In my day...

In my day, kids didn't spend a day off from school on a patriotic holiday hanging around the local Starbucks® chatting on cell phones about legal issues, flashing credit cards and drinking coffee I couldn't begin to pronounce at their age. Yet as I sat with coworkers Rey and Jerry on our lunch break, sipping my own overpriced hot chocolate, we might as well have been in a daycare center. It was impossible to distinguish individual words amid the cacophony, yet at times my Garberesque ears managed to distinguish bits and pieces.

The children couldn't have been older than 12, and some seemed younger. There were no parents in sight and the girls, already displaying calculations beyond their years, tried to ascertain if boys in their class knew who they were by interrogating two younger boys at another table. “Are you so-and-so's brother?” asked the leader of the teen girl squad, sidling up to them inquisitively. The boys mumbled an answer, more focused in their task of creating the perfect spitballs using Starbucks™ straws. As the girl returned to her group to resume the important discussions of who knew who existed and who lived where and was related to who, the boys returned to a near scientific analysis of just how much paper to tear off from the wrapper, and the force needed to achieve propulsion.

Girls mature faster than boys, so I can understand their focus on the social blueprint of their school society while the guys were focused on more childish pursuits. That much of the vignette mirrored my own childhood, and probably a good portion of my adulthood. But I couldn't help wondering when baristas became babysitters, or when the definition of roaming changed from leaving the playground to using your minutes in a different zone. It's not like we ran into these middle schoolers in a bar, but a coffee shop to me still seems like a place for adults. Certainly there were a few business people working on laptops or talking on their handsfree phone headsets, but the children were the dominant individuals in the population this afternoon. I was well into my twenties before I had my first coffee. I've only had a credit card the last four or five years, and I've only had a cell phone for one year. I still don't have Cable. I should point out that my office is located in a wealthy community, so in four or five years most of these kids will be driving expensive new cars, while I've only driven used cars.

It's not just rich kids though. In general, I think kids in our society are enjoying technological advances my generation never had, and hanging out at commercial establishments that didn't exist twenty years ago, or at least weren't as common. The local stationary store with their assortment of comic books and bubble gum drew my peers and I. When I was that age when we weren't gathering in someone's yard, we'd gather at a pizzeria, usually accompanied by at least one parent. The scariest thing of all though is that I've only been 31 for a week, and I'm rambling like an old man, now more than ever.

In my day, people my age weren't sitting at home on a Friday night, ranting on their web site about the state of our youth.