The Dwelling Place of Wonder. Harry L. Serio
gloves on my hands and said, “You’ve got to learn to defend yourself.” He taught me to keep my left up and lead with my right, occasionally jabbing with the left. Stay on your toes and move fast: it’s harder to hit a moving target. I learned the art of bobbing and weaving, of constant motion. Feints are important, and so is taking a hit in order to assess whom you are up against. These are lessons that could be applied to life as well as to the ring.
The following Christmas I found under the tree my own pair of Everlast gloves. Dad also had a punching bag mounted on a flexible metal rod. After suiting up and trying on the gloves, I went to war with the bag. I gave it a good shot, putting all of my 65 lbs. behind the jab. The bag hit back, smacking me in the face. I had had it with boxing.
Boxing is both an art and a science—the same as war. It is the art of patience and opportunity, of vigilance and attack, of discovering and exploiting the weakness of your opponent. Evander Holyfield notwithstanding, it is not a Christian sport.
There was also the matter of paying your dues. Ever since the Marquess of Queensbury imposed a set of rules, there were those who tried to bend them. Boxing was a sport that straddled the borders of respectability. Thugs in tuxedos at boxing events always seemed a bit paradoxical. There were often bits of chicanery and questionable legalities. One never knew whether a fight was legit. Young fighters on their way up were sometimes told that the only way to advance their careers was to throw an occasional fight. In that way, everybody could make some money.
Dad was asked to take a dive and he agreed. In the ring, however, his opponent hit him a little too hard in the jaw. It was enough to infuriate my father, and he fought back and won the bout.
While boxing never really appealed to me, I did try Graeco-Roman wrestling. It certainly wasn’t a career move, but I learned a lot in three lessons. The instructor was a college kid working with neighborhood guys at Wilson Avenue School. He approached wrestling like Sun Tsu’s Art of War, seeking ways to win by exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses. Wrestling was more cerebral than knocking your adversary senseless.
You circled the ring and studied your opponent, testing his defenses and reflexes with your feints. You learned not to commit too soon, and did so only when you were sure. You did not want your aggressive move turned against you. When you committed to the take-down, you did so wholeheartedly. It was a zen-like action, without conscious thought. If you thought too much, you could outwit yourself. You had to trust your instincts and training and put your actions into the hands of a higher power.
An early lesson I learned from wrestling was that sometimes the best way to deal with a problem was to engage it directly rather than to try to escape from it. If your opponent has you entangled in a predicament, turn towards him, not away. Your advantage is most often gained when you seize the initiative.
In Genesis, Jacob wrestled throughout the night with an unknown stranger that turned out to be an aspect of the divine, and emerged from his ordeal scarred, but blessed. For centuries, those close to God have wrestled with angels in the dark night of the soul and been tormented, some to the point of insanity. It is because of their anguished struggles with God’s presence, as well as God’s absence, that we have the gifts of their encounters, not only in their words but in the majesty of their deeds.
Sometimes we are broken by God and carry the wounds with us for a lifetime, like Jacob’s disjointed hip, but God also heals and uses our wounds to bring healing to others.
Paul referred to shadow boxing when discussing the importance of being conditioned for warfare with the world. He does not “box as one who beats the air,” but in all things exercises self-control and is deliberate in where he will land his punches.
I soon found that boxing and wrestling were not sports in which I wanted to invest my life. While there were some useful applications and valuable principles, they were additional tools in the toolbox for living. You still had to know when the hammer was more appropriate than the screwdriver. As in many sports where one individual contends against another, the object is to emerge victorious by defeating your opponent. Our competitive society glorifies the individual whose advancement is made possible by the defeat of an adversary, whether a personal rival or a corporate competitor in the marketplace.
Paul also used a metaphor about runners competing against one another for an imperishable prize. That seems inconsistent with my instinctive feelings about the mercy of God. I have always distrusted those who professed a belief in a personal salvation to the exclusion of the redemption of the world. We are not competing for top seeds in the hereafter, but rather we share the same spirit of God that is in each of us and need to strive together as members of one team so that we are all victorious in the end.
THE SUNSHINE HOOK
The American dream for many immigrant families began in basements and coal cellars. Those who left the old world with nothing more than the clothes they wore and whatever possessions they could stuff into their cloth satchels and cardboard luggage wanted nothing more than to own their own home in which to raise a family, a job that paid a decent wage, and the security to know that no one, no government, was going to rob them of their dreams.
They came to the cities where they could find employment, walk to work or take public transportation, but most importantly, be surrounded by fellow landsmen who spoke the same language and continued their traditions and culture. It was a haven of familiarity in a strange land.
My grandparents, both the Serios and Wertzes, were happy finally to be able to purchase their own houses. They were small and cramped considering the number of children that they raised, and the backyards were infinitesimally small compared to the farms they had worked on in Campania and the Russian plateau. As their families grew and more space was needed, there was no room for expansion. The houses in the Ironbound section of Newark were either attached row homes or single dwellings with three- or four-foot wide alleys between them. Sometimes there was room to build out the back.
However, the least expensive method was to convert the basements into kitchens and to change from coal furnaces to oil heat in order to make usable space from the coal bins. The Wertzes had a small woodstove in the basement that heated the house through open grates in the floor. Heat was regulated by opening and closing the grates.
The wood that was used were the scraps from pattern shops. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes. It was fun to build things out of these irregular wooden forms before they were consigned to the stove.
The basement kitchen was the gathering place for the family. Lucas Wertz was a stern and regimented Volga-German who insisted that meals be punctual and eaten in silence. But once dinner was over and Lucas ascended the stairs to roll his cigarette and listen to his radio program, the children were free to talk and to discuss the day’s events. In the Serio basement they often had to devise their own entertainments and amusements, from art to interactive games. Bingo, poker and other card games, and board games were brought out after the evening meal. It was a place to bring boyfriends and girlfriends. A place to be family.
During the day the kitchen was a place of muted light and shadow. Light from the outside came through the small basement windows that were hooked open to allow the sun and air to penetrate. Natalie Wertz, who would spend her life in this room and bring comfort to her children and her grandchildren, instructed me in the art of transcendence and the mysticism of ordinary experience.
There were times when I would bear the cuts and bruises of daily play and come crying to her healing arms. She would hold me close and point to the sunshine hook, a simple twist of metal that held open the cellar window and allowed a shaft of pure white light to illuminate the minute particles in the air. She meant only to distract, to divert my attention from the wounds and scratches of a child’s warfare with the world, but I was fascinated by the interplay of light and shadow and the reflection from the specks of dust that were everywhere around us, but which could only be seen in the light.
It was as if the world had changed, but it was only because I was now looking at it from a different perspective, in a new light. Suddenly I became aware of a new way of seeing. The intricacies of the dandelion in the backyard became an object of wonder. I thought of all the things that existed in the world