Believe it or not, dear commenting friends from yesterday's post, I had to WORK this morning. Yes, at 8 a.m. I was putting on the Poet Show for a class of eleventh-graders at Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. Their teacher was an attendee at last summer's Frost Place Conference, but I knew her before that because this is my son's high school. Therefore, of course, I tiptoe on eggs where he is concerned because that is the mannerly thing to do with a 15-year-old boy. After our perfectly amicable drive to school, he made sure to walk into the building alone, as if he didn't even know he had a mother. The students in my class similarly pretended they had no idea I was his mother, even though everyone knows everything about everybody. It was sort of like Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" in action.

The kids were excellent, however. They read aloud, they listened to me read, they laughed at the funny parts. I was unexpectedly paid. I went home at 9:30. What more could one ask for?