The Exam

It is mid-October. The trees are in their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green, orange) outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am thinking of my parents, of the six decades they’ve been together, of the thirty thousand meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept under the same roof. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success? Who could have known?