Author: Phyllis Swartz

The first time I caught sight of a surveillance camera in a school hallway, my breath went short. And I was fourteen again, thrown across my bed turning the pages of 1984.

Earlier that day, my teacher Mr. Deaton had dumped a stack of Orwell’s books on top of his cluttered desk. On the cover of each book, the deep-set eyes of a ghost-like man on a big screen glared as two people ran from him in fear.

“A dystopian novel is a warning,” Mr. Deaton said as he handed out the books, “about what can happen if we aren’t careful.”

To escape the peering eyes of the ghost-like man, I shoved Orwell’s book deep into my satchel. That evening after supper and far into the night, I read with an ecstasy of fear about Big Brother. In the super state of Oceania, he monitors citizens with telescreens and microphones. In Oceania, even a tiny, facial twitch interpreted as disrespect to the Party could lead to arrest and torture.

For some reason, more than any of the other atrocities in Oceana, this surveillance frightened me most. I couldn’t fathom living under a camera. And if Orwell was right, I probably would. I counted it up. In 1984, I wouldn’t be nearly dead.

I didn’t appreciate the curtain Orwell pulled aside for me—how he sucked my innocence away, making me grapple with the ideas of censorship and unchecked power and the manipulation of truth. I’d never see the world the same way again.

It was all this teenage angst that leapt to my mind decades later when, as a teacher, I first saw that hallway camera. But to my surprise, I came to appreciate that ever-watching, never-blinking eye. The camera protected the innocent, brought help to the troubled, and decreased theft and vandalism and bullying.

Though 1984 gave me nightmares, I’m glad Mr. Deaton assigned it. Orwell’s cautionary tale taught me to be careful with power, thoughtful with technology, and compassionate in relationships.

And, yes. I assigned 1984 to my students.

In a holiday bustle of four generations, I once caught a scene. Ben’s Great-grandpa Swartz sat on our living room couch showing his age. And Ben, racing round and round through the rooms that circled the fireplace chimneys, showed his. Each time Ben passed his great-grandpa, they exchanged chuckles.

Ever since he was a babe in arms, Ben had been drawn to this grandpa. He liked to touch his big nose and his balding head and the hearing aids in his ears. And he understood early that to be heard, you had to shout.

Which is what Ben did when he suddenly halted his racing. Planting his feet on the floor and his hands on his hips, Ben gave Grandpa an appraising look.

“Why,” he said in a voice you could have heard two rooms away, “don’t you do something?”

Ben waited while Grandpa considered.

“Because,” Grandpa finally said. “I’m tired.”

Ben nodded and raced around the circle three more times. But each time he passed the sedentary figure on the couch, Ben looked more puzzled.

Then he stopped again, looking at the legs that hadn’t moved at all.

“How in the world,” he asked, “could you be tired?”

Great-grandpa opened his mouth. But nothing came out, and he shut it again. Ben waited. Still nothing.

Ben shrugged. And raced around again. But this time Great-grandpa didn’t chuckle. He barely smiled. So Ben drifted away to find a more appreciative audience.

I couldn’t blame Ben. Or his great-grandpa. Neither had the capacity to explain the differences in their metabolic rates and in the abilities of their bodies to convert food into usable energy and, most of all, in how the wear and tear of ninety-one years contrasted with three.

The young and the old are good for each other. But now and again they need time apart.

By age four, I had seen plenty of dead people. At our church, whole families went to every funeral. So lots of little kids filed past lots of coffins.

We’d stand on tiptoe to look at the dead grandmas and grandpas. They’d lie there, hands folded across their chests and eyes closed as if in deep, peaceful sleep.

They probably like it in there, I thought. They’re probably tired of creaky knees and bent backs and hobbling around with a cane.

I never once thought, though, about how these grandpas and grandmas died. Not until one sunny afternoon when I was riding my tricycle. I had just passed the milk house, when I heard a tiny scream.

On the sidewalk, a mouse writhed in pain. Under the paws of a farm cat, its grey fur was laid open. Blood stained the sidewalk.

I covered my face with my hands. But unable to look away, I peered between my fingers until the screaming stopped and the mouse went limp. And I knew the mouse was gone.

The blood could never go back into the body. Never again would the mouse take a breath or nibble on cheese or run across the grass or hide under a leaf.

I might have seen lots of dead people reposed in their coffins. But the screaming mouse awakened me to the pain of mortality. It showed me that, though death might be like sleep, as the Bible verses so often said, dying was sometimes terrible. And at the next funeral, I was not so quick to assume that dying was an easy answer for the old.

How had those grandpas and grandmas died? How would my mom and dad die? How would I die?

I went to my parents with questions about how to live with hope when I knew they would die someday, when I knew I would die, when none of us knew how we would die.

They helped me begin to understand that death is a natural part of life and that, like life, dying can be hard.

I didn’t like what I was understanding. I had hoped all the grandmas and grandpas fell gently into death without pain. This new knowledge did one good thing—made me feel more grown up. And that helped. Though not enough to keep the screaming mouse out of my dreams.

But despite those dreams, I quit asking questions. I somehow felt I didn’t want to grow up anymore. At least not for a long time.

“Don’t shoot the grandma!” the kid yells.

A few blocks into my evening walk, I’m paused uncertainly on the edge of a Nerf-gun battle that spans the sidewalk. Some kids are sprawled on the ground, apparently wounded. Or dead. But the rest are shooting and dodging and yelling.

“A grandma!” the kid yells again.

And it’s a cease fire. They skid to a stop and point their guns to the ground. They stand silent, peering at me from behind their goggles as I step over Nerf darts and around the dead and wounded. As I clear the battlefield, some call out to me.

“Have a good day,” they say.

And I do.

There’s something real nice about being my age. I’m in the phase of aging called the young-old. Coming next, around age 75, is the middle-old. And then comes the old-old, which describes my parents.

It could be that for me, this young-old stage is the best of life. No longer getting on the treadmill at 4:30 in the morning, I sleep more each night. After fending off school-room germs for so many years, I have fewer garden-variety ailments. I worry less about other people’s opinions, juggle fewer inescapable obligations, and enjoy senior discounts at restaurants. I have stories to tell and more time to chase my dreams.

But perhaps the most satisfying perk is that when I’m out and about, I keep running into kindness. People open doors and carry my groceries. They stop their cars and motion me across the street. They help me with technology. They smile and call me ma’am.

And now I’ve discovered that they even stop battles by yelling, “Don’t shoot the grandma!”

“It was sort of romantic,” my dad says. But he isn’t speaking of my mom, not this time. Instead, he waxes nostalgic about sugaring season, when nights are cold and days are warm and sap rises and it’s time to tap the maples.

In his hands my dad holds a sap pail, one he held a little over seventy years ago. We know this because right there on the pail is a message he scrawled: David is tapping. Oscar Maust and I are driving spiles. Rachel and Alan are handling sap pails. February 19, 1954.

You can find other messages like these on the hundreds of sap pails, also known as keelers, that came from my grandpa’s now defunct sugar camp. On those keelers, you can read about snowfalls and weddings and births. Here are some sample messages from the 1920s:

It was fun, my dad says, to read these words every year as he washed and scalded the keelers and loaded them into the box spring wagon to distribute among the maples.

As I read these messages on the keelers, I think of words I’ve seen carved into school desks and spray painted under bridges and marked on prison walls. I think of Facebook and Instagram, of Tik-Tok and Twitter.

We all, it seems, have the urge to leave marks behind us, to show evidence of having once been alive in a particular place at a particular time.

And I’m happy to now own the sap pail my dad holds in his hands and to hear him remember that time and place.

The other evening I set out for a sad walk, not to count my joys, but to mourn my sorrows—the cancer diagnosis of someone young and dear to me; the precariousness of life for the old, especially my parents whose knees and eyes and shoulders and body systems show their ninety years; the anguish of friends who struggle with broken relationships and poor mental health; the ravages of war; and the fractured American church.

The weight of these thoughts fell on me, and it seemed all energy had drained from my life. I must have looked like a hunched-over old woman plodding down Main. And, come to think of it, that’s exactly what I was.

Absorbed in troubles, I didn’t at first notice when a fancy black car pulled over along the road beside me.

“Mrs. Swartz, is that you?”

The voice was a little doubtful. And no wonder. I looked a hundred years older than when he had seen me last, walking school hallways with a jaunt.

It was Asher. I could still recognize his middle-school face. While I had grown old, Asher had grown up. There he was in his fancy car with his girlfriend, both of them alert, lively, and full of hope.

“Couldn’t tell if that was you,” Asher said. “But I stopped just in case. Wanted to say that you changed me from a rowdy, always-in-trouble kid to one who cared.”

Asher had just become a police officer in our town, and his girlfriend had just started medical school, aiming to be a surgeon.

“I’ll keep you safe,” Asher said, before he pulled back into traffic. “That’s my new job.”

His girlfriend leaned over him toward the window.

“And if you need surgery,” she said, “I’ll cut you open.”

Their words didn’t change cancer or old age and didn’t solve the problems of broken relationships and poor mental health and war and a divided church.

But they did change the rest of my walk.

At my age, I’m supposed to be wise. But I had been forgetting to embrace the view of the world in which opposites are joined, to see the world whole, not only with dewy-eyed romanticism or with only steel-eyed realism. I had lost track that life has two sides. One light. The other shadowed.

Like Asher, who had once brought me sorrow but now brought me joy.

On my walk home, I was still old, but no longer hunched over and plodding.

It’s coming again . . . my favorite time of the year. For seventeen years now our grandchildren have come to our house for Cousin Week. At first, just three, all in diapers. And each summer we kept adding.

In the early years, we pulled them in wagons and pushed them on swings and changed their diapers and read them stories. They spilled milk and lost pacifiers and skinned knees. They begged to be carried and fought over the favorite red ball.

At naptime, they recharged and we regrouped. And then we’d start over again.

Now, many of them could carry me. And we’re dealing with cars, not tricycles; with sports injuries, not skinned knees; with sinks full of dishes from late-night snacks, not spilled milk. They lose phones instead of pacifiers and discuss the origins of the universe instead of fighting over the favorite red ball. Now we camp and kayak and bowl and ride the bike path and stay up until all hours and sleep the morning away. And eat and eat and eat.

“Are the grandkids coming?” my favorite clerk at Kroger asks.

She knows.

But what I like more than all the things we do together, is that they still come to us, these young people, just beginning to spread their wings. They won’t keep coming, not like this. Their wings will take them other places—to schools and jobs and relationships. They’ll be going on, to make their lives.

But this year, they’re coming, all of them.

Back in our day, we sang these nostalgic lyrics: 

   We have this moment to hold in our hands
	And to touch as it slips through our fingers like sand. . .
	We have this moment today.

Being a grandma, I’m permitted this sentimentality.  

But being a grandma, I also applaud their futures, when our house will no longer be a week-long haven every summer. When, instead, they’ll be out there, somewhere, creating havens for others. And we’ll be watching and praying.

I’m working with my 91-year-old father these days. We’re making slide shows for three history talks he hopes to give this fall.

From his computer, he sends an image to mine. And with a few clicks, the image is where it belongs—in slide number 21.

We’d been doing this for weeks. But on this day, my dad falls silent for a moment. His eyes travel from my computer to his. And back again.

“I’m amazed,” he says. “What path did that photo take between our computers? Where all did it go?”

My dad learned this kind of talk from his dad.

Grandpa used to lean back in his chair after a good dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes. He’d cross his arms and prop his chin in his hand. And he’d marvel as he recalled the first cars on the public road or the first airplanes that crossed their mountains or the first electric lights that dotted the country side.

He had grown up, after all, with horses and buggies and butter churns. He had seen wool shorn from sheep and then and carded and spun and knit into clothing. No wonder he was astonished at the first space travel and the moon landing.

It’s hard, he’d say, for each generation to imagine what the next one will invent. And he’d tell what he read in the World Book Encyclopedia—that in the early 1800s, an employee at the patent office resigned because there would be no more inventions to patent.

If my grandpa could have seen my dad and me working on the slide show—collecting images of log houses and census records and newspaper clippings and church-vote tallies and putting all this together to be shown on a big screen at a history meeting—he would have been amazed once again.

And I’m like my grandpa and my dad, I can’t imagine what my grandchildren’s generation will create. As far as I can tell, there’s only one invention left—a sort of transport that can bring grandchildren across the miles, from their front doors to mine, in seconds, not hours.