Author: Phyllis Swartz

When I walked into her kitchen the other day, my ninety-five-year-old mother looked baffled.

“Do you know how to make a toasted cheese sandwich?” she asked. “I can’t find a recipe anywhere.”

I thought she must be joking. But her kitchen counter was strewn with half a dozen cookbooks, and she seemed to expect an answer.

“Have you ever made toasted cheese sandwiches?” she asked me. “Have I?”

My mom has been cooking for nearly eight decades. She’s prepared perhaps 50,000 meals in her lifetime, mostly at home, but also in high school and college cafeterias.

When I was only nine or ten, she taught me to make toasted cheese sandwiches, to spread the butter to the edges of the bread, to keep the heat low so the cheese would melt before the bread crisped too dark. And she showed me how to flip the sandwich to the other side at just the right time.

Now, sixty years later, we switched places.

“First you butter the bread,” I told my mom.

As we made the sandwich together, she began to remember. And to laugh that she had forgotten how to do what she had done so many times.

“I’m going to tell your dad about this,” she said. “And you tell your brothers and sisters. You can tell anyone.”

She flipped the sandwich onto the plate.

“People need to know what it’s like to be old,” she said. “And learn to laugh at themselves. Then they can be happy at ninety-five.”

More and more, I’m teaching my mom what she’s already known.

 But she’s still teaching me.

Chocolate milk was the drink of my childhood. I drank it each Sunday evening at the kitchen table while eating popcorn. But I liked it even more at my grandparents’ wiener roasts. We’d gather—aunts and uncles and grandchildren—in the pasture near the spring behind my grandparents’ house. Before we drank chocolate milk from colorful aluminum tumblers, we’d spear wieners with the point of a stick and roast them, each according to our own style.

“Hold it right above the flame,” a cousin would say. “It gets done faster.”

“No,” an uncle would counter, “go for the red-hot embers. It gets done all the way through.”

Whether charred or lightly steamed, what topped off the wieners was the milk straight from my grandfather’s Jersey cows—rich, creamy and now flavored with chocolate.

There in the pasture with the fire crackling and the crickets chirping and my grandpa telling stories, all was well in my world.

Later, in a city school far from the pasture, I drank chocolate milk again. This time not rich and creamy. This time from a cardboard carton.

I didn’t know then that my mid-morning treat came to me from a national school milk program. I didn’t know that nearly three-quarters of the country’s children were drinking this milk along with me. Or that the program that brought it worked toward two goals at once—to improve nutrition for the country’s children and to make use of the nation’s milk surplus.

I only knew that I found quiet satisfaction in sipping milk through my straw with other kids. There wasn’t a mountain stream gurgling nearby. My grandma wasn’t bustling about handing out the aluminum tumblers that made cold drinks even colder. And there were no curious Jerseys across the fence blinking long eyelashes and lowing as if to ask whether we liked their milk.

Still, there was comfort in those third-pint cartons of milk. School milk breaks might not have come with the big feelings of a wiener roast. But small daily events have a way of becoming memorable. From the first long sip to the final slurp, we were together taking a break. And when we went back to long division, it seemed, somehow, more possible.

I’ve heard Handel’s Messiah in churches and concert halls, but never before in an ICU.

I remember the December, my husband and I bought tickets to hear it at the Ohio Theatre. We sat under thousands of ceiling stars gilted with gold leaf as a coloratura soprano sang, “Rejoice greatly.” 

The theatre was bathed in deep scarlet and gold hues. A 21-foot, 2.5-ton chandelier with 339 light bulbs and strings of crystal hung from the vaulted ceiling. Golden horses galloped around each cluster of its candelabras.

The Ohio Theatre was designed as a sort of palace for ordinary folk, a place that would free them from daily duties and usual thoughts.

It was easy to rejoice greatly that December as I sat with my husband in such grandeur. It seemed bit of heaven.

But in the ICU, Handel’s Messiah took an earthy vibe.

My brother and I heard the violins on a far-away stage play through my laptop speaker. But through all 53 movements, monitors beeped, wheels rolled, lights dinged, and nurses consulted.

From vocalists, we heard arias, recitatives, ensembles, and choruses. But from a bed in the room across the curtain, a poor soul moaned incessantly.

We were just two people in one small cubical in a vast hospital complex filled with people fighting for health and life. Just two people in a city where people battle poverty and crime. And just two people in a world where people are caught in the ravages of war.

So much pain. And such need for solace.

I’ll never listen to the Messiah in the same way again, not after I’ve been so near to the suffering parts of it and in such deep need of its comfort. The Ohio Theater may match the great beauty of the Messiah. But perhaps heaven came closer for me than ever in the ICU.

***

Postscript: My little brother is now out of ICU, out of the hospital, and home for Christmas.

I’m sitting again in my little brother’s hospital room. Fewer lights blink, fewer alarms beep, and fewer tubes link his body to bags. His heart is repaired and cleaned of infection. His numbers are good. And his post-surgery delirium is gone.

He’s been sleeping soundly. And long. And this deep sleep seems to be healing him of the past week’s damages, building him up and making him new.

When he wakes between naps, his mind is clear, and his eyes are bright.

My little brother is back again.

When he was a baby, he woke from his hard-won naps looking refreshed and ruddy and ready to go.

And now he is ready to get out of ICU, get out of the hospital, and get home for Christmas.

God willing, he’ll make it.

We are grateful.

I sit with my little brother in ICU. On monitors around his bed, lights blink and alarms beep. The infection causes his body to convulse and the bed to shake.

I am taken back almost six decades. He’s a baby in a carriage. It is my job to jiggle him to sleep. And what a job!

He was a high-gear baby, his motor stuck in fast. And so alert that he missed nothing. A wrinkle in his diaper, the flick of a light switch, the scrape of a chair across a floor in the next room, a dog barking in the next block—any of these could jerk him back from the brink of sleep.

If I got the jiggle wrong, his fists clenched and his back arched. And what came from his mouth was more than a cry. It was an urgent demand. It was as if he was announcing to the world that he was going to be a handful.

And he was. A delightful handful.

One of the joys of my childhood was to teach my little brother to read. It wasn’t hard. Being a teacher, I decided, as we bent together over Dick and Jane books, would be easy and fun.

Perhaps he led me into my life-long fascination with how people learn. His mind seemed to be in a constant firestorm of mental activity. Already as a toddler, he showed early signs of his ability to think rigorously and skillfully. And this propensity to actively question every step of the thinking process turned him later into an editor, and still later into a professor.

Tomorrow, surgeons will open my little brother’s infected heart. They aim to clean it of infection and rebuild the parts infection has destroyed.

But now, infection shakes his body. I wish I could pick him up and wrap him tight. I wish I could put him into a baby carriage and jiggle him, just right. And help him into a peaceful, healing sleep.

***

Postscript: My little brother’s surgery is complete. His heart is repaired. Now for the difficult healing.

Mr. Mitchell reminded me of a chipmunk—short and squat with puffed-out cheeks and a thick neck. Even the suit he wore everyday looked like a chipmunk—tawny brown, streaked with chalk dust, and flecked from chemical stains.

He brought no excitement to chemistry class. So students stepped up by setting off stink bombs during labs and dropping calcium metal into a pen to make it explode like a firecracker.

Mr. Mitchell lectured in a monotone and in circles. And if we managed to butt in with a question, he repeated what he had just said or contradicted himself or told us we should have found the answer in the textbook chapter he had assigned us to read.

Nevertheless, Mr. Mitchell made a way for us to succeed. Well, at least to earn an A.

His testing pattern was consistent. On day one, Mr. Mitchell would announce a test and conduct a review that no one understood. The second day, we’d take the test. On the third day, he’d turn back our graded tests, which we’d all failed, and harangue us for stupidity and indolence. We endured because we knew what was next—the right answers for the test, which we would retake on day four.

In study hall, we’d drill each other.

“Number 13?” John Jenkins would ask.

“Single replacement reaction.”

Donna Boyd beat me to the answer. But neither of us knew the question for the answer.

Not that this mattered. When we took the exact test the next day, we’d all earn A’s. And without even reading the questions.

Mr. Mitchell taught me exactly how not to be a teacher.

***

Read about other, more excellent teachers in my memoir Yoder School.

In a moment of self-disclosure, I once told a class about a devout childhood prayer of mine. I prayed it every night for maybe a year. Not wanting to appear self-seeking, I’d say the regular bedtime litany first, asking God to bless my parents and sisters and brothers and all the children around the world who had nothing to eat. But with that out of the way, I’d turn to begging.

“Please, please, please,” I’d implore with my eyes squeezed tight, “before my childhood ends, help someone invent a jump-rope turning machine.”

Jump rope was my sport. Too short to make a basket and too light to swing a bat, I was always chosen last for those teams. But with jump rope, I had the chance to be a star—to skip hot peppers faster than the brawny kids and to catch them in jump-rope tag and to beat them by jumping to higher numbers during the jump-rope jingles.

I loved jumping rope, so much that when I wasn’t jumping, I often dreamed I was.

But I had a problem. It was hard to convince my brothers to stop riding bikes and shooting baskets and come turn ropes. And my sisters were too young to turn steady or fast. If I only had a jump-rope turning machine.

Back then, I didn’t understand my passion for jumping. I didn’t know that jumping increased my feel-good hormones and pumped oxygen through my brain and acted as a metronome to develop my coordination. I only knew that, after jumping, the world felt right, and that fears of riots and kidnappings and communists coming and the world ending were less likely to creep into bed with me.

Not last night but the night before,
24 robbers came to the door.
As I ran out,
They ran in
How many policemen came around?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .

Mother, mother, I am sick.
Call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.
Doctor, doctor, will I die?
Yes, my child, but don’t you cry.
How many folks will bury me?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .

As we chanted about violence and death in the circle of the rope, life seemed less dire.

My prayers about the turning machine went unanswered. But several years after I told my class about those nightly pleas, a former student stopped by after school. She was waving a newspaper clipping.

“They did it, Mrs. Swartz,” she said. “They invented a rope-turning machine.”

She handed me the advertisement.

“They missed your childhood by a bit,” she said. “But still, you could buy it.”

She threw me an impudent smile and left me standing there, holding the tardy ad.

Three times this week, I’ve been asked the same question. And in much the same way. Before asking, each questioner studied my face, seeming to notice lines across my forehead and wrinkles around my eyes. And each hesitated for a moment before asking.

A new father, who had just eaten at my table, asked it this way, “Of all the years you’ve lived, which was the best?”

A few days later, a mid-life couple staggering under responsibility sat in our living room.

“If you could have frozen time,” one of them asked, “what age would you have chosen?”

The next day, I took my ninety-five-year-old mother to a podiatrist. Next to my mom, the podiatrist and I looked young. Still, our hair color matched. And so did the sag of our faces.

“You know,” he said, looking up at me from my mom’s feet. “I wonder sometimes. If I could go back to a younger age, what age would I choose?”

He paused for a moment.

“Do you ever think about that?” he asked me.

So I told him what the young father asked and the middle-aged couple. And I told him my answer to their questions—that I would choose my age, right now.

We talked about it, the podiatrist and I, how at this age we have less to prove, how we are more okay with what we can do and can’t do, how we feel more levelheaded and less pressured, and how people look at our silvered hair and make us sages by default.

We talked about feeling sorry for the young with all the hurdles they have to jump and the uphill battles they have to face.

“Still,” the podiatrist said. “I remember how I felt when I wrestled in college, so toned and agile and fast. When I moved, nothing creaked.”

He fell into silence. His hands kept working my mom’s feet, but his mind seemed to have flown to a long-ago gym.

“You know,” he said, looking up again. “What I’d really like is to have my old body back and keep the head I have now.”

All this time, my mom sat listening. She’s lived twenty-some years longer than me and the podiatrist. But neither of us thought to draw her into our conversation.

Though silver is in our hair, we’re apparently not as wise as we appear to be.

The poster in the dentist’s waiting room conjured up some memories. A smile, it said, is a curve that sets everything straight.

And those words on that wall took me back to the late sixties when Bob Dylan was singing “The Answer, My Friend, is Blowing in the Wind,” and we were all letting it all hang out and telling it like it was.

In my group of friends, we tried to be real—to rid ourselves of the armors our parents had taught us to wear and be completely candid with each other. In this way, we hoped to discover our best selves. 

So we’d sit in an honesty circle, maybe twenty of us, and give each other the right to interfere with our lives. One-by-one, we’d speak, each of us telling all of us what we didn’t like about the person to our left.

Maybe this exercise is what wiped the smile off my face. Or maybe it was the war in Vietnam and the riots in the cities and the assassinations. Or maybe I didn’t know how to be a teenager in that time and that place. Whatever the reasons, gravity just seemed to pull my mouth down.

And they called me on it.

Smile, they said in those circles. Get out of your head. Chill. Show some feeling. Hang loose. Quit being uptight. Get a groove. Lighten up.

So a smile became my armor. And though I never want to sit in such a circle again, what I learned helped me then and continued to benefit me years later as I taught.

I found that in the classroom, smiles made good things happen. Smiles won students over and helped me stay positive, even on bad days.

There’s science behind this.

When you smile, your brain gets the message that all is well. This sends feel-good chemicals through your brain, lifting your mood and lowering your stress.

And smiles are contagious. So when students smile back, good things happen to them. And their brains sync for learning.

I doubt my long-ago friends understood this science. But I’m sure they would have agreed with the dentist’s poster—A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.