If you have been paying attention you’ve probably guessed by now that I’m a “baby boomer.”

When I first heard that phrase, sometime in elementary school, I was proud to be recognized for the achievement.

About the time I was graduating high school and applying for college, I began to see the drawbacks.

Ever since then there has always seemed to be too many of us. Too many graduates looking for jobs. Too many trying to hold on to jobs. And about to be too many retiring and applying for social security.

I never did feel comfortable in a crowd.

When I got out of college and into the “real world” I began to be envious of that generation just before ours. I don’t know if they have a name, but I mean the ones born between the mid-thirties and the mid-forties. They were the ones a couple rungs above me in the job world and it always seemed to me that they had gotten there a lot easier than it ever would be for me.

There is another reason too that I am envious of that generation. They were privileged to grow up in the world before it was Wal-Marted and McDonalized to death.

For as long as I can remember I have been a fan of the small-town values depicted in the movies of my childhood, like the Andy Hardy stories, or It’s a Wonderful Life. There was a time when I thought that was a fantasy, that it was never really like that. But now I think I was wrong. The world really was like that once. And that generation just before mine, they got to grow up in it.

The latest proof of that for me is a book called The Oedipus Road. It is written by Tom Dodge who does humorous commentaries on the local NPR station and maybe across the country for all I know.

The first few chapters of the book are all I’ve read and they are about his growing up in Cleburne, a little town just south of Ft Worth. About the only thing I know about Cleburne is that I have to skirt around it when I’m travelling on US67 and there is an awful lot of traffic there. But I suspect it is a much different place now that when Tom was growing up there. Tom was born in 1937.

Tom talks about walking to the picture show and getting groceries on credit at the local store, where they knew him by name. It was a railroad town with three train depots and a Harvey House within walking distance. Stores stayed open late on Saturday night and the downtown sidewalks would be thick with people.

Apparently that was the way it was in small towns on Saturday night. My Dad used to walk with me along the two blocks of the “downtown” where he grew up. He claimed there used to be so many people there on Saturday night you could barely get down the sidewalks. I would look around at the boarded-up storefronts and deserted streets and wonder if he was ready for the looney bin.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live like that?   Wouldn’t it be great to sit on the front porch and wave at neighbors as they went by?  Or just walk around the corner to the grocery store or the movie theater and the malt shop?