[Caporegime]

48, but there are times when I feel like I'm 48,000,000 years old.

I remember snickering whenever my grandmother would lay one of those "good old days" trips on my siblings and I when we were kids. I'm sure some of you in my peer group heard many of the same stories growing up....How they all had to walk 8,000 miles to school every day in tenth hand shoes with ten thousand holes in them, how they could leave their doors unlocked at night even during a bread riot and still feel safe, how you could take your family of twelve to Coney Island every Saturday and send five of them to college all for a nickel, etc.

Today, I'm the old man, telling my dewy-eyed tales of nostalgia to half-bored children at family functions. Only, my tales of yore are filled with vinyl records, rotary phones, hand cranked Evel Keneval motorcycles, VCRs, and now hopelessly primitive video game systems like the Atari 2600 and Colecovision.

Hey, but like the old saying goes: "You're only as old as you feel", which probably explains why I hear the theme to Jurassic Park echoing in my head whenever I hear kids use lingo I don't understand or make youthful cultural references that makes me feel like something cloned from the stomach contents of a mosquito encased in 70 million year-old amber.