The Dwelling Place of Wonder. Harry L. Serio
to comprehend it all? We see the multiplicity of Creation, but it is we who impose our meaning on what we see. It is for poets and mystics to see beyond seeing and to help us to become aware of what is present in our everyday lives but overlooked by our own priorities of living. Our world is filled with wonder and mystery if only we had the mindfulness to be aware.
My second-floor bedroom was not heated except for the bit of warmth that ascended through the stairwell. On a cold January night, after my grandmother would tuck me in under the heavy blankets, I would lie awake and watch the moonlight through the frosted windows and think of other worlds and how vast must be the mind of God to conceive of so much. Years later, after seeing the movie Dr. Zhivago, the image that held particular poignancy was that of young Yuri, on the night of his mother’s burial, lying in bed listening to the rapping of a branch against the window as the sound of the balalaika added another layer to the growing complexity of experiencing life.
It is the frame of reference that transforms the ordinary into moments of ecstasy or despair. Meursault, in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, observes everything at his mother’s funeral: “the bright new screws in the walnut-stained coffin, the colors of the nurse’s clothes, the large stomachs of the old ladies who had been his mother’s closest friends, the whiteness of the roots in her grave.” The existentialist finds meaning in the moment, but those who see in the moment the totality of life soar to much larger worlds.
I went to grade school in the days when desks were bolted to the floor and arranged in rows, indicative of the rigid system of education practiced at that time in which learning was a body of knowledge funneled into a receptive brain. You were graded on how much you could absorb and regurgitate on an exam paper. Winston Churchill once remarked that his education was only interrupted by his schooling. We learn not only by the accumulation of facts, but by the integration and interpretation of life experiences.
Childhood is the dwelling place of wonder and imagination. Too soon we pass from it. There needs to be a place for fantasy, astonishment, and the sheer joy of discovery of that which you don’t understand, but which would be made clear either by science or personal revelation.
I watched a ladybug crawl on the back of Diane Podres’s neck in Miss Gless’s fifth grade class. The slow movement of its polka-dot shell contrasted with the twitching of her neck and the movement of her bright golden hair. I stared at the bug as it made its way through the folds and patterns of her green dress to the nape of her neck, wondering if and when she would feel the light pressure of tiny bug feet on her skin and whether I should swat it into oblivion. I still wonder about the significance of that particular bug. It has served its purpose in the fragment of memory that has endured over the years.
The sunshine hook, for those brief moments, suspended my fears and held back the tears, and brightened all the mornings that were to come. I could look forward in hope, realizing that this moment in time was simply one experience of so many more that would comprise my future.
THE ROLLING GARDENS OF PACIFIC STREET
Uncle Nick was the family patriarch, a title achieved mostly through longevity, although his wisdom was nothing to be trifled with. One would never know it to look at him, but within the family he was reputed to be fabulously wealthy—a fact he carefully concealed from everyone, including his only son, Louis, the banker, and his wife, Flo, who labored in a sweatshop well into her seventies when failing eyesight forced her retirement.
Nick possessed only one suit, a narrow-lapelled black worsted purchased back in the sixties to wear at the funeral of his brother, and subsequently at family funerals since. He bought a new suit that he wore to his older sister’s funeral some twenty years later, perhaps because he had become the titular head of the family.
“One man’s trash is another man’s fortune,” so they say. Nick made his fortune during the war collecting scrap metal and parlaying it into a sizeable sum. It was during this time that his ingenuity became legendary.
Rubber was a very scarce commodity. In order to make a buck, Nick removed the rubber hoses from his old Ford’s cooling system and replaced it with an intricate network of pipes and connectors. It worked beautifully. That is, until one day that a friend borrowed the car and it overheated on McCarter Highway, just outside of Newark. They pushed it to a nearby garage and lifted the hood. The attendant took one look at the pipes, which gave the appearance of a distillery on wheels and said, “You don’t need a mechanic. You need a plumber!”
When it came to auto improvisation, Nick was a genius. There was a time back in the thirties when Nick drove an old truck from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Newark, New Jersey. The tires were badly worn and the back roads were rut-filled. When the right front tire blew, Nick put on the spare. Then the left rear tire went. Fortunately he had an extra inner tube and he changed the tube and pumped it up. But when twenty-four miles from his destination, both front tires went, there was little to do.
Relying on his experience and expertise, Nick packed both tires with dirt and continued his journey with a less-than-comfortable ride.
My brother Bob, Uncle Emilio, and I visited Nick at his Pacific Street estate in the Ironbound section of Newark. It was a modest property. Bars and barbed wire protected the back yard. A “Beware of Dog” sign hung on the gate, warning of a junkyard dog no longer present. Flo was hanging out her laundry on the line. With all his money, we wondered why they didn’t have an electric dryer, or if Flo had to do all her wash by hand. Nevertheless, Nick was concerned about providing Flo with whatever convenience he could contrive. She was standing atop some moveable stairs that Nick had rescued from the junkyard. It had been used by Eastern Airlines for boarding the old two-prop planes years ago. We marveled at the application.
“Hey, that’s nothing,” he said. “Let me show you my garden.” There was nothing in the backyard except concrete and a four-car garage. He pushed open the doors of the garage and wheeled out his portable garden—sixteen barrels cut in half and mounted on roller skates. There were tomatoes and egg plants, a small fig tree, gladiolus, and other vegetables and flowers. “These kids around here, they’ll steal anything,” explained Nick. “That’s why I have to lock up my garden at night.”
After he watered his plants and positioned them where they would get the most sun, we sat on his swing for some lemonade and conversation. In spite of his gravelly voice and uneducated speech, Nick possessed a quick wit that could duel with any of the Serios. While he was born on a farm in southern Italy, the blood of the Italian Renaissance flowed in his veins.
It has been said that while the Swiss had lived for centuries in peace in their Alpine villages, all they could produce were cuckoo clocks. But the Italians who lived in the path of marauding armies and encountered violence at every turn gave us some of the world’s finest art, the greatest operas, and a system of laws and government that have become the foundation of the world’s great democracies.
Adversity is still our greatest teacher, ingrained in the fabric of our evolutionary nature. We adapt or perish. But sometimes, I wonder—to come four thousand years from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the rolling gardens of Pacific Street—whether or not it is worth it.
Still, Nick’s ingenuity and ability to take what was given to him and transform it into a functional accessory serves as an example of how the human species has endured.
RENAISSANCE MAN
One of the family associates, a Serio “wanna-be,” once made the remark that when brains were being handed out to the Serio clan, Emilio was first in line and got the lion’s share. I’m sure his brothers and sisters would dispute that. What they couldn’t argue, however, was that he was endowed with artistic gifts that he had the intelligence to develop.
When Edward Gibbon presented his voluminous work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Duke of Gloucester was said to have remarked, “Another damned thick, heavy book! Scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”
In his preschool years, Emilio did a lot of scribbling—sidewalks, walls, notebooks, library books, toilet paper, paper napkins, restaurant tablecloths. When he ran out of writing surfaces he would draw