In the middle of a meeting with a group of undergrads last year, the phrase "baby faces" occured to me as I looked at the students around me. This is odd, I thought -- when I was undergrad myself at the University of Toronto, I certainly didn't see myself and my peers as "kids". The guys, we were men, fellow sophisticates. And those attractive coeds who lived in the dorms next door -- they were the most beautiful women in the world at the prime of their lives.

Somehow in the 17 years that have since elapsed, I've become one of those old fogies who think of undergrads as kids (in spite of promising myself never to call university students kids). The students do get younger every year, don't they?

Not surprisingly then, my friends -- and I -- look basically the same way to me as they did the day I first met them. It takes hard photographic evidence to make me see that the receding hairlines, new wrinkles, rounder features that are invisible to me on a daily level.

If this is the way that I see others, then could it be that those older than I have the same self-centric way of gauging age? In other ways, when I see only weathered faces, gray or bald heads, tired eyes, do others see the reality of a past that still lives on? The present is only skin-deep.