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).

“See, I think about our grandparents,” the woman said, “and how different they looked. They were all old and wrinkled. Our generation doesn’t look like that. I mean, I’ve got a 35-year old daughter!”

Then she laughed, and waited for me to tell her she didn’t look her age. At least, that’s what I think she wanted me to do, looking back at the exchange (I mean, she was playing with her hair, right?). And, really, she didn’t look, what, say… fifty-five? I started doing the math only after I had signed my death agreement with the pharmacy, and had bid her good day. Let’s see, if she was twenty when she had kids…but what if she was a teen mother? Is she my age? She did not look like she was in her 50s. She could’ve been my age, of course, or around it (not exactly my age, unless she conceived at eleven, which…).

I was urged by the presence of the mute pharmacist to sign for the $133.00 it costs me to have rocket sex ten times a month (I think of it as “charging by the bullet”). I was caught between being gracious and personable and continuing the conversation, and getting my little blue pills and heading to the cash register to pay for the groceries I’d bought. I had a bouquet of flowers for my then girlfriend (a hot little number who caused me to go through Viagra like Tic Tacs), some seared tuna Sushi (or is it Sashami? I never know), a plastic carton of mixed olives and feta (feta? what strange world have I entered these days?), and organic milk. Most people become their parents when they get older. I’ve become a Harvard post-grad without the papers. My grocery bill screams “enlightened.” My bank account begs to differ.

I guess I was in too much a hurry, then, to contemplate the connection between the contents of my grocery bags and the woman’s statement (by the way, I was using my own bags so that I could “save” the planet [it’s a huge thing, but somehow, my arms are going to wrap around that big, blue ball]).

Our generation doesn’t look like that.

True. We live better. We eat better (well, we certainly eat more). The implication is we are better.

But are we? Are we really?

I have to say no.

Yes…

Maybe…

Okay, I don’t really know. The only law is the law of change (if I may borrow a cliché). You, me, us, everyone changes. There is no “better,” there’s just the elusive theory of progress, a movement from, through, and toward something else. There is only difference. A lack of wrinkles does not make me “better.” It might mean I’m better looking longer than those who get “pruned” early on. But how can I be “better?” No Great Depression. No World War. Not much of a Vietnam (I was crapping my pants, remember?). By the same token, I have a daily view of the expanse of the great, wide world, a view of the great scope of existence my grandparents couldn’t possibly envision. At the touch of my fingertips, on this very machine I’m using to type these words, I have trillions of bits of data, illuminated in words and pictures – parsed phrases and points of view come to me, a lone figure sitting on my porch in the dirt speck that is Kyle, TX (population, a few thousand). I am God of a universe whose scope fades to such incredibly wide margins that my all-seeing eye is blinded by the brightness.

Yet, I am not better than anyone now, nor anyone who came before me, unless the very act of realizing my own diametrically opposed significance and singularity makes me so. For my grandparents’ world, narrow in scope compared to mine, was at least condensed for them into the very simple, basic, near-universal things that have always been what is actually important – family and community. Can I truly say, and in saying so actually believe it, that when my community becomes the world, it is that much greater, that much more important, better, than the hands of a single loved one stroking my neck when I am tired, or the whisper of “good night” echoing from my lover’s lips, as we fall into our own condensed version of the world that is our bed? In truth, is there anything better than that?

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade our advances for anything. This wonderful machine replaces my abysmally horrid script with perfect letters (C’s in handwriting on my all-A kindergarten report card – still a great blotch on my academic record, and my greatest shame). But it is not better because I work less to produce more. For in the end, my machine runs on a battery, and my bed does not.

Let the world expand as it will. I will revel in the advances, as they are miracles, and they are good. But when my eyes close, all light fades, and the one thing I want before receding into the oblivion of the dream are the hands on my neck, and the good night she whispers to me. In that moment of half-darkness my world becomes as small and as important as it ever shall be. And I am as grand and Godlike as mountains eternal in the streaming clouds of heaven.