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As I was walking about the campus today, going to the office to take care of the stacks of grading that I had allowed to pile up (the first week of classes is not done, and already, my grading has begun to pile up--if it can be called grading when I write in annoyingly pink ink and do not assign grades to the student writing upon which I comment), it occurred to me that there is something of a campus uniform for the students as the fall 2013 term gets underway at Oklahoma State University.  The young women overwhelmingly wear brightly colored tank tops (that reveal equally brightly and usually contrastingly colored sports bras) and track shorts.  The young men tend to wear brightly colored t-shirts, shorts, and ball caps.  In something of an old-man moment, I thought that my undergraduate days did not see such things.  Then I realized that they probably did, but that I was too involved in my own concerns to really notice.

(Before any of you say it, I know that I am married, and I know that the undergraduates running around campus would be entirely too young for me even were I a bachelor by something other than a degree I have long since held.  I love my wife, but that does not mean that I do not notice what is around me, especially since, as I write, it is brightly colored.)

It was not the only old-man moment I had today.  I looked in the mirror this morning and was startled by the amount of white--not gray, but stark white--hairs in my beard and moustache.  I have known about the encroachment for some time, but for some reason, it startled me today, and it reminded me that I am not quite a young man anymore, despite once again being the youngest person in my shared office.  (I want to think that there is a poem in there somewhere, but it has probably already been written, and better than I have it in me to write, if my verse is any example.)

There is a certain strangeness to a man in his early thirties regarding himself as old.  It is not entirely accurate, admittedly; centenarians are increasingly frequent, and even in my own family, there are a number of people in their mid-eighties and older, so that I have reason to expect that I will be around for a while, yet.  And my body works well, aside from occasional stiffness of certain joints and my own ineptitude, so that I have not even that concern.  Only more gray hairs on my upper lip than my beloved wife--six years my senior--has in total, and the nagging suspicion that my students increasingly have no idea what I am talking about.

Eighteen years ago was 1995.  Twenty-two was 1991.  I remember getting beaten up in years my students have never seen.  And that does, in fact, make me feel old.