The title borrows the old joke about grandparents who trudged to school in impossible conditions, but the poem plays it with a straight, slightly wry face. The speaker remembers a childhood walk through a worn-down landscape: a ghost village, a town edge swallowed by the interstate, railroad tracks you had to leave when they began to hum. Everything seems damaged or half-abandoned, yet the walk itself feels alive and a little secret, especially the wild grapevines that seem to whisper "truancy," tempting a kid to skip school.
The opening lines suggest a child's mind, where the sun is just a letter and the stomach understands things the mouth can't say. School, by contrast, is cold and rigid: an "industrial classroom," a "prison of numbers." The last image, zero holding all the keys, leaves a bleak mood. The speaker feels that freedom and wonder belong to the journey, while the destination offers emptiness and control.