Seventy-five

I'm seventy-five. The last time I checked I was seventeen, going off to college. Then nineteen, going to work at a Children's Home and meeting a wonderful kid named Larry Lawson. Then twenty-one, graduating: and becoming somehow a Marine lieutenant. Twenty-four, starting graduate school, and teaching freshmen--and wanting to be older than I was, wanting to be thirty. A year in Ireland. Off to Ann Arbor to teach at twenty-eight. How much life, how much energy, how much hope for the future--and no limits to anything.

Twenty-eight years there, in Ann Arbor. Wonderful years, in many ways. Hearing from old students now, I remember how lovely those years were. Teaching, doing plays, protesting against the war--that war--poetry readings, writing books, wonderful ten-week hard-work summer study trips. Our softball team. Honors basketball. Students, friends. Sunday dinners. Bremen Scholars, every Monday night for ten years! But bad things, too: the selling of the university to greedy men, the betrayal of education, junk.

Leaving Michigan. Resigning, in protest. After twenty-eight years. Half my life. I'm suddenly fifty-six years old!

Taking care of my parents. Teaching in Louisville. An old childhood friend, Morty: we were five! Doing Greek--Homer, Sophocles, Euripides--with Ben every night. "A city where the main intellectual occasion of the year is a horse-race."

Years and years of letters, daily, with Don Hall. Wendell Berry just down the road while I am in Louisville. To Stockholm in 1995 for Seamus's Nobelling.

Amsterdam, after Mom's death. For five years. New Orleans. Then by a wonderful accident, to Saarbruecken. Living with the Schapperts in Sulzbach, teaching at the Universitaet des Saarlandes. Wonderful, wonderful. A Dickens Seminar, an Irish Semester. Waiting for Godot, Sebastian and Aoife and others.

But how did I get to be seventy-five? I have old students who write to tell me they have retired. Students who turn their children over to me for questions. A friend who asks me to write to his grandson!

My legs get tired climbing all the hills and steps here in the Saarland. It's beautiful--but I have trouble climbing. This March I will take thirteen students to Ireland for two weeks. I don't think I will drive; they are twenty-four to twenty-seven; I will turn the driving over to them, even though we'll be driving on the wrong side of the road. And though I will ask them to climb Ben Bulben, I don't think I will try. I've done it twenty-six times, the last when I was sixty-seven.

Not seventeen, off to Notre Dame for freshman year. Never having said the word "tragedy" out loud--never having had occasion to say it out loud. And now, thinking--at seventy-five--that someday I will have to say the words "death" and "good-bye" out loud.

That will be okay. I am confident--perversely so, perhaps--that things will get better in this crazy world, that the greedy and the violent and the cowardly and the
selfish among us won't always prevail, and that maybe the wonderful people I have known--all the lovely people who have been my students--will create a better world for their children and their children's children.

And maybe I won't be so angry, as I often am, at my generation: for our stupid selfishness, for our craven cowardice, for our irresponsibility to the good.

6 January 2011