On meeting Ted Kooser in a hotel lobby

I knew he'd be in Appleton, and I saw him, from time to time—a thorough gentleman without an arrogant air in the hotel lobby where the writers were staying. It isn't my way to interfere, to barge in, to announce. It was right enough with me that this former poet laureate was somewhere near.

But then the morning of my last day in Wisconsin, the elevator doors slid open and he was exiting while I was entering and I couldn't help it, I said: "I read your poems to my mother in the final days of...