Five Points Vol. 24, No. 1
Sample Content
Susannah B. Mintz
The Approach
One of your students, years ago now, once cried out, “Poetry! Why aren’t I uplifted by you?” He was older than average, what’s called a “returning” if not yet a “mature” student, as if going to school bespeaks a respectable forward-moving intentionality we grant to the young while returning to it smacks of some indelicate sojourn in the wilds of time-wasting. Chris had worked for a spell, left the military, written a novel; he approached his learning with hard-won appreciation for it, especially for the way literature can read you to filth, as another student recently said of Lucy Snowe, meaning that it’s possible to find ourselves, in all our startling messiness, right there on the page.
No one had ever apostrophized Poetry that way in your presence. You honored the bewilderment. Chris could not understand why poems didn’t work on him, like a dud batch of edibles, and he was honestly bereft.
At the bar, your friend is asking whether you turn sixty or fifty-nine in another two months and after you say, no, another year, you clock the bartender (she’s young, she’s blond, her fingernails are half an inch long and notably acrylic), looking sideways past the taps as she says, “five years!” like she’s paying you a tremendous compliment. You’re fifty-eight; she made you fifty-five; is she kidding?
The next day a student sidles his way up to asking, aren’t you nearing retirement? and you say, How old do you think I am? even though it’s hardly outlandish; you’ve been wondering the very same thing about yourself. He stammers, no, well, I just meant, the job is tiring. Which is the second time in a single semester that someone has openly marked you as wasted with fatigue.
Silver-phobia, as your friend calls it: whereby the undyed hair of an aging woman inspires such befuddling consternation—the horror of Medusa, coiling and slithering—but truth be told, you’ve had other reactions, too, like the young women who croon over your shimmering locks, Do you use purple shampoo? or the TSA agent you met on that trip to Atlanta who told you as if he were intoning a federal law that gray-headed women rock.