Walking out of the grocery store
not long before closing time
behind three young people—
well, young to me,
as so many are these days—

I heard the young man in the trio say,
“As far as I’m concerned, Sophie and me
are already friends.”

They had been talking with the
equally young night manager inside,
and, scanning my two items,
as I often do these days,
my half-tuned ears perceived only
part of their conversation.

But it was clear that between
the four of them, they had people
in common they were delighted
to learn about.

And because I have given up
the self-appointed job of grammar guru
after decades of English professor-ing,
debating about whether to end a sentence
with a preposition (grammatically OK for years)
and other rules that I once considered absolute,
it did not even occur to me to mentally correct him:

“…Sophie and I…”

Instead, I grinned at them as I walked to my car,
equally pleased that they had made such
a nice connection on a cold winter night
as the half-full moon directly overhead
beamed down on us all.