So I sold liquor to a kid the other day who looked like he was about 16...blond and baby-faced. I asked his for ID and he said: "I always get ID'd, and I'm 21, I was born in '88." He said it with such tiredness, as if the 88 he meant was 1888 and he was on the verge of death.
But, it got me thinking, being born in 1990 makes you legal to drink here in BC. 1990?? How can that be? That's like yesterday! I have meat in the deepfreeze older than that, I have underwear older than that, I have books that I set aside to read in a pile that is older than that.
Kids born in 1990 live in a world where Freddy Mercury and Bob Marley have always been dead. They vaguely know Woodstock as "some rock concert, wasn't it in the mud?" (seriously...go ask some young folk what they know about Woodstock.) They laugh at the stories I tell of the excitement in our house when I brought home a rental disk of "Alien" and we played it on the forerunner of the DVD, I can't even remember what it was called, but you had to turn the 'record" over half way through. We thought it was amazing that you could actually watch a movie at your leisure...turning it off and on and pausing it willy-nilly.
All this musing makes me think of my Grandpa, who was born in 1900. He was born before the Wright Brothers flew that plane at Kitty Hawk. And when he died, he had seen men walk on the moon. I wonder if there will ever be another period of time in which such massive strides are taken?
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