Part of an ERA...

It is a sure sign that you are getting OLD when the glory of the Internet reunites you with various and sundry people who were part of your past lives DECADES AGO and they share with you (and perhaps others depending on the forum) their impressions of your behavioral traits and recollections of your character - perceptions that DECADES LATER you may still be wandering the earth, clueless about.

I tend to consider myself as pretty well grounded,  centered, and think I know myself better than your average bear  (although there are still some mysteries unfolding) and most of the time I have an intuitive insight into others (which I almost always keep to myself, and please don't ask me to comment further - I dislike my character trait of being judgmental and even more so when  accurate,  plus it scares a lot of people when they find I understand them more deeply than they understand themselves.).  Once in a great while my cynicism fails me and I have a moment of naiveté that thankfully not many have been able to identify at the moment it happens.

So you can appreciate the pure entertainment value of being the recipient of all these comments that may or may not reconcile with the image I hold of myself.  I don't discard them, rather layer them to get a fuller, more dimensional picture of myself.

Lately I've been the recipient of comments indicative of the effect the passing of time has had on the exterior.  While I still feel the same youthfulness in my soul, I have noticed the checkout cashiers and baggers have taken to calling me "ma'am".  Don't they know that is a 4 letter word?  I find myself sounding like an old fart, recalling tales of 'back in my day' (Yeah old bag, the world keeps moving forward - don't get stalled), and now this:  A HS teacher asks who in my group I might still be in touch with, explaining he has not "seen anyone from my era".

I have to give credit to Wi

kipedia for illustrating the following point:

An era is a commonly used word for long period of time. When used in science, for example geology, eras denote clearly defined periods of time of arbitrary but well defined length, such as for example the Mesozoic era from 252 Ma–66 Ma, delimited by a start event and an end event. When used in social history, eras may for example denote a period of some monarch's reign. In colloquial language, eras denote longer spans of time, before and after which the practices or fashions change to a significant degree.

The word era is also popularly used to denote the passing of — often shorter — periods that are only defined in terms of a specific discipline of sphere of life, such as the prominence of an artistic style, or more specifically in music, see musical eras, described in History of music, such as the Big Band era, Disco era. An event such as the death of Frank Sinatra is poetically called the end of an era.

So, you see he really picked a fantastically accurate descriptive word to say "YOU ARE ANCIENT HISTORY, BABE". 

   Well, since his daughter is my age  and I am a dinosaur from the Pleistocene age, that makes him a primordial fossil, right?

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