. Jotting notes on my phone, I was distracted from time to time by the fear that my battery would drain before the end of the class. Five-and-a-half hours later and three hours back in time, we landed at JFK with 6% left in my battery and what would turn out to be more than five pages of printed notes.

           

        Later my wife complained that I hadn’t talked to her for most of the flight, and she was right, of course, for I was “in the zone, that magical, mystical sphere writers and artists and athletes are sometimes blessed to know when they’re immersed in their work, enthralled by it, transfixed beyond time. I was engrossed in a Master Class and flying home with Amy Tan.

 

 

 To Celebrate a Life

Long before I came to know them by name, I was only vaguely acquainted with trees. While not a single tree was to be found on the paved streets of our neighborhood in the Bronx, up on Fordham Road in a sliver of an island we called Banana Park, two or three trees graced a few benches with a canopy of shade. But as a city boy I could not tell you what types of trees they were. To me they were just trees. 

On occasional jaunts to other parks in the area, we became acquainted with some variety among trees, mainly by the seeds they dropped. We gathered chestnuts in the Fall and pelted each other with “itchy balls” that dropped from the branches and clung miraculously to our clothes. We opened other seeds and made polynoses or twirled them like helicopters when we sent them aloft in Spring and dove headfirst into piles of leaves in the Fall, all the while blissfully unaware of the species that had dropped these treasures in our paths. 

When my wife and I bought the house “in the country” some years later, trees, of course, abounded everywhere we looked. Over the decades I came to appreciate their species, their lifecycles, and their boundless beauty. We mourned the loss of trees to storms, infestations, and disease. We were ambivalent when the stilted willow that had served many years as first base in our backyard baseball games made way for the pool, but we lamented having to cut down the choke cherries and ash lest they fall on a neighbor’s house. 

Over the years I have come to cultivate many trees, mindful that they will grow to imposing maturity after I myself have returned to the earth. I planted whips of poplar and ash, honeysuckle and lilac. More recently, I have planted twigs of hawthorn, buckthorn, and crape myrtle, all of which have sprouted hardy stems and leaves after four years of blazing New York heat and frigid winters. They’ll soon be ready for transplanting to more prominent areas of the yard.

I can think of no more fitting gesture to commemorate someone we love than the planting of a tree in that person’s name. Whether to mark a birth or a death, planting a tree celebrates a life in all its transient beauty and all its enduring memory. So it is that we plant a tree each time a grandchild is born. We planted a sugar maple when our Canadian American granddaughter Chloe was born in 2010 and a Kwanzan cherry tree when our Japanese American grandson Alex was born in 2017. This year we planted a Yoshino cherry to mark the 2020 birth of our Japanese American granddaughter Lilia. All three of these grandchild trees grace the yard with their distinctive beauty and celebration. The maple drops its helicopter seeds with which I may someday teach the children to make polynoses, and in the Fall its golden yellow leaves illuminate the dusk. The Kwanzan cherry sprouts its graceful pink blossoms in the Spring and, alongside it now, the Yoshino cherry opens its snowy white blooms. If the grandchildren are visiting in springtime, we may picnic beneath the cherry blossoms to celebrate their transient beauty. 

It is with such transience in mind that I planted a clump of white birch trees to commemorate the life of John Palencsar, my closest friend of more than sixty years, who died rather sooner than we’d expected in 2021. John was fond of Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” with its idyllic image of a young boy swinging the pliable branches who “flung outward, feet first, with a swish,/Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.” I see that tree now, John’s birch, outside my den window, and I find comfort in knowing that, like those of the grandchildren, it is rooted firmly to mark a life, the “going and coming back,” in all its days of storms and resplendent beauty, to celebrate a life that once was, and—in all its seasons—a life worth remembering.