Ancient history

But one day, the teacher told a joke that inspired blank looks from the class. He shrugged and explained he'd gotten it from an Archie comic. Dead silence. "How many of you know who Archie Andrews is?" the teacher asked. Mine was the only hand that went up.

He and I laughed and spun off a little riff, remembering the characters together: Moose, Juggie, Mr. Weatherbee, Miss Grundy, Big Ethel. I was cool, he was cool, we were cool.

Meanwhile, the nice young man next to me peered at the overhead lights through the prism of his pink plastic triangle.

"What are you doing?" the teacher asked, a little peevishly.

"Nothing," the young man said. "I'm just not interested in what you're talking about."

And with that, reality hit me in the face like a big, wet raspberry: To these little toots, I'm just an old fart. And as I sat there, fighting a blush, my delusion unraveled. The right shoes? Who was I kidding -- mine were circa 1991 Dr. Martens. That would mean some of my classmates were in elementary school when I bought them. As for the rest of my clothing, nowhere on my body did the words "Tommy" or "Hilfiger" appear, nor "Old Navy" nor "Guess."

And look at me, carrying my schoolbooks not in a backpack, or a rolling suitcase, as was becoming trendy, but in a tote bag. A tote bag. For god's sake, I might as well have crocheting in it. And I could pull ancient hard candies from my pocketbook for all the nice children.

I clearly had no idea how to comport myself in class. I had acquired the idea that asking questions was a good thing; halfway into the semester I realized I was the only one. I mentioned this to my husband. "Oh yeah," he said, thinking back to his college days. "There was one old lady in every class who always had a million questions."

Worse yet, I asked all the wrong questions. I asked "how?" and "why?" and "what if?" instead of the one right question for young college students in the know: "Will this be on the test?"

There I had it. The inescapable truth. You can put an old broad in college but you can't make her young.

And so I invented a way to save face. I made myself invisible.

I try not to draw attention to myself. Whenever a question inspired by mere curiosity bubbles to the surface, I bite my tongue. The ones I do ask no longer begin with "what if?" Even my teachers don't seem to care for those questions. They just want to get on with things before the attention of the rest of the class wanders.

Perhaps most important, I have given up that adolescent notion that all the world is looking at me. Ever since Archie Andrews made a woman of me, I cast aside all concern for the opinions of people younger than some of my T-shirts. Instead, when I do look around, I notice that although I'm still there -- sitting in classrooms, walking the halls, passing through energy fields of raging hormones as schoolboy meets girl -- no one seems to notice my old-school shoes, my Tommy-free fashion, my dork-deluxe tote bag.

To be honest, no one seems to notice me at all.

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