An Old Fool

My day began with an email from an irate student who called me an "old fool." Why? Her composition earned a zero because it includes a plagiarized passage.

Late this afternoon, I attended a reading by poet Mary Jo Salter, whose poem "Goodbye, Train" reflects on another theme of young and old:

I'm stepping off the train behind a pair
of thirtysomethings with their baby daughter.

The father will stay fit for years, I think,
though here and there, his hair's a little thin;

the mother's confident in new jeans
she knows are sexy -- but carefully, tastefully so.

Seeing them floods me at once -- I can't say why --
with solicitude. Delight, and envy. Pain.

"Goodbye, train," the mother says, and then,
"say 'goodbye, train,' 'bye bye.'" She waves her hand

theatrically, the way we often will
with children , so nobody can find us

guilty, ourselves, of any silliness --
of joy in the trainman's cap, this ticket-punch.

The little girl is propped on her father's hip
and pointing vaguely at a world of things

she's just come to know, and which now must go away.
How grave she seems! -- a toothless oracle.

I see too how I look, if anyone's looking:
a weathered niceness, a trudging competence.

That's how I follow, twenty years ahead
of the parents, as I lug my bags behind them,

vowing to keep a stranger's proper distance --
as I did from those two lovesick teenagers

clinging in tears some stations back, when he
prepared himself to be left there on the platform

by a girl who swore it wasn't possible,
and both were stunned to discover that it was.

I think what luck it is, to be one who says
goodbye to trains instead of other people.

This afternoon at the Community Garden, two young yellows

battled a battered one over the zinnias.

If I am the battered one watching the thirtysomethings, that's fine: I have survived to tell the tale and I still ride the train, old fool that I am. Will they?