Apple to Apple

A call for the squad, a night in the emergency room, and an admission to the hospital—all this, and my parents’ lives change. They now live in a small apartment in assisted living, only two minutes and two seconds from my house. (Mom asked me to time.)

After only one week in, let me just say that I’m proud of my parents.

“This is like Pennsylvania Dutch cooking,” my dad says during one of his first meals in the dining room. “And with no Mennonites in the kitchen.”

One of their aides seems like a Bender. Another like a Hershberger. Familiar names from their home community.

My nonagenarian parents are handling all the intimate ways they need care with great dignity and humor and gratefulness. And celebrating that now with no grocery pick-ups, bed making, and laundry, they’ve got more time to write.

Mom, who copies the Bible by pencil into notebooks, is moving through the Psalms. My dad’s living back in 1895, researching and writing about the split of the Old Order Amish and the Amish Mennonites.

At the retirement center, my mom’s got lots of new friends. So she keeps giving away Erma’s Story, a collection of childhood memories my dad compiled for her. Her book has become her calling card.

I’m eating lunch with my parents one day when the CEO of the retirement center stops by our table.

“Erma,” he says. “I had the most frightful weekend!”

Concern flies across her face.

“What happened?” she asks.

“I was there when the house burned down,” he says. “And when Raymond fell to the tongue of the runaway wagon and when Papa almost lost the farm in the Depression.”

Awareness dawns for my mom.

“You read my book!” she says.

He nods.

“I felt so sad when your Papa didn’t hear you call and you missed your ride to town.”

You should have seen my mom’s face.

She leans toward me.

“He reminds me of my brother Oren,” she says. “He tells a good story.”

It’s not easy, this transition. You don’t leave an established, loved home without pain. And we’ve still got adjustments to make. But so far, it’s a promising match—my parents leaning into their new lives, finding themselves in the eyes of the new people they meet. And the community around them celebrating who they are.

I overnight with my dad at the ER. And here’s what strikes me—that the night shift goes off duty looking fresher than the morning shift coming on.

I’m not judging. Mornings are tough for me, too. I’d rather not talk until nearly noon. Certainly not about anything cheerful. Not about anything serious, either.

Not everyone’s like this. I’ve lived with morning people: my mother, my college roommate, and now my husband. For them, mornings are as yellow as the sun, as yellow as an egg, sunny-side-up. These people wake up, ready to eat, ready to talk—about cheerful things.

Me? Even though I taught early-morning classes for decades, I’ve always had to arrange my face, to disguise that tired appearance I have when first waking up. Emily Dickinson is with me on this one. In her poem, she ties her hat and tells her fingers to hurry. But what I like most is that she checks the laces of her face, using the metaphor of a corset to hold the muscles of her face into a pleasing expression.

To do this morning after morning, you’ve got to care about the faces in front of you more than your own—leaving behind worries about your children, a leaking roof, and a coming mammogram.

You’ve got to have some stamina, some staying power, and the hope that as the day goes on you can get into the rhythm of the way the hands swing around the clock.

I appreciate the nurses who woke before their alarms full of cheer and who now bounce through the double ER doors. But even more, I appreciate those of the laced-up faces, who go about doing good, not because a great day dawned, but because they’re determined to make it great.

By now, I know the drill. It’s a look. And then another, like they’re trying to figure out a puzzle, trying to see beyond my grey-streaked hair and my wrinkles to catch my essence.

Then the question: Were you a teacher?

And a growing smile.

“Are you Mrs. Swartz?”

But I’m not the only one changing. My former students—those kids who were so exhausting and so much fun, such jerks and so sweet within minutes—have left middle school behind. And high school. And now life has come for them.

They’re looking less carefree, more like they’ve been through something, like they’ve got more than one thing on their minds.

“Help me out,” I say. “You look so grown up now. Tell me your name.”

That’s when I almost always see their middle school faces—the same eyes looking out at me, the same lifts to their chins.

And I ask the question that works—Could you tell me something about your life?

Today a student looks at me for just a fraction longer than most, as if she’s considering.

“I’ve been to prison,” she says.

I nod.

“Tell me about it.”

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says.

That’s where she got off drugs and went back to school, where she finished high school and then two years of college, learning horticulture.

“The person who got me going in prison was an older woman,” she says. “A lifer, who told me to get involved, to make something of myself, and who wouldn’t let me stop.”

And now she’s out of prison, clean of drugs, and working in her field.

“So glad you went to school in prison,” I tell her. “I taught at a prison once.”

I place my herbs on the counter—rosemary and basil and sweet leaf—and give her my credit card.

She runs my card and hands me my flat, ready for spring planting.

As I walk to my car, a picture’s in my mind—of the way she sashayed down the middle school hallway between classes, young and popular, and full of hope.

Hope that she once again carries, but with a more measured step.

When I was a kid, I took history hard. I’d jerk awake at night, disturbed by visions of slaves lashed to posts and whipped to their deaths by overseers. Or by Nazi soldiers throwing babies in the air and shooting them before they hit the ground.

How could this be?

This question that I asked over and over sent me to an English translation of Mein Kampf. As a junior high kid, I didn’t understand all I read. But my main take was that Hitler viewed pretty much everyone else as a tool to be used or as a problem to be removed.

He thought he was it—at the center. That what he wanted mattered. And that what others wanted didn’t.

Which sounded just a little too close for comfort.

I was a purpose-driven kind of kid, and not above using my six younger sisters and brothers to accomplish my goals.

This sometimes ran afoul of my parents’ teachings. Hard-won understandings that had been passed through generations of Anabaptists, who had been hunted and burned at the stake-to be demütig, humble—to look out for the interests of others. Even my enemies. Even my brothers and sisters.

History gave me nightmares. But it also showed me myself. And made me sympathetic to other groups who also suffered. To Jewish people who’ve been displaced and harassed and mass murdered. To African Americans who were kidnapped by the millions, forced into ships, thrown into slavery, and later marginalized by segregation, economic strictures, and racial injustice.

Years later, when I became a teacher, I remembered how I had grown from this trauma-by-proxy. And I didn’t shy from showing suffering to my students. Photographs from around the world. Stories about kids who soldiered and mined coal and worked in factories. Diagrams of slave ships. My students wrote papers about the Holocaust and read Night by Elie Wiesel.

Did some of them have nightmares? Likely.

But I hope many of them still ask themselves a second question, one I asked myself as a student, and still ask—What would I do if . . .

The world is new for me one morning when I’m ten. I open the door of the optometrist’s office and step out into a place where I can see individual leaves on a tree and each board on a house and single blades of grass. With my new glasses, everything is clearer, sharper, more detailed.

And easier.

I no longer squint to see the chalkboard or cock my head at a different angle. And I can tell what people think—if they smile or frown or raise their eyebrows in question. Even their words are easier to understand when I can see their lips move.

With headaches gone, the world is brighter.

Sometimes when I take my glasses off at night and put them on the bedside stand, I get to wondering. What if I had lived in the old days, back when only monks and scholars and maybe a few rich kids wore glasses? And I feel sorry for the poor kids back then.

Every six months or so, the world begins to blur again. And since I can’t see, it’s almost as if I can’t think. But a new prescription and updated glasses bring back focus. To my eyes. But to much more.

Once again, I’m less distracted, less fatigued, and more engaged.

***

Decades later, after I’m retired and wearing trifocals, I read about the Vision for Baltimore. This initiative provided eye exams and needed glasses for 7,000 students in Baltimore’s public schools.

Johns Hopkins researchers analyzed what happened after the students used their new glasses. For the first year, reading and math scores rose significantly. But these gains were not sustained in the second and third years. Researchers suspected that many students had lost glasses or broken them. And that with the rapid physical changes of childhood, their lens prescriptions had become outdated.

Eyeglasses can’t solve all learning challenges and poverty and mental health issues that impede success at school. But for the twelve to fifteen percent of U.S. school children who go to class with blurry vision, eyeglasses can be a simple, cost-effective, efficient, and even magical way to help.

So here’s my regret—with how eyeglasses impacted me as a child, why wasn’t I more tuned into this as a teacher?

I should have been.

My dad tells me a story that’s hard to imagine. It’s about him and his walk-to-school friends. They were Amish Mennonite kids, my dad and his friends. Well, actually not kids, Amish Mennonite children.

Along their walk home one day, they had just topped a hill when they came across some “English” road workers who called them kids.

The children chanted their answer, like a playground rhyme:

We sit mesmerized as the sharks swim by.

“Why don’t those sharks eat those fish?” my grandson asks.

Good point.

With little effort one of those zebra sharks could take a lunge and suck in a seahorse or a garden eel or a clownfish or any of the other 300 fish minding their own business as they circle the saltwater tank.

I’ve got no answer for Luke. But his brother does.

“They aren’t hungry,” Jesse says. “They’ve been fed.”

Later I checked, and Jesse was right. It’s called target-feeding. Zookeepers feed aquarium sharks high quality chunks of fish and squid and vitamins. Everything sharks need to feel healthy and strong. And non-consummatory.

Lucky for the garden eel.

The keepers have settled the bully of the sea.

Sitting between my grandsons, I stare with them into the 88,000-gallon saltwater tank. But my mind is at the middle school where I taught. And the prison. In both places, I found bullies in my classrooms, sharks who circled to find the vulnerable and turn them to prey.

I’ve seen bullies sent to in-school suspension and expelled and thrown into solitary confinement. But punitive behaviors alone rarely stop bullying. Punished sharks come back hungrier than before. And once again, they circle and lunge and suck in prey.

What sharks need is keepers who recognize unmet hunger on the other side of gnashing teeth. And do something about it. Bullies need keepers who target feed, who throw in a smile, a touch on the shoulder, a request for help. They need chunks of  focused attention and stories that develop empathy. They need keepers who look for something good and say it, aloud and in front of others, and who help them channel power, not squelch it.

This kindness does not allow bad behavior. But it seeks to find dignity in each person and offers a way back into the group when someone chooses to do better. It seeks for ways to transform bullying into belonging.

Target feeding, this strategy of zookeepers can help in the classroom. And beyond.

“Come on, Grandma.”

It’s Jesse.

There’s more to the zoo than sharks.

Why does he come to my mind this morning? Like I’m with him again. I sit at my desk. He stands at the corner window. Like he does every day, just before lunch. No one calls his name. No one approaches. We all know to leave him be.

His hands are stuffed in his pockets, fisted hands. And his eyes cross the field, yearning eyes. Like a cat staring, as though an unwavering gaze will open a door. When the lunch bell rings, his head drops, just for a moment. Then he turns, and swaggers with the rest of them toward the cafeteria.

The classroom empties, and I walk to the corner window. Across the field is a double fence line topped with coils of razor wire. Ground-level coils fill the land between the fences. And mingled throughout are shaker sensors and cameras.

I’ve been where Matt’s eyes go—across the field and over the fences, inside the complex in the prison school. That’s where I taught inmates how to read and how to pass the GED and history.

Then there was child development, the class where I saw inmates swallow hard and cry, big burly inmates. And sometimes get mad.

Once a man with tattoos marching up his arms stood and slammed a fist on his desk.

“Why didn’t nobody ever tell me this stuff?” he shouted.

He sat down and dropped his head into his hands.

“Just wish I’d known,” he said, his voice subdued, almost too quiet to hear.

It’s something to teach on both sides of the fence. To see a grown inmate cry. And to see a young boy with a dry-eyed stare yearn for his dad.

And it’s something to wonder—where is Matt now?

All winter, my needle’s been going in and out, stitching my life, moving forward my autobiographical embroidery project. But now the snows are gone—I hope. Daffodils are poking through. Under grow lights in our basement, microgreens are coming alive. And spring rains have begun. So yesterday I rolled up my timeline, stored my needles in a pin cushion, and closed my embroidery box.

I’m almost caught up with myself. I’ve now embroidered the adult years of heavy lifting—teaching and running programs and making high-stake decisions. And I wondered as I stitched—how did I manage it all?

I embroidered the house where we hosted large groups for retreats and planning sessions. And where, one by one (and once two at a time), we welcomed our eight grandchildren.

I stitched my grandmother’s name on her grave. She died the year our first grandchild was born, the child who would have made her a great-great grandma. She knew he was coming. When I visited her deathbed, she held the blanket I was crocheting for him. She ran her gnarled hands over its yellowness.

“I hope I meet him,” she said.

She didn’t.

I embroidered the exhilarating and exhausting summers I ran a music camp for kids on a college campus. For my last year with the camp, I showed lots of color with a solfège symbol and a giant rest sign at the end.

But not all was joyful in those years. Especially the recession in 2008. I didn’t lose my home, as many did. But my school district lost its gifted program. And I lost a job I loved.

I pivoted to sixth grade for a few years. And then I retired, transferring my love of teaching to the Columbus Museum of Art, where I lead tours as a docent.

I embroidered the coronavirus, reliving my deep empathy for the teachers I left behind—teachers who scrambled to switch between in-person and remote teaching and back again, who dealt with the great fog of students and their parents, and who struggled with chronic absenteeism and apathy.

And where was I? Safe at home, writing a book and starting a blog and applying for Medicare.

And here’s where I’m closing up my third winter of embroidery. When I started, I wondered—will I catch up to myself before I die? At three images per year for more than seventy years?

I’m getting close.

But the question is still real.