Unbelieveingly Retrospecting

IF YOU'VE NEVER TURNED SIXTY, then gone back to college for free, give it a try. I heartily recommend it. You get to meet all the grandchildren you never had, or could have had, and after the first three days you're walking at their pace, barely and sorely, unless you happen to be wearing flappers, which I was. Flappers and a necklace. Hell yeah. Be modern. Be hip. The memories come cascading back. Forty years ago, the nineteen seventies, another campus, another time. Massive boxy immobile telephones, three television channels. All those history classes, the B.A., M.A., PhD., abd (sometimes, just to be rebellious, I tell people I have the degree. Hell, I damned near do.) Decades of short term teaching jobs and relationships, often enlivened by debates with administrators on the proper version of American History. Present the version wherein Thomas Jefferson is an atheist at your own peril. Ah, those halcyon days of hiding beneath our desks in third grade, withstanding every Soviet nuclear assault ever launched, unscathed. The Cuban missile crises made me more pacifistic, and more paranoid. The summer after I graduated high school I watched the Watergate hearings daily, and it radicalized me. Now,as I walk among the millennials, I feel thankful for forty years of sustained exercise. But all this computer stuff still rather frightens me, though of course it shouldn't. Hell, I have my own blog. Had someone told me in 1973,when I was 18, that in the year 2015 I'd be walking around a university campus wearing my high school class ring and a black and red lips n' tongue Rolling Stones T shirt, and that I would be a returning student, not a professor - I'd have rolled my eyes, beneath my long hair. I hope these twenty year olds aren't rolling their eyes at me. I know I can handle this, I know I can deal with this..somehow... Hell, I even got a couple of compliments on the shirt.