Apple to Apple

“How are you this morning?” I asked my ninety-six-year-old mom about a month ago.

She barely looked at me.

“Weary and worn on the pathway below,” she said.

And without a smile.

But not anymore. Her neck still hurts. And her hands. Her steps are still slowing. And her memory fading. But she’s got her pluck back. Spring is here.

So I took her to London Florist the other day. For a week before our outing, she pored over a photo album, one that showed her flowerbeds of past years. One summer, she won the Prettiest Porch Award in our town. Not because she applied, but because someone drove by, took a photo of her porch, and submitted it.

But now the beds around her porch have been modified. After she broke her foot while gardening, we convinced her to reach out for help.

And so her grandson, who studies landscape architecture, redesigned the beds for a college project. He filled them with flowering shrubs and blue holly and perennials, aiming to make them beautiful. And low maintenance.

But he left her two beds—a narrow plot along the driveway and one set apart by a semicircle of rocks—which is why we went to London, Florist, where she was treated like a queen.

“Come with me, ma’am,” said the owner, who offered an arm.

And he took her to find what she really wanted—a plant she remembered from her mother’s garden. Scarlet sage, she thought it was called.  But it wasn’t the right plant.

My mom explained some more.

“Red salvia,” he said. “You want red salvia. I’ll order it for you.”

Back at home, my mom consulted her photo albums while I planted the flowers.

Most days, we work together outside, pulling weeds, giving some Miracle Grow here, and extra water there. My mom might be tired at the end of these sessions. But she’s no longer weary and worn.

“I wish,” she said this morning, “that I could tell my mom what we’ve been doing out here in the garden.”

And the premonition came to me that someday I’ll wish the same thing.

“Just once,” an anxious teenager tells me, “I wish someone could get inside my brain and see what it’s like.”

And I wish I could.

A few days later, I sit in the waiting room of a dermatologist. Behind the counter, two receptionists chat about a twenty-year old man who had left their office.

“Screaming like that!” one said with a shake of her head. “Like a child.”

And I wonder—was he a wimp? Or did pain pass through his brain in an unusual way?

What would the receptionist say if she could crawl inside his mind?

The problem is that we’re all stuck inside our own heads. Yet, we operate with the belief that we’re not, that our own experiences match the world as it is, and that others who differ from us are wrong, maybe even crazy.

It’s easy to forget that what we experience is highly governed by how our bodies and their systems are put together. If the munching of potato chips caused your heart rate to increase and cortisol to course through your veins, as it does for people with misophonia, you’d find eating in a lunchroom to be an entirely different experience.

We can’t be blamed, of course, for having to stay inside our own heads. Our brains won’t let us out. But there is something we can do—have the humility to be more curious than certain about other people’s experiences.

My problem is that I like to feel certain. This puts me in the role of an expert, able make judgements, give advice, and take control. But this impulse for certainty hurts relationships. Even when I think I’m acting in another’s best interests, I can come too close to making that person over in my image.

It’s only when I quiet my problem-solving impulses, when I become curious enough to ask questions, only then do I have a chance to understand what otherwise seems utterly mystifying. I can’t get inside an anxious teen’s head, but I can discover more of what’s in there.

The season is upon us. So we drive four hours through pelting rain and snarled-up traffic and across the Ohio River to attend a grandson’s piano recital, one of the many short concerts that pop up each spring.

One by one, pianists leave their front-row seats to play—a kid with big glasses and a cowlick, a silver-headed retiree on a new pursuit, a girl whose feet reach the floor only because she wears platform shoes, and another whose legs dangle all the way through her three short pieces.

“We’ve heard this piece before!” my husband whispers once.

And we had, a hundred times, forty some years ago when our son practiced “Für Elise” for his piano recital.

As the recital nears its end, our grandson takes the stage.

“Are you nervous?” his dad had asked Ben that morning. “Excited?”

“I feel nothing,” he’d said, “absolutely nothing.”

He must have saved his emotions. Now, his hands seem to caress the keys, playing sometimes with strength and sometimes sweetly, sometimes fast and sometimes leisurely, sometimes in short, detached notes and sometimes smoothly.

I’m proud of our grandson. But at the end of the recital, his teacher plays, showing Ben and the rest how it’s really done. He’s perhaps the most exacting instructor Ben’s ever had. And he looks the part—a snowy-haired, bearded man with an erect bearing who sports a bowtie, even while giving piano lessons. Now, under his hands, the piano thunders and trills and sings.

His students lean forward. Even the kid who played “Bullfrog Blues” from a Level 1 book. Besides hearing our grandson play, this continuum of competence is my favorite part of the evening. Like an old country school, all the players are in the same room. And learning at every level is celebrated.

The girl with the dangling legs has reminded everyone else where they started. And the snowy-haired teacher has shown them how far they can go.

Don’t miss this season of spring recitals. If you look, you can find one near you. And you may not need to drive across a river and through snarled traffic to get there.

It used to be the other way around. I’d stir up hot chocolate and tell him a story. But this week, he becomes the storyteller.

No hot chocolate. He’s not even with me. But his voice rides the radio waves across the miles into my kitchen, where I sit with my Diet Coke.

A spider, according to the story, goes to a high spot and casts a thread, which blows in the wind until it sticks to another spot. This becomes the bridge thread.

And from this thread she builds a web. Her silk, which turns from liquid to solid as it leaves her body, is stronger by weight than steel, can stretch up to four times its original length, and can even be layered to form a bulletproof mesh.

Her weaving shows foresight. It’s tightly spiraled, framed, and anchored. And she tailors her web to fit available space, the size of the local prey, and even the weather. She plans for contingencies, fashioning the netting trap so she can tighten the strands when she’s hungry and become quickly aware of snared prey.

But life comes at her. Wind blows. Rain pelts. Animals smash through her work. And despite her competencies, the web breaks down.

So what can a spider do?

Many rebuild, the storyteller says, strengthening their framing threads and securing their anchor points. Some take a temporary rest and scavenge for food. Others move on to a better place. And start again.

Here’s the thing about spiders—they don’t weave in naivety. They sense danger in the world. With their eight eyes, they see it. And with highly sensitive hairs, they feel it.

But they have another sense, as well—that they can always make more silk. And they live in this double knowledge.

This story will likely stick with me, especially when I demolish a spider web. Or when I’m called to make silk in dangerous times.

We’ve found the right place. We know as soon as we step inside. The Schuster Performing Arts Center is full of grey heads and lines for elevators. Some of us eschew the elevators and climb the elliptical staircase to the balconies. But though we think ourselves fit, we stop at each landing—to admire the Wintergarden in the lobby below. And to catch a breath.

The 2,300-seat theatre begins to fill. The couple beside us discusses orthopedic shoes. Just over from us, a woman moves to a row below.

“Down here, I can see better through my bifocals,” she says to her husband, who follows behind grumbling.

Just a few seats away, a couple holds hands, wrinkled, blue-veined hands. A young guy walks in. He’s escorting a woman with a cane, probably his grandma. Nice guy to come with his grandma. Wise grandma to show him bygone days.

Finally, the show begins: The Simon and Garfunkel Story.

This touring show tells the story of the rise of Simon and Garfunkel by blending their songs with original film footage of the times.

We were young once, the show reminds us. And cool. We see the evidence on the screen—beads, long hair, tie-dye shirts, daisies, hippie buses, bell bottoms, and peace signs. The musicians sing about how groovy we were back then, how inclined to drop out of the rat race:

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Ba da da da da da,da, da, feelin’ groovy.

But if we were chill, we also lived through turbulent times. That proof’s in the images, too: war, draft-card burning, tear gas, generational conflict, and protests over racial injustice. The musicians sing about this:

And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence. 

Way back in 1968, when they released “Old Friends,” Simon and Garfunkel must have foreseen the future gatherings of grey-heads who lived through this turmoil.

Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be 70

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears.

There’s a pause before the pickup notes of the performance’s climax—“Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water.” This song brings a promise to the weary, to the crying, to those in dark times.

Like a bridge over troubled water, the musicians sing, I will lay me down . . . I will comfort you. . . I’ll ease your mind.

Back when this song was new, we were young and mostly absorbed in our own pain. But we sang those lyrics like we meant them. And maybe we did. Because now many of us care for two generations or three or maybe even four. Over and over, we lay ourselves down. This is the calling and privilege of being 70.

We’re a bit sobered, thinking of those we love. But the evening isn’t over. We come alive with “The Boxer,” a song about someone who doesn’t give up the fight. The lyrics and music are punchy. And during the filler syllables between the stanzas, those of us who, back in the day, waved flashlights at rock concerts, now pull out cell phones and move them with the music.

Simon and Garfunkel are right. It’s terribly strange to be 70. And fun. Even somewhat groovy.

“We need proof you’re married,” the man at the social security office says.

So my husband and I walk two blocks down Main Street to the Madison County Courthouse to get that proof.

On the day before our wedding, nearly fifty years ago, we had come to this courthouse. That day, we climbed the stairs under the skylight and entered the Probate Court office to apply for our marriage license.

They asked us some questions—whether we were habitual drunkards, whether we were imbeciles, insane, or under the influence of liquor or narcotic drugs, and whether we were of nearer kin than second cousins. We affirmed that none of this was true and signed on the dotted line.

Today, the clerk brings a leather-bound record book to the counter. She pages through the years to 1975. And there it is—the very paper we signed.

“Look at the occupations we listed,” my husband says.

He’s a beekeeper; I’m a licensed practical nurse.

How our lives have changed. On that pre-wedding day, neither of us dreamed that fifty years later, we’d be living, not in Michigan, but in Ohio, two blocks from the courthouse. Or that we would have retired from decades of teaching and counseling and church work.

Proof of our marriage in hand, we walk home through the chill of a clear, spring day in the small town that’s been our home for 45 years. It’s an ordinary day. But it’s also a moment to mark.

We’re seventy years old and applying for social security. We’re grayed, a little creakier, somewhat slower. We always knew this aging would happen. But we’re a bit surprised at how fast it’s come.

And we have now what we hoped for back then—a love that’s grown stronger, deepened by decades of shared experiences, many wonderful, some hard.

It seemed a bit ludicrous, after all these years, to prove our marriage.

But as it turns out, the man from social security gave us more than an errand. He gave us a gift—the chance to look back and remember.

It’s an image I’ll long remember—my Uncle Carl’s coffin on a farm wagon hitched to the first tractor he ever bought, a John Deere 520. And surrounded by grandchildren, twenty-two of them, sitting on long benches along the wagon sides, taking their last ride with Grandpa.

All that long funeral day, it was the grandchildren who caught most at my emotions. They were a beautiful bunch, young and strong, a few having crossed thresholds into careers and parenthood, a few in the primary grades, and the rest in between. During the reading of the obituary, each of their names were spoken, all twenty-two, one by one and with feeling.

At the cemetery, some of them carried their grandpa to his grave. Others stood close, linking arms. And still others supported their parents with an arm on a shoulder or the squeeze of a hand.

But what gripped me most was the ride back to the church for the funeral meal. As the tractor pulled the wagon up the hill, I could see the grandchildren once again lining the wagon sides. And between them, the now-empty wagon bed.

The funeral meal was subdued. At first. But soon stories took up again. Someone chuckled. Someone else laughed. And gradually, the banter began.

It had been a hard day. And a good one.

For the young and for the old.

“I’m so glad I came,” my mom said on our way back to Ohio. “So glad I went to the graveside.”

It was brutally cold that burial day, for all of us. Even the grandchildren shivered. We had triple-bundled my mom. Still, she began to shiver. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and offered a coat. Someone else brought a hunting jacket. And someone a hoodie. We piled them over her like blankets until she was ensconced in her graveside chair.

I’ve been home for a week. But I still hold images of the young and the old: my ninety-six-old mom sitting under wraps and a set of grieving grandkids.

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.