“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head – Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.”
...
I don't know why, but yesterday evening I was thinking about my third grade teacher. She was not the oldest teacher I had -- I suppose that would be Mrs. Smith, who was my second grade teacher. I generally liked the third grade one. She was Mrs. Marshall. She had a white/coloured blonde-ish beehive hairdo, the kind you would have done at the beauty salon once a week, and I was fascinated with the extra hanging skin under her arms where she had lost a considerable amount of weight. She brought divinity candy for us at Christmas time and I was fascinated because my mother never made anything like it. I remember it was pink and white. We were learning multiplication tables and had games where we would line up in two teams and pairs of students competed to see who could get the flash card answer correct fastest. The students who finally won wore gold crowns and silver crowns (one for the best of each team) for the rest of the day. We read books in class, and she sat in a rocking chair at the front of the room and read to us. I liked her a lot, but she was old and that is the thing that sticks in my mind most. She was pretty cool for being so old.I don't know how old she was, though. Perhaps in her 50s, as she taught for long enough that I had moved on to junior high school before she retired. But this third grade, the year after I turned eight, would have been 1970, and her 50+ years meant that she would have been born in the 1910s or probably at the latest the early 1920s (if I am overestimating her age). I am now that age myself. Do I seem so old to my students?