Chapter 2 - The Quiet Years
I want to be honest about how it felt, because people who write these stories sometimes skip the part where it just hurts, plainly, for a long time.
My first semester back, I was sixty-five years old sitting in a Western Civ lecture hall next to a girl named Priya who was eighteen and had a laptop covered in stickers I didn't recognize the meaning of. She was kind about it, mostly — a lot of the young people were, once they got over the initial stares. But there was always a ripple when I walked in. A few whispers. Once, a boy near the back asked, loud enough for half the room to hear, whether I was somebody's grandfather come to pick them up.
I laughed along with everyone else. Inside, it stung more than I let on.
My first birthday alone that year, nobody called. I sat at my kitchen table with a slice of grocery-store cake I'd bought myself and ate it slowly, watching the phone that didn't ring.
Christmas came the same way. I put up Eleanor's decorations because leaving them in the attic felt worse than putting them up alone. I made a ham I didn't need to make for one person. I ate it by myself in front of the television, and around eight that night I texted both my sons a simple Merry Christmas, love you both and got nothing back from either one.
There were nights I sat with my textbooks spread across the same kitchen table and genuinely wondered if they'd been right. Maybe I really was too old. Maybe this whole thing was vanity dressed up as ambition, an old man trying to prove something nobody was asking him to prove.
Then I'd think about Eleanor's handwriting. Finish it. Whenever you're ready.
So I kept going.
I failed one class my first year — Statistics, which nearly broke me, because I hadn't done real math in decades and my brain simply didn't hold numbers the way it used to. I retook it the next semester and passed with a C, and I was prouder of that C than I'd ever been of anything with an A on it.
I made a friend, eventually — a woman named Carol Ann, seventy-one, who'd come back to school after her own divorce settled and decided, in her words, that she "wasn't done becoming somebody yet." We studied together most weeks at a coffee shop near campus, two gray-haired people hunched over flashcards while twenty-year-olds studied around us like we were part of the furniture.
"Your boys still not calling?" she asked me once, over coffee, about two years into it.
"Not once."
"That's their loss, Walt."
May you like
"Feels like mine too, some days."
"Can be both," she said, and went back to her flashcards.
