On returning to college (for a 58th reunion)

Maude McDaniel, Columnist

Listen, my ancients, and you shall hear of modern developments quite queer: the peculiar habits of everyone raised, as or by Baby Boomers, and you’ll be amazed.

Here’s one: They all wear the same kind of pants, made out of the blue stuff that we used to fancy for working on farms and cleaning latrines; they wear them for everything and call them all “jeans.”

Your class had some beauties, say seven or eight. The rest of the girls dreamed of blooming late. Every teen girl’s a knockout now, thanks to the fake-up of contacts, not eating, and fabulous make-up.

Yes, you had equivalents to cool handsome dudes, but “bad boys” did not always appeal to girls’ moods. And though you’d be one who’d remember quite fully, you simply cannot recall one single bully.

Back in the day if you needed a drink of water you simply would go to the sink. But now this dehydrated generation drinks water by bottles for lubrication.

Where once you found radios super high tech, today’s average kid has Ipod round her neck. Where you once wasted time finding telephone booths, all teenagers now have their personal Bluetooths.

When they go off to college, just like you before, they tend to leave parents home minding the store. But when these kids party and drink and carouse, their billpayers (unlike yours) don’t say “straighten up — or else!”

In your day, the coeds all came back by 10 p.m. and their dorms did not include men. Now enlightenment rules that all genders may roam everywhere through the night, and not even come home.

Your whole student body ate in the dining room: one meat, veggie, starch — there was simply no whining room. But now there’s unlimited choice for each teen of Epicurean food and gourmet cuisine.

New dorms have their suites and luxurious quarters, private bathrooms, computer setups and porters. For all of these reasons, and so many more — no wonder the cost of it’s gone through the floor.

Religion in your time was part of the fixture, but it’s often gone now from the modern day picture. You sang in the choir, and you learned to love Bach and never in your darkest times predicted rock.

Today there is music that rants and raves, in multiple pitches and numerous staves. But mostly it screams and it shouts and it whacks away at all customs (except of course, sex.)

Mention their morals and here too there’s difference in action and attitude and surely good sense about doing certain things with the greatest avidity, and calling it freedom instead of stupidity.

But times are a-changing — the picture’s not pretty: Your thoughts turn from wonderment into pity. For years you’d watch graduates as they raked in the dollars, but now there are smudges on all those white collars.

Till lately they’d buy homes as big as a box so huge that they’d rattle inside there like rocks. These days you must feel for their sudden affright as mortgages limp away, lost in the night.

They still fly in airplanes the size of a house, but all can be brought down by birds or a mouse. Their summers are hotter, their winters a mess, they’re living much longer but enjoying it less.

You try not to go the “I told you so” route. You sympathize, offer assistance to boot, and, you know, it is true that life’s always been tough. We’ve all lived and we’ve learned. But not fast enough.

Now Easter’s a good time to clear up the weather. The important fact is, we’re all in this together.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.