Tag: family

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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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

Jim Kempster1 Comment
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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back to school

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1963
school picture, 1964

I have spent nearly my whole life either enrolled in a school or working for one.

So, August is always the beginning of a new year for me—the hours of anticipation, the new space full of new supplies, the fresh start, the fear of failing, the return to routine and assignments and work.

I’m resurfacing three of my essays that live in that back-to-school world and the anxieties of beginning again:

face lifting

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AgeMachine1500

Sometime in the 1970s, when cosmetic surgery was first being discussed on the nightly news as an elective procedure for those who could afford its extravagant price tag, my sisters who were gathered around the black-and-white TV in the kitchen dismissed the idea completely.

“I’d never do that,” they scoffed, extolling the ’70s all-natural look, “when I grow old, I want to do it gracefully—like Lauren Bacall.” They always referenced someone like Lauren Bacall (who only would have been in her fifties at the time), never Aunt Bea or Granny from the Beverley Hillbillies or any of the other women that most of the population ages into resembling.

At that point in the conversation, my mother turned from the kitchen sink with a wistful smile. “I don’t know,” she interrupted, “look at this.” Continue reading “face lifting” →

real christmas stories

Jim Kempster2 Comments

true lies

Santa came to our house on the eve of Christmas Eve each year, the night before December 24th, a whole day earlier than for everyone else I knew. My mom explained to us that there were way too many people in the world for Santa to visit on one night, so he had a special Christmas Eve list and we were on it. We also opened our presents ahead of tradition on Christmas Eve night, right after dinner, not the next morning like everyone else. But we didn’t ask for an explanation for that difference, not after waiting an entire day, from dawn to dusk, with unopened Christmas presents in the house.

Yes, later when we were older we learned that mom had practical reasons for breaking with tradition. She wanted to avoid squirmy children at church on Christmas morning. She had learned that, whether presents were opened right before or immediately after church, they danced too much in the eight wee little heads she needed to keep calm through Christmas morning mass.

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kempster all-saints day

Jim Kempster3 Comments

This week, many people have celebrated All-Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls Days, but my family has one more of its own: November 5th.

It started back in 1888, when my father’s father Edward Llewellyn Kempster was born on that day. And it remained a major day of celebration until grandpa’s death in 1990, having lived to be 101.

But only a few years later in 1995, my mother died on November 5th, followed over the next couple years by two of my father’s siblings—my uncle Brenton Kempster and my aunt Mary Kempster Hand—both passing on that day in subsequent years. Continue reading “kempster all-saints day” →

un-fair pigment: red hair, pale skin and mercurochrome

Jim Kempster5 Comments

1972_summer-lg
My first beard took the entire summer of 1972.

The first little paint stroke of Mercurochrome to my upper lip seemed like an interesting idea at the time. I, after all, had grown my first mustache and beard over the summer of 1972, between eighth grade and my freshman year of high school. To my adolescent mind, it was a badge of maturity that went with leaving behind Catholic grade school and the redneck bullies I had endured for eight years. The next day would be my first day at Rockhurst High School, Kansas City’s Jesuit high school, several miles and mindsets away from the Hickman Mills area where my family lived just at the edge of where the suburbs met the cornfields and hunting woods. Grateful to be moving on, I had spent the summer gearing up for what I hoped, if not was almost certain, maybe, would be a new life, and part of the passage included not shaving for three months just to see what kind of beard I could grow.

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one more for the new york time capsule

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Years ago, when one of my sisters and her husband were visiting New York, she returned after a long day of tourist activity still wearing the little tin Met button from her morning visit to the museum.

“Do you know what the ‘M’ stands for?” I asked.

“Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she replied cautiously, aware that the question was too elementary.

“No, that’s inside the museum,” I insisted, “but do you know what it means outside?”

She stared at me curiously.

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