Apple to Apple

It’s that time of year, and you can see it in their faces. By the end of cousin week, our grandkids wear this back-to-school look, one that’s a bit absent, wrinkled with worry, and clouded, as if a shadow has fallen. For them, it’s back to early-morning alarms and late-night homework, back to syllabi, papers, tests, and long hours in class.

But it’s not just the students.

“What can you tell me about classroom management?” a new teacher asks.

Good question.

She’s heading to middle school. Her students, as a neuroscientist once described them, will be driving cars with souped-up engines and bicycle brakes. And no wonder. Their emotional brains are in overdrive, while their logical brains just putt along.

Her eyes are wide. Fear flickers in them. But so does excitement. Her students, after all, will be experiencing brain growth that’s rivaled only by infancy. Their hormonal and neurological changes will transform how they think and feel and interact.

Perhaps at no other time is the work of a teacher so critical.

A few days after this chat with the new teacher, I eat lunch with an old one. And even after thirty-some years, I recognize that back-to-school look. Not fear in her eyes, just uncertainty and fatigue. Can she do this another year? Does she still “get” students?

“I do,” she answers herself. “I still like them. A lot.”

She sighs.

“But all the paperwork, the high-stakes testing, the ever-new technology.”

She sighs again.

I put down my fork.

Her sigh seems to echo from all the students in all the schools, from teachers and college professors, from school counselors and administrators, from bus drivers and custodians.

It’s hard to go back to school, which doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just hard, like weeding a long row of strawberry plants on a hot day, like sitting in front of a blank computer screen to write a post when words won’t come.

These things are hard. And they are good.

So the best to my grandkids and to my teacher friends and to all the other people in all the school districts who support them.

Good wishes. But still, tomorrow when school starts in our town, I’d rather be right here on my porch swing, content to watch them all hurry by.

Our grandchildren came for Cousin Week.

Then they said good-bye and went home.

We sit in a small boat in Halifax Harbour with two grandkids and listen to a story, a tragic one. Beauty is all around us, a blend of rugged coastal landscape and the historic charm of the city’s boardwalks, stone plazas, and merchant shops.

It’s hard to believe that in this very spot, the largest non-nuclear explosion of its time killed nearly 2000 people and blinded another 600. Here is where two ships collided—one of them, the Mont-Blanc, loaded with explosives to be used in the Great War.

The shock wave from the blast, our guide tells us, was felt across the whole of Nova Scotia. It disintegrated buildings, flattened trees, tumbled horse-drawn carriages and streetcars, and lifted ships from the water, dropping them on land. Nearly everything within 2.6 miles was destroyed.

All this happened right here, where our small boat rocks us gently. The guide is silent, so are the dozen people in the boat. The story is sinking in.

Later, after we’ve trudged along the pier through a cold, driving rain and we’ve changed into dry clothes, our grandson asks, “Why haven’t we heard this story before?”

“Right,” his cousin says, “way more people died than when the Titanic sunk.”

All the way to Halifax we’d listened together to a book about the Titanic disaster, learning that Halifax was the primary base for recovery ships sent to retrieve bodies from the North Atlantic. Earlier that day we had toured the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and gazed at Titanic artifacts. But the Titanic story was not new for them. They’d known about it long before our trip.

They wait for an answer. And I’m not sure what to say.

Is it because the Titanic caught the imaginations of movie makers and writers? Is it because the Titanic disaster unfolded in agonizing slow-motion while the explosion in Halifax was an instant nightmare? Or is it because the Titanic’s passenger list included some of the richest people in the world, while Halifax was primarily a working-class community?

“We hear some stories,” I say. “And not others. It’s our job to find stories hidden from us. And to figure out why they’ve been hidden.”

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.