What Year is This, Again?

          I think I’m stuck in a time warp.  Because my parents were the ages of my friends’ grandparents, I have the upbringing—and even use the expressions—of someone who was raised during the Great Depression.

 I still think some items “ought to cost a nickel,” and bet you “dollars to donuts” that I’ll “see you in the funny papers.”  Growing up I knew that a fuddy-duddy would probably not be in cahoots with an eager beaver.  Unless he’d fallen off the beam. In fact, I gave this same quirk to my main character in my last book, Golden.

I am baffled by clerks who don’t look up and greet you the minute you walk into a store.  I’m shocked when men on the airport shuttle don’t get up to give a woman their seat.  And I resist the urge to tell young ladies that their bra strap is showing, reminding myself that this is the very look they’re going for.

On the other hand, given names like FDR, Ho Chi Minh, Gandhi, and Harry S Truman, I can tell you which ones were “all wet” and which ones were “cookin’ with gas.” I didn’t live through that era, but I somehow absorbed it anyway.

And I love the music.  Big Band can bring me out of a slumpy mood faster than you can flip your wig. Last week I had it cranked up on The Robot Who Shall Not Be Named Lest You Get Into a Long, Involved Conversation with Her.

And I was dancing through the house to Glenn Miller when I passed our daughter, Nicole.  “Don’t you wish you’d grown up in the Forties?” I said.

“I basically did.”

          Well, hot dog!  I think that’s pretty swell.

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