Author: Phyllis Swartz

They’re dying off, the people who’ve known me all the way back to my infancy, the people who can tell me new stories about myself, sometimes stories I don’t want to hear. The other week, my oldest cousin embarrassed me with one at a dinner table full of guests.

A dozen years older than I am, he recalled that from the start, I had a headful of hair and eyes that watched everything.

All fun to hear, but then he went on.

One day, as he told it, I was playing with a bunch of my boy cousins. Apparently, nature called, but, not wanting to interrupt their play, the boys unzipped and took a leak. Undaunted, I dropped my drawers, stepped out of them, and did my own business.

Unlike my oldest cousin, most people who know me now have seen only an abridged version of my life, like they started reading a book in the middle. They can’t tell me my early experiences, the ones I’ve lost to childhood amnesia.

On the other hand, the number of people I’ve known from a young age keeps expanding. I sometimes look at these people—my children and grandchildren, younger siblings, now-grown up students, who run city departments and research climate change and work hospital jobs—with some astonishment. They’ve morphed into something bigger and better, like they’ve grown into the clothes they were meant to wear.

Perhaps my sense of humor is aging right along with me. Because, while I decline from my peak as others reach the heights of theirs, I sometimes take a contrary delight in remembering back—a runny nose, a wet bottom, a failed middle school romance, a joke that went flat, a bad haircut for picture day, a detention for being late.

I don’t go around telling these stories. I just keep them as a playful amusement, a way to help me marvel at what these matured people can do and who they have become.

Besides, it gives me a lift to think that, although they are so valued and relied on by others and have more insight that I do in so many ways, that just maybe, in some small ways, I understand them better than they understand themselves.

You can’t walk around looking like a pushover. Erlene taught me this. Bullies picked on her. And to keep them away from me, I watched Erlene and did the opposite. I kept my shoulders straight, faced up to every look, and walked like I had places to go.

And this worked, mostly.

I thought of reaching out to Erlene, being her friend, suggesting that she stand tall and square up. But my fear of the bullies kept me away. In the middle-school jostle for position, my own dignity mattered more than Erlene’s. And I was remarkably incurious about her life.

This is one of my deep regrets.

I wish I had bothered to learn more of her story, more than what happened in the school cafeteria and hallways.

I had no gifts for Erlene, but she brought good to me. Without knowing, Erlene schooled me early in how to carry myself. And throughout my teaching career, I took what I learned into daunting places— through a yard of inmates on my way to the prison classroom, around a gym supervising several hundred middle school kids, and across platforms to speak to audiences.

In addition, guilt about my one-dimensional view of Erlene led me to be more open to the stories of others and less consumed with my own, which is maybe my favorite definition of humility.

There’s more to the story, I’d tell myself when students disrupted a class. And I tried to shift focus from my story—the annoyance of a lesson gone awry—to their stories.

What happened? This, I found, is the best question, the one that makes it come tumbling out. Life sucks. No friends. Kicked off the football team. Always someone on my back. Bad at writing, worse at math. Choir stinks. Not enough money. Too much homework. Not enough food. Too much bickering. Dad knocks Mom around. Can’t sleep. Mom’s leaving Dad. Bullied in the cafeteria for wearing Walmart shoes. Life sucks. All of it.

To teach without getting eaten alive, you can’t be a pushover. You’ve got to walk around with assurance in your step, show some dignity. To teach with compassion, you’ve got to ask questions. And listen, really listen, in a learning kind of way.

Self-assurance and humility. Same coin; two sides.

So, to Erlene—my thanks. And my deep-felt apology.

I wouldn’t want to be poor again, but I do have a cherished memory from our newlywed, penny-pinching days. Some folks thought we married too young, especially since neither of us had jobs. Even worse, times were tough in the Rust Belt city where we lived, so prospects for work were slim.

Home to more General Motors workers than any other city in the world, Flint had already been suffering because of foreign competition, collective bargaining, and declining profit margins. Then the 1973 oil embargo and the accompanying stock market crash pushed Flint into economic crisis.

When we moved into our tiny honeymoon home on Hartman Street in 1975, recovery was barely in sight. One day Steve’s friend told him the good news of a job opening: pumping gas at Texaco. Steve headed straight there. But at the gas station, some eighty laid-off auto shop workers already waited in line.

We found small jobs—extracting honey and cleaning a laundry mat. But our living was slim. We ate what was cheap—beans and cornbread and rice and potatoes. Still, we often lived on the verge of hunger.

So when we found a baby was on the way, our emotions seesawed, feeling one moment delight for a child and the next terror because we had no health insurance.

Likely not knowing any of this, my uncle gave us the perfect Christmas gift that first year of our marriage.

“Take this to remember me,” he said at the end of a family gathering. “It’s from the deer I shot on Thanksgiving Day.”

That evening when Steve placed the venison in our refrigerator, he turned to me with resolve.

“That venison,” he said, “is for you and the baby. I won’t eat a bite of it.”

And he didn’t.

I portioned out the venison to make it last. The daily eating of it became my private ceremony—a celebration of my uncle’s generosity and of Steve’s goodness.

Almost fifty years have passed since I took the last bite of my uncle’s venison. But sometimes on a Sunday evening when the fire crackles in the hearth and Steve and I sit in our recliners like old, retired people, I look over at him and think about the venison.

And each time, it’s as if he’s kind to me all over again.

“The days are shrinking,” my dad says one morning when I visit him, and he doesn’t mean the shortening days of fall.

He bends over his bad knee coaxing on a shoe.

“It takes so much time for us to live,” he says, “that I’m losing time to research.”

And he’s right. Just living sucks hours from his day. Buttoning a shirt, answering a doorbell, climbing the stairs, opening a jar of peanut butter—all this takes double the time, maybe triple.

Even answering the phone—“Pardon me, could you say that again?” Or reading a page, sometimes holding one eye shut to read the fine print.

When he was young, he didn’t fill pill boxes once a week or go to doctor’s appointments for his heart and gall bladder and joints and ears. He didn’t elevate and ice his knee. He didn’t check on my mom multiple times a day. And he didn’t need a two-hour nap to clear his brain.

My dad isn’t complaining. That’s not his way. He’s just detailing life as it is in old age, as if telling me what to expect.

Shoes on, my dad reaches for his cane. He hobbles out of the kitchen, through the dining room and living room, and climbs the stairs to his office, leading with his good leg on each step. I hear his computer make its booting-up noises. And I imagine his internal sigh. Having temporarily subdued all the ever-expanding banal demands, he’s now free to do his real work.

But in the short drive between his house and mine, I think again. For most of his life, my dad has written papers and sermons and poetry and songs. But he’s also changed diapers and shoveled manure and washed dishes and stayed up late helping his kids write papers.

My dad wasn’t born with patience. But accepting the things of everyday life, the mundane tasks of each decade, has helped him master patience. So, at ninety-one, he’s a good sport about encroaching physical demands. And he appreciates that counting out my mom’s pills and tucking her in each night is part of his real work.

Part, but not all.

After she’s safely in bed, he once again makes his laborious way through the house and up the stairs where his mind moves unimpeded back through the centuries and across lands and oceans.

And if these moments are harder to find, they are also more precious.

I’ve been watching my grandkids cook this summer. And they’ve got skills.

Some make crêpes and bread and strawberry trifle. Others concoct Boba tea and smoothies. One serves up spicy noodles that he eats with chopsticks. Another Alaskan cod with cabbage. Yet another roasts salmon with cinnamon-flavored sweet potatoes. This kid also buys his own seasonings and hides them away, out of general use. 

We took a couple of grandkids on a trip this summer, staying in a cottage with a kitchenette. They preferred to be in charge of the breakfast skillet, wanting to ensure scrambled eggs with just the right amount of fluff and bacon fried to the perfect crisp.

Our grandchildren run Instant Pots, air fryers, panini makers, and grills. But they draw the line at my humble, trusty crockpot. Maybe this is because there’s a certain luxury in their cooking. Rather than feeding a family three times a day, their forays into the kitchen are usually, prompted by personal hunger or by the urge to create. For whatever motive, I’m glad they’re learning to cook.

Though not without mishap.

After all, their bodies are growing so fast, their brains can’t always calculate just how to move in space. No wonder they trip over their own feet. And no surprise that they misjudge the strength of their hands.

In my kitchen this summer, I saw two such fast-growing hands grip opposite sides of a new bag of flour. The hands jerked. Flour first hit the ceiling and then descended like fine snow into our hair, over my glasses, across the counter, and into the cracks of the wooden floor.

The next day, another set of hands assumed the same grip, this time with a package of pasta.  

“You might want . . .” is all I had time to say before the noodles cascaded across the kitchen floor.

I opened my mouth again. But before I spoke, I thought of another kitchen floor, a commercial kitchen in a retirement center, where I once worked when I was the age some of my grandchildren.

In the rush of the dinner hour, the head cook handed me a garnished, family-style platter of chicken, potatoes, and roasted vegetables.

“Take these,” she said, “to Table 5.”

Something happened. Maybe I pulled the platter too forcefully from her hands. Or maybe I was daydreaming about last night’s date. Whatever, hot food avalanched down my apron and across the kitchen floor into the path of the Table 6 waiter, who slipped.

What I remember best is that the head cook didn’t say a word. Her lips may have tightened, but she managed to keep silence.  

And so did I. Which is good. Sometimes to gain a skill, you’ve got to make a mess.

“I’m ninety-five and a half,” my mom’s been saying for the past few months.

And to my mom, the half matters.

As it did to my daughter, when she was three and a half, and four and a half . . . until she was nearly a teenager.

In those years my daughter felt as though a year stretched on forever. So six months was worthy of being marked and counted. She knew who, among her friends, was a half year older or younger. And this ranking mattered.

But before she even conceived the concept of age, I had counted her age in even smaller increments.

“She’s three days old,” I told her brother when we brought her home from the hospital.

“Five weeks,” I said to an inquiring grandma at the grocery store.

“By the time she’s six months old,” my mother-in-law told me, “it’ll feel a little easier.”

And I hoped she was right.

My mom is no longer ninety-five and a half. Last week, her children gathered to celebrate her birthday. For most of us who sat around the table, half years fly by without notice. Some of us even have trouble remembering our ages.

But the time may well come when, like my mother, we’ll also count in half years. Smaller measures of age carry more significance at both ends of life. In those remarkable times, just after birth and just before death, states of affair can change fast.

Right now, my mom is just plain ninety-six. But it probably won’t be long until she claims another half year. And ninety-six and a half sounds impressive.

How can it still happen?  I take a whiff, and the world seems safe again. Like it did every Monday when I was a kid, back when I was newly moved away from my cousins and grandparents, away from the dog named Rover and the Jersey cows munching chop in the dairy barn. And away from fresh mountain air.

Life was different in the city. On muggy days, factory smog hung in the air, sirens wailed by on Saginaw Street, and tap water tasted of chemicals. But something stayed the same— Mondays still smelled like Mondays. And this was my reward for lasting out each week’s first day at my new school.

The whole walk home, I’d know what was coming. I’d open the door and breathe in the familiar. The washer would chug and the dryer hum, and I’d stand there inhaling the fragrance of Tide.

Which is, of course, why I still use Tide.

Is it all in my head—the way a whiff of laundry transports me back and makes me feel safe?  Actually, yes!

The brain gives special treatment to the sense of smell. Unlike the other four senses, smell gets to bypass the regulatory thalamus and go unmodulated to the amygdala, the emotional brain, the part of the brain that holds on to memory best.

This is why you feel young again when you smell fresh-cut grass or newly baked bread or wind-blown pines. These childhood scents imprinted on your brain when the world was full of wonder, stay right there, always waiting to be unlocked again.

And when triggered, they transport you back.

The Monday smell doesn’t make the world any safer. I know this. But it feels safer.

And that counts for something.

The September of 1978 was interminable. Our baby didn’t show up for her due date on September 3. She didn’t come the next day or the next. Temperatures reached into the eighties and stretched toward ninety. The only cool place in our house was the bathtub full of cold water.

The baby still hadn’t come when my husband Steve went back to college near the middle of September. Steve said he’d call me from a pay phone after each class. Trouble was that we were counting every dime. So we made a plan. Steve let the phone ring three times. If I was fine, I wouldn’t answer, and the dime would return to Steve. If I needed help, I’d pick up the phone.

Steve used his dime all day and all week. The doctor left for vacation, and Steve kept collecting dimes from return slots. But the day finally came, and on September 23, after twelve hours of labor, I held our daughter, feeling a love for her that was deep and fierce.

Ann Marie knew the ways of a baby without needing to be taught. She held her head steady from the beginning and knew how to latch on to nurse. With dark hair long enough to braid, Ann Marie was popular with the nurses.

September of 2024 has also been interminable. The baby I held forty-six years ago, the baby with the long, dark hair, has lost it, all of it. And now she wears a hat. All through these months of treatment, I’ve watched her fight against cancer and for health with pluck and grace. She is, once again, popular with the nurses. When they see her coming, they smile.

This morning, as I write, Ann Marie is receiving her last infusion of chemotherapy. And we are grateful for her good prognosis.

My love for her that September of 1978 was fierce and deep, as it is now. But in this long September of 2024, my respect for her has grown. I’ve seen her get up in the morning and take her courage in hand to do the daily things that must be done, even when the world seems to have cracked and split in two.

When I wrote Ann Marie’s card, I couldn’t bring myself to say happy birthday. It likely won’t be very happy. She’ll still be recovering from her last infusion. But this birthday signifies something bigger than carefree happiness. It marks a year of fortitude and growth.

Kudos, Ann Marie!

“Just to let you know,” the principal said, “you’ll likely have trouble with Jake’s mom.”

Jake Jeffers was new at our school, but his mom’s reputation had preceded him.

“Try not to get sued,” the principal said as he left.

I couldn’t tell if he was serious about the suing. But he was right about trouble.

From the first phone call, Jake’s mom begged for a quarrel. I wanted to hang up. Instead, I asked to meet. And then I gathered the tools I had learned at the Corrections Training Academy.

At the academy, I was all ears. How to avoid conflict in a classroom full of inmates? I wanted to know. How to de-escalate? That, too! How to make the classroom a safe, peaceful place? Yes! Yes! Yes!

But what I didn’t appreciate then was how much that training would impact my teaching outside the prison. People everywhere, it seems, need someone to bring calm.

Especially Jake’s mom.

By the time she came along, I had circled the block more than a few times. And I had honed some strategies. In my many discussions with Mrs. Jeffers, here’s what I put to use:

Talking with her, not at her: I tried not to say things as if there was one answer and I was the only one who had it. Instead, I worked to keep our talks a dialogue, not a monologue. For my part, I took short talking turns, making bite-sized comments and asking questions instead of making assumptions.

If she went on and on, I’d break in.

“Mrs. Jeffers,” I’d say, “I’d like to cut in here. I’m curious. Could you tell me . . .”

She liked to hear her name, so she usually stopped to find what was coming next. And she took my curiosity as a compliment.

Redirecting Negative Energy: If someone throws a punch, an instructor at the academy said, you have options—slip it (get out of the way), smother it (move in on it before it develops enough momentum to hurt you), or ride it (position yourself in a way that makes the force of the punch dissipate to a tolerable level).

The instructor was describing what to do with a physical punch. But these strategies also work during verbal attacks. With Mrs. Jeffers, smothering worked best. At the first signs that she was riled, I’d move in.

“I’m curious,” I’d say. “You’ve been frustrated with every teacher Jake’s had. “I keep trying to improve my teaching, so tell me, what traits are important in a teacher?”

When I moved in close like this, Mrs. Jeffers couldn’t work up a good punch.

The school year ended, and Mrs. Jeffers never sued me. She even said once that I was a good teacher. And so, among many failures, Mrs. Jeffers became one of my success stories.

But there was an added element I put forth, one I didn’t learn at the academy, and one that was key. When my conversations were soaked with compassion and free of contempt, that’s when they worked best.