-I often have wondered, Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?

-I frequently do need to stop and unpack my adjectives.

1 polyester Princess Leia Halloween costume, including paper mask with cut-out eyeholes and an elastic band stapled across the back (which immediately becomes layered in condensation as soon as you take a breath, and pulls out little pieces of your hair every time you turn your head): $10.00 on ebay

1 set of large, ceramic Christmas tree light bulb strands, with at least one dead bulb which no one thought to mark last Christmas when we took the tree down: $25.00 on ebay

The rush of adrenaline that comes from knowing that at any moment you, your Christmas tree, and possibly your whole house could burst into flames due to the extreme flammability of all holiday products manufactured in the 1970’s: priceless.

Oh sure, there have been signs for a while now:

-the fact that the music from “Top Gun”, the defining movie of my teenage years, now frequently appears in its’ panflute version as Muzak.

-the fact that when I said to one of my tutoring students, “Oh, we’re about to start the chapter on…THE PLANE”, he did not immediately respond with an impression of Tattoo.

-the fact that I began a sentence with, “When I was growing up in the ’70’s”, and the student I was tutoring gasped so heavily I thought he was going to implode.

-the fact that when I try to explain the parts of speech by singing, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?”, or, “Lolly Lolly Lolly, get your adverbs here!”, my students don’t join in and sing with me. Instead, they surreptitiously look around for the nearest exit.

But tonight I saw something that forced my out of my denial and into the truth: the cultural experiences that played a part in forming who I am are “officially” old. I realized this at the music store when I saw that the 3 disc sets of 80’s hits on sale for $9.99 looked EXACTLY like the 3 disc sets of the music that I consider to be “old”.

Clearly fictionalized stories of my childhood, involving phrases like, “barefoot in the snow”, and “uphill both ways” cannot be far behind.

So about two weeks ago I finally took our knives in to be professionally sharpened. Everything was going along just fine until the man helping me asked me what I wanted him to do about the edges on one particular group of knives, in a tone that suggested that, a) I should know exactly what he was talking about, b) clearly the mere fact that these knives even had this type of edge should have been keeping me up at night, and c) I should apologize for even owning that kind of knife, much less bringing it into a professional cutlery establishment.

I decided to do what anyone would do when faced with a room full of sharp knives, dangerous machinery, and a very large man with bulging, tattoo-laden biceps who tests knife blades by slicing off his own arm hair. I told him to do whatever he wanted.

So he did, and now that our knives cut well again I am ready to be seized by a new compulsion. I’ll keep you posted as things develop.