Author: Phyllis Swartz

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.”

“Is the universe a friendly place?”

Some people say Einstein asked this. Some say he didn’t. Either way, it was good question for me.

When I came up against a daunting class of middle schoolers or inmates or the highly gifted, my first instinct was to keep myself alive. Convinced the class was full of students out to get me, I’d build my defenses and scan for trouble.

Sullen faces, knowing looks, shuttered eyes, closed books—I noticed all this and expected the worst.  

My clenched gut was a clear answer to Einstein: The universe was not a friendly place.

But in an unfriendly place I couldn’t teach, not really. There was no curiosity, no marvel, no weaving of magic. And no learning, not real learning.

To truly teach, I had to foster love and forge peace. I had to look for the right, not the wrong.

Each time I switched to this focus, something happened. I began to notice small, everyday miracles—the lifted chin of an adolescent on the first day back after his mother’s funeral, the suspiciously bright eyes of an inmate as he asked what teenagers need from a father, the catch in the throat of a science geek who told me she had just discovered her life calling, to study black holes

To be sure, trouble still bubbled up. The lives of many students are messy and filled with pressure and pain. But when trouble came, I learned to first assume the best, not the worst. And even in the worst, to assume there was more to know. And this sucked the power out of trouble.

As I learned all this, my answer to Einstein began to change. The universe was a friendly place.

At least some of the time.

And these photos show why:

They’re coming. They of the ferocious appetites, who prowl through the kitchen two hours after a meal, who chug milk by gallons and devour hamburgers and pasta and eggs and bread and, actually, vegetables.

For the past seventeen summers, they’ve descended on us. This used to mean changing diapers and tying on bibs. In those first years, they were easily entertained with backyard sprinklers and Plasma cars and Razor scooters. For hours they painted with water—the walls of the garage, the picnic table, the doors all around the house—and marveled at their handiwork. They colored pictures as we told Bible stories.

They went to bed early back then, and shook us awake at the crack of dawn. During their long afternoon naps, we’d catch our breath. Now we can breathe long into the morning. Their internal clocks now hold them to their cots. And as they sleep on and on, their pituitary glands release growth hormones. The tables have turned. Now it is our turn to shake them awake.

They may slog through their mornings. But at what is our usual bedtime, they become fully alive. And if we want them to talk with us, we need to adjust to their schedule. It’s like we change time zones without leaving home.

We’ve traded in Plasma cars for roller coasters and kayaks for sprinklers and crayons for discussions on how to bring a bit of heaven to earth. We take them to outdoor dramas—this year Trumpet in the Land, the story of the brutal massacre of 96 pacifist Moravian Delaware Indians by an American militia. And we cook together and do dishes and visit their great-grandparents, just three blocks away.

Cousin Week, I know, won’t last forever. We’re headed for our dotage and they for adulthood. But for this time of life, Cousin Week, for me, is the most wonderful time of the year.