It is strange to be in the position of being the older woman in a group of younger people. All the others here are college students, and of course stay together and don’t have much to say to, or interest in, someone who is clearly not one of them. So we sit at the breakfast table and they plan their days together while I listen quietly, amused. How often I have been one of the younger ones, especially when travelling and when travelling to more interesting places, and there is a quiet older woman there as well, usually alone, who seems different from us and is, unintentionally ignored. A young fellow arrived yesterday and took the room next to mine, and I listened with some amusement and pity to his sturdy self-belief. The girls, at least one of them, found him irritating, I could tell as he was so very certain. He didn’t believe in learning grammar, for example, and he expressed surprise that his Spanish conversational partner, a woman, was “quite intelligent, you could have a proper conversation with her”. I wonder if he’ll ever realise how unflattering that was to himself. Though I too once believed that grammar was not necessary, not realising that it’s not necessary only when you are fully immersed in another language, and even then the broken English of many non-native speakers who have lived in English speaking countries but never become fluent might perhaps tip him off that he is no exception nor are they less intelligent. But there it is, youth is king of the world, and with that I stand on the threshhold of my forties.
One of the young women here is very young, impatient, fiery and has that indefinable dismissive air that many young women of that age have. She is quite sweet, I suspect, but has a lot of growing up to do. The other is very tall and very straightbacked, and I would have pegged her as solidly Midwestern WASP had she not said she came from Arkansas. She seemed more aware, less self-absorbed than the other two; I noticed her listening to conversations, looking around the table when making conversation. An interesting lot. I wonder what I was like at that age to an outside observer. I suspect quiet, introspective, hiding from notice if I possibly could, but also convinced that if there was a future to this world I would help to shape it.