Sentimental Education
 

In a coffee shop in Amherst, we let the breath of students envelope us.  Their faddish clothes threaten like documents held by a blackmailer, their faces raw and plain as cauliflower.
            How can we convince them that two old scones like ourselves have suffered the rage to wear deadly fashions, to shut books and our minds forever and wield rhetoric so large governments would puddle at our feet?
            Maybe, though, we overrate the children in baggy wool coats, high-top sneakers, who against medical odds smoke obnoxious foreign cigarettes.  Maybe, like the “girls” Cyndi Lauper describes, they “just wanna have fun,” but read Dostoevsky to find out how.
            Outside, the cold is painful to the naked glance.  A famous professor swaggers in, his beard as cruel as barbed wire, his suit unpressed since the Eisenhower years.  We've never liked his books, but now in the passion of his fame he sears like Tabasco on the tongue.  Two wriggly young women compete to offer him a seat and themselves, their breasts like bread from the oven.
            We're too old for this.  Later, in our dotage, we won't care, but in middle age it's shameful to sit among the very young and hear them rattle like stones in a brook and notice their expensive educations peeling like wallpaper in an abandoned house, their faces already trained to bare emotions far safer than those they feel.


• William Doreski says “My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Publishers, 2007).” We will be publishing more of his work over the next few months.