Apple to Apple

An hour with my dad is a treat. But if you want a meaningful exchange with him, you’ve got to step up. Conversation, after all, rests on an agreement to cooperate—to work together to be mutually understood.

Those who knew my dad in his prime saw him as a communicator—clear, precise, courteous, thoughtful, and coherent. And at ninety-two, he’s still all of those things. Only some people can’t tell—the ones who don’t step up.

“He’s got a sharp mind,” I tell his doctors, “but rotten ears.”

And some of them adjust. They match my dad’s ears. And his brain.

Here’s how to make such a match:

• Assume he’s accumulated some wisdom. For decades now, he’s navigated difficult, complex, and uncertain life situations with aplomb. And with deliberate thoughtfulness.
• Avoid elderspeak, that singsong version of babytalk for seniors. Somehow, my dad’s got the sense that he’s a grownup and wants to be treated like one. Besides, he appreciates words like sweetheart and honey only from my mom.
• Keep your mouth visible. Don’t speak with your back turned or your head down or your hand around your mouth.
• Speak up, and speak clearly. Not only for the first sentence. Not only for the first word of a sentence. All the way through.
• Watch for evidence of understanding. At a puzzled look, say it a different way. A new consonant and vowel combination may help.

The other day someone came to see my dad. Someone young, who somehow understood.

“What a fun talk,” my dad said later. “And meaningful.”

This young person stayed for only an hour. Did he have a deadline? Maybe. But perhaps he was wise beyond his ears—understanding that bad ears make conversation a challenge and knowing when to stop.

“I hope,” my dad said, “that he comes back.”

He made me feel like a dunce, the man I’ll call Mr. Petee. And I wasn’t the only one. I could tell by the way my classmates dragged into class with shuttered faces.

Mr. Petee was smart. None of us questioned this. He knew all about graduate-level statistics. He could solve applied problems in differential and integral calculus and apply probability theory and construct a predictive model with regression analysis. He could do all this without strain, and likely in his sleep.

But his depth of knowledge was our curse. Especially since it was paired with a shortage of imagination.

He couldn’t seem to conceive what it was like for someone else not to know what he knew. It didn’t occur to him that he saw through polished glass while we peered through fog. And when he assumed certain steps were self-evident, our fog deepened.

Mr. Petee lacked what we in education call theory of the mind—the ability to distinguish between his own mental state and that of another. And to honor, not disparage, that difference.

But it’s not just nerdy statisticians who fail to bridge to others’ minds. We all do it.

Some of us know how to manage time instinctively or catch a rhythm or say words that uplift and bring peace or visualize which way is north and which is south.

It’s tempting to think others should carry the same impulses.  And when they don’t, we become irritated at their lack of sense. And we try to scold them into knowledge.

But good teachers recognize that we all have different inner lives. And they know where to start—in their students’ minds, not in their own. Instead of deepening fog, these teachers go into it and lead the way out. And with each step, students feel smarter, not dumber.

If it hadn’t been for the coming night, hay-baling day would have been heaven. Not for the haymakers, of course, the work being hot, itchy, exhausting, and sometimes hurried, with an eye to the sky. Rain meant trouble. Even I knew that. I could never understand, though, how something wet like rained-on hay could start a barn fire.

Already the hay had been cut, crimped, and raked into windrows. And on my favorite day of haymaking, the baler moved up and down the field binding the mown, dried grasses into blocks the perfect size for building, what we kids called, hay houses.

We made them big enough to hold two or three of us at a time and with windows to let in light. We’d take dolls inside and kittens and, if we were lucky, a nest of baby rabbits that survived the tractor in the field.

This play was all the more alluring for its brevity. As the sun inched down the sky, the tractor would chug toward us across the now-emptied field. For some reason, likely the goodness of my grandpa’s heart, the bales of our houses were the last to be loaded onto the hay wagon.

Following the wagon, I’d trudge toward the barn to watch the hay elevator, the source of my nighttime disquietude.

My grandpa hefted one bale at a time onto a long ramp that hauled hay up to the loft window high above. There the bales dropped off the elevator and landed with a satisfying thunk on the haymow floor below. This dropping-off triggered the nightmare that haunted my childhood.

In that recurring dream, I’d get caught at the bottom of the elevator ramp. It would take me up toward the yawning hayloft window. But inside the barn, there’d be no hayloft. Instead, a bottomless pit, where, if I’d start falling, I’d fall forever. Just before this drop,  I’d jerk awake in terror.

But it got worse. One day, a cousin told me with great authority in his voice that if you had a bad dream and you didn’t wake up before its terrible ending, your heart would give out and you would actually die. In real life.

Why was this dream so strong? And why did I dream it over and over? I’ve never figured it out.

I’m quite certain, though, that if my husband had played in the same hayfield and watched the same elevator at work, this nightmare would not have visited him. He’s prone to finding good, even in the bad.

I, on the other hand, can detect danger, even when it isn’t there.

Usually my ninety-two-year-old dad and I talk about ideas—like how the invention of the telephone changed daily life and why some people think before they talk while others talk so they can think and whether the form of the sonnet enhances or constricts creativity.

But the other week, our topic was, of all things, tractor pulls. The evening before, the annual roar from the county fairgrounds down the street had bounced around my parents’ porch. But my experience had been more intimate. In an act of great love for a grandchild, I paid good money to sit in bleachers, maybe fifty feet from the track, cover my ears with my hands, and inhale exhaust gases mixed with the smells of all the fair foods—fried chicken, deep-fried Oreo, fried ice cream, fried mac and cheese, fried Snickers, fried pickle. And fried butter?

My dad has never parted with money for a tractor pull. But a few years ago, when his legs still took him on walks around town, he had heard the end-of-summer roar and walked down the sidewalk to watch through the fence.

This is a man who knew pre-tractor times. Back then, he was a plough boy on his father’s farm. Each evening, he pitched hay into the horses’ mangers and threw straw onto their stall floors.

His grandpa—who appreciated that horses recognized familiar faces and read human emotions and partnered in work—once told my dad that thousands of people could have the same model car, but thousands of people could not have the same horse.

Working with a tractor was different.

“With a tractor,” my dad told me once, “you’re out to get things down. With horses you settle in to be there for a while.”

And in this patient way, he worked behind draft horses with thick muscles and large hearts and powerful lungs.

But my dad, standing outside the fence of the fairgrounds, watched tractors that each used the power of more than a thousand of those horses.

And sitting with my grandson, I also watched as one tractor after the other thundered down the track. It seemed that they’d never run out of power, that they could go on forever. But with every tractor, the weight-box slid across the trailer. And the balance shifted until the sled dug into the ground and all that power ground to a halt.

“Kind of like life,” my dad said.

Which is exactly what I had thought as I sat on the bleachers with my lively grandson.

My dad and I fall into silence. We know each person’s place on the track—my grandson’s and mine and my dad’s.

But for all of us, the balance keeps shifting.

I sit with more than 65,000 people in a stadium called The Jungle. From the stands we see barges, motorboats, and ski jets stream by on the Ohio River. On the other side, trucks, vans, and cars pass on Interstate 71. To my left are the buildings of Covington, Kentucky. To my right, the skyline of Cincinnati. And all around me on this first home game of the season is orange, orange, orange.

Except for a sprinkling, a sparse sprinkling, of teal.

I’ve got to own up. While I like going to games with my husband, I’m not there for the football. It’s the atmosphere and energy and suspense. Today I’m taken by the camaraderie of all the people wearing orange.

Also by the steadfast loyalty of those wearing teal.

Despite the sea of orange around them, they stand and cheer each time the teal makes a sack or a field goal or a touchdown.

Though I don’t say this to my husband, I’ve got sympathy for the teal. I’ve also worn the shirt of another color. I’ve dressed as others haven’t , said what others didn’t, and thought in different paths. I’ve worn teal in a sea of orange.

The game is close. And its end is near. At two minutes to go, we’re all at attention, the orange and the teal.

In the last 18 seconds, orange scores. And wins. I’ve got a happy husband, for sure.

We all leave this sports arena they call The Jungle. Inside the stadium, we were civil to each other, even kind.

And I hope we all, orange and teal, carry this civility with us into the real jungle.

For more than seven decades, I’ve been breathing on this earth. More than 36 million minutes of growing up and then growing old. Most of those moments have faded into nothing. Others remain in my memory. Why those, but not those? 

I took high school Spanish for two years and remember maybe ten words. But I can tell you the song my great-uncle sang to me on the steps of my grandparents’ porch when I was six and he came back from Luxembourg. And what he was wearing while he sang it (a plain-style straight-cut suit). And the color of my dress and my stockings (both white) and my shoes (patent leather black).

I can’t tell you the current cost of a gallon of milk, but I remember my grandparents’ telephone number (TW5-5451). I recall the names of all my elementary school teachers. But only a few of my college professors.

How strange are the tricks of memory. As Mark Twain says: When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.

Perhaps more puzzling are those long-forgotten memories that pop up from my subconscious brain, unbidden and sometimes unwanted.

Why that? I wonder. Why now?

Just the other day, such a lost scene emerged.

On a visit to a brother, my husband and I woke early. So as not to disturb the rest of the house, we took a walk through a sleepy, little college town. There were small stirrings—dishes clinking through an open window, a woman walking a dog, a man in a bathrobe retrieving a newspaper from the end of his driveway.

We turned a corner. And across the street sat a little girl behind a table selling something. We read the sign: Rocks for Sale.

But more arresting than the kid behind a table was the old man behind the kid. He waved both arms over his head in exaggerated motions.

“Buy some!” he mouthed to us.

It was a shout without sound from a grandpa who was watching the battle of life begin—the first foray of a child he loved into entrepreneurship, into having a vision and making it happen.

We crossed the street. It was not an auspicious beginning—just an ordinary girl with rocks lined in a straight row. No geodes or quartz crystals or gemstones, just backyard rocks.

“How much is this one?” my husband asked, picking up what looked to be common sandstone.

And he bought it for a nickel.

The grandpa hadn’t said a word. The girl was on her own. But he was still there, behind her and watching for the next passerby.

After more than two decades, why has this memory come forth? And why now?

Maybe because I’m the old one waving my arms, the grandma of eight young grandkids making their ways.

And maybe because that grandpa in that sleepy town shaped me, helped chisel me into the grandma I am today.

This is a benefit of growing old—that a plethora of memories are stored away, some in deeper storage than others, just waiting.

Mr. Cline called me a liar. And in front of his whole class at the community college, where, when I wasn’t changing diapers and reading storybooks, I was taking one class and then another on my way toward a teaching degree.

Instantly, I was back in my elementary school playground, where kids dealt with a perceived untruth by surrounding the suspected fibber.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” they’d chant. “Your tongue’s as long as a telephone wire.”

The words sounded dire. And I never understood how the accused could possibly have the gall to chant back: “I don’t care. I don’t care. I can buy another pair.”

I certainly had no such audacity, as I stood accused in front of my college classmates.

Mr. Cline taught by rules, one of which being that, if you were late for class on a quiz day, you took an automatic F.

I had tried to arrive on time, rising early to nurse a baby and dress a toddler and throw something in the crockpot for dinner. And I had walked out the door exactly on time.

But halfway down our brick sidewalk, I stopped and stared. The car wasn’t in the driveway.

Steve looked up in surprise when I walked back into the house.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

He finished pushing a pin through Ann Marie’s diaper, picked her up, and walked to the window.

We stared at each other.

I took the city bus to class, arriving fifteen minutes late.

“Could I please take the quiz?” I asked. “Our car was stolen out of our driveway.”

“Yeah, right!” he said.

And that’s when the ill-boding chant rose in my mind: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

Later, after I got over having earned an F, I fell to wondering about the origins of the chant.

Turns out it had once been even more ominous.

 In 1810, William Blake, of “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright,” wrote:

“Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?”

And later, in 1841, an unknown author got even more explicit:

Liar, liar, lick spit.
Turn about the candlestick.
What’s good for a liar?
Brimstone and fire. 

Someone hit with these words isn’t likely to confess a falsehood. And if the goal is to get to the truth, pronouncing judgement doesn’t help. I’ve found in my decades of teaching that what got me closer to the truth was asking honest and good-hearted questions.

Mr. Cline was incurious, choosing to see only one sliver of truth in my life—the moment I walked into class late. And he refused to widen his view by asking questions and hearing my words.

The car was found. Six months after it disappeared, the police called us. It was in a field near a woods, stripped of its tires, engine, radio, and battery.

Buying another car gouged into our meager finances.

But somehow, being called a liar left the bigger hole.

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.