Apple to Apple

We’re taking my ninety-six-year-old mom to bury her little brother. She’s reclined in the van seat beside me, two coats over her, another three layers underneath, and the car heater blowing.

“After the funeral tomorrow,” she says, “I want to go to the graveside service.”

This will be in the mountains on a cold spring day.

She’ll sit there in a winter coat we packed for the occasion and hear words of comfort before the casket is lowered into the earth. This cemetery scene has become familiar to her, having now lost three older siblings and five younger.

Of this warm, generous-spirited family of eleven children, only my mom and her youngest sister will be there to hear the nephews form a men’s chorus to sing a final farewell for their last uncle. One other living sister will be at home in bed, unaware of the shrinking of what was once a large family.

And still is. From those eleven came—at last count— 55 children, 165 grandchildren, 274 great-grandchildren, and 35 great-great grandchildren. With in laws, the family numbers well over 700.

My mom and her youngest sister might be bereft of siblings as they pay their respects to their brother. Nonetheless, they will be surrounded by a clan.

But many of the 700 will be missing. Not because Uncle Carl isn’t loved or worth memorializing, not because they don’t care. But because they do—about children and grandchildren and students and clients and employers and employees.

They’ll be out there living like a Bender—honoring Uncle Carl by doing the good they can with warm and generous spirits.

It was a marvelous, once-in-a-childhood day. Because of a telephone. Actually, because of two telephones, both in our house for that one day. And one was mine.

It hung on the wall—a mahogany box, with a crank on one side and a receiver on the other. One more day, and the telephone company would take this phone away, leaving us with only the strange new rotary phone they had just installed.

But for one day, because my parents had use of the new phone, the old one was mine. And I could crank it to call my friends on our party line as much as I wanted.

All day we talked, Gertrude and Alice and I—about little-kid things, like how they cut a new paper family from the Sears catalog. And how I shook red paint in an empty catsup bottle for a make-believe grocery. And how the telephone company was coming to school to show us how to use a rotary phone so we could teach our parents. We talked and did our chores, talked and ate lunch, talked and set the table for supper.

After that delightful day of unrestrained jabber, I never saw telephone wires the same way again. Those lines strung in the sky—how could they carry so many words from so many people so fast?

Years later, I found someone else who marveled at this, the poet Carl Sandburg:

I am a copper wire slung in the air.
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying.
     A copper wire.

But the magic didn’t stop with a copper wire.

More than half a century later, words no longer need wires. Now, words from my cell phone ride invisible radio waves that somehow land in a grandkid’s phone in Kentucky or Illinois.

And not just words. Images. And not just images. Moving images. And what next?

That marvel I felt as a kid—it keeps coming back.

I catch my ninety-two-year-old father nodding off at his desk. This doesn’t happen often. But there he is, hands on the keyboard, eyes closed, and a slight whiffling snore coming from his mouth. The cursor on his Word document blinks away.

He hadn’t heard me on the stairs. And doesn’t hear me call his name. But when I touch his shoulder, his eyes fly open, his head jerks, and his hands shoot up.

“How could I fall asleep,” he asks, “in the middle of the Civil War?”

I don’t know what my father read that morning. Perhaps, a report like this one, written by a soldier after the Battle of First Manassas:

There were piles of legs, feet, hands and arms, all thrown together, and at a distance, resembled piles of corn at a corn-shucking.  Many of the feet still retained a boot or shoe. Wounded men were lying on tables and surgeons, some of whom at the time were very unskillful, were carving away, like farmers in butchering season, while the poor devils under the knife yelled with pain.  Many limbs were lost that should have been saved, and many lives were lost in trying to save limbs that should have been amputated…

To my dad, history is not just facts and events. I’ve seen the sudden glistening in his eyes when he makes another’s pain his own.

“Such sorrow,” he says now, shaking his head, “and I fall asleep.”

It’s amazing, the pull of sleep. It draws me into oblivion at unthinkable times—when I overnight in a hospital room, for example, while my dad groans in his bed. Though I fight to stay awake through the dark night watches, just before dawn, sleep takes me down.

Sleep is more than a luxury. Like food, our bodies crave it. But though our bodies can’t force us to eat, they can put us to sleep, even behind the wheel of a car or in a hospital room or when we are reading about the Civil War.

And as we sleep, our bodies reset. And our brains. Perhaps the best path from despondency to hope is sleep.

My dad’s micro nap got him going. As I leave, he’s already back in the Civil War, his computer keys clicking away.

You wouldn’t think a stack of catalogs could hold so many memories.

“I’m ready to give them away,” my mom said when we found them under the eaves of her attic.

But not without some stories. And what amazes me is how the Sears catalog has woven its way into my mother’s daily life.

Way in.

It’s pages used as toilet paper, for example.

“I’d get in trouble,” my mom said, “for staying in the outhouse too long. It was more fun to leaf through catalog than to do dishes.”

With summer, spring, fall, and winter editions, new 1000-page catalogs kept showing up the in the mailbox. Beyond the outhouse, these “Big Books,” as they were called, served as booster seats and doorstops. Their pages were torn out to clean windows and sometimes crumpled up for insulation in walls.

My memory doesn’t stretch back to a catalog in the outhouse. But some of this story comes down to me. I sat on a stack of catalogs at my grandma’s kitchen table and folded their pages to make doorstops. And my own attic holds scraps from old Sears catalogs—paper people cut from their pages.

I spent hours naming these people, assembling them into families, and seating them together on church benches made from folded catalog pages. My favorite was a little girl named Karen, who wore a pink coat with a pink, lace-edged cap

Times have changed. Sears is almost gone. Big Books no longer land in mailboxes four times a year, Sears stores no longer dot the country, and the eaves of my parents’ attic are now emptied of catalogs.

But the Big Books they saved all these years still hold value. They’ve found their way to my daughter-in-law’s university classroom, where she uses them for sociology exercises, helping her students uncover stories of the past.

I’m not always sure what my grandkids are saying.

“Are you glazing us, Grandma?” one of them asked at the end of what I thought was a satisfying late- night talk.

Glazing them?

My grandma always glazed the Sunday dinner ham, not me.

My grandkids use words like cap—meaning unbelievable.  And big mad—a way to describe anger. And skibidi, which my grandson explains is a throw-around word that can mean anything. You can use it when you don’t know what else to say.

Skibidi— I’ll remember this the next time I can’t find just the right word.

There’s a whole list of these words: slay (not meaning kill), rizz (nothing to do with getting up in the morning), and flex (no connection to bending with the times). This emerging lingo tempts me to roll my eyes with others in my generation.

But I remember another set of words—groovy, far out, jive, dig it, turkey, bummer—talk that was cool (not meaning chilly) back in the days of peace signs and maxi dresses and bell-bottomed jeans, back when I promised myself not to roll my eyes when I was old.

And I recall telling my students that Shakespeare messed with the language. He changed nouns into verbs (Unhair thy head) and married two words into one (eyeball, madcap, green-eyed). And invented language he needed—skim milk and night owl and wild goose chase.

So there you have it—my grandchildren and Shakespeare—playing with words, helping the language evolve.

I looked up glazing. And that’s not what I was doing in that late evening talk. I wasn’t biased or overhyping. I meant every word I said from the bottom of a grandma’s heart.

But, like my grandma, I did glaze a ham for Sunday dinner.

I sit in a chemo center with my little sister. She tells me how kind people have been—food, prayers, cards, letters, texts.

And she tells me about the gift from our father.

“I feel helpless,” my dad had said to me when he heard about my sister’s cancer.

His legs are lame, his hands hurt, and the three blocks of winter weather between his house and hers daunt him.

Still, he had an idea—one he felt reluctant to suggest.

“I could call her every day,” he said, “with a history lesson.”

Well!

But, you know, they’ve rarely missed a day.

For about an hour, Dad takes my sister away from her life to a time when our ancestors met secretly in caves to worship. And to long goodbyes when people gathered at the homes of departing immigrants to sing:

Now have come the time and hour
To travel to America.
The wagon by the door now stands
With wife and children, we will go.
And when we come to Baltimore,
We’ll hold our hands upraised
And shout a word of victory.
Now we’re in America!

My sister has heard about castles and milkmaids and plowboys. And about the years of driving dangerously, when people shouted whoa to stop their cars, and especially about an accident of her great-grandfather, which resulted in the death of a young boy.

My dad has talked about the distilleries of his great-grandparents and how a man who had too much to drink brought his horse into the house and commanded it to step over the cradle of his sleeping baby.

My sister now knows that my dad traded his suspenders for a belt when he was seventeen. And that his first suit with buttons, not hooks-and-eyes, was for his wedding.

And my dad even confessed a boyhood escapade—that sometimes, on his way home from school, he’d climb the steep bank to Strawberry Hill, an abandoned children’s home. And in the office of that empty orphanage, he’d browse with great interest through records of former orphans.

As my sister tells me all this, we’re here in the cancer center. Hopefully those in the cubicles around us are receiving their own gifts of support. But I wonder, how many of them get a daily history lesson from a ninety-two-year-old father?

“Dad helps,” my sister says. “He gets me into other worlds, shows me I’m not the only one with problems.”

I keep trying to forget the other grandma. She sits on the opposite side of the bleachers, her hair as silvered as mine, a fuchsia scarf around her neck, and her hands clenched in her lap, much as mine would be if the scoreboard flipped the numbers.

All through this basketball season, there’s been some grandma sitting over there. Sometimes the hair is coiffured, sometimes a no-nonsense wash-and-dry, sometimes bundled at the nape. Sometimes the grandma looks like she’s rushed in from the office wearing a blazer. Other times you’d think she just untied her apron and come straight from the kitchen. Whoever the grandma, she’s for the opposing team.

If she’s like me, she’s learned more about basketball than she ever thought she would—what palming is and goal tending and a five-second violation. She now understands the difference between an outside cut and an inside cut and between a personal foul and a technical foul.

And if she’s like me, she watches more than the game. She studies her grandson’s face for signs of desperation or accomplishment. She hopes to see him hold a temper, help a fallen opponent off the gym floor, and keep trying, even when he knows he’s lost. And she hopes to not see him crumpled on the court with a torn ACL.

Like me, she’s glad to be on the sidelines for her grandson, to feel the rise and fall of the ball and the emotions. Kids know who’s in the stands. And she hopes her presence now will help her grandson feel her with him long after she’s gone.

But for today, she wants her grandson’s team to win. She pictures him going to sleep this night savoring the three-point shots and the swishing free throws and the coach’s thumbs up.

Mine isn’t the only grandson out there—this is what the grandma of the fuchsia scarf in the opposing bleachers keeps reminding me.

Still . . . if I had to choose . . .

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.