Apple to Apple

Last week I hung a mirror in our kitchen by its leather strap. It’s an old mirror, at least 130 years old, likely much older. And it has a sad story.

This mirror hung in my mother’s home. By the time she was a child, her father, my grandpa, had already shaved in front of it thousands of times. That was because it hung in his boyhood home, too. He probably learned to shave in front of it.

As a teenager, Grandpa once used the mirror as a hiding place—for a love letter from a classmate. In a family of eight children, there weren’t many private places in the house. But behind the mirror there was just enough space to slip the envelope he wanted no one to find.

But someone did—the sister next to him, just two years older. Salome pulled it out and made public what Grandpa wanted private. In front of the whole family, she waved the envelope and chanted that Norman—that’s my grandpa—got a love letter. She didn’t read the letter. She didn’t even open it. But what she did was enough, too much.

When my mom was a teenager, her papa told her the story about the love letter behind the mirror. He liked Salome well enough. All their lives she was a good sister to him. Still, when he told the story, he blinked a little faster.

When Grandpa was old and moved to a retirement center, my mom bought that mirror. She hung it in her house to remind her of the tender side of her papa.

He died on his ninetieth birthday, but one day not long before, my mother visited her father. He told stories that day. And one of the stories was about Salome and the love letter she found behind the mirror.

That day, he did more than blink fast. That day, as he remembered more than seven decades back, tears stood in his eyes.

Today that mirror in my kitchen shows some damage in the bottom right corner. Something bad happened on one of the days of its long, long life. But I’m not having it repaired. This mirror, with its leather strap and banged-up bottom and sad story, somehow comforts me.

“I’m coming in now, before school starts,” Mr. Baker told me on the phone, “and bringing my boy. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

He cleared his throat. “And Mrs. Swartz,” he said. “Make sure the principal is there for the meeting.”

These were not words I wanted to hear on a Monday morning. In less than an hour, a hundred kids would start passing through my door, and I had things to do.

I wrote the prompt on the board and stacked papers for each class and reviewed my lesson for the day, while searching for what I could have done to upset Mr. Baker. What were we getting to the bottom of?

“I’ll be right there,” the principal said when I called.

And just a few minutes later, we heard them coming, Mr. Baker and his son. All the way down the hall, one heavy step after another. The principal and I looked at each other. His left eyebrow rose.

Mr. Baker didn’t knock, just barged right in, pulling his son behind him. Jake stood, his eyes on the floor, his hands behind his back, his head turned toward the window.

“Tell her you’re sorry!” Mr. Baker commanded. “And look at her when you say it.”

What had Jake done? I couldn’t think.

Jake wrenched his eyes from the floor and found mine for one second.

“Sorry, Mrs. Swartz,” he said.

“You better be,” Mr. Baker said. “And another homework card had better never, ever land in our mailbox again.”

This was about homework cards? About Jake missing a homework assignment?

The principal’s eyebrows went sky high. We weren’t used to this level of parental support.

But before I could answer, Mr. Baker, who was obviously leading this meeting, reached for his belt buckle. It snapped open, and Mr. Baker yanked the leather belt, whooshing it through the loops.

The principal was on his feet.

“Mr. Baker,” he began.

“You just leave this to me,” Mr. Baker said. “I aim to teach Jake a thing or two about not doing his homework, disrespecting this here teacher.”

But the principal took his arm and steered him toward the hall.

“Let’s you and me have a private talk out here,” he said to Mr. Baker. “We’ll leave Jake here for Mrs. Swartz to deal with.”

The principal kicked the door shut behind him. Jake sank into his chair and I into mine.

We looked at each other, Jake and I. Neither of us knew what to say. The bell rang, and that ended the only parent-teacher conference I ever attended where I hadn’t said a word.

It’s a sad day each fall when I shut our front door against the growing chill. It’s a heavy door, four feet wide. And though it’s beautiful sitting between sidelight windows and the transom above, its closing silences the summer sounds of our small town.

Just a block down the street in the bell tower of the Methodist church, 16 tubular chimes, nearly a century old, mark time. All summer through our open door, I hear the Westminster sequence mark each quarter of the hour. Without looking up from my computer, I can tell it’s ten o’clock or half past three. And at noon and six, the bells call me to the porch to hear the hymns they play. This audible passing of time takes me through my day, somehow managing to both comfort and enliven me.

So do the trains—their low rumbles and haunting whistles tell of places I’ve never been, making me want to go, but at the same time keeping me content to stay home and wait for the next passing through. On days the whistle is so clear that it seems to come right into the house, rain soon follows. My dad got it right when he used to say, “If the sound is plain, it’s going to rain.”

All summer, so many small sounds come through our open door—the swish of traffic on wet pavement, the clanking of scooters on the sidewalk, the chatter of a pack of teenagers walking to the park, the melancholy wail of a neighbor’s saxophone, the laughter of a toddler splashing in the next-door pool, the clink of the mailbox lid. Behind a shut door, all these calming sounds fade away.

What’s left are the interior sounds of winter—the crackling of fire, the humming of the refrigerator, the cuckooing of the clock I picked up in the Black Forest, and the whoosh of the furnace, which makes me scramble to sit near one of the cast iron scrollwork floor grates to catch the heat.

I love the warmth of a fire, but still I miss an open door.

I pull a paper from the file and instinctively snap to attention. It’s a chore chart in file number 626 of my dad’s home archives. It’s labeled Household Activities.

And, there we are—seven of us kids, minus the baby, all lined across the top of the grid, with the days of the week anchoring the left side.

We grew up on these charts, a new one appearing every month or so to provide variety and to increase challenge as we grew. The bottom corner dates this one as May 25,  1969. I was 14 years old then, taking on so many household tasks that for Saturday, my part includes All Sorts of Stuff.

This work was not for allowance, not for rewards, not for extra money. We worked because we lived in that house—ate at the table, dirtied the dishes, slept in the beds, filled the hamper with dirty clothes, and tracked in mud.

My parents had a mantra: If you live in a house, you contribute to that house.

And these chores, the bane of our childhoods, eased our emergence into adulthood. It was no surprise to us that some things, boring things, had to be done over and over. And then again. That some work, like washing diapers, is distasteful. That ignoring work doesn’t make it go away.

In an 86-year multigenerational study, Harvard researchers evaluated the backgrounds of over 700 “high achievers.” They found a strong connection between household chores and later professional success. My parents never read this study. They didn’t need to.

Having grown up on a farm, they already knew the value of a communal effort. They knew it taught kids to work as a team, to handle challenge, to manage time, and to develop grit and determination.

And happiness.

The Harvard study shows a strong connection between doing chores and later professional and personal happiness. Shared responsibility, the study says, helps kids develop greater self-worth, confidence, and empathy for others.

File 626 in my dad’s archives holds a stack of chore charts, proof that my parents were as smart at raising kids as any Harvard professor.

I always thought I’d live in the city or in the country. Either I’d have art museums and concert halls and shopping or starry skies and fresh air and a dog. The city or the country, but not a small town.

But for forty-six years now, I’ve lived in a small town in the center of a rural county in the middle of a midwestern state. Not in the mountains or a valley. Not by the ocean or near a desert. Not even by a river, although the Big Darby tries to make itself one.

Here’s where I’ve made my home, where I taught for decades. And where I am now surrounded by my former students in a town strong enough to hold us together but not large enough for us to lose each other.

They’re assuming more and more that my memory is fading, that my eyes can’t see, and that I may need help. And so they are coming out of the woodwork, so to speak, or maybe coming into their maturities, ready to take responsibility in our small town.

Take, for example, the night I call the emergency squad for my dad.

“We’ve got him, Mrs. Swartz,” one tells me with his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll take good care of him for you.”

The mayor is my former student. And now the chief-of-police. At the hospital outpatient, they check my insurance when I come in for a lab. And during overnight stays in hospital rooms with my parents, they bring me warm blankets.

Once I walked out of Walmart without paying for a newly installed battery in my old-fashioned watch. Even when I heard shouts behind me in the parking lot, I assumed the security guard was going after someone else.

But one of my students ran faster.

“She doesn’t steal,” he told the guard. “She just forgets.”

Sometimes I feel them looking at me in grocery aisles, hesitant to talk, afraid I won’t remember them. But I do, at least once I get past their own growing lines and shadows to the younger faces that peered up at me in my classrooms. I can’t always say their names. But I know who they are at heart, the long-ago fears and failures and successes and passions that have formed their present selves.

I don’t have the mountains I love. But in this small, nondescript town, I am known.

And I can always drive into the country for a starry sky and 30 minutes down Route 70 for a concert.

“I’m puzzled,” the physical therapist tells me. “It’s like your mom has tech neck. Her muscles feel like a kid who’s been bent over screens and texting for hours each day.”

He glances around the room. No screens. No smart phone. Just a corner desk with a spiral notebook and a Bible, a paper one.

“Can you think of small repetitive muscle movements she makes every day?”

I could.

“She’s copying the Bible,” I tell him, and his eyebrows shoot up.

So I tell him how she started several years ago at the first verse of  Matthew. She spent hours, day after day, week after week, working her way through the New Testament.

Each year, her handwriting has decreased in size. Now, every line space of her notebook contains two lines of her script.

Long before the last chapter of Revelation, she had a plan—start in Genesis and work her way through to the end of Malachi. By the time of her 98^th birthday in a few weeks, she’ll likely be well into Jeremiah.

“Her head’s heavy,” the therapist says. “And holding it forward like that exhausts her already worn-out tissues.”

He picks up her notebook to look at her handwriting.

“But I like what she’s doing.”

He looks at me.

“I’ll give her the exercises I give the kids,” he says. “And do you think you could talk her into taking a break every few verses?”

Hand on my heart, I’ve tried.

And failed.

She’s got a prayer, she tells me, asking God to keep her alive until she gets to Malachi chapter 4 and verse 6, the verse about turning the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents. And she wants to do her part to make the prayer come true.

I’ve got a pitchfork hanging in my kitchen, one my son wants to inherit. It’s wooden, and old, at least a hundred years, likely much more. On the bill of sale beside the fork, you can see that my grandpa bought it for 75 cents at his father’s estate auction.

And you can see that the tines on the fork aren’t even. The tip of one is broken off, by my dad, when he was young and impatient with a bull. From the fuddergang, the feeding alley, he had already pitched the morning hay into the mangers of the horses. They had stood nicely back, making my dad’s job easy.

But then, he came to the bull, a pure-bred Jersey. Once this bull had been a docile, curious calf, likeable and easily led, at least with a staff clipped to its nose ring.

But now he was 1200 pounds of brawn, gentle one moment, but aggressive the next. And this was not his best morning.

Each time my dad tried to pitch the hay, the bull blocked the fork, over and over. Finally, my dad decided to show who was boss and brought the fork down across the head of the bull, breaking a tine.

“You know what happened to that bull?” my dad asks as he tells me this story.

The glint in his eyes is noticeable, until he grimaces and uses two hands to shift his leg.

“Some years later,” he says, “after the bull grew even meaner, your grandpa harnessed up a team of horses and hitched them to a wagon. He laced a rope into the bull’s nose ring and tied the rope to the wagon. And he told the horses to giddy-up.”

Only they couldn’t. The bull wouldn’t go. He propped himself against the wagon, skidded his feet, and refused to take a step. The bull had made a decision. And no amount of prodding helped.

My grandpa changed tactics. He put a staff into the nose ring of the bull and led it across the fields and up a hill to the slaughterhouse.

But my grandpa wasn’t stupid. The horses pulling the wagon came right along with them. And on the wagon was a farm hand with a rifle. Just in case.

My dad flinches from leg pain as he leans back in his chair and folds his arms. I rarely see gloat in his eyes. But at this moment I do.

“Now, why do you want a pitchfork hanging in your kitchen?” he asks me.

And I’m not sure.

But I do.

When football season starts, I suddenly become the least knowledgeable person in the room. My family has tried to teach me. And so I understand more than I ever thought I would—that if a defensive player catches the ball, the defense becomes the offense; that if a player fumbles a ball, it’s up for grabs; and that referees throw yellow flags for false starts and offsides and holding.

But knowing all this still doesn’t give me the capacity to actually follow a game. I’ve resolved to try many times, if only to give my family the gift of sharing their enthusiasm. But each game is so long. How can a playing time of 60 minutes stretch on and on, sometimes past three hours?

There are so many stoppages and timeouts and breaks, so much secret talk in huddles while multitudes in the stadium and at home wait. I could drive 250 miles in the time it takes 22 people crashing into each other to reveal the winner.

Still, I’ve made peace with football season. With my book and a puzzle and embroidery, I stake my corner of the couch and relax into the hypnotic rhythms of a game that help to soothe away real-life anxieties, enjoying a room filled with children and grandchildren.

During a lull in a game last year, a sportscaster said the name of someone familiar.

“Paul Krause!” I said. “I used to dust his high school trophies.”

Ten sets of eyes turned to me. For once, I had some inside information about football. And they wanted to hear.

So I told them about how when I was a kid, his folks lived in a small ranch house a couple streets from my family in Flint, how I earned spending money by cleaning their house on Saturday mornings, how the whole basement looked like a Paul Krause shrine, its walls lined with photos and newspaper clippings and the trophies I dusted.

Paul Krause was famous at our school, having earned 14 varsity letters in almost every sport. And he was even more famous when I was dusting his trophies—starting games for the Vikings, intercepting passes, and playing in the Super Bowl.

So I wasn’t surprised that the sports commentators were talking about his 81 career interceptions, a record they considered unbreakable. I’d always known he was famous.

The whistle blows and someone kicks off. The eyes in the room are back to the game, and I stitch away at my embroidery. But I’ve got to admit. It felt good to teach them something for a change.

She walks down the hall ahead of me, everything I’m not. Shoulders squared and stride sure, her shirt swishes under a fashionable jacket, her heels click. A stream of students divides, giving her wide berth. But their faces turned toward her are not hostile, just curious. What will she do now? You never know. It’s like trouble walks down the hall with her, good trouble, even though she’s the assistant principal.

“Cosgray!” she might shout at a guy trying to slink along the outside of the hall. “Turn yourself right around and head to my office. I’ll see you in a few.”

What’s up with Cosgray? You can’t tell. He might leave Mrs. Schwaller’s office with five days of detention. Or maybe with a new bike because his name was drawn from a jar of good behavior tokens.

She fills up the room, not by her size, but by the open look on her face and her queenly bearing and a voice that draws you in, that makes you stop and listen, actually want to listen. She’s like a sunflower in a bed of violets with small, understated, drooping blooms and soft, subtle fragrances. She’s the assistant principal, and I’m only a beginning teacher.

And I’m on her list. Once a quarter she sits in the back of my classroom to evaluate my teaching. Mostly she shines down on me.

“You’re organized,” she says. “Well-prepared. Students like you, as do their parents. You know your content, and mostly you get your students.”

But violets, as I’m finding, get stepped on. They don’t survive long in the middle school yard.

“You’re short,” she says. “So walk tall. Your voice is quiet, so make some noise. Slam your door shut at the beginning of class and then smile. Ring some bells. Carry a yardstick and slap it on your desk before you make a point.”

She leans in close.

“You know the biggest change you need to make?”

I don’t.

“You’re too consistent,” she says. “Students know exactly what to expect from you. And that puts you on the defensive.”

She smiles at me.

“You can do this,” she says. “Keep them on edge. Surprise them. Catch them off guard.”

She gets up to leave.

“Knowing you,” she says with a chuckle, “you’ll find a way to get organized about how to do this.”

Having Mrs. Schwaller as my mentor is perhaps the best thing that happened to me at the beginning of my career. And she gave me a mantra for my decades of teaching.

Walk like Schwaller—this was my incantation each time I walked into a new classroom in a new school for the rest of my career.

So thank you, Corliss, wherever you are (in, I assume, retired bliss). And I hope you see this.