While examination of narratives written by and about older adults is, by now, recognized as crucial to the critical work of age studies, the overlapping projects of age studies and studies of literate activity (including writing) have not yet been sufficiently integrated. Through analysis of The First Grader, a film dramatizing the true story of an eighty-four-year-old In an overcrowded primary school classroom, small children in blue gingham squeeze together on benches and on the packed earth floor. From among the tangle of youth protrudes an anachronistic body. Shoulders hunched over a child-sized desk in the front row, his walking staff leaning nearby, an eighty-four-year-old man strains to hear instructions on writing a lowercase letter a. Holding a pencil awkwardly, he struggles. The teacher pauses to adjust his grip. Slowly and almost tenderly, he forms his first letter.