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I'll tell you a secret...
Jun. 2nd, 2015 09:17 amToday suddenly it's summer. Last week we had snow. This weekend there was an inch of hail and I think we lost the zucchini. But this morning as I walked out the door on the way to the office, it was summer.
So I took the surface streets to work instead of the freeway, and drove to work with both the front windows down and my hair flying in the breeze. Which made me think about Mollie Irwin. Mollie was an English prof my first year of college back in the late 60s. At sixteen, I had no idea how old she was, looking back I'd say anywhere from forty to sixty, but I knew she was OLD. She had long grey hair that she wore loose down her back and I found that downright embarrassing it was so odd. Old women I knew had short grey hair, or at least they wore it up. Mollie looked out over that room of callow youths and started talking about death, and love, and the meaning of life, and how important it was to learn about the last two before you faced the first. Her answer to it all was the Romantic Poets, and I was young enough then that I learned great swatches of poetry just from reading it and hearing it read.
It was the only class that I took with her, but I still think of her when my grey hair blows in the wind or when I read Byron, Keats, or Shelley, or, of course, Coleridge. My prayer today, Oh Lord, is that I can touch someone in my life the way Mollie touched me, so that sometime fifty years from now some person will feel the air on a summer day, or remember the words of an ancient poem and think, "There was a woman I knew once when I was young..."
So I took the surface streets to work instead of the freeway, and drove to work with both the front windows down and my hair flying in the breeze. Which made me think about Mollie Irwin. Mollie was an English prof my first year of college back in the late 60s. At sixteen, I had no idea how old she was, looking back I'd say anywhere from forty to sixty, but I knew she was OLD. She had long grey hair that she wore loose down her back and I found that downright embarrassing it was so odd. Old women I knew had short grey hair, or at least they wore it up. Mollie looked out over that room of callow youths and started talking about death, and love, and the meaning of life, and how important it was to learn about the last two before you faced the first. Her answer to it all was the Romantic Poets, and I was young enough then that I learned great swatches of poetry just from reading it and hearing it read.
It was the only class that I took with her, but I still think of her when my grey hair blows in the wind or when I read Byron, Keats, or Shelley, or, of course, Coleridge. My prayer today, Oh Lord, is that I can touch someone in my life the way Mollie touched me, so that sometime fifty years from now some person will feel the air on a summer day, or remember the words of an ancient poem and think, "There was a woman I knew once when I was young..."
