This post is a response to a Blogging 101 Challenge to take something I found on another blog and make it my own. This is a bit of a two-pronged answer to the challenge. One fellow blogger with whom I’ve connected is Charlotte Latvala of the The Introvert’s Dictionary and How to Be 50. Another blogger I met in this session of Blogging 101 made a passing remark that stuck with me about giving away his age. So brewing all of this together all this time, I started thinking about aging and growing older. As I thought about these things, I realized that while I might never grow up,

I just might be old because

You’re probably old if….

…you remember hearing a real phone sound like the “vintage” ringtone on your iPhone. Yes, I have it set as one of my own ringtones.

…you can visualize the process of dialing a phone. Yes, my young friends, a phone used to have a round dial, hence the phrase dialing a phone. As I thought about this, I realized that we have another linguistic holdover. how many of you have thought about cranking the car? People used to literally take a handle out in front of the car and crank it to start it. (No, I don’t remember that!) Although we haven’t done that for decades, we still refer to starting our cars as cranking them.

 

Hey, I think I went to school with her!

…your adolescence is used as the historical setting for a movie. When my husband and I went to see Super 8, we were at first delighted and then dismayed to find that everything about the setting of this movie felt so familiar as we discovered that our teen years were now an actual historical setting. As George Takei would say, “Oh, my!” Just to clear things up, it wasn’t so much the creepy aliens that we remembered as… well, everything else. Although I have looked back on one Melinda, a beastly bully from my high school days, with new eyes afterwards.

 

Everything old is new again.

…your old clothes have come back in fashion. I was a grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and skinny jeans were all the rage. If we could breathe, our pants weren’t tight enough. When I look around my classroom today, sometimes I feel like I’m back in my own high school days. (Except for the big hair–mercifully that is not back in style!)

 

Last, but not least…

…the little foil packets you never leave home without are wet naps. I think many of us remember a different little packet our friends all had in their wallets, and with quite a different purpose. Gone are those days. Now, we want to be sure we can wipe down those shopping cart handles, clean our hands after touching something questionable, wipe the jelly off our kids’ faces, or just have the security of a triclosan-soaked wet-nap close at hand–just in case.