Me tearing into my Christmas gifts, 1956, Sunset Drive, Arroyo Grande.

Some TV pundit this morning made the point that the American electorate’s demographics have changed drastically in the last eight years.

Twenty million Baby Boomers, he noted, have died. He was uncommonly cheerful about it.

I know, and it’s probably justified, that it must seem that my generation–there were so MANY of us– is doing 55 mph in the fast lane.

But, to borrow from another of my generation’s contributions, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I’m not dead yet.

Hey! I’m doing the best I can!

And I don’t mind being dead all that much, but that might be because my generation grew up with such a massive inferiority complex. After all, who could top our parents’ generation, labeled as “shallow and pleasure-seeking” by academics?

That was before Pearl Harbor.

Alas, our greatest battle was probably Fess Parker, as Davy Crockett, fighting off Santa Ana’s soldiers at the Alamo. Since we were so massively overgifted at Christmas, here is a Marx Alamo playset like mine. The rounded parapet atop the mission was made, I think, of tin, and was so sharp that it was capable of inflicting deep and potentially fatal wounds, if sepsis set in, on careless eight-year-olds who tripped and fell on it.

Our two-room 1888 Branch Schoolhouse was covered, too, by pink asbestos shingles, and I used to frolic amid the crop-dusters as they laid down pesticides all along the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley.

But I’m still here, still a Boomer. I guess we won’t be around all that much longer, according to Political Prognosticators.

But, if nothing else, we will have left this behind:

And this:

And this.