It feels a little funny to drag these stories from the depths of memory now that us baby boomers are all supposed to be picking out the patterns for our tombstones, counting our wrinkles, and trying to replicate the secret of Ronald Reagan's perpetually dark hair.

 But speaking as a voice from the crypt, let me see if I can impart some mangled semblance of wisdom to a seriously brain-damaged world. To follow this tale of moral profundity, you'll have to travel with me back to the dim and distant days of a long forgotten time, before microwaveable popcorn, MTV, the affordable hand-held calculator and L'eggs panty hose. Yes, we are fumbling through the swirling mists of the past to those years of astonishing antiquity when even Johnny Carson was only middle aged... THE EARLY SIXTIES!!!

  More specifically, it was 1962. I had just left college without finishing my freshman year, a high crime in that primordial eon. Escape from an institution of higher learning before your sentence expired was so unheard of for a middle-class Jewish kid that there wasn't even a name for the crime--just a mushroom cloud of incoherent curses that erupted when your parents discovered your abominable act. The phrase "drop-out" wouldn't plop into the American vocabulary for years to come.