Author: Jim Kempster

Jim Kempster is a long-time academic marketing, identity, and integrated communications professional. As a social media and web communications pioneer, he has helped educational institutions develop creative marketing solutions that integrate web, print, and social media, as well as public relations and media strategies driven by robust digital news vehicles. A Midwest native, Kempster has called New York City home for more than three decades.

so far from there

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A well-crafted cradle awaited at home:
masterful hands turned each wood post with care,
expectant love sewn into bedding and quilt.
But the night he arrived, they were so far from there.

Summoned to journey to prove their allegiance 
amidst rumors of vengeful tyrant kings, 
they cleared dung from hay for a bed in a trough
and shelter from what the encroaching night brings.

Family back home would have gathered to welcome
with kettles and blankets of comfort to spare.
But here, only strangers followed cries in the fields 
to a drafty hay barn, oh, so far from there.

This winter my heart is heavy and broken
amidst news of a vengeful tyrant king,
can’t rise to the joy on my twinkling bower
or wish for a chorus of angels to sing.

If I’m wanting for hope or assurance tonight
that the world turns towards peace and all that is fair,
I remember the family huddled in the hay
and all that they’d hoped for, so far from there.

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leaving instagram

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Instagram never cared much about what my friends were posting until I stopped using Instagram. 

A large part of my decision to take a break from both Instagram and Facebook was specifically because I wasn’t seeing posts from my friends and family anymore. Just before I checked out from both social media giants, I did a few counts of exactly how many posts in my feeds were from people I actually knew: on average, out of the first 30 posts, there were only two, three at most. The rest were advertisements, suggested strangers, gag reels, and random politics. I found myself scrolling through a lot of unrelated and unwanted content longing for something from the people I know and love. 

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something real

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An imageless black square, often used to indicate the subject is somber or not for interpretation.

Airbrushed Ashley’s puffed lips 
ask to be my Meta-friend, daily.
Josh-bot phones me on the hour
about my Medicare A and B.
A.I.’s six-digit hands scramble history 
in Pixar-colored newsfeeds
where my friends used to be.
And, junk pollsters survey if I’m mad
enough to donate more and more.

This old historian 
and humanitarian 
vacillates 
between setting the record, 
comment-by-comment, 
or retreating 
to a good book and 
the dog on my knee.

But I know isolation,
like soulless contact, 
breeds despair, 
and Nero fiddles 
with tariffs
while America burns 
out.

So, I join the struggle,
to write 
something real,
wondering
if the algorithms
will expose 
or bury me.

trepidation

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An imageless black square, often used to indicate the subject is somber or not for interpretation.

Restaurants, 
comic clips, 
cats and dogs,
don’t make it
to the feed
right now.

I open the news
in trepidation. 

Who have they 
terrorized 
today?
Whose fear 
brought them 
pleasure?
Whose distress 
made them feel 
powerful?

How can the 
church lady 
post 
Disneyland pics
while her heroes
destroy
her neighbor

as herself?

last night, first morning

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Teetering down 8am street on flimsy heels,
the last-night party sequins clinging 
like spackled glitter to first-morning tatters,
passing among bodega owners sweeping out
the last night, 
the first morning
broken spectacles and trampled hats
emblazoned with the digits of the new year,
monumental on last-night billboards
now first-morning dross, no more than 
assigned numbers to be scrawled in 
checks and forms for the next 365.
The first morning.
The last night.
Brash eleventh-hour promises —
trumpeted on paper horns and traffic jamming
with jazzed yelps from the intoxicated chorus
— now sounding mundane and frail 
on the hiss of dawn’s cold blues.

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city leaves

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City leaves, keep their color 
long into Novembers, 
chartreuse and saffron hues 
still aflutter on the avenues
while country cousins 
dour and rust back home.

City leaves hold on 
into their Decembers,
clinging to brittle leases 
on reaches intended 
for short-term stays
well after they’ve 
crinkled brown 
trying not to 
snap
and
fall. 

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2020 hindsight: how restaurants saved new york

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On a warm August evening in 2020, Bob and I sat at a table on the uneven sidewalk outside Union Square Cafe (USC) for the first time since the pandemic began, watching the patchwork staff somehow making it work. USC’s new Chef Lena Ciardullo was back in her kitchen, but so was Chef Tom Allen from the Modern, who was serving as her sous chef until whenever his restaurant would reopen. Denez Moss, who’d left Manhatta to become the new general manager at USC only a month before lockdown, was pouring drinks, and Halle Murcek, now Guest Experience Manager for the entire restaurant group, was waiting tables. Together they managed just about everything at the front of the house (or should I say out in front of the house) with the skeleton crew they’d assembled.

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aunt sis’ dinky cookies

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I spent this afternoon conjuring my mother Aurelia Kempster’s memory, once again, as I whipped up a batch of her crisp little Christmas cookies. Each step in the making brought visions of her. It wasn’t just her handwriting in the photo of her original recipe that my sister texted to me. I could also see that diminutive woman counting 20 tablespoons of Spry, scooping the measuring spoons back and forth quickly as if she were forming quenelles, and tapping them into the mixing bowl. Rolling the dough into little balls and gently pressing a baby spoon of colored sprinkles into a small divot on top.

Mom’s cookies were never the flashy show stoppers on the cookie table, but their simple flavors dominated by nutmeg are Christmas to me. Some of my cousins (who, unable to pronounce Aurelia, called her “Aunt Sis”), referred to her cookies with a wink as “Aunt Sis’ Dinky Cookies” because of their size (and hers).

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aurelia’s fruitcake

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Aurelia’s Homemade Fruitcake

There’s magic in making a recipe that you haven’t tasted in more than 40 years, from a beloved baker who hasn’t been around to guide you through a recipe for a quarter century. It’s like finding seeds in an archeological dig and testing to see if they’ll grow.

That’s how it was making my Mom’s fruitcake this year during the COVID-19 holiday lockdown. Mom passed away in 1995, and this was the first time I’d tried making it myself. The recipe came by way of my sisters, with measurements like “a package of” that I had to guess at just how big a package Mom had used. I adjusted the recipe below with the way I measured the ingredients.

Growing up, I never knew that people didn’t like fruitcake, because I loved my mom’s. Aurelia Kempster made this moist, spicy cake with juicy fruit and nuts throughout. It always made the house smell of great holiday spices, and was a favorite dessert for me and my siblings.

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