I was talking with a young lady pharmacist about the old needles they used to give shots and take blood with. Those were used thick and were used over and over, being sterilized in hot water. They were, compared to present needles, very thick. It was like having a dull pencil jammed into your vein.

Like almost everybody else in the medical profession I deal with, she didn’t even remember those old needles. She hadn’t even seen them in a medical museum. I then said, “Oh, well, like all old men, I just wanted to impress you with How Tough I Had It. So we started joking about the old walking twenty miles in the snow bit.

She is a mother, so we started talking about how hard it was being YOUNG today: Diversity, choices to make. The ultimate contrast I always thought of was my grandfather, who was a railroad telegrapher. He had the exact same job for forty years, then retired. Today you don’t have the same job five years from now, even if you stay in the same place.

But my grandfather, who DID walk to his limited schooling in the snow, was of the generation that that talked about The Good Old Days. They didn’t drool and cry over their Suffering.

Then it occurred to me that the young lady and I represented two oif three generations after my grandfather’s time. A third one was absent.

AT LAST!

There was no one there from the self-styled Greatest Generation to tell us how easy kids have it today — the theme of my youth — and how nobody knew what SUFFERING was except those who went through the Depression and the War. Only they and the Jews Knew What Suffering Was!

The TV ads demanding yet more money for ANOTHER memorial to the crowd that calls itself The Greatest Generation moans that thousands of them die off every day.

They say “What a Loss!”

I say, “Blessed silence!”