Author: Phyllis Swartz

Middle school teachers should get hazard pay, someone told me once. And I knew what he meant. Middle schoolers have a way of taking you to the edge.

They walk into class asking if we are doing anything today, drop backpacks in aisles, tap pencils incessantly, and forget to wear deodorant. They talk when they shouldn’t and fall silent when asked to speak. And after you give crystal-clear directions in middle school speak, they ask, “Now what are we supposed to do?”

They’ve got what educators call adolescent egocentrism, meaning their world is small and they’re in its center. They tend to believe they’re the focus of everyone’s attention—that they’re being spoken of in every room and that one social mishap could ruin their lives forever.

One day they show manners, asking how you’re doing and lending pencils to classmates. The next day, they sulk and throw tantrums with the skill of a toddler. They’re young enough to clip Critter Plush Animals to their binders and old enough to carry guns. And you never know which version will walk through your door.

One thing for sure, middle schoolers never bore you.

This is because good middle school teachers always do two things at once. First, they use empathy to see students as they see themselves. And more, they use insight to see adolescents as they cannot see themselves. Good teachers use this empathy and insight to pull back the curtain so kids can see the beginnings of what they can become.

Kindergarten teachers may get hugged every day while love from a middle schooler is often hard-won, but when it comes . . .finally . . ., it makes up for living on the edge.

One Friday afternoon, three middle school girls came to me with a sealed envelope.

“Wanna send a message to your husband,” Natasha said, her tone as brusque and off-hand as it usually was in class.

“Mr. Swartz,” my husband read aloud when he opened it. “When Mrs. Swartz dies, please invite us to her funeral.”

Apparently for Natasha, writing please was easier than saying it.

I’m back home from the Danube, living regular life in what I’ve always considered to be an old, old house. Built in 1872, it has ten-foot ceilings and narrow closets. It is replete inside and out with spindle work and stained glass. And its floors remind me of what the Austrian architect Hundertwasser once said about old-house slopes.

“The uneven floor,” he said, “becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet.”

But after a trip down the Danube, my house doesn’t seem so old.

“You’ve got to be careful in Europe,” a guide told us. “Lots of buildings here pretend to be old. Don’t be fooled.”

And she explained the sometimes subtle clues that give away true age.

“Look for concrete,” she said. “Concrete wasn’t invented until the mid-1850s. If you see concrete, the building isn’t that old.”

Really old buildings, she went on to explain, have irregular hand-cut bricks and stones, metal gutters, timbered doors, and enough chimneys to heat all the rooms.

But with some buildings, there’s no guesswork. They tell their ages right out.

“Watch the roof overhangs,” a guide in Salzburg told us.

And looking up, we could see two dates painted on buildings, the first showing the year it was built; the second showing the year it was renovated.

On our last touring day, we ate in what is considered to be the oldest restaurant in Europe, perhaps in the world. Built in 803, St. Peter Stiftskulinarium fed Christopher Columbus, Michael Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I sat there eating chicken on polenta under a chandelier hanging from a coffered ceiling and tried to take in the years and decades and centuries that together have amounted to more than a millennium.

And that’s when I realized that my house is new after all.

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Traveling down the Danube, my daughter and I kept hearing voices. And we listened. They were telling us, after all, what we’d never heard before—that chocolate makers in Salzburg had to prove they weren’t sampling sweets by whistling as they worked; that lots of chimneys on a roof meant lots of money, and so some people added fake chimneys to fool their neighbors; that Maria Theresa, who was the ruler of the vast Habsburg Empire for 40 years, also had 16 children.

We listened even when it was hard.

At the foot of the Plague Column, our guide told us that Vienna lost two thirds of its population in one year. Outside the Colosseum building in Regensburg, we learned about Jewish prisoners, who had been brought from death camps and housed in the building.

By day, they endured frequent beatings as they repaired railroads that had been bombed by the Allies. In the evening, they were marched back to the Colosseum, the stronger dragging the weak. A handcart followed behind them, carrying the dead of the day. At night, they were packed like sardines into the dance hall to sleep on wood shavings behind windows that were barb-wired and nailed shut. And each morning, they were warned at roll call that escape attempts would result in the shooting of ten fellow inmates.

Such listening takes effort. We all think faster than most people talk. And this leaves lots of time between words for brains to wander off, especially if you are standing on a street corner in a new city on a new continent. But my daughter and I found ourselves unusually attentive.

And we began to wonder why. So we took notice of not only what guides said, but how they said it. We found that they didn’t speak in black and white, like they were reciting. They colored their words—emphasizing and de-emphasizing, pausing to create anticipation and to give time to mourn.

Their voices were full of tears and of smiles. And because they were taken by their content, we were also drawn in. Never syrupy, their warm buttery tones made us want more.

We started thinking about our own voices. What would happen, we wondered, if we borrowed their skills? My daughter, in the thick of her career as a parent coach, has years to practice. I, on the other hand, have already run my race. But I still use my voice—with young people who ask to meet with me, with an occasional speaking assignment, with elderly parents, with my grandchildren and children, with my husband.

And so I’m grateful that, along with the wonderful and terrible stories I heard traveling down the Danube, I also learned more about how to tell stories.

I’m on a ten-year-in-the-making trip with my daughter. As we sail down the Danube, we keep stopping to visit castle districts, pause in churches, walk narrow streets in medieval cities, see great art, and hear transcendent music. And there’s the beauty of the river making its way through ten countries.

But sprinkled through charm are constant reminders of how Europe has been pummeled by war.

In memory of the 3,500 people who were lined up on bank of the Danube, told to remove their shoes, and shot into the river, sculptor Gyula Pauer created sixty pairs of period-appropriate shoes out of iron. Then he fastened them securely to the bank.

In Budapest, we saw rows of communist bloc housing. During World War II, eighty percent of the city was bombed. So after the Soviets drove the Nazis from the city, they built massive concrete structures filled with flats. Some of buildings have now been brightened with color and balconies, but they continue to remind Hungarians that they have come under military occupation one too many times.

Hungary’s national anthem may be the saddest in the world.  For eight stanzas, it laments lost wars, slavery, corpses, and destroyed cities. In the song, Hungarians beg God for relief from their long-ill fate. This haunting music moved me, even though I was hearing it through the tinny speaker of a bus.

“This is my city,” said our guide on the bus. “And the city of my parents and grandparents. But I’m telling you, and it is true, that we are the grouchiest people in the world.”

“Not me,” she added, “and not my family. Just everyone else.”

She paused.

“After all,” she said, her voice now serious, “we’ve been through it!”

Beauty and sadness—both are touching my daughter and me. 

My mom grew up plain. And not only in how she dressed. Her speech, she was taught, should be as unadorned as the hair tucked under her head covering and her ankle-length, solid-color dress. Her yes should mean yes and her no should mean no and God’s name should never be taken in vain. Not in Pennsylvania Dutch and not even in English.

She knew all this. And followed it mostly. But she had an ear for the dramatic. One day in town, she listened to a conversation between her papa and an Englischer. Over and over, the Englischer used a phrase with a ring to it, one she decided to use on the right occasion.

Just a few hours later during the dinner blessing of the food, her mind strayed back to the Englischer’s words. With the family all gathered, she decided, this was the time.

At the amen, she was ready.

“My gosh,” she said. “Lang mich die grumberi.” Pass the potatoes.

No one said a word of reprimand to her. Not then, not later. The looks on their faces said it all. And she never used those words again.

But when I was a kid living in Flint, Michigan, far from the plain people, she taught me about plain speech. A softened-up oath, she explained, is God becoming gosh and hell becoming heck and damnation becoming tarnation. You might not be coming right out and using God’s name in vain, but you’re getting mighty close.

So though most of our neighbors used these words, we didn’t say them at our house.

But I noticed something. My mom still found ways to add flavor to her speech.

“Mei zeit noch amal!” she might say at an unfortunate event. Here we go again.

Or when something unbelievable happened: Unvergleichlich! That crazy stuff!

For ninety-five years, my mom has lived simply, dressed simply, and spent simply. Her yes has meant yes and her no has meant no. But these plain ways haven’t kept the sparkle from her speech.

I saw them. And for an instant, I stopped walking.

They stood there, between me and the Walmart service counter, exuding their dark, mysterious vibe—lips and hair colored black and clothes as dark as a funeral. Each held in his arm an equally grim skateboard.

Perhaps I didn’t need the Walmart service counter after all.

But before I turned away, I caught myself.

My middle school students and I had just read The Outsiders. This is a book about a bitter rivalry between two groups with socioeconomic differences. My students had appreciated the themes—that differences don’t need to make enemies and that commonalities exist among people with differences.

I had hoped reading The Outsiders would help my students build bridges, not walls. And here I was, my feet fixed to the floor.

I took a step and then another. They noticed me coming, their eyes watchful. And suddenly, I was surrounded, arms reaching out to hug me. I knew them. There was Jason, who lived down the street, and Jamal, who loved to draw, and Andre, who had come to talk to me on the day his father entered a state prison, and Isaac who had stopped by my room on the last day of school several years before to thank me for a good year.

We stood there blocking the Walmart service counter while they told me what was going right for them and what was going wrong. And we remembered the detention I had assigned to Jamal for disrespecting the girl who sat in front of him and the phone call I had made to Andre’s dad when he couldn’t remember to do his homework.

Then we realized we were blocking the Walmart service counter, so we hugged each other goodbye. As I stepped to the counter to do my business, they, in their profusion of goth refinery, walked the other way.

The most bitter feuds of my childhood took place at the kitchen sink. Getting along with siblings can be tough in any setting, but especially when you work just inches from each other in a cook-from-scratch kitchen that feeds nine people three times a day.

We soldiered through stacks of plates and mounds of pots and pans, each of us assigned a job: scraping, washing, rinsing, drying, putting away, and sweeping under the table. As the wash water darkened and tea towels dampened, we issued forth a barrage of complaints–scraped dishes still gunky, washed dishes dirty, rinsed dishes soapy, dried dishes crowding the counter. Someone was sure to be sniffling or whistling off key or making faces.

But this was only some of the time.

Other times it was us against the dishes. Shoulder to shoulder, we tackled a messy kitchen . . . and more. With eyes on the dishes, it was easier to talk about what it was like to be the only Mennonite kid in our classes, how we could cope in the year 1984 when Big Brother would be watching, and how infinity could go on and on and on. Perhaps the simple, repetitive nature of washing dishes gave us the courage to admit our angst.

Those may have been the good-old days. But these days, I’m grateful for a dishwasher. During our family’s staycation this summer, the fourteen of us each loaded our own plates into the dishwasher. And while it washed and rinsed and dried, and achieved a level of sanitation far greater than that of the long-ago kitchen, we played Frisbee golf and visited a cave and coerced the grandchildren into reading at a poetry slam.

Troubled thoughts didn’t stop when people found they could survive 1984. There’s still infinity. And the feeling of standing alone. And adults coercing cool teens into poetry slams.

But I’ve seen my grandchildren pound out anxieties on cross-country trails and basketball courts. I’ve heard them in deep discussion on late-night road trips in dark vans. Dishwater isn’t the only place to shed angst.

It was surreal. Fifty years before in this very room, we had signed each other’s yearbooks. And here we were again, in the best possible venue for a half-century class reunion—our high school cafeteria with the same old floor tile and the same old windows tilted open to catch a breeze that still wasn’t there.

We were not unscathed. We had lost muscle and vision and memory and health. We had lost spouses through death and divorce and dementia. We had taken career hits, many when General Motors pulled more than 70,000 jobs out of Flint. And we had lost classmates through cancer and accidents and murder.

I hadn’t been one of the cool kids at Bendle High School, but at this reunion, they made me feel cool.

“You might remember me,” I told everyone when I introduced an icebreaker, “as the little Mennonite girl with long skirts and long hair and a covering on my head.”

As I expected, I saw recognition dawn. But what I hadn’t expected was all the warm hugs from all the cool kids.

We had nothing to prove in the cafeteria that day, no need to brag, nothing to show off. We were content to just sit with each other, to share memories and renew friendship.

Brian and Sue and I had a conversation. Now all retired, one of us had been a police captain, one a casino blackjack dealer, and one a teacher—all jobs with high risk for conflict.

“How did you de-escalate?” one of us asked.

The dealer spoke first: “I killed them with kindness.”

That’s it, I thought. That’s what we’ve learned in fifty years. That’s what I feel in this high school cafeteria on this day.

What mattered had changed. Dunking baskets and running 100 yards had shrunk to size. So had class standing and victories on the homecoming court.

What mattered now in this room was kindness.

Swanson’s new TV dinners had nothing on my mom. Not owning a television, we didn’t peel back the foil to eat a pre-made Salisbury steak in front of “I Love Lucy.” And though we were jealous of kids who did, we had something better—reading suppers.

On evenings my dad was out of town, we’d troop to the table, the seven of us, with a picture book or a Hardy Boys mystery or The Diary of a Young Girl. And after saying grace for the mashed potatoes and meat gravy, we’d fall into a silence that was usually broken only by the turning of pages and the scraping of forks.

Occasionally, one of the little kids would chuckle over The Cat in the Hat. Or someone would look up from the latest Guinness World Records to ask if we all wanted to see a picture of the tallest man in the world. Sometimes we’d hear someone chuckle or sigh or say, “Please pass the potatoes,” but these interruptions were usually ignored and certainly not applauded.

My mom would glance up from her book now and then. And as she trailed her eyes around the table, she’d look downright pleased with herself. As a child, I thought she was delighting in our literary gain.

But years later on a cranky summer evening when my own kids had nothing nice to say, I got an idea.

“Guess what!” I said to my kids, and I sent them for books.

As pages turned and bickering stopped, I understood that long-ago smugness on my mother’s face.

But my mother gave me more than a tool for grumpy kids. She also showed me how to compound joys. So since I’ve retired, I bring two things to my daily lunch—a sandwich and a book.

“Eating and reading,” C.S. Lewis said, “are two pleasures that combine admirably.”