Author: Phyllis Swartz

On a miserable morning of an otherwise glorious vacation, I stand in a damp, dark place shivering with cold. I’m several hundred feet below ground, wishing I were up above, where the brief summer of the upper part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is sticking at it, where flowers still bloom and red-winged blackbirds fly and monarchs feed on milkweed

But I stay underground because the story of mining grips me. This mine, in its day, was the deepest in the US and one of the deepest in the world. Miners descended its narrow shaft, and with only candles and carbide lamps to light the thick darkness, wrested copper from the rock.

Brutal work—early on using only sledgehammers and chisels and later, noisy pneumatic drills that spit fine rock dust into miners’ lungs. This new innovation earned the nickname of widow maker, albeit for death that was slow and suffocating, not sudden and sharp.

“Ten hours a day,” our guide says for perhaps the twentieth time, “six days a week.”

The deeper they went, the hotter it got. At the lowest level of the Quincy Mine, 6000 feet below ground, miners worked in a humid 95 degrees.

Ten hours a day, six days a week.

“And think of winter,” the guide says. “Up here in the North, we get snowfalls of over 200 inches a year with regular temperatures of ten degrees below zero.”

So at the end of ten hours of brute labor, as miners rode up the skipway, winter came new every evening—90 degrees, 85, 75, 55, 30, 20, 10, 0, -10. And at the top, miners made a mad dash through drifting snow and frigid winds to the changing house.

Cold, but glad to be alive. Quincy Mines had a casualty rate of 33 percent. This includes both deaths and injuries. But the death of a worker above ground didn’t count, even if injuries or the conditions related to death could be attributed to working in the mine.

Those who died were friends and fathers and brothers and sons.

I shiver. And from more than cold.

How can I begrudge these few hours underground?

“Ten hours a day,” the guide says again. “Six days a week.”

For a brief, inadequate moment, I stand there bearing witness to the miners. To the cost they paid to provide, what was at that time, 80 percent of the world’s copper. And to their families who far too often heard emergency-sirens, signaling that, once again, injury and death had come.

It’s one thing for me to read a story about mining in a comfortable chair. It’s another thing to listen to this story with my entire body. To stand where they stood. To feel the darkness and the dripping. To imagine the terrors of cave-ins, explosions, and toxic air. And to hear how miners were entrenched, not only in the earth, but also in economic struggles with large corporations.

To help us remember, we brought home a memento—a copper rose. The irony of the tragic origins of its beauty is not lost on me. But I take comfort in Toni Morrison’s words. 

“Art,” she writes, “invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.”

I check once. And again. And one more time. This can’t be right. But it is. I’ve been retired for a decade. From full-time teaching, that is.

Why is it, then, that this particular year, I wake in the morning thinking I have only a few more days of summer, that I need to set up my classroom and check class rosters and move my waking time earlier each day so that 4:30 A.M. won’t feel like such a shock? Why does my gut tighten with back-to-school anxiety?

My first fall off, I expected this. Although school was a mile away, it was like I could hear the opening bell. I knew when first period ended and that three minutes later second period started. I could count the periods through to the end of the day.

The following fall, I felt it again, but not so strongly. And each year, the school bell sounded more faintly. And less often.

I still follow school closings on snowy mornings and send silent sympathies to teachers on the sugar-loaded day after trick-or-treating and wonder about the absentee rate the Monday after the Super Bowl and follow federal, state, and local education news.

But falls no longer feel like someone forgot to ring the bell.

Until this year.

Why?

On a hammock one afternoon, it comes to me. It’s my grandkids. Four of them, the ones who turned tassels, tossed hats, and dwarfed me in family pictures last spring, are all headed to college. Two other grandkids are entering tough high school programs. Another is enrolled in a new school. The youngest of them all is now in middle school. And how well I know those wrought-filled years.

All of these young people, who once toddled around our house and rode scooters in our driveway and flopped on the floor to watch a train circle under our Christmas tree—all of them are heading to perhaps the most uncertain and thrilling parts of their lives so far.

They’ve got to be feeling it.

And so am I.

Emotional contagion is what we call this in education—mirror neurons in the brain that take on the experiences of another.

In retirement, it’s called a sappy grandma.

Maybe sappy and seventy and retired for a decade. And maybe a hammock. But I’ve still got three decades of teaching inside me.

In the span of an hour, I’ve changed worlds. An afternoon with my dad in a medical office filled with sterile fields and needles and x-rays that show what you don’t want to see. And an evening with my husband at a minor league old-time ballpark complete with hot dogs, picnic terraces, a family lawn, an open grill, and personalized walk-up music.

But all this nostalgia becomes a backdrop for me. I’m watching legs. And what they can do.

Players warm up with high kicks and lateral lunges and hip flexors. A catcher moves seamlessly from a squat, to a one-knee stance, to a two-knee throwing stance. A man jumps over the backs of stadium seats to catch a fly ball for his son.

A girl with a backward-facing ball cap dances to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” Couples link arms and sway to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” A runner slides into second base on his left leg—on purpose.

Legs are climbing bleachers, running, lifting people to their feet to cheer a homerun, heading for one more hot dog, one more drink, tapping to music, propping up on the backs of empty seats in front of them. A whole stadium of people throwing their legs every which way to get what they’re after.

Such a contrast to the afternoon with my dad, where every movement of his leg was carefully considered. Is the move worth it? Is it necessary?

He transferred gingerly from his wheelchair to the examining table and shifted his lame leg with two hands to readjust his position. Back home after the procedure, he moved up the ramp behind his walker one slow step at a time and sank with great relief into his favorite chair.

And an hour later, I’m at the ballpark, watching this multitude of legs. If only all these people took notice of what their legs can do.

But back in his day, my dad didn’t either. He climbed silo ladders, ran bases at recess softball, and sprinted before he bellyflopped headfirst onto a downhill snow sled. And all this without much thought, expecting his legs to cooperate.

Bats continue to crack and balls smack into gloves. But the game is winding down. My husband stands

“Tomorrow’s coming,” he says, reaching down to give me a hand up. “Let’s go home.”

It’s when I stand that I feel a creaking in my knee. But only because I’ve been thinking about legs. Or maybe because I gardened too much yesterday. Or sat too much today. At least this is what I tell myself.

But my husband is right—tomorrow, in its several meanings, is coming.

In a far corner of my brain, I store a collection of characters. People I’ve known who belong in a book, who are larger-than-life and who move through the world, not without notice.

Sometimes when sleep eludes me, I call forth a character or two. Someone like Amos, as I’ll call him here, who was the first in my collection. Trouble walked into the room right along with him, a good kind of trouble that livened a hot afternoon in my first-grade classroom and made even the teacher smile. He bounced through recess. But also through spelling tests, even when he missed words. No matter what, the fun came out from under his skin. Amos was not like me, not like anyone else in first grade.

Amos has got to be my age now, but in my brain, he stays forever young, unlike Edna, who I met when she was old. She was a pillar of a woman. Time had cut fine lines in her face and veined her hands. Her whole bearing breathed refinement, her speech was as precise as her movements, and she set herself steadfastly to her life. She had none of Amos’s bounce. Instead, she saw what was wrong in the world and had the courage to say so. Her words were fueled by intended kindness. And people usually listened.

Elam had a wonderful face with deep fissures and strong features and perhaps the biggest head I’ve ever seen. Big and bald, completely bald. His voice bellowed like a bull, and he had the look, somehow, of an extremely intelligent dolphin.

“Strong minds discuss ideas,” Socrates once said. “Average minds discuss events. Weak minds discuss people.”

Elam’s mind, according to this scale, was strong.

There are other characters, too. The woman who, when she hears sirens in the street, goes to the attic and drags down a chamber pot and a kerosene lamp. The guy who likes separate food—chicken can’t touch potatoes, which can’t touch green beans, which can’t touch a dinner roll, who begins eating with his least favorite food and works up to the good stuff. The woman whose brain is always sending her off on missions, whether or not she wants to do them. The kid who either invigorates people or wears them out—one or the other with nothing in between. And many more such characters, all eccentric, original, nutty, weird, interesting, and amusing.

They’re good company for a sleepless night, partly because they make me think. But mostly because I enjoy their quirk.

With a brain that tends toward the macabre, I dust on Wednesday mornings. Whatever comes—cancer diagnoses, political turmoil, emergency-room runs for my parents, uncertainties about the futures of my grandchildren, appliance breakdowns—on Wednesdays, I dust.

A drop-down writing desk from my grandma. A dye box, now used to store teabags, from my great-grandma. A piece of driftwood with a verse inscribed from my husband’s childhood. A six-inch thick unabridged dictionary from a library sale. A cup and saucer my husband gave to me just before we married.

And there’s more.

A spinning wheel made by my three-greats-back grandpa, who could craft almost everything someone needed—cradles, coffins, sugar keelers, chairs, tables, and wooden legs for amputees of the Civil War.

A shelf that holds the work of poets, who help me see wider, deeper, and in new ways—Dickinson, Frost, Whitman, Shakespeare, Millay, Sandburg, Lanier, and Williams. Another shelf with a stack of Cousin Week books that chronicle the nearly two decades of summers with our grandchildren.

And more.

A cuckoo clock I brought home from the Black Forest. A singing bowl I found at a market in Thailand. A rose-colored vase from a dear friend.

Room after room, my hands lift objects and polish surfaces. It’s a sort of rhythmic work. And as the lemony scent of furniture polish rises, so does a sense of normalcy and calm.

I need this steady beat of the quotidian—the daily duties and ordinary rhythms of life that give me the courage to move through the world and my days.

Though my world may seem to split in two, mornings come. And with them, the small functions of life that help hold me together. It’s amazing what worries I can tolerate when there’s work to do.

And so I dust. On Wednesdays.

Back in the day, my dad’s legs took him places—up and down hills a mile to school, across fields behind plow horses, and along fence rows and creeks on his family’s farm checking traps in his first entrepreneurial effort to sell pelts to Sears Roebuck.

And less than a decade ago, my dad was small-town famous for walking.

“I just figured out who you are,” a man once said to my dad in the waiting room of a neighboring city hospital. “You’re that old guy who walks all over London.”

That’s where my dad lives, in the small town of London, Ohio, where he once had six walking routes, one for each day of the week minus Sunday.

He was known not only for how much he walked, but for the way he moved. I’d drive home from a day of teaching, and far down the street I could spot him—erect, purposeful, and sure, with a steady fall of each step and arms swinging forward at the same speed and same angle of the opposite leg. His head high, he looked toward where he was going.

He walked the way he lived.

At the time, I thought he was old. Now I know he wasn’t.

The other day, I watched him cross the dining room.  It was like he set out to mime Emily Dickinson’s poem.

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

But the poem is about more than my Dad’s altered gait. As always, Dickinson uses concrete images to show abstract concepts. Here, she writes about my dad’s increasing wisdom, how he now thinks—with a lack of speed and with great concentration, considering first this angle and then another, how he tries to take perspective of the generations before him when he writes history, and how he considers the views of the three generations that follow him in his family.

He’s seen what missteps can do. And he wants to tread his final inches with care.

Almost forgotten on the top shelf of my closet is an album filled with photos of kids. I owe these kids. They showed me how much I needed to know.

I met them fresh out of their traumas—before foster care, before court hearings, and before treatment. And though my husband and I lived with them as their houseparents at a group home, they’ve mostly disappeared from our lives.

I drag a chair to the closet and stand on tiptoe to reach for the album. And I turn the yellowed pages, poring over photos of kids frozen in the crises of their childhoods.

Page after page, I lament—if only I had known then what I know now.

Shawn, whose father tried to strangle him. Amy, whose mother died. Eric, who had been rejected by his birth parents and two sets of adoptive parents. Kelly, who was caught in a fierce custody battle. Nicole, who had run away, making it to Ohio from Montana before she was caught. Melissa, who had been found in a sting operation when her mom sold her “services” to a trucker.

Nearly fifty such stories.

So much I hadn’t understood back then. So many tools I didn’t have—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Gardner’s ways of learning, Dabrowski’s intensities, Erikson’s stages of development, Piaget’s cognitive development, Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory, Horkheimer’s critical theory, Bloom’s domains and taxonomies. And more. Much more.

What I did have was love. But a painful reality is that being loved is not the same as being understood. And love without understanding often bewilders and even wounds. My failures to understand filled the group-home kids with angst. And me with questions.

The very best teachers arouse curiosity so students ask questions.

Shawn did this for me. And Nicole. And Eric. And the rest.

After I left the group home, I took my questions to college and graduate school. My search for answers lit up every teacher-training class I took, shaping my pedagogy and making me a better teacher for the thousands of students I taught later in middle school and prison and college.

If only it hadn’t been at the expense of the group-home kids.

Their fading faces in the yellowing album look out at me with brave smiles and bewildered hurt and ill-concealed hostility.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry, so sorry!”

My nonagenarian dad has a Pennsylvania Dutch saying. He’s apt to toss it out when someone feels regret: Vee get too soon oldt, but too late schmart.

It’s true, of course.

But I wish it weren’t.

The physical therapist takes my mother’s hands.

“Squeeze,” she says, and then actually flinches under my mother’s grip.

My mom hides a smile. She loves surprising doctors and therapists with the strength of her hands.

“I’ve got milking hands,” she tells them.

Starting at age seven, she was in the barn each morning and evening, sitting on a stool beside a cow, her head against its flank, and her hands emptying its udder by squeezing milk into a bucket.

At the average of maybe 500 squirts per cow and with 5 cows per milking, she topped 5000 squirts per day, making more than a million compresses per year of her childhood hand milking.

The therapist is lucky.  My mom’s grip could have been stronger. When she was fourteen, her barn time changed. Milking machines came to the farm.

“Want me to tell you a story?” my mom likes to ask after a grip assessment.

The therapist says yes. They all do. It’s what you say to a ninety-six-year-old.

And so my mom tells about the time she was on a committee to buy carpet for a church sanctuary.

At a flooring store, the committee found exactly what they wanted—the right style, the right color, the right quality. Only the price wasn’t right. And so the committee stood in the showroom wavering.

“Tell you what,” the salesclerk said, as he loosened a strand of fabric from the carpet sampling. “One of you break this strand with your hands, and I’ll give you a discount, a big one.”

He handed the strand to the committee chair. And one to the next guy in line. And the next. None of them could break the strand. My mom was the only one left. But the salesclerk didn’t offer a strand to her.

“Let me try,” my mom said.

She took a strand in into her two hands, snapped it in two, and the price became right.

“Milking hands,” she says now to the therapist. “That’s what did it.”

At ninety-six, my mom’s good grip means she can still open jars and chop vegetables and carry pails of water for her plants. But even more, her grip strength is an indicator of health. Studies show that people with weak grips tend to have higher risks of developing heart disease and stroke and metabolic disorders.

All my life, my mom’s hands have been stronger than mine. She still loosens jar lids I can’t budge.

But then, my hands have been on computer keys far more than on the underside of a cow.

I’m only one of 221 great-grandchildren. But still, I’m one.

And at seven years of age, just learning about death, I go to my great -grandpa’s house to see him laid out in a casket. I squeeze under the elbows of adults to find him in the living room.

In this room I often played with his wooden blocks and listened to people tell stories and perched with a plate on the couch when the dining room table was filled with adults.

I stand on tiptoe at the casket peering in at his beautiful snow-white beard, always soft in my hands. Especially the morning I sat with him in the amen corner at church, twining my fingers through its whiteness this way and that. And watching it jump up and down while he sang. The benediction never again came so fast as it did that morning on my great-grandpa’s knee.

But in the whispery silence of the death vigil this evening, I keep my hands where they belong—out of the casket, and away from the beard.

A lamp on a pole above the casket shines on his face. I’ve never seen such a lamp. It has a pink glow like a sunset. Its shade is a glass bowl with a hole in the bottom. And sprinkled inside are hundreds of what must be snips of hair. I look at the beard in the casket. And at the snips in the lamp. The hairs match. Exactly.

My father nudges me away from the casket. People wait to see Great-grandpa, a whole line of them.  

So I find a seat not far from the casket where I can see the lamp. And think.

Someone else must like Great-grandpa’s beard, too. And decorated the lamp with hair from his beard. Maybe good hair gets you a lamp. I take a peek at the bottom of my braids.

Soon after Great-grandpa dies, we move away from the mountains. To a city, where vigils are in funeral homes.  And I forget about the lamp—until one day, decades later.

I go back to the mountains for my aunt’s funeral. In the churchyard where my great-grandpa is buried, I remember the lamp. And when I see the funeral director standing alone, I tell him my story.

That old lamp, he tells me, is still stored in a backroom of the funeral home.

“We took it to home vigils,” he says, “to soften the appearance of death with a soft, rose-tinted light.”

He grins.

“It wasn’t your grandpa’s beard hair in that lampshade,” he says. “Just a textured lampshade.”

Of course.

Every day I walk by Great-grandpa’s photo on my dining room mantel. It holds the memory of the funeral lamp. And reminds me to be gentle with youthful imaginings.