Apple to Apple

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.

On Sunday morning, March 8, the day of the changing of time, my husband gave me his biyearly gift—setting the new time on my thirty-nine clocks. Cell phone in hand, to keep the times accurate, he wound his way through the rooms of our house.

He changed them all—the counterclockwise clock, the word clock, and the geometry clock; miniature clocks, like the hand painted one from Delft and a homemade wooden one; the math-problem clock and a clock that shows days of the week; clocks that were gifts from students and friends and my husband.

He sprang all these clocks forward, one hour, ending standard time with its bright mornings and darker evenings, bringing our home into Daylight Saving Time with its darker mornings and brighter evenings, following a century-old system.

Not that he’s a fan of this change.

He’s against all this switching back and forth, in the camp with others who think we should choose one permanent time system—it doesn’t matter which—and just stick with it.

But some folks care which. The sunlight seekers—those who want permanent Daylight-Saving Time—say light in the evening matters. More people will shop and eat out and play golf. And fewer will commit crimes.

Many scientists opt for Standard Time. Morning light gives strength for the day, they say, and evening dark brings sleep. My ninety-three-year-old dad, still sharp in his thinking, sides with these scientists. The sun helps us track time, he says, so go with the sun. It should be straight up in the sky at noon in the middle of each time zone.

Daylight Saving Time? Standard Time? We haven’t agreed. So we keep switching.

Down the street from our house of many clocks stands the courthouse clock tower. It’s a handy way to tell the time when I’m working in my garden. I can hear the chimes and see the hands move.

A hundred years ago, the commissioners in our county just didn’t know what to do. Time wasn’t federally mandated then. Some shop owners operated on Daylight Saving Time, others on Standard Time. Many displayed two clocks in their stores. So what time should the courthouse clock show?

Both, they decided. And they ordered that a second set of eight-foot-long hands be added to the clock.

If I’d been in my garden a hundred years ago, I could have looked at the tower clock and read both times—fast time with the red hands and slow time with the black.

What will happen? Only time—some kind of time—will tell.

But perhaps next year my husband will be able to end this decades-long, twice-a-year gift he’s been giving to me.

You should go to the doctor with my mom. You might be surprised.

Not me. Not anymore. After dozens of visits to urologists, oncologists, podiatrists, primary care, and physical therapy, the pattern is clear.

For my mom, these appointments are not so much about infections or tightened tendons, or high blood pressure. For my mom, it’s story time.

Lately, she’s been slipping a book into her go-to-doctor bag. Erma’s Story, the book my dad compiled for her, about her childhood. Two weeks ago, she gave this book to Dr. Madison, who read it. And last week, they traded stories.

My mom grew up in a family of 13, he in a family of 14. Both walked to school—she across the mountains, and he fifteen miles, from the small Liberian village where he lived to the nearest city school, thumbing a ride when he could.

They talked about now living in a town where most people have no clue what it’s like to grow up in Liberia or in an Amish Mennonite community in the mountains. About how it feels to be different from those around you.

Today, my mom does it again, this time with a physical therapist, who mentions my mom’s strong grip.

“Milking hands,” my mom says.

They trade farm stories, the therapist having spent summers on her grandparents’ farm. And the therapist gets a book.

If I were on the exam table, I’d be wondering. Has my blood pressure soared? Do my lab results show infection? Is the biopsy benign?

These questions flit somewhere in my mom’s mind. But not in the forefront.

At 97, here’s what matters—her stories and theirs.

We sit on leather recliners in front of the fireplace and watch as the Olympic U.S. hockey team competes against Canada. Just the two of us, the house picked up, quiet. No babies cry. No diapers need to be changed. And no need to set an alarm for an early morning college class.

It’s nothing like February 22 forty-six years ago.

“You need some fun,” Steve’s uncle had said one evening. “Come get our black-and-white for the Olympics.”

So on the first day of the Olympics, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, Steve brought home his uncle’s fourteen-inch television and set it on the dresser in our bedroom. At first the picture was fuzzy. But Steve wrapped aluminum foil around the ends of the rabbit ears, and the reception improved.

We put the children to bed early, shook a pan across the gas burner on our stove until we had filled our large green Tupperware bowl with popped corn. And settled on our bed—really a four-inch foam mattress on a piece of plywood. With our backs against the wall, we celebrated Valentine’s Day by watching the XIII Olympic Winter Games.

Friday evening, the U.S. hockey team, full of amateurs and college students, played the Soviets, the favored team that had won four Olympic gold medals in a row.

I felt funny about how much I wanted the U.S. to win. This probably had to do with overhearing my dad, back when I was six, worrying about the Bay of Pigs, saying that the Russians could bring an end to the world as we knew it. It had to do with cowering under my desk during the bomb drills at Yoder School.

It had to do with stories I’d been told about Clayton Kratz, a Mennonite relief worker who disappeared in Soviet Russia while bringing relief to Russians who were starving because of World War I and famine. My great-uncle Alvin Miller had been sent to find him. My uncle was unsuccessful.

God loved the people of the U.S.S.R as much as he loved the people in the U.S.A, my dad often said. And so should we.

Still, as the home crowd waved flags and sang “God Bless America,” as the U.S. tied the game in the third period, and as the teams fought into the last minute, I wanted the U.S. hockey team to crush the U.S.S.R.

Sportscaster Al Michaels ended the game by screaming into the microphone, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

We needed some miracles back then—more money for food, more hours in the day to write those papers and rock those babies, a clear path for getting through college as young parents.

But now, forty-six years later, silver-haired and having seen so much pain in the world, I want to believe in miracles even more. Big miracles, wrought of courage and kindness.