Author: Phyllis Swartz

He had two ears and one tongue—my Uncle Monroe.

At family reunions, he’d pat an empty chair next to him and ask me a question.

Amazing, his eyes would say, while I talked, tell me more.

So I did. And I came away from Monroe seeing the fascinations of my life.

Never mind that his stories were better than mine.

After all, he was the only human “guinea pig” I knew. As a conscientious objector during the Korean War, he was among the first volunteer normal-control patients in clinical studies at the National Institutes of Health. In one study, he and eleven others were kept awake so doctors could study the effects of sleep deprivation. What happened, Monroe told me, was strange. After a couple days, he and his study partners couldn’t talk straight and saw things that weren’t there. But, their bodies faring better than their minds, they could still play basketball.

I know this much, but I wish I had asked him more.

And not just about being a human guinea pig. What was it like for an Amish-Mennonite plowboy from the hills of western Maryland to earn a Ph.D. and to work in Manhattan at the New York University lab where moon rock was analyzed?

What was it like to serve on a bishop board and on a Head Start board and on a camp board?

And after 55 years in the Big Apple, how did it feel to retire in a cottage nestled into the hillside of a retirement village just miles from the fields he plowed as a boy?

With Monroe having asked the questions, I’ve missed my chance to hear more from him.

Instead I’ll mourn at his funeral today. But already I’ve heard stories from others who knew him.

“He was curious about my life,” they’ve been saying.

And this gift he gave to so many of us has now become our calling.

She had snowy-white hair and sat like a queen, turning her willow rocker into a throne. And we all came to pay her homage and drink her homemade root beer. As a child, her life seemed magical to me. Her job was to rock, and the job for the rest of us—her more than 85 children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—was to bring her coffee when she was thirsty and food when she was hungry and a shawl when she was cold and to smile and tell her a bit about our lives.

What I didn’t understand then and can’t fully appreciate still is the toll of her life. By the time I knew her, she had borne seventeen children, including two sets of triplets, and buried five babies and a husband. She had pinched pennies during the economic panic of the 1890s and the Great Depression. She had lived through the Great War and the 1918 flu pandemic and World War II and the smallpox epidemic.

And she had worked hard. Year after year, her diaries record massive food preservation—canning 32 batches of cranberries in one day after gathering them from a bog at Bup Beitzel’s farm and another day 41 quarts of pork and 30 quarts of beef from livestock she had raised. In one week 300 quarts of tomatoes came from her garden. She heated water over a fire for washing clothes with soap she made from lye and lard.

My granddaughter Anna shares a name with my great-grandma of the snowy-white hair. And a birthday. Both born on September 24, though 129 years apart, their lives will be starkly different. My granddaughter Anna will likely never make soap with lye and lard or grow a garden that produces 300 quarts of tomatoes. But when she runs cross country, I can see that she’s got the pluck of my great-grandma. Which is good. She’ll need it for what lies before her in the twenty-first century, though I can’t quite envision what that might be.

I hate going to the dentist. I know I shouldn’t say this aloud, especially around my grandchildren, but I spent this morning in dread, knowing I had two deep cavities that would require a cap removal and fillings and two possible root canals. I wasn’t looking forward to the numbing needle thrust deep into my gum and the laughing gas that makes me all loopy and the grinding, the shrill, high-pitched sound of the drill, and the continual requests to open wider, wider, still wider, please.

So I turned to history, as I often do to get a perspective when I need one.

I could be heading to the barber shop, I told myself to have my teeth yanked out by a burly barber or to a smithy where a blacksmith would do the job with a pair of pliers. Or I could be walking into one of the first dentists’ offices where they used chisels and hammers to knock out a bad tooth. With these tools, the force needed to jerk a tooth from the gums often caused the tooth to break leaving embedded roots and tooth parts behind.

Even the privileged suffered. The face of Queen Elizabeth I was often swollen from gum abscesses, and the teeth that weren’t missing from her mouth were yellowed and so uneven her speech was hard to understand. And George Washington lost his teeth, replacing them, not with wood as you read in children’s stories, but with teeth extracted from animal and human corpses.

For a nice pair of dentures, you held out for human teeth. But the less privileged classes of Britain couldn’t afford these dentures, not until after the Battle of Waterloo. The bodies of tens of thousands of the soldiers who died in that battle, were stripped not just of valuables but also of teeth. These teeth shipped to Britain in barrels were made into affordable dentures known as Waterloo teeth.

Being a wimp for any kind of pain, I need to find ways to gird myself up. And history usually helps. Thinking about Waterloo teeth took my mind off the drilling. Almost.

From my family to yours

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t harass each other on Twitter or Instagram. But we found our own way. We called it the Slam Book. It was a notebook passed among students when the teacher turned to write on the chalkboard.

The keeper of the book wrote questions on the tops of pages—questions like Who is the most unpopular boy in the class? Or Who won’t get a date to prom? or even What do you hate about Emma Jean? And in the guise of writing an English report or doing quadratic equations, students would leaf through the pages, writing their comments.

The Slam Book never landed on some kids’ desks. Maybe because their names were in it. Maybe because they weren’t really part of the class. Maybe because nobody cared what they thought. But those kids, especially, watched as the book made its way up and down the rows. And if the book lay carelessly open on someone’s desk, their eyes strained to see what they dreaded to find—their names.

The Slam Book had the power to hurt. It spread rumors and ridiculed the weak and destroyed relationships. But unlike the social media of today, its influence was physically limited to one classroom in one school. And it took only one alert teacher to destroy it.

But now Snapchat and Facebook can reach far beyond the classroom, sending out humiliation for all the world to see. Once public, the damage can be amplified with comments and further sharing.

I don’t think kids are getting worse. With some time-travel, the bullies of my childhood could take on the bullies of today. But there’s a difference. Today’s social media tools are more potent. And the challenge for my grandchildren and their generation is to use these tools to build people up and bring them together, not to pull people down and tear them apart.

Both my mom and my grandson have learned to write in shorthand. And though the symbols are different, both of their writing methods abbreviate language—compressing phrases and sentences into miniature packages of meaning.

The other day, I watched my grandson as he texted. Before this, I hadn’t known that AFAYK was short for as far as you know or that you could write B4N when you meant bye for now. I have long appreciated the use of the thumb for turning a doorknob and tying a shoe. But my grandson’s agile thumbs on the cell phone pad mesmerized me.

“It’s easier than typing everything out,” he told me. “And it still gets the point across.”

Decades ago, my mom said something similar one evening. Working through an adult-education program to earn her high school diploma, it was her practice to join us kids at the kitchen table for after-dinner homework. This particular evening, she was practicing shorthand for her speedwriting class.

I watched over her shoulder as her pen flew across the page, condensing into seconds what would take minutes to write using the methods my teachers expected. I went back to writing my English report, but I kept glancing at my mom across the table, training her mind and her hand to get it down fast. I was envious. I had often wished for a way to write as fast as I could think. And I became curious about the letters and words and sentences coming from the tip of my pencil. How had all these symbols developed?

Being in education, I’ve heard the alarms about texting—that it wrecks havoc with grammar and punctuation and literacy and is leading to a downfall of the English language. But I’ve been in education long enough to remember the fear that keyboards would ruin penmanship and that word processers would bring an end to good spelling.

It’s always been hard to change. Schools found the transition from individual slates to chalkboards on walls difficult. And when paper became available for common use, educators feared that its easy access would decrease memory.

In 1911, teachers shuddered when Thomas Edison said, “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to touch every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.”

But language is fluid, and in the end, schools have always adapted to new ways of communicating. Dangers and all. Words, in whatever form they come, carry power, and texting, like any language, can be misused. But teachers are learning the texting jargon and using it to communicate with students. And I’ve found that students are more willing to take a look at Shakespeare when their own lingo is appreciated, when they see themselves in the long line of people who have used and changed language.

Finding a short way to get the point across—this is what my mom was after when she learned speedwriting. It’s now my grandson’s aim when he texts. And this is the essence of language.

To use an old sailing phrase, you could say I’m stuck in the doldrums. And getting into this state of inertia is exactly what they told me not to do—they being podcasters on writing and authors of how-to-write books and instructors on Masterclass. I’ve heard their warnings: Make sure you have no between-book time. Plot your next book before you write the last chapter of the one you’re writing. If you stop writing for a day you start going soft, stop for a week and you fall behind, miss a month and you start from scratch.

It was our recent Amtrak trip that got me off track. There was something about riding the rails that breathed motion into the book I was writing. I’m ensconced, I kept thinking, and moving, both at the same time, and always with something new to see out my window—harvested fields and deserts and mountains and cities and towns. And inside were the passengers. In front of me and behind me and walking up and down the aisle beside me were people with hidden, and sometimes not so hidden stories.

All this charged through me. It was as though my brain was being fed chocolate-covered coffee beans. And with my fingers on the keyboard clicking in rhythm with the train, the book that was meant to take months more, came to its end.

So now I’m between books. And I’ve been feeling becalmed, as though I’m stranded in that belt near the equator, where winds sometimes stop blowing for weeks on end. Not knowing what to write next has left me listless and drifting. But I’m trying to remember the sailors who keep their sails trimmed. Ready to catch the smallest shift in the air, they have the best chance to survive. So though there is no wind in my sails, I’m trying to keep my ship in shape.

I’ve entered my second childhood. At least that’s how it felt at my Medigold wellness check-up the other day. It seemed I was back in first grade.

“See if you can remember these three words,” the nurse said to me, and I’ll ask you later.”

Banana, sunrise, chair I kept rehearsing in my mind. I sitting on a yellow chair eating a yellow banana watching a yellow sunrise.

To distract me, the nurse gave me another job.

“On this paper,” she said. “Draw a clock. See if you can put the numbers in the right places. And make the clock hands say 2:30.”

Satisfied with my work, the nurse had one more question: “Are there places in your house where you could stumble? Any stairs?”

I thought of the pull-down attic stairs I had climbed that morning and of the narrow stairs built in 1880 that wind to our basement.

“A few,” I told her. “It’s a two-story house.”

It isn’t just the nurse. At drive-through windows, they’re calling me Sweetie. In the grocery store, they’re offering to lift a sack of potatoes from the bottom of my cart. And just the other week, my husband and I were walking. Coming toward us down the sidewalk was a group of high school kids, chatting and jostling. We all smiled and said hi, and just as we passed, one girl spoke.

“Just got to tell you,” she said. “You two are so cute together.”

And she wasn’t being snarky. At least I don’t think so. But being in my second childhood, what do I know?

The day after my wellness check-up, my hands were in dishwater when I became curious about when the word baloney came to be used to mean nonsense. So I asked Alexa.

“I have no information on that,” she said. “But I can help you explore the world of sounds. Try asking: What sound does a cow make?”

My mom met Alexa at our house at Christmas. She listened as I asked Alexa about the weather and as my grandchildren told Alexa to tell them a joke and play “Eye of the Tiger.” She heard Alexa read a Wikipedia article about Camp Nelson in Kentucky. And she kept trying to figure it all out. How did all this work since Alexa didn’t have a brain. Or did she?

“How nice,” my mom said another day when she stopped by our house, “to be able to just ask Alexa, instead of typing it all out on a keyboard for Google.”

So on her ninety-third birthday, Alexa seemed a perfect gift. And when she opened the package, it seemed we were right.

It was after Alexa was installed on her kitchen counter that we ran into trouble.

“She’s just not listening to me,” Mom said on the phone one day.

And when I stopped by her house, I found why. As I walked in, I thought she was chatting with someone on the telephone. Her voice was conversational and leisurely and pleasant. But there she was, standing in front of Alexa with a puzzled look.

“I’ve asked her nicely,” Mom said. “But she just doesn’t understand.”

“Be more direct,” I told her, “more bossy.”

But I couldn’t figure out how to cure my mom of being nice.

Not until one day when I was researching horses for a book I’m writing. When you command a horse, I read, use few words and make them short and crisp.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “talk to Alexa like you’d talk to a horse.”

She knew all about horses from her long-ago childhood, having driven them to cultivate corn and gather up pea vines. She had used short, crisp commands—get-up and gee and haw and whoa—to bring horses in from pasture and to urge them up and down the hilly fields of western Maryland and to turn them into the next field row and stop them at the end.

This analogy worked. My mom might not be sounding so nice these days. But she’s getting Alexa under control.