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I just entered my seventh decade and don't remember getting here.

Still, time gave me a hard nudge a few days ago, shoving me from middle age to senior citizen. Like it or not, at that moment I hit 60; it was like seeing a car crash coming from far off yet knowing you can't avoid it. Not long ago, I was thought of by many as cool, even hip; would the world now see me as a coot, a crank, a crab, a 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 diaper game call the "Gramper's" (cq) market when customers aren't listening.

I can't believe that it was a half-century ago when the world seemed very small.

Back then, everything and everyone worth knowing was within an easy bike ride. We actually learned in school because, if we didn't, there was hell to pay. Summer vacation meant total freedom and endless possibilities. Kenny Paap's (cq) 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 (cq) 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 without a fence to whitewash or runaway slave to share a raft. But I did have a Becky Thatcher. Her name was Pamela Perlick (cq) 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 (cq) saw us and ratted on us 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, along with "duck and

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