Living a life that she chanced upon, she metthem as patients: Korean War vets, who’d letout a string of syllables that almost registeredas a word or two—like annyeonghaseyoor gamsahamnida—in glee, as if recognizinga childhood sweetheart.She recalled that she thanked them.“I didn’t know what else to say.” These days,the students I teach literature and writingoften come from the Appalachia, barelyin their late teens, unable to leaveuntil they can, scattering for homes.Even though it seems unlikely that I seemyself in their lines, I do, and I seehow they, if they’d arrived in the last century andstaggered into life, might have looked out at the coldKorean mountains, once as blue and old as NorthCarolina’s, barren after armies sweptthrough them, snow-covered, lined with trenchesdecorated with Christmas lights, after allthe trees got blasted black as coal. How my ancestors,all dark-haired, all dressed in gradations of whitepeasant clothes, must’ve dematerialized like ghostsout of fog and dark at the demarcation linesin demilitarized forms. How the triggers of steel-hot gunsin boyish hands that hadn’t yet held a lover’sfingers may have been the only glowing assuranceagainst the unnamable terror of beingin a place where you have no reason to be.All plays out like one more film playingthe refrain of innocence lost. I snapout of it, finding myselfteaching the dactylicmeter: long and short and short,like my finger pointing at the whiteboard—I’ve written down the first half line,Arma virumque canō—all I remember. I being to rememberasking my mother why she thanked themwhom she can’t nurse as often now, and soon,won’t be caring for at all.“What else are you supposed to say?” she said,living a life we’re given, thelong and the short of it.