Author: Phyllis Swartz

It’s been a beast of a year. In rapid succession, I heard the cancer diagnoses of my daughter, my son, my husband, and my sister. Two cases ended quickly—surgeries and clear margins. Two did not.

Perhaps others are braver than I, but for me this wasn’t the year to wrestle with the philosophical problems of pain. Not the time to figure out why some people suffer all their lives through while others live pain-free and die peacefully at ninety in their beds.

This was the year to deal with fragments, little things, one at a time. Cancer might have cracked my world, but, come what may, there were grandchildren to feed and sterile dressings to change and pharmacy runs. And these small functions of life steadied me.

I had taught this theme once in another world. Long ago with seventh graders, I had read Frost’s Dust of Snow.

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of the day I had rued.

At first look, I told my students, this seems like such a pretty poem. But Frost doesn’t write about a hummingbird and an apple tree. He uses the crow and the hemlock, both long-held symbols of sorrow and death.

And in the presence of such doom comes the dusting of snow, something light and delicate, something silent and waiting to be noticed, something hinting of new beginnings.

It’s not that the suffering of people I love faded away, not that I forgot the increasing bone pain and malaise that each chemo cycle brings. It’s that I began to see that suffering exists alongside dewy grass and bright blue skies and dustings of snow. I found that sometimes, when big things can’t be changed, little things can help.

We had an original idea. Or so we thought. Not a good idea, for sure, but at least a new one. And one teachers hated.

We called it the Slam Book, an ordinary-looking spiral notebook we passed among ourselves when teachers turned their backs to write on the chalkboard.

The keeper of the book wrote questions on the tops of pages—questions like Who looks like a hippo? Or Whose breath stinks? Or Who’s the stupidest kid in class?

The book didn’t land often on some kids’ desks, maybe because our names were on too many pages.

People had always been mean. I’d known this. But I doubted anyone had found such a wily way to show hate.

Turns out I was wrong.

The Romans beat us to it, having invented curse tablets nearly twenty centuries before.

Inscribed on small, rolled-up lead plates and buried with the dead, their comments were more threatening than ours:

May the worms, cancer, and maggots penetrate.

May he botch his performance in court, forget his words, become dizzy.

I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts, and memory.

To make the curses even more powerful, they were written backwards and the tablets pierced with an iron nail.

The Romans weren’t messing around. But then, neither were we. In the middle school scramble for status, we tried to move up the social ladder at the expense of others.

Curse tablets and slam books—same function, different tools.

All through the years, platforms have changed—graffiti on city walls in Pompeii (Atimetus got me pregnant.), pamphlets published by the newly-invented printing press (Even brutes do not devour their young.), scandal sheets (the Prince Regent, a blockhead), and fast forward to the insults on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

It seems that a mean streak runs through.

But so does the good.

“Grace be to you and peace . . .” a Roman once wrote.

“I don’t do slam books,” my classmate told me.

And my young friend on Facebook uses her birthday to raise money for digging wells.

Good and evil—neither is new. We make choices in every age.

I decorated a grave last night. And I couldn’t stop adding flowers. My Bender grandparents were salt-of-the-earth people who died 37 years ago, Grandma on the first day of a new year and Grandpa on his ninetieth birthday, six months later.

All winter, I’ve been stitching away on my embroidered autobiography, three images for each year. And when I got to 1988, I knew I’d mark their deaths.

And think about their lives.

As I stitched, I remembered that my grandma showed up for me on a day when the world seemed to stop, the day Kennedy was shot. I came home from my new city school in Flint, Michigan, that day, surprised to find a car with a Pennsylvania license in our driveway. And there at the kitchen table, she sat, short and round and snapping beans for dinner. Her hair pinned under her head covering, her cape dress covered with an apron, her instant smile—all this made me feel that the world would keep turning.

And Grandpa, he’s the one who helped me get into first grade. I knew my ABC’s and how to count to 20 and my telephone number—all first-grade requirements. But I couldn’t tie my shoes. My mom couldn’t teach me or my dad or my aunts. But one Sunday after dinner, Grandpa took me aside. And five minutes later, my shoes were tied. By me.

“Maybe because he’s left-handed,” my dad said. “Since his tying is reversed, she could finally see it.”

Grandpa may have been left-handed tying shoes and hammering and milking cows. But he didn’t write with his left hand. What he learned in first grade is that if he picked up a pen with his left hand, he got his knuckles wrapped, hard.

Maybe this is why he understood how scary being six could be.

For me, Grandpa and Grandma Bender provided a bubble of safety.

But life hadn’t been safe for them. They lived through two world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, and the Great Depression when they came close to losing their farm and when their house on that farm burned to the ground while Grandma was heavily pregnant with her fifth child.

As a kid, I didn’t know all this. All I saw was that they kept eating mashed potatoes and smiling. Gradually, as my knowledge of their history drew back the curtain on the hardships of their lives, I marveled that they had borne these rigors with such grace, accepting that life brings both joy and pain, both loss and gain.

That’s what embroidering this timeline does—makes me think. About, for example, how to bear trouble with enough equanimity so as to still bring some sanctuary to others.

There are some days it’s easy to believe in Puck.

The morning I fell up the stairs at the middle school, I actually glanced over my shoulder to see if he was there. It looked like his work. Essays, department meeting notes, and newly mimeographed tests now littered the landing and drifted down the stairs. Diet Coke gurgled from the can and dribbled its way across the papers. And in my classroom, thirty students waited to read A Summer Night’s Dream, which is probably why I had Puck on my mind.

Middle school kids appreciate Puck. Much like them, this quick-witted sprite, is both good-hearted and capable of mean tricks.  He cavorts through Shakespeare’s play messing with mortals—stealing cream from the top of the milk pail, misleading travelers at night, tripping venerable old dames, and pretending to be an apple in a woman’s drink so she spills it. He often turns into a stool and then disappears so that old ladies land on their “bum.” And like middle school kids, he delights in the chaos he creates.

Since that misadventure on the school steps, I’ve never again looked over my shoulder for Puck. But I’ve been tempted. There are days, he seems to trail me everywhere I go, when he’s in cahoots with Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

On those days, it’s one thing after another—my computer freezes, I arrive at the grocery store without my list, the toilet clogs, my coat button falls off. Everything I touch seems to spill or slip.

And my day turns grim.

Unlike a showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

During this play, audiences chortle over every mishap Puck inflicts. Germans call this schadenfreude, finding joy in the misfortune of others. It’s a kind of humor that’s like low-hanging fruit, easy to access.

What’s harder for me is to take the advice I’ve given hundreds of middle school kids.

“If you can laugh at yourself,” I’d say, “you’ll be fine. No one can touch you!”

In Shakespeare’s play, Puck messes not only with mortals, but also with himself. Sometimes he’s a horse, sometimes a hound or a hog or a bear. Sometimes a fire or a stool. And to get through times that grow dark, he becomes a merry wanderer.

So when Puck seems to follow me, I need to stop turning grim and follow my own advise—laugh at myself.

I never heard of sumac, not until I married my beekeeper husband. One afternoon he pulled over to the berm on a country road and opened the door.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

In the thickets along the fencerow, round, red fruits grew on the hairy stems of staghorn sumac.

“This fall, I’ll harvest the sumac,” he told me, “and use it in the smoker to calm the bees while I take their honey.”

Suddenly, sumac cropped up all over the place—in old fields, at the edges of woods, at the sides of meadows and along highways.

“There it is again,” I’d say.

It’s called frequency illusion, the same impression you get when you buy a Prius and see them everywhere or you learn a new word and everyone begins using it.

What we focus on, we find.

Frequency illusions can be fun. You buy a new Apple watch and become part of a watch-wearing community, spotting your comrades at the gym and the airport and the grocery store.

But in the classroom, frequency illusion carries consequence. What you spotlight can impact a whole academic career, an entire life.

“Watch out for Jason,” a veteran teacher told me as a first-year teacher, “he’s a Cooper.”

So I watched. And I found what supported my hypothesis—a sullen face, a cocky walk, an unopened book, a dull look in the eye, a clenched fist. The more I fixated, the more Cooperish Jason became. And if a poem or a story or an idea ever lit a blaze or even a feeble spark, I never had the eyes to see. With me, Jason didn’t have a chance. I was too busy fighting the bad to detect any good.

But the longer I taught, the more I came to believe that my classes were not made up of good students and bad students. Rather that each of us, me included, is capable of good and bad. And that if I focus on the good, I find more of it.

Frequency illusion, after all, works both ways.

If I had my druthers, I’d be packing a suitcase. But this isn’t the time to travel up the Rhine past castles and vineyards and through the mountains, where my forebears once lived. It isn’t the year to fly to Hawaii to stay with my sister-and brother-in-law to see the Haleakalā sunset and walk the black-sand beaches. It’s not even the year to cash in on an Amtrak deal for a coast-to-coast train trip

This is the year to stay home—to take care of the sick and the old, the people I love.

So we talked yesterday, my husband and I, and we decided to travel at home. Starting tonight. It is, after all, Emily Dickinson’s birthday. So we’re headed for Amherst, Massachusetts via the Drexel Theater for talks on Dickinson’s life, a birthday cake, a poetry contest, and the screening of the award-winning film, Showdown in Amherst.

We’re invited to dress in Victorian-style clothing. But we won’t. We’re too old. Mostly, we’re too inhibited.

In a few weeks, we’ll travel to San Juan in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. West Side Story will take us back to a time when love struggled to rise above hatred and the fear of immigrants and the plague of racism. It probably won’t feel like we’ve traveled far.

We haven’t made a bucket list, yet. But we’ll probably include live train webcams that to take us through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and across Kansas and up the coast of Italy and through the mountains of Norway, all while we read on our recliners about faraway places and long-ago times.

We can always tag along with Rick Steves. And with just a thirty-minute drive we can eat Polish food at Pierogi Mountain or Argentinian food at the Barroluco or Somalian food in Hoyo’s Kitchen.

With Ken Burns we can zoom in on the Mayo Clinic and the Vietnam War and the expedition of Lewis and Clark. And with Getty Art Conversations, we can feel smart with art as we visit impressive museums around the world.

All this without packing a suitcase, without booking a hotel room or buying air fare or arranging for someone to come water the plants.

And mostly, all this while staying close to those who need care.

Here is a gift to the world from my neice Christy Showalter.

Enjoy!

For three years now, I’ve attended an unlikely holiday concert. Accomplished musicians take the stage—people who sing in operas, play in orchestras, give piano lessons, direct musicals, own music stores, and hold master’s degrees in music. But these people, for all their qualifications, are not the stars.

They take the stage, not go into the spotlight, but as supporting vocalists for the leads, who sing with meaning and dignity and sometimes with gusto but who are often off key and out of rhythm.

We’re with you—this is the message the trained musicians give to singers from the county’s program for those with developmental delays.

And the audience echoes the same message from their seats, mouthing words to the songs, clapping in time to the music, and fist bumping singers who return to their seats. In the whole auditorium, no one slouches or frowns or glances at their phones. And everyone accepts the gifts of music, just as they’re given, without critique.

Together, we rock around the Christmas tree and tell it on the mountain and confess that all we want for Christmas is a big, collective you.

In the finale, we all sing—the performers, the supporters, and the audience—of a white Christmas and hearing sleigh bells in the snow. And we wish each other days that are merry and bright.

As I walk through a whipping wind to my car, I think about withness, that this is what Christmas is about. Grandmas with grandkids, sisters with brothers, parents with children, friends with friends, God with people. Withness is an entering into, a willingness to set aside our own domains and become fully present to others.

I’ll come back next year to this unlikely holiday concert. By then, I’ll be needing another reminder.

We knew what was coming next. Still, we hung together in the long pause as the tension built. And the gravitas.

As couple thousand of us sat under the sky ceiling of the Ohio Theatre and held a collective breath, it began to dawn—that the next word would come as a challenge. And a choice.

I hadn’t expected this pause.

I had expected the last word of The Christmas Carol to roll right off the tongue of Tiny Tim in a jovial sort of way. After all, Scrooge had already been redeemed. He had committed to living in the Past and the Present and the Future, to let the spirit of all three strive within him.

And he was feeling mighty good.

“I am as light as a feather,” he said. “I am as happy as an angel. I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody. A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here. Whoop. Hallo.”

I wanted to leave the theatre as happy as this new Scrooge, with visions of the parlor games at the nephew’s house and the dancing at Fezziwig’s party. I wanted to remember the pudding singing in the copper and the twelfth-night cakes and the great goose. 

But the pause did its work.

God bless us . . . Tiny Tim had said before he broke off, suspending the flow I had anticipated.

And the stillness compelled me to reflect on my values and, even more, to move forward with greater purpose and intention.

. . . Everyone.

Perhaps this last word encapsulates the yuletide spirit. But it does more. It adds a caution. It’s easy for all of us to become like Scrooge, before his redemption, that is.