Читать книгу The Dwelling Place of Wonder - Harry L. Serio - Страница 9

Though he was born in Russia, my mother’s father, Lucas Wertz, was thoroughly German, a descendant of Catherine the Great’s peasant migration of 1763. His ancestors had come from southern Germany, brought by the empress from Anhalt who had hoped the industrious Germans would serve as an example to the indolent Russians that she ruled. Later tsars would relegate these so-called Volga-Germans to serf-like status, binding them to the Russian heartland to grow wheat on the great plains. The communists would nearly exterminate them.

Lucas possessed those Germanic qualities that have distinguished that noble race since the time when they had fought with Caesar in the forests of Gaul. He had a fierce pride in who he was. A tall, handsome man whose face and clear-framed glasses reminded people of Harry Truman, he enjoyed the acknowledged resemblance and took pride in this small link to American greatness. He had pursued the American dream and was content with its fulfillment.

I never heard the story of how he came to America. Perhaps he felt the early rumblings of revolution in Imperial Russia or saw liberty’s faint glow on another shore. I wish I could have asked him why he left, what stars he saw, what voices he heard; what consuming passion drives a man to leave one world for another? Perhaps the myth is better than the reality, and a fragment of memory more comforting than truth.

This farmer from Saratov came to Newark, New Jersey, not far from the gates of the new world at Ellis Island. He was content with a small framed house on a tree-shaded street in a German-speaking neighborhood, a family of three daughters, a son who served his country in the Navy and then struck gold in the postwar California real-estate market, and a good wife, also from Russia, who always had his dinner served at the required hour. His social life centered around his church where he served in the honored position as Elder and as president of the church’s Board of Trustees. He also had other gifts that were seldom spoken of.

The Pennsylvania Germans, who are of the same ethnic stock, believed that their braucherei, also known as “pow-wow doctors,” had, in addition to their gifts of healing, certain psychic abilities, especially precognition. The lore of the braucher, with its many spells and incantations, could be passed from one generation to the next, only by alternating gender. Thus, a father could teach a daughter, but not a son, to practice the braucher’s art. There also seems to be a transmission of certain arcane gifts that were acquired not through any verbal or observable methods, but simply by being in the presence of the person.

Perhaps one day it might be discovered that all our knowledge, personality, behavioral patterns—all that makes each of us truly unique—is not merely a formation of the brain, but resides in the spirit of the person. There is a mind beyond the brain. There is a way of knowing that goes beyond the empirical method, a “tertium organum” as Peter Ouspensky, the Russian esotericist, described it.

When you have established a strong relationship with someone, you begin to pick up clues that let you know what he is thinking or feeling. Some of this may be attributed to the art of discerning nearly imperceptible signs in body language, tone, or feelings, based on previous experience. Much might be explained by conventional behavioral science.

However, there are events in our lives when we seem to “know” something without the benefit of our senses—the extrasensory perception. Human history is replete with accounts of precognition, from Caesar’s dreams to the many psychic accounts surrounding the sinking of the Titanic to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, although in many cases the predictions were made after the fact.

Lucas Wertz never admitted to having psychic abilities. I doubt if he even knew the meaning of the word. However, there were several incidents that now cause me to believe that he had this sixth sense, and that some of his abilities were transmitted to his daughter, my mother.

We were living in a third-floor apartment on Monroe Street. Lucas loved to walk—a few miles was nothing to him compared to the great distances he must have walked in the region around Saratov. He often walked the mile or so to our place on a Saturday afternoon.

On this particular Saturday he arrived late. He was baby-sitting while my mother went out for the evening. My brother and I had already been put to bed, but we were not yet asleep. I had a double bed to myself and my two-year-old brother, George, was in his crib in the corner. Mom was in the kitchen putting on her finishing touches. Lucas was having a cup of coffee.

In the middle of their conversation, with no explanation whatsoever, Lucas stood up and calmly walked into the bedroom, picked up George from the crib and carried him into the kitchen. No sooner had they left the room there was a crack and a loud crashing thud. The bedroom was suddenly filled with plaster dust. I was covered in gypsum flakes and white powder and emerged from the covers coughing through the dust.

Mom and Lucas rushed into the room and brought me out before any more damage ensued. They saw that the plaster in the ceiling had come loose and fell in the corner of the room over George’s crib. Had not Lucas picked him up, he would have been crushed. Covered in dust by the side of the bed was my Little Golden Book and its story of Chicken Little.

Lucas seemed to know things that struck me as unusual, though he never talked about his own personal faith. There was always a special connection between us. During his last illness as he lay dying of stomach cancer, he was appreciative of my visits, but embarrassed by his loss of dignity. Our conversations were superficial, but behind the words was a strong bond. The night Lucas died, I had been working on a project at the Boy’s Club. I was using a band saw to cut a piece of wood, being extremely careful with this tool. In the midst of my concentration I felt as if someone was standing alongside of me, and a chill came over me. It was enough of a distraction to cause me to nick my finger with the blade of the saw. The sight of the sudden loss of blood was enough to bring on an ebbing of consciousness through which Lucas’ presence became very strong. After my wound was bound, I walked the long mile home anxious for my mother’s healing words and some rest.

The apartment was empty. Rose came up from her first floor apartment and told me that Lucas had died and that Mom had gone to Marne Street. I sat at the kitchen table and waited, staring in silence at the spot where Lucas often had his cup of coffee. A few hours later, Mom came home and told me that her father had died. It was precisely the time I had felt his presence at the Boy’s Club. To this day, whenever I look at the scar on my ring finger, I remember Lucas and wish that he had chosen a better time to make his final appearance.

Lucas’ wisdom was more mechanical than it was intellectual. When Uncle Richie returned from the Navy, he and Lucas decided to go into the tool and die business. They constructed a small three-room factory in the backyard. It seemed that everything in the city was done in miniature. There just wasn’t enough room. But the tool and die shop appeared big at the time, and I helped build it, though I was only seven years old.

In those days, with memories of the Great Depression less than a decade old, one made do with what one had or could obtain for free. Richie kept his eye open for used building materials. When an old factory was torn down in another part of the city, he and Lucas and I got into his old Ford pickup and went for the bricks. The shop went up in one summer.

Dreams do not die; they evolve into something else. In a few years the shop was closed and Richie was humming “California, Here I Come.” He had found his spiritual rainbow with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and sought his pot of gold on the opposite coast.

There never is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because rainbows are seen from one’s own particular perspective. You see it when you are in a mist, and should you travel to where you think the rainbow ends, you find that there is no end, just another beginning. The treasure of the rainbow is in the beauty of its vision, its hopes, its dreams. It’s good to follow one’s dreams as long as they keep receding into the future and you recognize that you are continually in a state of becoming.

Richie settled in California and worked at an assortment of odd jobs. He and his wife, Barbara, held positions as butler and housekeeper for the actor James Cagney. He thought it unusual that the Cagneys saw their children only by appointment, and only at certain times of the day. What other stories they could have told. Richie was also a horticulturist, and then he began dabbling in real estate in the Los Angeles area. Those were boom times for land development and he made a fortune. He later moved to Oregon where he also continued to sell real estate before he died of a heart attack.

Richard and Barbara Wertz crossed the country several times in the fifties, but the only stories I heard were of Jehovah’s Witness theology, of how blood transfusions, Christmas, and aluminum pots were bad for you. It didn’t bother me about the transfusions or cooking in aluminum pots, but not celebrating Christmas was an entirely different matter. I felt sorry for their kids who seemed to proliferate in biblical proportions with every trip east. Nevertheless, I delighted in sending them a religious card every Christmas.

The trips east were not so much for family reunions as they were for the Jehovah’s Witness conventions. There was a particularly big one at Yankee Stadium one year. Campgrounds were set up in New Jersey and New York where Witnesses from all over the world could pitch their tents and park their campers. In the fifties, American highways were wide open and people were on the move. I was impressed with the huge numbers of people attending the religious gathering. When you can show the world how many people you can pack into Yankee Stadium, you create the thought that if so many thousands of people believe their doctrines, there might be some truth to it. Numbers may work in politics and business, but religious truth shouldn’t be determined by how many adherents it has or how many converts it makes.

When Charles Russell founded his sect in the nineteenth century, he had the revelation that only 144,000 would make it into heaven. When his group grew to a few million worldwide, some were getting short-changed. Richie couldn’t persuade me to join a religion that had limited occupancy in the hereafter.

I was also bothered by their constant predictions of the end of the world, which they seemed to make with regularity every other decade. Originally known as the Millennial Dawnists, the group was founded with the expectation that the cosmic curtain would be drawn in 1874. And then it was 1914. And then 1918. And then 1925. I don’t know how many times since then, but Richie was now pushing for 1975. I suppose if you keep making these predictions, you will eventually get it right. But who was going to be around to say “I told you so”?

Richie sold his home in San Diego, bought another one in Tujunga, and realized the fortune that could be made in the burgeoning real estate market. Years later, he cashed in and moved to the Rogue River area of Oregon where he was not so successful. His wealth was not compatible with his religion, however, and eventually he drifted from his church, although his family continued in the faith. Richie’s faith journey has raised the question of whether a person’s life experiences determine what his spiritual expression will be, or does a person’s faith shape and mold his character and experience?

Of course it is both. That’s why it is called a “spiritual journey.” Everyone is on such a journey. We are continually in a state of becoming as faith shapes life and life speaks to faith.

I wish I had had the opportunity to discuss this with Richie, and with Lucas. I can only guess that Lucas’ spirituality was traditional and deep. I was too young to have deep philosophical and theological discussions with this simple man of simple tastes and rigid ways.

Lucas lived by the clock and by the calendar. Five days a week he worked at the weaver’s trade, coming home on schedule and demanding that his dinner be served exactly at 6:00 p.m. Soup was required at every meal, usually chicken. Dinner had to be eaten in silence—even a slurp was met with a stare.

After dinner, Lucas would go upstairs and take down a wooden cigar box in which he kept his tobacco and cigarette papers. He used a rolling machine by which he made his cigarettes in a very precise manner. After listening to the radio and his favorite programs, “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow” among them, he would retire. It was a pattern from which he seldom deviated.

Today our lives are seldom routine and are filled with overcrowded calendars and multitasking. We have lost the freedom that comes from a disciplined life that provides space for family, for simple joys and special graces, and for interior maintenance of one’s soul. It is in remembering this plain farmer from Saratov that my heart longs for his wisdom that was lost because I never recognized it as such at the time, but now that I have reached his age I have come to value.