You started to first grade almost exactly two years after the end of World War II.
 

The first thing you did every morning in first grade was to face the flag, hold your hand over your heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance—without the "under God" part. Then you sang in succession, My country 'Tis of Thee, America the Beautiful and the Star Spangled Banner.
 

Between the third and 12th grades there were open bottles of blue ink in your classrooms.
 

You had blue ink stains on most of your fingers and way too many of your clothes.
 

You had a skate key.
 

You were a girl but never played with a Barbie doll
 

You were a boy but never played with a skate board.
 

You didn't watch TV until you were 11 years old.
 

When you were little you loved going to shop for new shoes because you got to check out your foot bones with the store's fluoroscope. Oddly, your feet still have not fallen off as a result of this practice.
 

You have a slide rule and you know how to use it.
 

You remember what card catalogs were for.
 

You can still remember driving into a Lubbock "filling station" and expecting someone to run out of the building to wash your windshield, check your tires, pump your gas and whisk out the dust on your floor mats before taking your cash (probably three ones since gas was was 19 cents a gallon), bring your change with a piece of glassware or a steak knife as an incentive for filling with him in the future, then tip his hat and say, "Please come back. You, of course, never got out of the car.
 

Your filling station didn't sell groceries.
 

You remember when houses cost $30,000, not cars.
 

You wonder whether those parts of your brain that may still cling to fragments of the Dewey Decimal System and Morse Code could be re-trained to remember where your reading glasses are.
 

You may not remember why you came into a room today, but you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard the words:

"One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock,
Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock
Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight!"

You're parents worried about your listening to "music" like that.
 

You're grandchildren listen to rap.
 

You worry about their listening to "music" like that.
 

You think maybe your hearing loss may be as much a blessing as a curse.
 

You were a girl you never wore jeans or any other kind of trousers to school. (It was forbidden. We should have done what our little sisters did and wear mini skirts so administration would have been delighted to see us in pants.)
 

You know what L.S.M.F.T. means and you can still hum along with the words and clap at the right place to: "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."
 

English teachers still fretted because grammar rules said that it should have been "as" not "like" a cigarette should.
 

You brushed your teeth with Pepsodent. Or maybe Ipana. Then later you brushed your teeth with chlorophyll. For a while there you did almost everything with chlorophyll. It seemed as though chlorophyll might be the cure for all the world's problems. Whatever happened to chlorophyll anyway?
 

You had to memorize at least 100 lines of poetry to pass any English class with a decent grade. Some of these still rattle around in our brains, surfacing occasionally at odd moments. You wonder whether you could retrain the parts of your brain thus afflicted to remember all our computer user names and passwords.
 

You remember when you could mail a post card for a penny. You could mail a letter for three cents. You wrapped parcels in brown paper and tied them with string before mailing.
 

None of your family's cars had ever had seatbelts. You had never been strapped into anything except some of the rowdier rides at the South Plains Fair or Mackenzie Park. Somehow you survived this neglect.
 

When it snowed, first you made a snowman and then you made snow "ice cream" with a dash of vanilla and maybe some Eagle Brand milk. However, you still show few signs of strontium-90 poisoning. Can we blame current memory loss on the strontium-90-laced snow ice cream we ate in fourth grade? Yeah! That's the ticket!
 

When you were little you didn't have "play dates." You put your ice cream money in your pocket and went outside to find your neighborhood pack and run with it--in and out of various houses, garages and back yards--until dark. If it was summer and this pack activity lasted all day, somebody's mother fed you lunch and somebody else's mother provided drinks and snacks. Did they coordinate this? I don't think it ever occurred to us to ask.
 

Your family didn't latch the screen or lock the door until bedtime. Neither did anyone else in your neighborhood.
 

You can remember when circuses really performed in tents.
 

You can remember 3-D movies.
 

You were born before penicillin or any other antibiotic treatment was commonly available.
 

You had red measles, "three day" measles, mumps and chicken pox as a kid. If you are lucky, you don't have too much vision loss or too many scars as a result.
 

You remember polio before Drs. Salk and Sabin. You may know someone who still limps, someone who lived out his/her life in an iron lung, or, all too often, someone who died way too young.
 

You had your tonsils removed. No, there wasn't anything wrong with them, but they existed and therefore must be removed. Most of us survived this procedure without incident and compensated for the pain and indignity by pushing the ol' "I can't eat anything but ice cream" thing to the limit.
 

You're no longer interested in much of this medical stuff, but you really, really, really hope that somebody finds a cure for arthritis. Soon. Today would be good.
 

You have lived though Pepto-Bismol pink, coppertone, avocado green, harvest gold and almond and finally—older and smarter—you stick with white, black or stainless steel.
 

You rented your phones from Southwestern Bell. Period. Your only choices were between party or private—a few colors and black—and wall, table or princess.
 

You wanted a camera, you got a Kodak or Polaroid.
 

You wanted to change channels, you got up and turned the dial, then walked back to your seat. This wasn't a big problem and you didn't even get much exercise doing it, since Lubbock had only two TV stations.
 

You played board games. Battleship. Clue. Gusher. Monopoly. Parcheesi. Risk. The only violence in these games involved Professor Plum or Miss Scarlet wielding knives or lead pipes or some such in the library or conservatory. And that entire messy affair was over by the time the game really started. Eye-hand coordination was not necessary for success. Neither was a Game Boy. But playmates were.
 

You wanted violence you read comic books. If you didn't want violence you read Little Lulu or Archie comic books.
 

The house you grew up in was built on a foundation, not on a concrete slab.
 

You have always been a miner's canary for the Baby Boomers.
 

You didn't know about daylight savings time because Texas didn't observe it.
 

You didn't know about sales taxes because Texas didn't have them.
 

Until you were 12, you could get a quarter from your parents, then go to the neighborhood theater and see a movie for 9 cents while eating a bag of popcorn or drinking a cola you bought for 5 cents. Then on the way home you could stop at the drug store and buy a comic book for a dime and a piece of Double Bubble for a penny. Kids under 12 really got their quarter's worth!
 

You know that a left arm straight out the window signals a left turn. If the arm is bent up at the elbow, the driver is signaling a right turn. Straight down to the side of the door means you are going to stop.