Apple to Apple

The porch swing creaks and pages turn. The air’s gentle and fresh, not hot, not cold, not humid. It’s a perfect late-May afternoon. On Main Street in front of my house, a school bus screeches to a stop. But the door doesn’t open. And no students emerge. Instead, young faces press to the window. A hearse passes by in the other lane. And funeral flags flutter on somber-looking cars driven by sober-looking people.

I close my book.

In a few minutes, I’ll turn my car north on Main toward the Bluebird Retirement Center, where my parents live with eighty-some people who once ran the world: teaching, doctoring, farming,  running businesses, building houses, and conducting scientific experiments. Most, but not all, can look back at their lives and recall what they’ve done. Some continue to work in their interests—writing history, cultivating flowers, encouraging others. Many host grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the retro ice cream shop, trading stories over cones.

In a few days, we’ll point our car south on Main to a grandson’s high school graduation in Kentucky. He’ll cross the stage and turn his tassel with more than 300 people who aim to run the world. Most, but not all, have a next step in mind—college, apprenticeships or entry-level jobs. Some know exactly what they hope to accomplish by the time they retire and enter care in a retirement home. But none know what the ensuing years will hold.

I give the swing a few more pushes. And think about the generations. About our youngest grandchild just finishing grade school, the ones in high school, and those already in college. About our children in the throes of their careers. About my parents, closing up a long-loved home and making a new one at Bluebird.

School buses, graduation stages, hearses and all that happens in between—this makes a life. Not all days are gentle and fresh and spent on porch swings. But some are. And the other days, those that are hard and hot, help us through the next transition and on to the next stage.

I slow the swing. I’ve got to visit my parents. And then I’ve got to pack for a grandson’s graduation.

They’re merging us down to one lane on a Friday afternoon in Michigan, where everyone’s going the same way—Up North to the cabins and lakes and wooded lots with firepits. It’s good to be back in the Wolverine state, where we met and married and welcomed our two children.

Old music comes through our fancy, new Bluetooth speaker. Steve’s got his playlist going. Peter, Paul, and Mary still want a hammer.  Simon and Garfunkel bridge the troubled water. The wind’s still blowin’. And after more than six decades of the song being out in the world, everything keeps on turn, turn, turning. All the sounds of long ago.

Steve rolls down his window and smiles at me.

There are all sorts of good reasons to keep windows shut on the road: to reduce wind noise and air resistance, to increase fuel efficiency, to keep debris from flying in. But at this moment the open window takes us back to the pre-AC days when folks had tans on their driving arms and wind in their hair, when they breathed in the sharp, heady scents of  asphalt and combustion exhaust.

That’s how we rolled down Saginaw Street after a date.

But for me, open windows go even further back—to my childhood. To nine-hour family trips from our city home in Flint to grandparents and cousins in Western Maryland with five or six of us packed into the back seat of a sedan. The baby was lucky, riding in spacious luxury between our parents in one of those small dangle chairs that hooked over the front seat.  

My parents were lucky too. With the roar of the road through the open windows, they missed most of the tattling. Who stepped on whose foot and who was spreading halfway across the seat and who said something that was not at all nice.

But luck ran out for all of us when the baby soiled a diaper. The odor didn’t mix well with asphalt and exhaust. One time the baby wet once too often. Extra diapers were packed deep in the trunk. So my mom closed her window over the end of the damp diaper, where it flapped outside in the wind.

The flapping worked well for my mom, muffling protests of embarrassment from the back seat.

At sixteen I ran into luck—finding something more calming and way more fun than being a big sister in a back seat—open windows and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” on dates with Steve.

But even better is old music through the Bluetooth and a smile that calls back the decades.

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.