I am of the age at which I can occasionally begin a sentence with “In my day …”

Don’t judge me: the decades since I was born on an Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1958 have been turbulent, and I feel that simply having lived so long entitles me to a pompous moment now and then. Vietnam, Watergate, Stonewall, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reagan, two Great Recessions, two Iraq wars, two Arab-Israeli wars, the birth of Justin Bieber and the death of David Bowie, the rise of China, the fall of the Soviet Union … A lot of water has flowed under the bridge I stand on.

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