WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #16
Sitting in the sun outside the music building at St. John’s College. A fly. Imagine that. How I would love to be as carefree as when I used to be a student here. What’s different in twenty-five years? Twenty pounds. A laptop computer. That creeping crawl of age in face and step and political leaning. That unruly hair that glints silver from a part of chocolate brown and brassy orange. What’s different? My 16-year-old daughter enrolled in the Shakespeare community seminar, “The Merchant of Venice.”
[So what did you talk about tonight? I will ask later. Whether revenge is worth it. And what did you decide—is it? Not in the end, but it feels really good at first.]
What’s different? All those elastic years in between that accumulate so heavily, then fall away so easily in this gentle spring wind.
Here’s what’s different: this weathered teak table in this sunny spot wasn’t here when I was a student. The enormous two-story library wasn’t built, or the gym, or the extra upper dorms. The scratchy flat leaves of hollyhocks are new, and the twining chalk-white stalks and budding green leaves of this tall bush next to me.
[A couple walking by: We got our Language paper assignment. So did we. Did you decide what you’re going to do? I was thinking about the option of writing a sonnet. Writing your own sonnet might be hard.]
That ponderosa pine was surely here twenty-five years ago. And the chords flowing out of the music building—not the plucked hesitancy of a new student, but a ponderous melody being practiced—have that timeless mark of youth and age mixed together.
[Colin calls my cell phone—which I didn’t have as a student—to ask if I want to go to Blue Corn Cafe tonight for my birthday. We already ate, I tell him. Do you want to come watch us eat?]
A son. Two sons. A daughter. They didn’t exist when Ron and I met, exchanged names for the first time in the cafeteria, his chair turned three-quarters to meet mine. Who would sleep with him first? was the talk then. I did. But more important was who would get him for the long haul. And I did.
