Our Place on Earth at the Talbot County Free Library

by Bill Peak

When hostilities finally ground to a halt on Okinawa, my father and his fellow Marines had only a few days to appreciate the fact they'd survived the island's murderous ridges and draws … then it was time to prepare for the invasion of Japan itself. Military planners expected that assault to be so deadly they ordered their suppliers to begin mass-producing Purple Hearts.

As it turned out, of course, the bomb obviated the need for those medals. All the Purple Hearts awarded to soldiers wounded in Korea and Vietnam were furnished out of this vast World War II surplus. For all I know, the government may still be using them.

Instead of invading Kyushu, Dad and the rest of the 1^st Marine Division were ordered to North China to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces stationed there. My father ended up living in Tianjin for the better part of a year, quartered with a wealthy Chinese family. There, he developed a lifelong passion for Chinese culture: he loved the food, he loved the traditions, he loved the history, and, most of all, he loved the people. I still remember one of the stories he used to tell about China, a story that illustrates the affection he felt for the place, the age-old wisdom of that world.

You have to understand that, at this time, the Nationalist Chinese government was struggling—its ranks decimated by war, its leadership corrupt, its erstwhile allies, the Red Chinese, beginning to assert control over larger and larger sections of the country. As a result of these strains, the government's monetary policies were in disarray. New currency was printed regularly, its value fluctuating wildly, often changing from one hour to the next.

Dad was in a marketplace one day, standing in line with a lot of Chinese before a money-changer's stall, hoping to exchange some of his old yuan for a new version that was said to be more secure. Suddenly, in a loud voice, the money-changer announced a significantly better rate of exchange. The people in line behind Dad surged forward at the news, pushing my father into the back of an elderly Chinese gentleman. The man turned around, looked up at the young Marine standing behind him and, in perfect English, said, “Patience is a flower that blooms in few gardens. Cultivate it, my son.”

I've been thinking about that story recently, reminded of it by another Chinese proverb that the book I've been reading keeps calling to mind.

In addition to using the Talbot County Free Library's “Books-to-Go” service during the pandemic, and its downloadable eBooks via Libby, I scoured my own library for reading material as well. At one point I hauled down an old favorite, Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth. Over the course of my life, I must have read A Place on Earth at least five or six times (and I hope to read it ten more before I go to the big library in the sky). Every time I read it, I discover new delights, meet up again with old pleasures. The novel, which takes place during the final year of World War II, tells the story of a hard-working farming community trying to get through their seasonal labors while their sons fight and die in what seems to them another world, a place they cannot imagine. But their place—the land they and their fathers have worked, studied, and loved all their lives—consoles them, it gives them a purpose and a faith: a reason to look forward.

Of all the books I have read in my life, few have struck me as being as wise as Wendell Berry's. Each time I read A Place on Earth, I find myself changed by the experience: I begin to move a little slower, at a more humane, a more thoughtful, pace; I don't take myself quite so seriously; I look at my wife, friends, and neighbors with new eyes, seeing how blessed I am to live among such people; and, interestingly, I always find my step a little lighter as I go about my daily chores. For it is one of the book's greatest gifts (and surely one of the rarest in literature) to delineate the joys to be found in work itself, the hard-won achievements of our simple, everyday lives.

And of course reading it as the pandemic raged, I found myself walking alongside the novel's characters in a world that, in many ways, seemed just as strange and bewildering as theirs. And like those characters, despite the confusion, despite the uncertainty, I found in the place I live reason to hope, that, in the company of all the good-hearted people of Talbot County, I could be assured the world would eventually right itself, that, together, we would make it through to a better day.

Which brings me back to that old Chinese proverb A Place on Earth keeps bringing to mind: “To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend, to read it a second time is to meet an old one.” Now that the vaccine is beginning to take hold and restrictions are starting to ease, I hope to see you and a lot of other old friends at the Talbot County Free Library very, very soon.