"What's With the Old Guys??" (The Poet)

The long running joke. It's no secret that 9 times out of 10 I am the younger by many years. I strayed away from my pattern this one time in a very long time and look what happened. An old guy never would have beat me up.
(I'm so glad that I still have a wicked sense of humor.)

Reading through a copy of Smashed at Barnes and Noble reminded me of the origins of that frequently asked question. The author was a peer of mine at Syracuse University, specifically in the English/creative writing program. Much of her New York Times best-selling, drunken memoir concentrates on her time at SU. We had many of the same classes and writing instructors. It made me think back to my beginnings there. A large part of which was my Living Writers class freshman year and accompanying crush on my poetry teacher. My close friends on my Boland 3 floor remember me coming home Wednesday nights after class talking incessantly about Him- his "uncool" poetic style, literary good looks, and the glimpses into his own writing that I gobbled up. I clearly remember with a smile, my initial amazement when he first asked me out and excitement when we started dating. When reminiscing about our first SU semester recently, Melissa reminded me that he had taken me to see a very disturbing indie film at a small, local theatre. My first time at his apartment we watched a French film. I remember there was a heavy ceramic bowl with cereal remnants on his wooden coffee table. It was odd to see breakfast debris in my teacher's living space. Lots of cigarettes, volumes of obscure poetry, literature and music. Definitely the apartment of the serious, semi "tortured" poet that I first saw in class. The entire experience was exciting. We started seeing each other regularly at the end of my first semester when I was officially out of his class. Except that my unstable, loudmouth roommate had his class the next semester. He was nervous about calling the room we shared so would email me. I would have to run down to the computer clusters in the basement and then meet him outside my dorm. There were other members of the English Department faculty that resided in his building. One time while walking from his car in the parking lot we almost ran into a very well known fiction writer/professor who lived in the building. The Poet quickly jumped ahead of me and I hid around a corner, wondering to myself what other professors lived in this worn building.

I was teased pretty regularly about my affinity for the old guys. It's really funny thinking back to that now. My first poet- the oldest I had ever dated at the time was not terribly old in the grand scheme of subsequent age gaps I have engendered- but reflecting on the fact that I was 18 at the time it still upholds my patterned theory.