I am a coach for my stepdaughter's t-ball team. Our games are on Monday and Wednesday evenings. So on those two days, having pulled an 8-to-5 and travelled home on the bus among other worn down office workers slumped in their seats, working their Blackberries or scanning The Wall Street Journal, I get to spend a couple of hours with a bunch of 6-year-old ballplayers. What a relief! It's depressing, however, to think that the commuters were themselves once bright and voluble boys and girls learning to throw a ball, swing a bat, and run the bases. One day my Lynnhurst Pirates will be on the bus, too. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the generations usually lie down in order. How many mothers, if they had a chance to cast an appraising eye on their 60-year-old offspring, would think it had all been worth it?
Yeats has a poem on the subject, "Among School Children."
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