2069

Recently, my wife and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. It was much more of a milestone for her than for me because… well… she’s easy to live with. And what did we end up doing to celebrate our anniversary?

We went grocery shopping.

I’m exaggerating, of course. We went for lunch at a hibachi grill in Charles Town and went to check out the downtown area, take pictures of buildings, and explore antique stores. The kind of stuff that we used to do many many years ago. Before kids.

But on this particular anniversary afternoon, we found ourselves at Weiss. Getting groceries and some Angry Orchard Hard Cider for our planned dinner, which would be grilling over our brand new fire pit.

We went through the line with the incredibly young cashier. In supermarkets, it’s usually the younger cashiers that are faster. However, there is a breaking point where you get one that’s too young and doesn’t care all that much. That’s what happened to us.

Since alcohol was involved with our purchase, the cashier asked Lorie for ID and had to type in her birthday to get the computer to continue with the transaction. The cashier glanced at Lorie's drivers license, and then turned to type, asking Lorie what her birthday was.

"Two, seventeen, sixty-nine." Lorie said.

That’s when the problems started. The cashier took way too long trying to enter this information. The computer was acting up.

Lorie leaned over to see what she was typing. I couldn’t see the cashier’s screen from my angle, but I could see Lorie’s face and the dark look that crossed it. Lorie leaned back.

“NINETEEN sixty-nine.” Lorie sighed.

“Oh!” The cashier giggled.

“TWENTY sixty-nine is actually in the future.” Lorie explained further.

“Yeah!” The cashier giggled again, and then went about completing her order.

I don’t see this as commentary on our culture, or an indicator of the intelligence level of the girl, or anything like that. I do find it interesting. It was the first time I had become aware that we’re dealing with a person who had probably never written the year as ‘nineteen’ anything on anything, unless it was a history paper. Her default mode was actually ‘twenty’.

This I found disturbing. My head started to do that thing where it swirls through the decades and the inter-relationships between the decades and how could Martin Landau be so YOUNG when filming Mission Impossible in the sixties and how can Sean Connery look so OLD when filming Untouchables in the eighties and have you seen Clint Eastwood lately and where IS Jack Benny, anyway?

Then Lorie punched me in the chest and said “Wake up. Let’s go.”

And we went home and grilled over our new fire pit while the kids ran around the yard being solidly in the year 2012.

What do they know?

Thanks,
DCD