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Hey! How Did I Become 60? I just entered my seventh decade and can't figure out how I got here.

Time gave me a hard nudge at 5:48 one afternoon a few weeks ago and I stumbled from middle age to senior citizen. Like it or not, at that moment I hit 60; for years, it was like seeing a car crash coming from far off yet knowing you can't avoid it. I knew intuitively that the world suddenly began seeing me as a coot, crank, crab, curmudgeon, a codger. Long ago, I accepted the fact that I was irrelevant to people selling enticing images of beer, bikini's and beaches. But it's unsettling to realize that my habits now are watched closely by people who make what folks in the disposable diaper game call the "Gramper's" market when customers aren't listening.

It seems odd that a half-century ago the world seemed very small.

Back then, everything and everyone worth knowing was within an easy bike ride. School was safe and kids learned because, if we didn't, there was hell to pay. Summer vacation meant total freedom and endless possibilities. Kenny Paap's yard was directly behind mine and the baseball diamond where we always found a pickup game was in a grassy field that we reached on foot in five minutes or in two on a bike. Behind Jimmy Hinsdorff's yard were woods with a creek where, despite mother's warning that "dangerous bums live there," we concocted countless adventures. We never did see a bum, much to our dismay, so we speculated on what a bum might look like in case we spotted one.

It was a Mark Twain childhood but without the fence to whitewash or a runaway slave to share a raft down the Mississippi. But I did have a Becky Thatcher. Her name was Pamela and she lived five blocks from me. When I was eight, the time of our flirtation, we would meet in the alley behind her house and kiss chastely on the cheek. It was risky and thrilling and daring until Butch Loemeister saw us and ratted to her mother. That ended that. I didn't see Pamela the rest of the summer and, when school re-opened, I was crestfallen to learn that her family had moved. Never mind. We moved a few months later, too, so Pamela and I were doomed anyway.

Ike was president, times were good, people had jobs and money, kids didn't need play dates, and no one imagined the social, economic and political earthquake awaiting us a few years up the road. Mother's backyard picnics, dad hitting towering fly balls to me and my sister setting up her dollhouse on the drive were scenes repeated all over America. So were

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