As I get old, and by definition I am aging daily,

[Ocelot II]

2. Familiar stuff. It's amazing how much things have changed

in what seems (to us) a relatively short period of time. My grandmother was born in 1883 and died in 1981. I'm not sure she ever quite adapted but she saw a whole lot in her lifetime, including two world wars, a depression, cars and airplanes and television - and we have seen even more and in a shorter period of time. I had a college classmate who had a brace on his leg from polio (I saw him at a recent college reunion and he still has it, some 50 years later). My mother, a nurse, saw kids in iron lungs.

Cars didn't have seat belts until the '60s. We ate oleomargarine instead of butter because there was some weird thing having to do with how it was taxed vs. butter. You had to squish the plastic packet it came in to mix the dye into it to turn it yellow. We put mercurochome on cuts and played with the mercury blobs from broken thermometers. Almost everybody smoked (I was fortunate that my parents did not, but they were the oddballs in the neighborhood in that respect). I was given a transistor radio when I was about 12 and I thought it was the coolest and most modern thing ever.

There were sonic booms that scared people and some neighbors had fallout shelters. They announced the strontium-90 counts from atomic tests on the radio. And we had duck and cover drills. Then there was the Cuban missile crisis. Lots of shit happened - but it always does.