I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear my trousers with 1% lycra spandex for comfort

First it was the stretch jeans. I had resisted them for a very long time because of their inherent wrongness. I mean, stretch jeans. Old people wear those. But then there they were on the clearance rack, and they looked like normal jeans, and they were so damn CHEAP. So I tried them on.

Hey, I realized. These are comfortable. And they look fine, and they're cheap. Check, please.

I won't recite the standard tales of all the things that we've had to explain to our teenage children didn't exist before their time. Yadda yadda, stipulated: the Internets, the cell phone, the personal computer. The first thing Rachael ever read, when she was 2, was "dot-com". I knew from the beginning that our kids were growing up in a completely different era. That they would never understand what it meant to not be able to program your own music without a great deal of patience and a tape deck.

But this morning, during our standard getting-ready-for-school mayhem, Daniel came into the kitchen for a fashion consult. It's 60s day at school. How's this Pink Floyd t-shirt? Yes, he knew Floyd played in the 70s and 80s (we're not going to discuss the post-Waters period) but didn't this t-shirt have, well, a 60s feel? Mark and I pointed out that the 60s were a period of loud attire and suggested a Hawaiian shirt. But predictably Daniel grew bored of the exercise and came back to the kitchen a few minutes later wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a bar code on it.

Oh, no. "Hey, that bar-code isn't sixties. They didn't have bar codes until the eighties."

"What?"

Here we go again, alas. I remember not only the invention of the bar code but the consternation it caused. I remember the appearance of the unlabeled generic item. (Repo Man, anyone?)

Hell, I remember when lycra spandex leggings were cool. Uh, the first time.

Check, please.