Do you know my grandma?

There comes a time in everyone's life when they realize that they have made a shift from one level of life to another. When you're a kid, you dream of hitting your teens. Once you hit 13, you can't wait to be 16. After 16, you long for the day you're 18. After 18, it's just a mere 3 more years and you'll finally be 21! Ahh, to be 21. I knew it all then. I could do it all then.

I'm still 21, but now I have 26 years of experience. Body parts are seeming to wear out. I can hear my parents voices when I say things to kids now. "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." "Turn out the lights if you're not in the room! Do I look like I'm made of money?"
"You'll do it because I said so." These old adages seem to flow out of my mouth more and more as I grow older. Usually, when such things happen, I pour myself a drink, curl up on the couch with my worry beads, and meditate on how I'm DIFFERENT than my parents! Eventually, it passes.

Today, however, I was just slapped in the face with reality again. One of the students in the 5th grade (not one of mine and that's a good thing -- if she was mine, she might never get out of the 5th grade!) came up to me and asked "Do you know my grandmother? Her name is (another problem with age, short term memory isn't wasn't it used to be)? Now, there was a time that kids would ask if I knew their sister, their mother, their aunt, and maybe even an uncle. That phase of my life is over. Now I know their grandmothers. Keeping in mind that these kids were born in 1998 or 1999, I guess I shouldn't really be so shocked.

Kids ask me things like this all the time. But, for whatever reason, it hit me differently today. I could know somebody's grandma. I could have gone to school with them. I could have grown up with them. I could of hung out with them. I could still be friends with them.

So kids who want to ask me if I know their grandma or their grandpa or their great great aunt Lulu or great great uncle Bubba, to all you little people who will never know the joys of record players, roller skates with keys, and the Beatles, to you I say....

Yeah, I know them. So what of it!?