The License of Age

When I was a student, a faculty member I was working with put me in touch with another faculty member who had written the manuscript of a novel and wanted it edited. I'd never edited text that long, but it seemed like a good experience and the author was willing to accept my review.

Over the next several weeks I got to know the author in an unusual student-professor relationship. I would regularly give him portions of his work with my editing scrawled all over it. I criticized everything from his punctuation (I still remember his somewhat ascerbic comment about my editing of his comma usage) to the logical structure of elements in his work. He accepted this review with a bit of a continual scowl, and when I later took a creative writing class from him, he gleefully remarked that it was his turn. I was never really sure where I stood with him, and somehow I think he still resents my editing of his commas.

The professor was old then—somewhere near traditional retirement age—and in recent years I have been surprised to see him still on campus, some 15 years later. Today he gave a lecture, and I, curious, attended. He's at least 75 and has been teaching writing for 50 years now. At one point, he revealed that his father was 12 years old when Brigham Young died in 1877 and that he had two half sisters who were born in the 1890s.

Someone that old, I guess, has a right to scowl when a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate starts zealously correcting commas.

After I left the lecture, incidentally, I wandered into the library to work for a while and passed another former professor, similarly aged, brilliant white hair rimming his bald head, seated at a table with a rather text-heavy magazine or journal in front of him. I've previously observed that professor seated in about the same place in the library, reading. He was a professor of physics and astronomy, and he taught me things about the stars that I still remember. I am impressed that, though retired, he still frequents campus and, especially, the library. That he's still studying, that he's still learning.