Traveling in Search of Ambiguity

    

            Speaking of traveling abroad, the writer Pico Iyer notes, “When we see people from our own community, we’re particularly sensitive to all the things that are wrong with them. When we see people from another community we’re alive to what’s refreshing about them.” “I travel in search of ambiguity,” he continues. “To me," he says, "the beauty of travel comes in dissolving one’s judgments.” Iyer speaks then of the assumptions one typically makes about people in a foreign culture, saying, “ . . . the beauty of going to [such a place] is quickly to have to throw out all those notions, and to see a reality that’s much more human and complex and to some extent unfathomable.”

            Having just returned from a five-week trip to Europe, I can attest to Iyer’s idea of travel in search of ambiguity. It operates, this search, as do most of our assumptions, at an unconscious level. It is not so much that we go abroad with a mindful attempt to compare ourselves and our culture to others,’ yet inevitably that is what occurs when we find ourselves at once amid another way of life. From language to custom to food to architectural style, all is foreign, unfamiliar, somewhat exotic, curious in its newness, utterly different. How quickly we come to realize, as heads turn at the sound of our voices, our accents, that it is we who are different, we who are the novelty amid all that is so familiar to our hosts, yet so strange to us.

            Our own ears perk up at the sound of American accents when we encounter fellow travelers from the States abroad. But then we meet the Floridian in Amsterdam who discloses that he is a firearms instructor for the NRA and proceeds to proclaim the virtues of owning semi-automatic weapons when the conversation turns to the  killing of children in Newtown. And the mid-westerner on a Dublin bus who, yearning aloud for a taste of corned beef and cabbage in Ireland only to be told that corned beef is an American substitute for boiling bacon, is dismayed that the Irish don’t eat corned beef with their cabbage. We come quickly at such moments to recognize in these fellow-Americans the folly of their assumptions. Perhaps in perceiving their shortcomings, we come in turn to recognize our own.

          Where an American who stumbles on some impediment on a sidewalk might almost instinctively seek to sue for damages, a European would be more inclined to feel that he himself was at fault because he hadn’t been looking where he was going. Where an American might expect efficient service at a restaurant or counter, a European is more mellow and patient by nature. “There are two speeds in this country, Yank,” my Irish brother-in-law reminds me, "slow and stopped.” 

Where Americans are more likely to obliterate in the name of progress all traces of a historic site, the English are inclined to memorialize even fictional ones: “The Tabard Inn,” a historic plaque reads on a wall in the London Borough of Southwark, “Site from which Chaucer’s pilgrims set off in April 1386.” The reference, of course, is to the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, characters who never, in fact, existed.

          A foreign culture—that place that does things so differently—is “refreshing” in contrast to our own, as Pico Iyer observes, so challenging to the ethnocentric assumption that ours is the way to do things. And so we find it surprising that accident rates are lower on Germany’s Autobahn, most of which has no speed limit, than on U.S. highways. Or that spacious, cobble-stoned town squares in so many European communities, like the Grand Place in Brussels, can serve as popular public gathering places to savor a meal at an outdoor café, to saunter arm-in-arm with a lover, or merely to observe the passing crowds—rather than the paved parking lots they would likely be in America. And our assumption that pedestrians should take precedence over bicyclists is turned on its head in Amsterdam, where the bike lanes are wider than the sidewalks; the bikers don’t wear helmets because they are capable, cautious riders; and parking lots are filled with hundreds of bikes rather than cars.    

           We come also, along the way, to let go of our stereotypes and assumptions about the people themselves in our travels. Having heard that Germans are blunt and rather cold emotionally, I am pleased to find them tactful, warm, and eager to please. They also have a keen sense of irony. “It’s modern—only one hundred years old,” says a waitress in Bacharach of a tapestry lining a wall of the restaurant where we stop for lunch. We had heard that nearly 60% of Belgians identify as Catholic, but found that a mere 10% attend church regularly. Farther west, our Irish friends and family have always known how to party enthusiastically, but their celebrations seem more subdued in the face of economic austerity and the closing of many rural pubs throughout the country in recent years. Yet the Irish have become much more “European” of late and, owing to cheap regional airfares, are more likely to holiday in Prague, Budapest, or Vienna, than in Ireland. 

                                   

The more we travel, then, the more we tend to see people in a true, authentic light as we forego our assumptions about them. Like Pico Iyer, I too have come to travel in search of ambiguity, dissolving my presumptions about a place and its people. And in doing so, I come to know them—and myself—much more clearly than I had before.          

                                                                                      

            

The Coming Spring

            What a glorious day. It’s 54° and climbing, the sun is warm and bright, the clouds low lateral swaths in a cobalt sky. And the birds are back. All morning a flurry of cedar waxwings alight on the bony branches of a choke cherry tree in the back yard. With their tufted crests, signature black eye bars, and plump buff breasts, they lazily preen their feathers and peck away at the fragrant bark. They flutter off for a while, only to return and perch again, basking in the warming sun. The robins have been back a few weeks now, and the chickadees, though many of those tiny wonders have wintered over, eking out what spare feed they could find in that harsh season that is fading now.

            Suddenly the yard is a flurry of commotion as whole flocks of birds cut through the air like a meteor shower. Then a few break off from the pack, darting to and fro in search, perhaps of incipient seeds or of nesting spots. Their shadows streak black ribbons across the snow that still swaddles the yard in a foot-deep blanket.

            I had spread some crumbs of seeded rye bread out on the deck this morning as a welcoming treat, but so far, my hospitality has gone unappreciated and my offering sits there like an unwanted gift. Some waxwings and a robin perch nearby for a closer look, but the chickadees—usually so curious—have given it no heed. Hours later there are still no takers. “Maybe they’re just not hungry,” my wife offers. I nod in agreement but wonder too if the crumbs were just not to their liking, or perhaps not stale enough for their taste. No bother, really, as the blue jays and the squirrels will discover them by late afternoon.                                                                                                                        
          It is now mere days until the vernal equinox, but I’m reminded that we cannot rush the spring, try as we might after this year’s “winter of our discontent.” We’ll have more melt-off today and then some days of rain will follow. We may even see a dusting of snow yet again. But every day we see more of the driveway emerge from ‘neath its fringes of snow and ice. The yew bushes and privet hedges spring back into shape and patches of earth reappear where we knew they were hiding under a cover of snow. No, we cannot hurry the spring, but the winter now is receding with the snows, and the welcome sighting of the birds is a harbinger of warmer days to come.

Deep Winter

                                                                   

            We find ourselves ensconced now in the heart of winter this early February day, buried yet again under heaps of snow. Close to ten inches this time—not the mounds of snow dumped during a blizzard, of course, but a pounding nonetheless from storm after storm after storm in recent weeks, many mere days apart.

            We are by now so weary of snow that we have stopped shoveling one-or-two-inch accumulations, resigned instead to trudge through the drifts and hope that  the sun will melt the driveway before the next storm. But the heavier snowfalls we can't ignore. So we reach for our parkas and scarves, don our earmuffs, hats, and gloves, step into our wellies, crank up the snow blower, then set forth yet again to battle the storm.

            This is deep winter in the northeast, with six more weeks till spring. Yet, despite our Florida relatives’ playful facebook taunts to “come on down,” there's hope on the horizon here in the lower Hudson Valley. A friend has reported the first sighting of a robin.

            I’m reminded too, that February 1^st was St. Brigid’s Day in Ireland. On that day, the ancient Celtic feast of Imbolc, the mid-way point between the winter and spring equinoxes was observed. Brigid was originally a Celtic fire goddess associated with the coming of light amid the long days of darkness. St. Brigid’s Day observances in Ireland today are rooted in that pagan festival and still identified with the welcome approach of spring.

            Here now, amid the menace of Nor’easters in the deep of a New York winter, the days are growing noticeably longer as we nudge our way toward spring. Just a few days ago my wife remarked how light out it still was at 4:45 p.m. And yesterday the sun didn’t set until about 5:15. Having cleared the driveway of snow and dug out the mailbox, I sit beside the fire, staring at the flames. I think of Brigid and wait for the spring.

Abie's Christmas

                   I always have a fondness for Jewish people at Christmas time. I remember one dark winter night the week before Christmas many years ago, when Marge Coyle came to the door and spoke with my mother, their heads inclined, their words cloaked in adult whispers. She handed my mother a slip of paper that Mommy clutched in her protective palm. It was a furtive, conspiratorial handoff as if they were passing contraband.

                  The next day my brother Gerard and I walked fifteen blocks through the streets of The Bronx with our mother, following that mysterious piece of paper like a treasure map that brought us at last to Abie’s Toy Shop on West Kingsbridge Road. It was for Gerard and me like unearthing a chest of pirate’s gold.

                  Abie’s was, in fact, the answer to a Christmas prayer. My father, a bakery mechanic, had been laid off some weeks earlier, caught up in a wave of consolidations among the three national bakeries that still operated plants in the Bronx in 1961. It was to be a very humble Christmas. Still, we clung to our family holiday traditions. My mother assembled the cardboard fireplace with its red and white painted bricks and perched it snugly against the living room wall. We hung our stockings from its cardboard mantel. My brothers and sisters and I jostled daily to see who would get to open the new window of the advent calendar. And we got the tree. 

                  Every year we walked with my father down to Elm Place, a block away on E. 188^th Street, to Mike Sedano’s tree lot outside The Mayo Inn. Dad and Mike would dicker awhile, then seal the bargain by spitting on their hands, shaking on the deal, and going inside the bar for a ball and a beer as the six of us sized up the tree outside. In perhaps my father’s proudest moments, we’d follow him home, Rose Ann, Elizabeth, Gerard, and I carrying the trunk, and Richard and little Christopher in the rear holding the tapered branches of the treetop in our annual family Christmas parade. The scent of freshly cut balsam filled the house. After the tree was decorated and draped with tinsel, we’d arrange the Nativity scene beneath it and then we’d lie for what seemed hours playing “Colors,” in which we’d announce in turn, “I’m looking at something . . . red,” and the rest of us would offer, “Is it this?” “Is that it?” all the while Christmas carols jingled from the record player.

    The Coyles were tenants in our building, decent, caring people who couldn’t bring themselves to celebrate the season of giving with their two sons, knowing that my parents had no toys for their six children that year. And so, as people of goodwill do in every time and place, they made arrangements.

                  Our working class Bronx neighborhood in the Irish Catholic enclave of Tiebout Avenue didn’t have much daily contact with Jewish people—or with many Protestants, for that matter. In fact, as far as I was aware, we barely knew any Jews. We used to know Terry and Herbert and their kids Bonnie and Howie, of course—friends in our previous neighborhood—but we’d lost contact with them years ago. There were the Siegels up in Apt. 4B and Mrs. Aaron in 2A with the strange little mezuzas beside their doors. And the Jewish family, the Starkys, in the  building across the alley, refugees from the Nazi atrocities in the war who were persecuted still by some people in the neighborhood. And then there was Mrs. Weinstein, the kind old woman several neighborhoods to the north, whose sidewalk Warren Bacon, Gerard, and I would shovel for a dollar and steaming, frothy cups of hot chocolate. But aside from Mr. Abromowitz, who owned the dry cleaners shop just around the corner, we had little contact with Jewish people in our daily affairs. Like the other parochial neighborhoods surrounding our parochial school, we were growing up, for the most part, among people just like ourselves.

                  So Abie was as much a novelty to Gerard and me as was his toy store. A small white-haired man with bushy brows and deep set eyes, he sat alone behind the counter of his narrow shop, rising to greet us as we entered. My mother muttered something to him in the hushed and reticent tone of one who knew that she was about to accept charity. I heard her mention Mr. Coyle, and Abie’s face brightened. His eyes, it seems to me now, conveyed the memory of one who had himself known what it was to want over the years. It wasn’t exactly deprivation—proud working class people would never allow themselves to use that word, for we never thought of ourselves as poor, and I can barely bring myself to use it now. But Abie’s eyes knew what it was like to be bruised by life.

                  “Ah, yes, yes, of course . . . come right in, mother,” he said in a grainy voice that made me want to clear my throat. “I vant that you should fill these bags . . . .”  He moved in a shuffling gait, his arm gesturing in a wide, sweeping arc toward a pile of bags on the floor behind the counter, as if we would somehow be doing him a favor by complying with his wish.

                  The toys in Abie’s Toy Shop were displayed everywhere. Toys of every imaginable description were stacked on shelves, hung from peg boards, or dangled like temptation from the ceiling. It was a child’s vision of paradise, and Gerard and I were lost in the luxury of it all: trucks and games and balls and skates, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, Mr. Potato Head and Fort Apache sets, cowboy hats and guns in holsters, spinning tops and yo-yos galore, as far as the eye could see.

                   But as we were leaving, burdened by our bundles slung over our shoulders, what I remember most was the kind, knowing smile on Abie’s face. “Vat for?” he responded to my mother’s humble thanks. “Merry Christmas, Mother, Merry Christmas,” he said with a gentle nod.

                  We made our way home through the holiday crowds that afternoon faster than we had come, despite—or perhaps because of—the sacks we carried. Old enough to be entrusted with the source of this bounty, at 13 and 14, Gerard and I were drafted into the conspiracy of adults in hiding the toys and their source from our younger brothers until—Christmas Eve come round at last—they would appear, mysteriously, under the tree. There would be no coal in the stockings that year after all, thanks to Santa Claus, Mr. and Mrs. Coyle, and a kindly old Jewish man named Abie.

                                                                                                                 -- Thomas D. Kersting                                                                                                                                                  

 

A Cornucopia of Books

            When I was very young, my mother bought for her six children a set of Collier’s Junior Classics from a door-to-door salesman. It must have taken my parents quite some time to pay it off, but that ten-volume collection of stories, myths, and poems planted a seed that I have been nurturing ever since. There were books of Fairy Tales and Fables from around the world, Stories of Wonder and Magic, Hero Tales, Stories From History, and many other tales and legends to fascinate young minds.

            Each book was a different color, each leather-bound, illustrated, and filled with the wonder that words can weave. I don’t know whatever became of the books, but nearly fifty years later I bought a set of them on e-bay. Today they’re among my most prized collections. I think it was in those tales and poems that I first was drawn to the alluring rhythm of words. In the budding imagination of a kid in the Bronx, Lydia Maria Child’s lines from “Thanksgiving Day” with their attendant lilt must have offered a rustic vision:

                                                Over the river and through the wood,

                                                To grandfather’s house we go;

                                                The horse knows the way

                                                To carry the sleigh

                                                Through the white and drifted snow.

And the opening lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha’s Childhood” enchanted me with their exotic sounds:

                                                By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

                                                By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

                                                Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

                                                Daughter of the moon, Nokomis.

A little later, I recall falling under the spell of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The Land of Counterpane,” which fed my imagination with its simple metaphors and conditioned my ear with its sinuous rhythms and orderly rhymes:

                                                When I was sick and lay a-bed,

                                                I had two pillows at my head,

                                                And all my toys beside me lay,

                                                To keep me happy all the day. 

                                                                        

                                                And sometimes for an hour or so 

I watched my leaden soldiers go, 

With different uniforms and drills, 

Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; 

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets 

All up and down among the sheets; 

Or brought my trees and houses out, 

And planted cities all about. 

I was the giant great and still 

That sits upon the pillow-hill, 

And sees before him, dale and plain, 

The pleasant land of counterpane. 

    

        At about this time, an intoxication of rhythm and rhyme came to possess me in our family ritual called "Stage" when gathered at our cousins' house on Hermany Avenue in Castle Hill. With Nana and our parents sitting front row and center, we'd each take a turn "entertaining" the audience with a dance, a song, silly gyrations, or a goofy act worthy of "Ted Mack's Amateur Hour." Cousin Artie, who charmed the audience with his voice and guitar, always garnered the most applause. The rest of us were his opening acts. He still performs today in his 60s as "Party Artie." My act was always the same, yet ever-changing in its litany of rhymes. Years before "The Name Game" was to dazzle the nation, I'd take the stage and chant a string of nonsense rhymes along the lines of "Santa Claus was a turkey, and the turkey's name was Burky, and the burky's name was Furky, and the furky's name was Hurky, and the . . . ," and so on and on in what was to me an endless incantation of mesmerizing rhythm and sound. The audience had to applaud to get me off the stage. I would bow with a relish and take my seat in the audience, awaiting the next act.

        But it all began with that set of books. I didn’t know it then, but sprawled upon the floor amid that cornucopia of books, I was becoming attuned to the wonders of the imagination and to the sounds and cadences of language that lift the soul and captivate and move me still. Fortunately, my rhyming repertoire has expanded beyond my "Stage" act, though Cousin Artie still draws a larger crowd. 

            

For Seamus Heaney

                 When Seamus Heaney, the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on August 30^th, I was struck by the loss of this humble, approachable man. I had met him only once, at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, in 2003, when he was signing some copies of his books. He had a warm, engaging smile; a most amiable manner; and the rumpled look of a farmer. At home with heads of state, academics, and common people alike, Heaney was the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, and, I think, our greatest living poet. The world that he had so illuminated in his verse is a little darker now without his voice.

                  From my first trip to Ireland in 1969, when Heaney’s native Northern Ireland was plunged into the sectarian violence that would seethe and detonate for three decades, I was captivated by the storied Irish landscape that transcended any political borders of the past century. The fields and ditches, the bogs and mountains of Heaney’s County Derry in Northern Ireland bore the same prehistoric stone monuments, the same ancient past as those of Counties Cavan, Sligo, and Donegal in the Republic of Ireland to the south that I would come to explore over the next forty years. Heaney, too, recognized that common ground in his poetry, often writing as if excavating both a personal and a cultural past.

                 

                   In the turmoil that would come to be known as “the troubles” in Northern Ireland, the minority Catholic nationalists demanded equal rights and the unification of the six counties of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, while the majority Protestant unionists fought to sustain both their allegiance to Great Britain and their privileged status. Reflecting the tension of that conflict, Heaney chose to raise his family in the Wicklow hills outside Dublin in the Republic. As his poetry reflects, his identity is often Irish rather than British. In fact, Heaney once objected to being included in a book of British poets with these lines:

                                    Be advised my passport’s green.

                                    No glass of ours was ever raised 
                                    To toast the Queen.

                  Heaney’s nationalist sympathies were rooted in the discrimination he knew first-hand growing up in Northern Ireland, where the minority was long denied equality in voting, housing, and employment. His poems sometimes spoke of  “the troubles” in a historical or cultural context, but by 1975, three years after British soldiers fired into a crowd of civil rights protesters in what would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” Heaney’s poetry became more politicized. Yet he resolutely avoided becoming a spokesman for nationalist violence.

                  In his first published volume, in1966, when the long-simmering hatreds in the North were festering, his poem “Digging” had set the tone for his life’s work:

            Between my finger and my thumb

                                    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

                                    Under my window, a clean rasping sound

                                    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

                                    My father, digging. I look down

                                    Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

                                    Bends low, comes up twenty years away

                                    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

                                    Where he was digging.

                                    The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

                                    Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

                                    He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

                                    To scatter new potatoes that we picked

                                    Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

                                    By God, the old man could handle a spade.

                                    Just like his old man.

                                    My grandfather cut more turf in a day

                                    Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

                                    Once I carried him milk in a bottle

                                    Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

                                    To drink it, then fell to right away

                                    Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

                                    Over his shoulder, going down and down

                                    For the good turf. Digging.

                                    The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

                                    Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

                                    Through living roots awaken in my head.

                                    But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

                                    Between my finger and my thumb

                                    The squat pen rests.

                                    I’ll dig with it.

                 It is no accident that Heaney opens this early poem with the image of his pen “snug as a gun.” Raised on a farm in the North, he was the first of his family to attend university. In poetry he finds an alternative to the agricultural labors of his ancestors, but as we come to see, he also rejects the violence that will scar his land for decades. In the end, there is no more mention of a gun.

                 In rejecting farming, however, Heaney also finds a dignity in it as nature imagery—the imagery of the land—pervades much of his poetry. The image of cutting “Through living roots” on the bog becomes a metaphor for all searches for our ancestral pasts. And his more literal image of digging for “the good turf” brings me back at once to a summer morning in Ireland in 1972, when I had gone up to the bog with my wife’s family to bring home the turf. With his reference to “. . . the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat . . . ,” Heaney captures precisely the sound and texture of cutting deep into the turf with a spade and slicing out a dripping sod the size of a loaf of white bread, then flinging it up to be stacked and dried in the sun. In a week or so, the turf—shrunken to a little larger than a brick—would be brought down the mountain to warm the fires of the home for the next year.

                                                               

                  That is the power of Heaney’s poetry: its crisp, precise images; its accessible language; its affinity with the natural world and the ancestral past. And its ability to capture for all time a moment worth remembering. Seamus Heaney once wrote, “. . . I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” It seems now that with his death, he has “set the darkness echoing” for all time.

“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date”

         

            Chilled by a cool morning breeze this lovely mid-August day, I realize that the season is fading fast and, indeed, “summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Then, as the sun warms the air, I’m reminded once again that every day’s a blessing, and I am astonished at the beauty all about me. It’s found, mostly, in the little things, the small unheralded moments of joy, like the medley of birdsong that greets the promise of the day. The warble of a thrush, the subdued cooing of the mourning doves, the dit, dit, dit of the cardinal as if tapping out some Morse code to announce the glory of this day.

            Sometimes the beauty is found in the scarlet splendor of a cyclamen blooming anew amid its lush green foliage in a window pot. Or in the trembling glimmer of sunlight that plays upon the leaves of the chokecherry tree in the yard. Then, later, in the stubborn sway and tussle of the branches as clouds obscure the sun and a late summer wind sweeps by.

            At times, the shrill cries of children at play outside or the jingle of the ice cream truck triggers warm memories of earlier times on those same roads. As the day wanes in the lazy, languorous way of summer, the late afternoon sun casts a soft sepia tint upon the houses and lawns, the privets and trees, and soon the shouts of the children fade with the evening. Then—earlier now, around 8:30 or so—a soft glow appears in the neighborhood windows as dusk gives way to dark and the katydids begin their raucous overture to the night.

            The days grow perceptibly shorter now, and we ease our way toward the end of summer, the Labor Day weekend and the return to school. Pre-season football is back, while the Yankees faithful cling to the hope of a wild card berth. Soon it will be time to gather wood. Already some leaves, as if weary of clinging to their branches any longer, drift to the earth, a harbinger of the Autumn that awaits us just around the bend. And some nights in the suburbs even dip into the forties.

             While summer, in fact, will last until the Autumn equinox on September 22nd, still more than five weeks away now, we know that is just a calendar fact, that psychic summer ends much sooner. Yet there is so much beauty still to behold. It is to be found every day, in the little things.