A song before class

One morning before beginning class, I mentioned that a song had come to mind while I was driving to school. “I don’t remember all the words, but the song begins, ‘I leaned the truth at seventeen, That love was meant for beauty queens, And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles, Who married young and then retired.’

“There were other words and then, ‘Inventing lovers on the phone,
Who called to say, ‘Come dance with me,’ And murmured vague obscenities, It isn't all it seems at seventeen.”

“And later, ‘We all play the game and when we dare, To cheat ourselves at solitaire, Inventing lovers on the phone, Repenting other lives unknown … At seventeen.”

“That’s all I remember,” I said, and I heard a girl say, “Huh,” in a voice that said she knew everything the words meant. And I was sad in realizing that a young woman would know, that anybody would know, even Janis Ian.