As I was standing at the pharmacy cash register, finalizing the purchase of my monthly supply of Viagra, an attractive, mature black woman, having overheard me utter my birth date, remarked, “Nineteen Sixty-Two…Seems like just yesterday, doesn’t it?”

I was somewhat taken aback by the statement, if only because I’ve discovered through my repeated forays to the pharmacy that no one ever talks to anyone while they’re picking up their medicine. Maybe it’s because of the personal nature of what we’re doing, exposing our foibles and flaws for anyone who wants to eavesdrop. Maybe it’s because we just want to get it over with (Yes, I have herpes, now please leave me be). Maybe it’s because it’s just too hard to be friendly with so much cold medicine nearby. Explain it how you will, but I can’t recall anyone talking to me in the line at the pharmacy unless it was to complain about the line itself.

The woman was friendly, and very well-dressed. She had on what I would term business attire – a gray skirt and coat over a grape-colored blouse. She wore large, hoop earrings, a pair of burgundy-framed sunglasses, and she had a tendency to touch her hair when she spoke. I don’t know if she was primping for me, or the world itself, or if she was just prone to check her hair a lot. Given closer scrutiny, maybe I would have conceived an answer of sorts . But it’s hard to concentrate on psychological minutiae, to make the correct judgments, connect the dots and so forth, when you’re standing there waiting for boner pills.

Still, we had a bit of time to exchange pleasantries. In between me fumbling for my cash card, and signing the electronic waiver (the one that basically says, if I die from taking the pharmacy’s medicine, it is absolutely and entirely my fault), in between all that, we briefly spoke of what constitutes “long ago.”

I told her I didn’t think about my age much, except when I had to give my birth year. Even then, of course, I seldom stop to think, Jesus Christ, Kennedy was still President (for another 11-½ months or so). For he was. I was born during the era of Camelot. The 60s. Liberalism was running rampant in the bigger cities. Youth was rebelling, sex was getting easier to come by, and rock and roll music was entering its neoclassical period. Meanwhile, I was crapping my diapers. Even had I not been so young, had I been born, say 16 years earlier, I still would have missed it. I lived in a small town in Texas. We never could figure out what those crazy bastards up north were doing (still can’t).