The Times They Are A-Changin’

A reader writes:

I swung by the post office the other day with a few of the kids in the car, including one age 12.  While we were pulling in, she bought up an urban legend she’d read, about people getting roach eggs embedded in their tongues from licking postage stamps.

“But, Mom,” she said, “Why on earth would anyone ever lick a stamp???”

Do you feel old?

I first recognized the disconnect between me and "the younger folks" when I was in my mid 20s and was teaching a Bible study for teenagers, and I needed an example of a really, truly, obviously crazy person and cited Charles Manson.

None of them knew who he was.

When did you realize it? (If you have.)

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

82 thoughts on “The Times They Are A-Changin’”

  1. We moved recently. My wife has several boxes of vinyl albums. One of the movers (in his twenties) gazed at them and said that he’d heard of these, but never seen one.

  2. Same here; made a passing reference to records and needles and my kids gave me a blank stare. They found the whole concept quite quaint, especially the idea of “skipping” and putting pennies on the stylus so that the needle would plough thru the nick.
    But the past has come back with a vengeance because we are finding that CDs and DVDs are much more susceptible to damage than records were.

  3. My Mom-in-law brought over her typewriter so my husband could fill out a bunch of forms for a government background check. My daughters were interested in that thing that was “like a computer”, but didn’t have a screen.
    Also, my parents have a record player and play old children’s records for my girls when they visit. My daughters were interested in those “big CD’s” (LP’s).

  4. 1988. I was 31, working with a kid in his early 20s. We were looking over tabloids and one of them had a headline, “Which Celebrity Shares Your Birthday?”
    I quickly blurted out, “Bobby Sherman!”
    He looked at me funny, and I said, “Hey that was a big deal when I was 12.”
    Him: Who’s Bobby Sherman?
    Me: He was the big teen idol before David Cassidy.
    Him: Who’s David Cassidy? I’ve heard of Shaun Cassidy.
    Yikes, did I feel old!!

  5. Me and my Dad were talking about jobs he had held when he was my age. He was a bag boy at Krogers (a grocery store) and remarked how the cashiers posistion used to be a pretty high skilled job—before the age of barcode. I can’t imagine having to key in every purchase!

  6. I realized I was “old” when I was 23 years old and my father had just bought a new computer for my family. The new computer had a blazing 100 MHz Pentium processor and 4MB of RAM. It was then that I realized that this was my 3-year-old sister’s first computer, and that my first “computer” was an Atari 2600 VCS when I was 5. (My first programmable computer was a VIC-20 when I was 9 years old, with a whopping 5K of RAM, which netted down to 3.5K on startup, less than 0.1% of that Pentium.)
    And now I’m complaining that I only have 512MB of RAM on my 5-yr-old 1200MHz home computer, which my 2-yr-old daughter loves to play at. Yeah, I’m now officially getting old…

  7. I went back to college in 2001 at the age of 31. I transferred in and began classes at the sophomore level. Needless to say, I had 10-13 years on my classmates.
    I often found myself making humorous references to older pop culture icons which meant nothing to the other students. However, the professor and I would often have a good laugh…
    For instance:
    “This is the big one Elizabeth!! I’m comin’ to join you honey!!”
    “Nip it in the bud.”
    References to Col. Hogan, Col. Klink, Sgt. Schultz, Major Nelson, Major Healy, Little Joe, Hoss, Nellie Olsen, Laura Ingalls, Jack Tripper, Crissy Snow, Janet Wood, Mr. Furley, Mr. Roper, etc… would all elicit blank stares (I could go on).

  8. Twelve years ago, in 1995, I was teaching a seventh-grade CCD class, and as an illustration I cited the movie Back to the Future — which they had all seen on DVD, so that didn’t make me feel old.
    But then I mentioned how Doc Brown of the 1950s has to help Marty McFly get “back from the 1950s to the present.”
    Then I stopped and said, “Well, not the present — 1985.”
    Then I said, “That probably seems like a really long time ago to you, too, doesn’t it?”
    One of them offered, “I was two.”
    Then a couple of years later, teaching another 7th grade CCD class, I told the students that story, and one of those kids — who of course was born in 1985 — asked, confused: “Why was he in seventh grade if he was two in 1985? Did he get left back?” So I had to explain that kids who were in seventh grade a couple of years ago were older now.
    And the worst part? I no longer remember why I was talking about Back to the Future in the first place. Now I feel old.

  9. “You have to get older; you don’t have to grow old”–George Burns.
    “Experience and treachery will overcome youth and skill”–Robert Heinlein.

  10. A friend of mine’s daughter was raving over this “cool bass player named Paul McCartny and you know what…He was in another band called the BEATLES!!”
    Really!?

  11. When was the last time any of you saw a payphone? Virginia seems to have gotten rid of 90% of them.

  12. I have a motto on my desk.
    Good judgement comes from experience.
    Experience come from bad judgment.
    I felt old the first time in my late 30’s when a young man first called me ‘Sir’.

  13. At a family event we asked one of my young teenaged cousins to call for a cab. She was directed to use the phone in her great aunt’s kitchen.
    She came back and told us it was ‘broken’… actually it was a rotary dial phone and she had no idea how it worked.

  14. I was teaching a college course for upperclassmen in 2000-2001, and made reference to the original Star Wars (Ep IV)… apart from a couple non-trads, none of them had seen it.
    Wow.

  15. A related thought is the sounds that we “old folks” recognize that mean nothing to the youger crowd – the “ding” at the end of a line on the typewriter, the “ding ding” as you drove over the air hose at the gas station, the “flup flup flup” of the dial phone, the “cha-ching” of a cash register opening, the hiss crackle and poping of an LP, the tortured sound of a tape being eaten by the cassette player . . .

  16. I stopped watching television in 1974.
    By the 1990’s, I realized that the English spoken by college students was significantly influenced by what they heard on television. Some examples:
    – “My bad.” for “I’m sorry.” Did this come from “Friends”?
    – “Shut up!” for “Really?” I’ll never forget the first time my wife and I were having dinner at a restaurant, and the young woman at the next table told her date, “Shut up!” according to this modern usage. We nearly dropped our forks.
    When I grew up a “residential” telephone was a think in a specific location, like mounted on the wall by the kitchen, with a rotary dial. No wireless or mobile anything. All you could do with it was talk (hence the name: tele-phone, from Greek for “distant voice”). Multifunctional, wireless communication devices were only seen on “Star Trek” (first season). Of course, no internet. No cable television. Less than ten broadcast television channels in a big city, with non-stop cigarette advertising.
    Typing with a typewriter. Taking a whole year of typing class in school in the early 1970’s (typing was an art). Last weekend we watched “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (starring Gregory Peck, 1956). We loved the scene where he is sitting at the typewriter trying to write his autobiography. How many would know how to load paper into a typewriter today?

  17. My wife and I are big Division-I ice hockey fans, and in our city we have a nationally ranked D-I team…
    About ten years ago (before we had our kids) we both had a fall afternoon off from work, so we decided to go over to watch our team in its first week of fall practice, to develop some idea of how our season might be looking.
    The arena had approximately 10 people inside watching the practice (which is usually open to the public)…and my wife and I are sitting in the lower level just behind the player benches.
    I’m about 30 years old, and my wife is 28…this young college student approaches…sits down…addresses me as “Sir”, and asks me if one of my sons is out there on the ice playing, for our team…
    That’s when I knew I was no longer a kid.

  18. A friend tells a story of his kids trying to increase the volume on the TV, but they couldn’t find the remote control.
    He walks up to the TV and pushes the volume butten. The TV gets louder.
    The kids looked at him in amazement: “Wow dad…how did you do that??!”

  19. Seeing a whole bunch of High School to College age male skater types (or what looked to me as skater types, that may have changed though) clamoring to get a Britney Spears album at a midnight release party did it for me.
    I mean, no matter what she looks like (which isn’t all that), men just don’t buy albums like that.
    Period.

  20. I was once describing to my wife’s brother,who is 25,a funny comedy sequence by Laurel and Hardy.
    He said,”I don’t know who that is.”

  21. Any example from before Bill Clinton is viewed as historically irrelevant to most everyone under 40. They know nothing, but they are content. Bless them.

  22. When I referred to a CD as a record.
    There’s also an example from the movie, “When Harry Met Sally”. Harry realized he was a lot older than his date, when he asks her, ‘where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ She replied, ‘Ted Kennedy was shot?’

  23. (1) It was the late 90’s–I must have been about 30 or 31–and I was trying to get the students in my International Relations class to tell me why the U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics. One was able to tell me it was because the Games were in Moscow, but apart from the Cold War in general, he didn’t know why that was significant. Finally, exasperated, I said, “Come on! Doesn’t anyone remember what happened in December ’79?” Then I looked around the room, started doing the math, and realized that most of them would have been no more than a few months old when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
    (2) Last year, I posted the following items on the board in one of my freshman classes, and asked students to tell me what they knew about them: Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, Leonid Brezhnev, Breszhnev Doctrine, Lech Walensa, Solidarity, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Vaclav Havel, Checkpoint Charlie, East Germany. The only name that even rang a bell for them was Gorbachev. Again, I started doing the math. They were born in ’87, so they were two when the Wall came down, and have no conscious memory of the U.S.S.R., or of a divided Germany.

  24. I was browsing CDs at the store with a friend, before we had both become Christians. He used to like ’em VERY young. She picked up a CD and said one of her favorite songs, “Live and Let Die” was on it.
    I said, “You like Paul McCartney and Wings?”
    She said, “Who?”
    I said, “The guy who wrote that song for the movie of the same title. Paul McCartney.”
    She got mad at me. “No, Guns ‘N’ Roses sing that song. I’ve never heard of Paul McCartney.”
    “The ‘Beatles’ Paul McCartney?” I asked.
    “The WHO??”
    A more recent example occured when my wife (28 but looks 21 or 22) and my brother-in-law (17) sat at a table in the restaurant I manage eating lunch. One of my cashiers asked if that was my wife. I said yes. She asked if that was my son with her. I asked her how old I looked. My wife turned eight shades of red.
    All this from a 30 year old who doesn’t think that references to history before Bill Clinton is irrelevant, remembers vinyl, owned and used a typewriter, and looks forward to Friday Night 80s on Star 105 in Toledo each week. 🙂

  25. I was in a bookstore just a couple years ago. A little girl came up to her mom with a clearance table kid’s book that read “Comes with a Free Cassette” on the cover.
    Her question: “Mom, what’s a cassette?”
    I was only 21 at the time..

  26. When a co-worker was having a bad day and said he felt like climbing a tower in Texas. I had to explain it to the 30 something working with him.

  27. I teach undergraduate economics and I was trying to come up with an example to explain how the availability (or supply) of a good doesn’t affect your demand for it, that supply and demand are separate. So as an example of a good that doesn’t exist, I chose Hoverboards (from Back to the Future II) and got a room full of blank stares.

  28. I feel sad for all the people alive today who do not know the joy of turning the T.V. on and adjusting the volume with a pair of needlenose pliers.

  29. I also went to college late, a year and a half ago at age 29. When I made a joke in a paper for my English Composition class about Al Gore inventing the internet, some of my fellow students asked me if it was true.

  30. It happened to me when I was seven. All the kids at school were listening to Michael Jackson, but I was listening to Bach.
    Actually I’ve *never* felt connected to the yout’ where I lived ..

  31. I was talking to my friend about the Righteous Brothers, showed her one of the album covers and she gasps: “The Righteous Brothers are WHITE??”
    I guess she thought they were “righteous brothers” in the colloquial sense.
    The other time was when I found a great radio station that played U2, Van Halen, and Guns n’ Roses. Then realized it was the Classic Rock station. When the heck did those become CLASSIC Rock?? Pretty soon they’ll be on the “oldies” station.. sigh.

  32. When at a 4 year olds birthday party i was taking photos with a disposable camera. When I took a picture of the birthday girl she immediately asked to see it. She didnt understand why she couldnt as she’d only ever known digital cameras!

  33. Well, I started to feel old when I began to hear bands like The Clash and Talking Heads on our local Classic Rock station. Oldies but goodies.
    Also, when I made a comment about seeing Saturday Night Live in the Old Days and my son thought I was talking about Chris Farley and David Spade.
    Or when I realize that Happy Gilmore was a decade ago.
    Tops recently, though, has to be when my daughter found some pictures of me in an old photo album and said “Dad! You used to be COOL! What happened!?”
    I just tell him I had kids!

  34. This is funny. 🙂
    I recently went to high school reunion in the same high school one of my youngest cousins (18) attends. The school board placed several class pictures on a mural, and my former classmates and I had fun watching them and teasing each other about how much we had changed in the last 11 years. This was on Saturday.
    About a week later, I casually met my 18-year-old cousin, and before I could say anything about the school reunion, she said that the school had put some very OLD pictures on the walls, which her classmates and her had found very funny, mentioning how ridiculous the hairstyles and clothes were in that era (the 90’s!).
    Also, at that same reunion, a woman I didn’t recognize, greeted me very cheerfully. I was sure I had never seen her before, until I asked a friend who “that lady” (who looked about 40 to me) was. It turned out she had been in my same classroom for more than a year, and was around my same age! I nearly died right there and then…

  35. My 24 year-old musician (heavy metal) son loves vinyl. When he was first introduced to my LP collection about 6 years ago he was impressed with the technology — both sides were playable!

  36. I finally got this computer a couple of years ago after I was told repair on my almost-new typewriter would cost more than a new one. The repairman said that typewriters are now built cheaply to be disposable.
    When I was in junior high, the honors class was treated to a field trip to see a computer. It was a huge machine in an air conditioned room and had big blue vacuum tubes and giant rolls of tape that spun forward and backward as the computer searched for information.
    I’ve been told that the simple pocket calculators we have now are faster and can do more than that machine with the tubes.
    “What’s a Hudson?”

  37. I feel sad for all the people alive today who do not know the joy of turning the T.V. on and adjusting the volume with a pair of needlenose pliers.
    Or having to adjust the rabbit ears on top of the TV in order to get better reception.
    Or when the TV station shut off for the evening and went to a test pattern.
    Or when the local news was just a 15 minute scroll down the screen. Now the scroll is at the bottom of the screen. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  38. “I feel sad for all the people alive today who do not know the joy of turning the T.V. on and adjusting the volume with a pair of needlenose pliers.”
    Or hearing the tack-tack-tack the turning wheel with a ‘U’ made when you changed channels…
    Or feeling left-out cuz all your friends had Beta casette recorders and you were the only one with a VHS…

  39. It was 1978 and I was 17. I was in a record store (remember them?) when a girl next to me exclaimed “Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings!” It’s just been downhill from then.

  40. When I hit 36, and then again at 42 (depending on legal age for adults), when I realized that there adults walking around who weren’t even BORN when I was already an adult. I was weirded out, bigtime.

  41. Oh dang Ed!
    I just read your comment and though “I’m going to be 36 in two months.” Ha! Thanks for making me feel old.

  42. I’ve felt it several times. I worked at a college as an interpreter for the Deaf, and was frequently the only one who giggled at the profs’ jokes. (It made them feel better, though.)
    I’m going on 37 this April, and this past Thanksgiving, I really got hit with it.
    First, some background. Not too many years after Chernoble (sp?), I was working in a restaurant that got in strawberries for drink garnishes. Some were HUGE, and a waiter joked that they were Chernoble berries. Since then, Hubby and I joke that any abnormally large fruit or veggie is a Chernoble variety.
    At Thanksgiving time, I bought a sweet potatoe to make mashed sweet potatoes. The recipe called for three large ones, but I found ENORMOUS ones, weighing in at 3 pounds and measuring nearly a foot long, and decided to get that to freak everyone out.
    At the cash register, I commented to the girl that I loved the new Chernoble yams. She stared at me blankly. I asked her if she knew what Chernoble was. She shook her head, as did the bag boy. I think they might have been high schoolers, but it occurred to me that they were probably not even born when it happened. Needless to say, I didn’t get carded for the beer and wine in my order. (That hasn’t happened in ages, anyway. The kids usually give me away.)
    *sigh*
    I think I’ll stick with the self-checkout from now on.

  43. My kids are too young, but a friend’s older kids were quite puzzled at the concept of “station wagon”.

  44. A great post, Jimmy. Mine was when I was discussing the Iraq situation with my older son, who is 13, and in the course of the conversation realized that he had no recollection of the first Gulf War — because he hadn’t been born yet!

  45. By the way, I remember when I made my Dad realize how old he was — I was about 13 and he said I was the Gary Cooper type, then laughed at my blank response, realizing I didn’t know who Gary Cooper was. Ironically, I am now a big fan of Gary Cooper’s and my 13-year-old knows exactly who he is.

  46. I grew up in a small town. While I was young, I could call anyone in town by dialing 4 digits – no prefix needed, much less an area code.

  47. Re: glasnost, etc.
    Most history classes never get to the eighties and nineties, and people’s parents don’t talk to them about it. Of course the kids know little of world events back then.

  48. “A friend of mine’s daughter was raving over this “cool bass player named Paul McCartny and you know what…He was in another band called the BEATLES!!”
    Really!?”
    Almost the same experience. I was in the CD section of a local bookstore and Paul McCartney’s latest CD was on display. Two young ladies (probably all of 16 or so) walked up, one picked up the CD, and said “Paul McCartney? Who’s that?” The other girl just shrugged.

  49. My “you kids don’t know how good you have it” rant: We had a black-and-white TV until I was in junior high, which is when we got our first microwave, too.
    We didn’t have TV remotes, and we only got 5 channels, but my dad was the original channel-surfer, so during commercials, we had to get up and turn a knob for the next several minutes!
    And, our video game…was a ball and two sticks! (They didn’t believe me about Pong; they just laughed.) They think our movie projector is pretty cool, though.

  50. The comments on movies made me recall this: when I was teaching CCD about five years ago to the high schoolers, I mentioned the movie “The Ten Commandments.”
    Blank looks around the table.
    I tried describing it, and finally one girl raised her hand and said, “Is that like ‘Prince of Egypt’?”
    The irony is at that time I’d never heard of ‘Prince of Egypt.’

  51. Maybe I’m just aging prematurely 🙂 Last year, on my 23rd birthday, I was in a mall. I don’t go to malls often, and I was astounded at how inappropriately the high school girls were dressed. My friends and I all commented that girls didn’t dress like that when WE were in high school and that we would NEVER let out daughters go out of the house like that. Either I’m getting old, or (more likely) the culture is getting worse.

  52. Think about this: People born in 1991 are now old enough to drive! People born in 1989 are old enough to vote, gamble and smoke! People who were born in 1986 are now old enough to drink!
    The sad thing is that I vividly remember those years, I was born in 1976!

  53. A friend of mine told the story of when she was helping a confirmation class with their community project. The plan was to clean up the local cemetery. After looking around, she said, “You girls in thongs should watch out, there is a lot of poison ivy around here!” When she was greeted with blank stares, the assistant said, “you have to understand that in our day, flip-flops were called ‘thongs’.”

  54. My daughter was the one cited in Jimmy’s post about licking stamps.
    She just did it again, twice in two days. One incident– I had picked up some mechanical pencils for the kids to use for homework. I was marvelling that the little lead container now comes with a sliding lid that doesn’t actually detach fully from the rest of the container.
    She shrugged and said, “Yeah, they all do that.” I explained that back in college (only 15 years ago!) the lids came off, and were very easy to lose.
    “They had mechanical pencils back then?!??” Sigh…
    I also made the mistake of inquiring about a pair of jeans she was wearing yesterday. I’d never seen them before, and they had several visibly worn spots on them. I wasn’t sure if they had been handed along to her by a friend who’d outgrown them.
    “No, Mom!!! Aunt K. gave me these for my birthday! That’s the in thing now.”
    “Well, honey, that was the in thing back when I was your age, too…”
    It was actually worth feeling old just to see the horrified look on her face… 🙂

  55. It happened the first time, last year, when I went into teach a Confirmation class and realized that none of the HS students I was teaching were evn born when I graduated college. I felt 50 grey hairs pop in that day!

  56. OK, one more.
    In my first year of college, I took the last slide rule offered at the school.
    Show of hands… how many know what a slide rule is?

  57. You know you’re old when they start making music compilations for your decade.
    Also, when you try to compliment someone by telling them: “Wow, you’re a regular MacGyver”
    And they respond: “MacGyver, who’s that???”

  58. A sign I’m getting old, and since several other folks have brought up computers: The first computer I ever used was back in high school (’79), with 8″ floppy drives that had to be manually mounted and dismounted from a control console, a complicated startup sequence (no “plug and play”), and 26K memory–shared among FIVE workstations. My school replaced the dinosaur with five brand-spankin’-new Apple IIs in my senior year, one of which was promptly stolen and never recovered….

  59. “When the cool “grunge” bands of the 90s end up on the “Classic Rock” Stations!”
    How about when the cool songs of the 90’s you used to love in high school are now covers from new bands? Worse if not many people around you actually remember the original song, or think that the new version is the original one. (sigh)
    And let’s not talk about the new ‘modern’ versions of Strawberry Shortcake and He-Man… I felt like a hundred when they came out! Even worse is the fact that they called the originals “retro version from the 80’s”.

  60. When the cool “grunge” bands of the 90s end up on the “Classic Rock” Stations!
    I must be SUPER-OLD — They actually showed “Groundhog Day” on Turner Classic Movies!

  61. Not only did I take an entire course on use of the slide rule in high school,
    but I was required to use it in college chemistry (early calculators existed, but were not allowed).
    Still have one.
    This is related to another phenomenon regarding young folks working behind cash registers.
    I expect them to be able to do the math in their head.
    I realized some time ago that, if the bill was 1.72, and I wanted quarters, and I gave the cashier 2.22, they looked at me funny, and I assured them that if they just punch the number into the machine, it would tell them to give me two quarters.
    Now I am finding cashiers that even balk at this, refusing to take “the wrong amount”!
    It is not that they cannot do the math in their heads (which they can’t anymore), but they even cannot believe the concept that some old geezer could, more or less instantly, at some multiple of twenty-five cents to the total in order to exhange small coins for quarters.

  62. -When students were awed by my ability to use DOS commands to try to copy files when my classroom computer had issues with Windows…(I brought in an Atari classics game collection CD-ROM and showed them Pong. They were underwhelmed).
    -Until Columbia broke up in re-entry, they hadn’t heard of Challenger.
    -I mentioned “American Pie” in US History class (since it references the death at the Rolling Stones concert, which our book also mentioned). It took a moment for them to realize I was referring to the song, not the movie. They did, at least, recognize the song.

  63. To bounce off Old Zhou, I was recently in a store, behind someone checking out. This lady was buying a case of those “teeny” drinks. To further elaborate, the rows were 6 X 4. The (young) cashier looked at them for awhile and said, “20?”

  64. This one’s work-related. I conduct surveys at this major theme park (WDW) and one of the surveys asks for the guest’s birth year. I nearly groan every time I get a guest with an ’80s YOB; at least I know when to cut off for age limit (must be 18+ to be surveyed). Pax et Bonum!

  65. I used to teach high school back in the 1990s, and I referred to the Beatles one day. One of the girls asked who I was talking about. When I explained, she said, “No WAY! You mean that Paul McCartney, that guy from the Travelling Willbourys and Julian Lennon’s dad used to be in a band together?”
    Siiiiiiiiiiigh….

  66. A while back, I picked up an unsuccessful mid-80s tv series that I’d seen once or twice as a youngster and wanted to revisit. Among other things, it featured computers the size of living rooms, hand-animated laser effects, Vietnam vets in their thirties, Korean and WWII vets who were hale, healthy and not-retired men in their late primes (one character from that demographic was a martial artist, another was supposed to some kind of high-level Reagan appointee in the State Department or something), James Bond’s original Aston Martin, complete with sixties gadgets (presented as a still functional and not superseded piece of spy-tech) and kind of a general “fading Americana” feel. One guest star had last made a movie in 1931-1932.
    I realized watching it that my generation would the last who could remember the “analog world” in any way.

  67. Don’t know if this has been mentioned above but for me it was this morning when I heard that the Oakland Raiders hired someone 31 years old to be the HEAD COACH!!!
    I am still clinging to 30 and thus that young wipper snapper is still my elder, but not by much.
    If a head coach in the NFL is younger than me, then I am old…just not yet!

  68. There’s also an example from the movie, “When Harry Met Sally”. Harry realized he was a lot older than his date, when he asks her, ‘where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ She replied, ‘Ted Kennedy was shot?’
    Okay, honesty check!
    How many of you, when you’ve ever watched this scene, said to yourself, “If only…”
    (not actually wishing the man harm. I don’t want the Secret Service swarming me. I’m just saying…)

  69. Jamie,
    Expect Secret Service at your door in 5 – 4 – 3 -2 – ooopppsss…. too late!
    (j.k)

  70. Oh, I have another one.
    I was doing a fire inspection of a local Senior Center the other day and, in an offhand comment, I asked the guy I was walking around with, who qualified for being a member. He said the only requirement was to be 55 or older. I had just turned 49. Six more years and I’d be elgible for the Senior Center!
    I was mortified, to say the least!

  71. You guys think you’re old —
    Hey, anybody remember IRC????
    It was the hippest thing back in the days and the way we used to communicate to one another!
    This was way before www, for goodness sake!
    (For those who don’t remember or don’t know, Internet Relay Chat)

  72. I realized I was old when I was called “Gre’-aunt Jeannie!” by my oldest niece’s son. My great-aunts were all in their 50s.
    Incidentally, the pop culture thing doesn’t faze me in the least. I grew up in a rural area, so in order to watch TV, my father had to go outside and rotate the antennae by hand. As a result, we tended to watch a lot of PBS. Hence my best friends and I didn’t watch McGuyver or other popular ’80s shows, but we knew “The Avengers”, the comedic stylings of Dave Allen, and occasionally watched The Lawrence Welk Show.

  73. Okay, just this morning I felt old in providing comments for today’s Photo Caption.
    Does anybody really know or remember “Hi-ho Silver, Away” anyway???

  74. In 2004, I was teaching catechism to fifteen or so 12 years old. I spoke of Mother Teresa as a model of charity, and only two of them had heard of her (and only vaguely).

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