Apple to Apple

Our sidewalk’s been alive this summer. Wheels keep rumbling by, electric wheels on the bottoms of scooters and bikes and go-carts and mini-cars. And high above the wheels, eyes are alive, hair lifts in the breeze, and smiles curve high.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve had to swallow a few times. Back when I was a kid, playing was hard work. We shoved off to pedal and kick-push our way down sidewalks. We earned our suppers and slept easy on our pillows.

But grouching takes away the fun of a porch swing on a summer day. Besides, long ago as a kid, I had discerned the difference between grumpy grandmas and curious ones. All those years ago, I had decided which I would be.

As my porch swing creaks back and forth, I ask myself a question. Why does whizzing down the sidewalk lift these kids up?

And out of my accumulated years comes a memory: Safetyville in Flint, Michigan, where I drove a battery-powered miniature car around a kid-sized city. To drive one, I had to earn a license by passing a test, proving that I knew the rules of the road.

We drove on paved streets, waving at each other, stopping at real street lights and even driving over a bridge. Little Mac, its sign said.

For me, the mini-cars were more than a fun toy.  Safetyville gave me a chance to rehearse for adulthood. Anticipatory socialization is what we call this in education—just a fancy way of saying that kids practice for adulthood, much like playing house or office.

I slow the swing. The streetlights are blinking on. But before I get up, one more scooter buzzes by. A kid is still out at dusk, enjoying the first tastes of independence and making her own decisions about how fast to go, how sharp to turn, when to brake, and which street to take home.

And I hope she’s had a good supper and sleeps easy on her pillow tonight.

For two decades now, we’ve held Cousin Week. But this year’s a different vibe. Six of them have spent the summer at camps. But not as campers.

They’ve been counselors, echoing the words I’ve said each summer during Cousin Week: Hey guys, help me out. Pick up your dirty clothes, change your socks, put on sunscreen, five minutes until lights out. They’ve worked long days, wrangling a cabin full of sixth graders to breakfast on time, lugging water, setting the mood in the heat of the day, and smoothing quarrels. They’ve been last to bed and up with the sun.

Given all this, what will happen with the cousin-week script this year? Will it come back to me or will they use it on each other? Perhaps there will be no script, each one self-governing.

As Cousin Week approaches each year, I count the days with pleasure. It’s a time when we’re immersed in the grandchild-grandparent relationship, when the rest of the world disappears, when we forget (mostly) the daunting transitions that will come in the fall.

And, to be honest, I also count the days with small amounts of trepidation—have we prepared enough food, are the activities too young for the older ones or too old for the young, will we strike the right balance between guidance and generous acceptance?

But this year, I’ve also got a new feeling popping around inside. I’m intrigued. We’ve got a full slate. Once again, they’re all coming. But who exactly? Not little kids lugging favorite blankets. Not rule-following grade school kids, who take the schedule as law. Not even middle school kids who roll on the floor and chew on hoodie strings.

So who’s coming? Emerging young adults, taking a break from long days at camp or on summer jobs. Fully half of them are now accustomed to running things, not being supervised.

I’m ready for the new vibe, to just be together, to hear their thoughts, to watch them interact, to follow their lead through museums, and let them take the wheel.

And I’m doubting we’ll need a lot of script. I’m thinking it will be more of a conversation.

Sixty-seven years ago this month, someone snapped this photo. We look happy, Julie and I. But it was a sad day. We were saying goodbye—though only until the next summer when Julie would again climb onto a train in New York City with other Fresh Air kids and ride back to the mountains of Western Maryland and down my grandma’s lane to stay for a week. Or if we were lucky, two weeks.

Each summer Julie and I connived ways to get together. At my house or Grandma’s, we played in the woods and packed picnics to eat on the porch. Dumped into the same bathtub at the end of the day, we slathered bubbles over our bodies to see how they showed up more on Julie’s shiny black skin than on mine.

Back then, the reason Julie came was simple to me. She came from the city to breathe country fresh air, of course. But mostly she came to make a party. During Fresh Air weeks, our parents gave us all a break—fewer chores, more ice cream, a trip to Swallow Falls, hot dog roasts, Bible school classes, hayrides, and firefly catching long past bedtime.

I never wondered, not once, why Julie always came to my grandma’s house while I never saw where her grandma lived. Why Julie milked our cows, while I never rode her trains, the ones she said traveled underground.

Looking back, I can see how much I assumed. That my grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy and the rich Jersey milk  from my grandpa’s cows were a treat to Julie. That our country food was better than Julie’s pizza and bagels and pastrami sandwiches, foods I’d never tasted. That there was everything to learn in the country and little of value in the city.

But in the decades since, my assumptions have turned to questions. Of the nearly two million Fresh Air kids who have participated in the program, how many sensed that their host families felt country life was superior?  How many of these kids were targets of intended or naive cultural insensitivity, oppressive attitudes, or racial slurs?

It was hoped that the Fresh Air Fund would quell cultural misunderstanding and ease racial tension. But this is too heavy of a load for a one-way, short-term program.

On the way to the train station my last summer in the Western Maryland countryside, Julie and I sat in the back seat of the car clutching each other in deep sorrow. We would probably never see each other again, we thought. And we were right.

Even so, knowing Julie in those early years of my life impacted me and still influences the way I read books and engage in conversation and travel through cities.

If only we could find each other again, Julie and I, and have one more day to remember and hear each other’s grown-up thoughts.

My dad has maple syrup running in his veins. Not really, of course. But maple syrup might work better than his blood that keeps clotting.

He grew up with a sugar camp in his back yard. He could tell winter was wearing down when his dad started tinkering around in the sugar camp, gathering the spiles that pierced the trees, washing the 900-some keelers that caught the sap, and firing up the evaporator.

In his teens, he guided horses under the maple trees on the wooded, steep, sometimes snowy slope to the Casselman River collecting the sap. He tended the fires to boil the sap into syrup—forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

Even when he moved 500 miles from the sugar camp, from the country to the city, he had a nose for sugaring weather, night time temperatures dropping below freezing and day temperatures in the forties. And he still had a taste for the real stuff. Mrs. Butterworth’s sweet, buttery syrup not making the grade.

Now he’s ninety-four, in assisted living, and taking each step at great cost. His body is failing him, but his mind is still razor-sharp. At the retirement center, people are curious about my dad and that mind of his. So they ask him questions. And someone found out about my dad and his love for maple syrup.

If you walk into that retirement center, across the dining hall, through the kitchen, and into the pantry, you will find a can of pure maple syrup purchased by the kitchen. On that can is a label. On that label, the dietician has written my dad’s name. Whether it’s on pancakes, in oatmeal, or over cornbread, my dad gets what’s been running in his veins—pure maple syrup.

I was maybe twenty-three. And my life was so huge to me I couldn’t see anyone else’s. Who else was putting two people through college with two babies? Who else had a grocery budget of $15 a week and a clothes budget of $0? Who else had left all her friends two states away and was living near her husband’s family and not her own?

My life, it seemed, was separate from all others, my pain and heartbreak unprecedented in the history of the world, at least in my part of the world, at least at this time, at least among the people I knew.

No longer thirteen, I had the sense not to say any of this aloud. But not the maturity to stop feeling it, deep down in my gut, where no one else could see.

I’d been taught better. Since I’d been knee-high to a grasshopper I’d been tutored in looking, not to my own interests, but to the interests of others.

But I was a new adult, overwhelmed, and sure I had a corner on suffering. It was at this sorry juncture that I enrolled in my first astronomy class ever.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I walked into class, carrying my load of grievances. But a sky full of stars did something, making me feel both small and part of something infinitely bigger than myself. And older, much older than myself.

The light we saw from the stars had left them thousands of years before, had traveled trillions of miles to reach earth and to shine on me.

Me, one person out of more than four billion people in the world, and holding the troubles of only one life, a good one, at that.  Above all us earthlings moved the stars and planets and galaxies, the ones we could see and those we couldn’t.

Ninety minutes later, I’d walk out of class, ready to cuddle my babies, to stretch my grocery budget, to make new friends.

And I’d walk out relieved.

I was, after all, just a speck in the universe.

Last summer, my parents still lived on Elm Street, where their house won the prize for the prettiest porch. Not by my dad’s doing. It was my mom’s flowers that cascaded from hanging baskets and from pots on the porch railings and that reached up from the beds below.

On a midsummer evening much like today, I walked into that house. My dad had written his history for the day, and he was relaxing in his recliner, reading.

“Longfellow,” he said, waving his book at me.

It was an old book, clothbound, its cover embossed and its title gilded, probably from his college years.

“This is about your mom and her flowers,” he said, and read me some lines: “… gorgeous flowerets in the sunlight shining, blossoms flaunting in the eye of day, tremulous leaves with soft silver lining. ..”

He hands me the book. On the yellowed pages,  Longfellow calls flowers the stars of the earth. And he writes that some flowers with their blue eyes cry.

If it had been my dad’s druthers, he’d have planted foundation shrubs around the house and been done with it. He’d never have won the prettiest porch prize. Neither would people stop by his porch to enjoy the flowers and stay to talk. But his eyes hold admiration for Longfellow’s words.

He points to the poem and says it again: “This is your mom.”

***

Today I walk into my dad’s room at the retirement center. He’s revising a sixty-page document on the schism that formed the Old Order Amish church. Most days, he wants to read to me, to talk about what he’s writing, and to get my suggestions.

But on this day, he leans back in his chair.

“What is it about your mom?” he asks. “It’s been happening all her life. And now it’s happening again in this new place.”

I know exactly what he’ll say next. And he does.

People are coming to talk to her—in the dining room, in the hallways, after exercise classes, and in the common living area.

“Why do they talk to her? And not to me?”

He’s not complaining. He’d rather write history. But he’s fascinated.

And his eyes hold admiration.

After seventy-two years of marriage, he’s still got reason to marvel.

One misstep and our summer changes. No more two-mile walks together through town as the stars come out and the lights blink on. No more working together in what we planned would be our best garden ever. No more biking or swimming or disc golf.

Instead, my husband straps an iWalk to his leg or props it on a knee scooter to go everywhere his two feet used to take him. Life changed so quickly. So easily. Without warning.

“It’s a Jones fracture,” his doctor said. “Absolutely no weight on that foot. Not once.”

Doors open to a perfect June evening, but we sit morose.  The breezes and the bird calls tantalize us. Just one walk. That’s all we want. Just one walk down the street and through the park and over the creek. Just a chance to wander through streets where children play hopscotch and zip by on bikes, where we can stop for ice cream and meander back home past the courthouse and down the sidewalk to our front door.

“We’ve got to get hold of this,” my husband says. “Find a way to redeem the summer.”

But we’re stuck. Until we think of a recent vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where we took a GPS-guided audio tour through copper country. It was as if an expert sat in the back seat of our car interpreting what we saw.

“You think they’ve got something for the middle of Ohio?” my husband asks.

We’ve got no mines here, no mountains, and no water to speak of. But does Ohio have stories?

We do!

So we install an audio tour app. And off we go, Steve hobbling to the car on his iWalk. Our first tour takes us to the Grimes Flying Laboratory, where we learn that Warren Grimes is known as the father of aircraft lighting.

“Think of the lights you see on aircraft wing tips,” our guide says. “Grimes invented those to make flying at night safer.”

The laboratory is accessible with an iWalk. Inside, we see a 1940s airplane being restored. And we read about Warren Grimes, a runaway orphan, who ended up working for Ford Motor Company and taught himself engineering. And whose red, green, and white navigation lights are found on the wingtips and tails of almost every plane in the world.

Well, this will change the way I look out at my next airplane wing, the way I’ll watch the next plane fly at night in the sky above our deck.

And to think, a runaway orphan boy, someone given a bad deal in life, did all that!

On the trip home, we’re pleasantly drowsy.

“Let’s take a small nap,” Steve says.

Just ahead is a shaded graveyard. Steve pulls in. We open our windows and recline our seats. The birds sing, the breeze wafts, and we sleep with the rest of them.

People trust me for lots of things—to keep a secret and read a MyChart, to plan a cousin week and apply for long-term health care benefits, and to lead workshops and speak to groups. But there’s something no one trusts me to do. Not my parents or my husband or my grandkids. And not my friends.

All of them know this one thing about me—that I can’t find my way, almost anywhere.

Back in the pre-GPS days, I drove twice a week to graduate school. And each time, a card with directions is what got me there: Take I-70 East. Keep left to continue on I-670 E. Follow signs for airport. Take Exit 2B to merge onto OH-315 N. Take Exit 3 to Cannon Drive. Turn left into the Ohio Union North Garage. By the time I earned my masters diploma, the card was tattered.

One by one, my grandchildren learned to mistrust me, usually around the age of five.

When I was in the driver’s seat, they’d sit up straight, their eyes alert.

“Not that way, Grandma,” one would say. “This other way.”

Even at the zoo and in parking lots and on walks around town, they watched and corrected my path.

And my dad. He just can’t understand this lack in my brain.

“For how organized you are …,” he mutters when I turn the wrong way once again.

Usually this is not on the road, where the GPS now maps my way. It’s me pushing his wheelchair out of Coumadin clinics and doctors’ offices and through hospital hallways.

But he’s known since I was three that the spatial orientation part of my brain is missing. And he’s found a way to get himself where he needs to be. He sticks out his left hand or right, as the need may be, and points.

So I’m set with my dad.

And with my grandkids, who now take the wheel and the lead, no matter where we go.

Besides having my nose in a book too long, too often, and at the wrong times, the main reason I got in trouble as a child was forgetting. In sixth grade I forgot my books. That evening I had to write 500 times: I will not forget my books. The next day I left my boots at school, the rubber kind we pulled over shoes back then. That evening, I was writing sentences again—I will not forget my boots.

In junior high I sat in detention one long afternoon with other rule breakers—those who cheated and fought and smoked and skipped school. Why? I’d forgotten my clarinet on a band day, left it at home, under a stack of library books.

I just couldn’t stop forgetting. Back when I carried purses, I left them on shelves in mall dressing rooms and under chairs in restaurants and on top of my car after buckling babies in car seats. I missed appointments and didn’t renew my license on time. I dreamed that I forgot about a college class until three weeks into the term. Finally, I had enough. And decided to do something about it.

So I set up systems. I slipped notes in the bottom of my shoe and carried my credit card and license in a pocket. I kept scrap paper by my bed so I could write reminders in the night. Then I’d crumple up those notes and throw them into the middle of the floor so I’d trip over them in the morning.

And then came the age of technology with even better ways to keep track of my life and the lives of those in my care. Of all the new tools, my favorite is the snooze feature of Gmail.

Just yesterday, I sent myself an email about my father’s next Coumadin clinic check and then snoozed the email to the day before the appointment. I snooze when I want to remember the week a grandchild goes to camp, the anniversary of a friend’s death, and the month I can renew my passport.

Two emails I keep snoozing over and over. They’re not about what I need to do. They’re about who I want to be.

One email that helps me with my parents reads: As slow as possible, as soft as possible, as sustainable as possible, as sincere as possible, as steady as possible. Allow space and pause.

Another email reminds me of the lyrics of a song, one about peace on earth.

Each month when this email pops up out of its snooze, I plead for peace—that it will come to earth. I make an offer—to have it begin with me, and a vow (which I sometimes manage to  keep) to take each step and live each moment in peace. 

A snoozed email is better than stuffing a paper in the bottom of a shoe, especially when you’re over seventy.  By snoozing and by wearing a crossbody wallet case for my iPhone, I’ve managed to avoid writing 500 sentences or sitting in detention.

It’s not that I’m forgetting less. Not at seventy-one. It’s that I’ve got some fancy tools to help me remember.