Apple to Apple

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.

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.