Author: Phyllis Swartz

When I was a kid, I dreamt of what could be.

On laundry day, I’d thunk the iron down on yet another of my father’s shirts and conjure up a magical closet, one that would sanitize clothes and shake out wrinkles, all with the press of a button.

When my arms ached late at night from holding a book above my head, I’d imagine a futuristic book, one suspended at just the right distance above me, that would turn its pages with the double-blink of my eyes.

And when I longed for the mountains of Western Maryland, I’d concoct a personal aircraft, something like a closed-in version of a flying carpet, that could transport me 500 miles in ten minutes. I’d drop in at my grandparents for apple butter on home-baked bread, and be back home in time for bed, even on a school night.

But in all my daydreams, I never imagined last Thursday evening.

First, my daughter texted me: Micah’s playing in a basketball tournament tonight. Want to watch?

I did.

So on my computer, I logged onto the NFHS Network. And there in my lap, I held, not only my grandson Micah, but his entire basketball team as they dribbled and passed and shot and rebounded balls, almost 500 miles away in Illinois.

Micah had just swished a three-pointer, when my phone rang.

“Christy’s hosting an apartment concert,” said my sister. “Want to join?”

I did.

So I logged onto Zoom and propped my phone beside the computer.

With the basketball game in Illinois muted, I could hear the exquisite sounds of my niece’s violin as she played for her guests in Washington, D.C. Christy’s violin has many voices, haunting and sad and shimmering and urgent. And she used all these voices to tell the Christmas story.

With the basketball swishing and the violin strings vibrating, I sat there in a marvel. This I had never imagined.

I’ve been watching my parents sing their way home. And I have a stage-front seat. Grab bars are going up in the showers, pill boxes line the mantle, and, if you don’t watch your step, you could well stumble over a walker or a couch-side tray or a sock-puller-upper.

Likely not in their last days, my parents know they are in their last years, and they’ve made a choice, each of them—that though their audiences have narrowed, they will keep on singing.

And so my mother sends her great-grandchildren to deliver hand-written notes to her backyard neighbor and her next-door neighbor and her across-the-street neighbor. She journals with her Bible for hours in the early morning when she can’t sleep anyway. And though her energy is waning, she has idea after idea, each one as urgent as the last—a theme for a drama that should be produced, a group of people who could gather for a party, a book to be written, a class to be taught.

My father writes birthday and anniversary cards for all of his seven children and their spouses, 19 grandchildren, and 27 great-grandchildren, often including an original poem. He reads two side-by-side Bibles each morning, one German and the other English. And he researches and chronicles the history of the Casselman Valley Mennonite Church, knowing that what he doesn’t write may well be lost to following generations.

They’re not singing the same song. But they are both following the lyrics of the old children’s ditty—to brighten the road and lighten the load, to drive the shadows away, sing your way home at the close of the day.

“Keep your day job, Mrs. Swartz.”

This is what a principal said to me after I hit him with a basketball. Not on purpose, of course. But the temptation to amuse myself had been too great. On a trip to the office during my planning period, I had encountered a student in an otherwise empty hall.

Michael was a quiet kid who sat in the back of my second-period. There was never a moment’s trouble from him, but there weren’t moments of active engagement, either.

A gym helper, he was carrying a newly pumped-up basketball. On impulse, I held out my hands. Michael’s eyes widened, but he bounced the ball toward me. All the way down the long, empty hall we swapped bounce passes. Finally, he couldn’t help it. And a smile broke through.

At the corner where we would part ways, me to the office, him to the gym, my pass went awry. At that very moment, the principal came into view and the ball smacked into him. His face turned instantly stern and his mouth opened. Then he saw I was the culprit. But as Michael stood agape, a smile broke through on the principal’s face.

And that’s when the principal advised me not to switch to a basketball career.

Michael changed after that. He didn’t frantically wave his hand to answer every question I asked. But he looked up. He looked at me. He seemed to recognize that I was a person, even though I was a teacher. He even gave a nod now and then.

Got it, he was saying, I’m with you.

Michael taught me a lesson that that day—that sometimes teachers can reach students by breaking the shell of convention, by doing something off beat, a little quirky, something teachers don’t usually do.

I had often watched funny teachers and wish for their humor. But passing the basketball with Michael, showed that, if I couldn’t be funny, I could at least reach toward whimsy. And that students learned better when I did.

My grandsons are now the age of Mick when he came storming into my life. Seventeen years old with the body of a man, Mick had been living on his own for a year when someone turned him into social services. And he didn’t take kindly to being deposited in the children’s home where my husband and I were house parents.

I once read that fear can be smelled, that the sweat of terrified person actually emits signals that send the fear out to others. Nobody would have smelled fear on Mick when he showed up at the children’s home. But if fury works the same way, the room would have reeked. And while he was with us, Mick spread this ire—glaring, stomping, banging doors, smashing a hole in the kitchen wall, and threatening to bash in faces.

Back then, I didn’t understand much about teenagers. I hadn’t been the parent of teens or the grandparent. I hadn’t taught school for three decades. I hadn’t listened to inmates talk to me about how adults in their lives had messed up with them.

I wish I could do Mick again. Given a second chance, I’d applaud his ingenuity in making a life for himself. After his mom died and his dad went to prison and his drunk uncle knocked him around one time too many, Mick slept in his clunker of a car until he found a job flipping burgers, earning him enough money to rent a single room with a shared bathroom. On his off hours, Mick’s head was usually under the hood of a car, gathering skills from a street mechanic.

The caseworker had told me all this, but I didn’t sit with Mick, asking questions and paying tribute to his gumption. I was too busy urging him into the routines of a children’s home. I should have concentrated on Mick’s future, not on whether he had made his bed. I should have said no as little as possible and yes at every chance.

Mick didn’t stay with us long. He ran away. And I can see why.

I owe a debt to Mick and the other kids who came to live with us at the children’s home. I learned on these kids, as you can read in my book Yoder School. And the lessons they taught made me a better parent and grandparent and teacher.

But I feel bad. Mick was someone’s grandson.

My dad’s nearly-ninety-year-old knee took him places. As a boy, he trudged two miles to school on a country road that wound through the hills of Western Maryland. On long summer evenings, he ran barefoot across the yard playing tag with his cousins. And hand to the plow, he plodded in furrows behind Bob and Fern, the draft horses, to ready the ground for winter wheat.

And it took him across the world: Israel, Turkey, Cyprus, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Belgium, Great Britain, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Ecuador, and Canada.

In these last years, his knee has bent to help my mother when she fell, to wash her blood from the floor, and to spade her garden, because growing plants nourish her spirit.

But this last year, his knee has constrained him, keeping him in the house instead of on summer walks, on the couch while others rake his leaves and shovel his snow, and in a recliner at night, trying to find a position that will take away pain.

So to distract himself from the reality of a nearly-ninety-year- old body, my dad turned more fully to the life of the mind. When I dropped by to check on him, I’d find him at his computer, researching, for example, road conditions in the 1850s and how the indentured-servant system worked. Though his face was often fatigued with pain, his eyes would be alert and intrigued.

My dad’s knee did manage to take him one more place—to the hospital, where its worn-down parts were replaced with metal and plastic. And as we soldiered through the first post-op day, he seemed to manage his pain by turning to ideas. We talked about the difference between a meadow and a pasture, how President Buchannan might have staved off the Civil War, the function of applause at a sacred concert, and what it means to be one of eight billion people on the earth.

It’s been fascinating to watch my dad resolutely turn attention from his knee to ideas. But I’m looking forward to joining him for a long springtime walk with his new knee.

He was there for me every morning—Jerry Revish, with his tired face. At 5:00 A.M., when he signed on to anchor the morning news, I’d be already on the treadmill, gritting my teeth and thinking about how time slows down as speed picks up.

Though the treadmill was good for my health, I hated it. And no wonder. It was originally designed to punish inmates. On the first treadmills, inmates in British prisons stepped off their paces for ten hours a day in the summer and seven in the winter, turning wheels that pumped water and powered mills. This mind-numbing, body-breaking repetition was meant to teach a lesson, to rehabilitate, to prove that prison isn’t a good place to get free food, just in case someone was hankering after prison rations.

Unlike these inmates, I chose the pain of the treadmill.

Still, I didn’t want the company of a fresh-faced, day-brightener while I kept rhythm with the belt under my feet. I wanted someone of my own kind—someone like Jerry with hanging-low eyelids and droopy-mouth corners, someone with a lack of sleep visible on the face.

“My alarm rang before yours,” his face said every morning. “And I’m already at work. If I can do this, you can go wrangle a couple hundred middle school kids today.”

And I believed him. He had done it yesterday, he was doing it today, and he’d do it again tomorrow. He was doing it tired. But he was alert and skilled, it being no accident that he was an award-winning reporter.

And he was kind.

“Comfort the afflicted,” he liked to say, and he did.

His investigations helped exonerate a woman who had been wrongfully convicted of killing a baby. His reporting resulted in DNA testing for a man who had been unjustly imprisoned. And, away from the newsroom, he worked to establish a high-school journalism program for minority students.

Jerry Revish was known as a nice guy in a tough business.

And that became my goal each morning—to be a nice in the tough business of teaching, no matter that my face sagged.

I’m in a club I never joined. Not on purpose, at least. And though we never meet, those of us in the club recognize each other, wherever we are—in airports and hospital waiting rooms, in Egypt and Ohio. We find each other in grocery stores, our carts piled high with foods younger people eat. And those of us who are fortunate are sprinkled around at cross-country meets and basketball games and graduation parties.

You might think it’s the silver hair that helps us find each other. Or the lines that give our faces character. Or the occasional grimace when a body part fails—or one of the other medals of our long passage through life. But these are only the trifling signs.

What bonds us into a club is the instant knowing. From the very first moment our eyes meet, we have the feeling that we understand each other, that we can see in each other what we each know about ourselves.

We know the realities for our time of life. For example, people, especially those who don’t know us and how quick-witted we really are, have begun to talk to us in a different style—using a singsong voice with a limited vocabulary and exaggerated words. Elderspeak some folks call it, a kind of twilight-of-life baby talk. Others see us as antiques, stuck in old ways, holding onto landlines and paper and analogue clocks and flashlights with batteries. And, we, ourselves, can feel the gradual shift from the centers of life to the sidelines—in our professions and in our families.

In one shared glance, we in the club acknowledge to each other all this we are losing.

But that quick look does more. It also celebrates what we are gaining.

Having moved off-stage, we are now the chief applauders of those still on it—our children and grandchildren and so many young friends—whose successes mean more to us than our own. Though we’re not on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter, those we love reach to us with emails and dinner invitations and earnest conversation.

They need us, these young people we applaud. And we are fortunate when they want us—those of us in the silver-hair club.

We’re home, back in our 150-year-old house on Main Street in small-town Ohio. And how can it feel so good? Especially after nearly a month of alluring palaces and temples and pyramids and a cruise down the Nile and walking in a city built with Jerusalem stone.

It’s all still here—that creak on the third step, the rattle of the foyer windows, and the patina of the wide-board floors. The newel post still holds up the banister worn smooth by the hands of adults and the bottom sides of kids. The sun hasn’t forgotten how to peek through the rose-tinted living room windows. And my many clocks are still ticking and chiming and swinging their pendulums.

After eating shawarma in Egypt and upside-down chicken in Jordan and falafel in Israel, how can a bowl of popcorn taste so good? How can it be so satisfying to fill an entire glass with ice before pouring water? And I could go on—our own bed, with an American-style top sheet, bubble bath, clothes in drawers, and real Diet Cokes, not Zeroes.

My delight in these at-home pleasures has made me feel like a stick-in-the-mud old fogy. But then I read this study. Coming home, scientists have found, makes your brain release extra doses of dopamine, the feel-good hormone. At least if you’re a mouse. Mice who are returned to their home cages experienced a rush of dopamine equal to the surge from a dose of cocaine.

No wonder the popcorn was so good and the ice. No wonder the squeaky floorboards under my feet and the banister under my hand makes me feel like a child returned to her mother.

I love to travel. And I wouldn’t say that the best part of traveling is coming home. But when you’re almost seventy, it’s close.

I quit feeling sorry for David on this trip to Israel. At least partly. It couldn’t have been easy for him to know the king was hunting him down. But if he had to hide, En Gedi was the place to do it.

Maybe because we had just come from the Dead Sea. Maybe because the land around us had been scorched and craggy and brown, brown, brown. Maybe because without the early rains, water had been scanty. Maybe for all these reasons, it felt like God had touched his finger to En Gedi, making it a patch of paradise.

No wonder many people call it the most beautiful place in Israel.

We hiked Wadi David that runs through En Gedi. But instead of the dry desert river bed I had expected, water spilled into crystal basins along the trail, ran off rocky ledges, dripped from giant reeds and cattails, and flowed into pools large enough for swimming.

We trailed along an amazing labyrinth of narrow gorges and through tunnels created by decades of dried reeds that thatched into each other, making a roof over the trail. Sometimes we descended to the creek bed, where we stepped on rocks to keep our shoes dry. And we climbed to David’s Waterfall, which cascades a forceful 120 feet into the pool below.

Above us ibex scampered on the mountain rocks. Around us sweet dates, balsam, and persimmon grew. And in our ears was always, always the sound of a water that is perhaps the freshest and most nutritious in the world.

This is what makes En Gedi—the water. But what also makes En Gedi is the desert. The desert is necessary to truly appreciate the water. More than opposites, the desert and En Gedi are also aspects of the same thing.

On this waterside hike, I thought about the famed encounter between David and King Saul at En Gedi. Given, Saul’s animosity, what gave David the courage and grace to cut a corner of Saul’s cloak instead of killing him?

I don’t know, of course.

But maybe desert water helped.