Four things I miss

This is what old people do, you know: Talk about the way things used to be and how it was so much better back in their day.

I don't know how much "better" things were when I was younger, but I do know there are things I miss. For example:

Game Rooms

Or "video arcades." Whatever you want to call them. These were places where you could bring a couple of dollars, buy some tokens, and happily spend the next few hours playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Centipede, etc. And now they're mostly gone.

Well, there are still arcades around at malls and amusement parks and places like that. But there are a lot fewer of them, and the ones that do exist are filled with expensive games I don't want to play.

When I had a newspaper route, I would regularly stop by one of my customer's houses on my way to the game room and collect their biweekly bill. That amounted to $3.10 for those who received The News-Herald every day, which was more than enough to fund an afternoon at Galaxy Gardens, the game room that was a 5-minute bike ride from my house.

Now home video game systems have advanced to the point that there's no need for game rooms. Which is OK. I just miss putting on my painter's cap (adorned with buttons representing various early-80s bands) and heading to the game room so I can try and beat my high score on Defender.

Johnny Carson

Hey, I love Jimmy Fallon. And Letterman. And Craig Ferguson. They're all great, as far as I'm concerned. But Johnny was a staple. He showed up on your TV every night, walking onstage to the same music and, to some extent, telling the same jokes. And it was great. It was something you could count on.

But "The Tonight Show" has moved on (as it should) and Johnny himself is gone. Which is kind of sad.

My elementary school

They tore it down to build homes for old people, or something like that. It's not like I would return to Mapledale Elementary School every day if it was still there. It's the idea that I could if I wanted to. I'm old enough that none of my old teachers would still be there, but just having the chance to walk through the halls and smell that elementary school smell again would be a lot of fun. So it goes.

Not knowing (or caring) how most of the food we ate was terribly unhealthy

Part of this was simply because I was a kid at the time, but we ate all kinds of horrible things back in The Day that would kill a lab rat in hours. We didn't know it was bad for us, nor did we much care. And come to think of it, most of the adults I knew took pretty much the same attitude.

Well, I mean, we knew that McDonald's wasn't the most healthy food in the world, but the general feeling was that if you kept it to once a day or so, you would be fine. As it turns out, the only people who turned out to be "fine" in that arrangement are today's cardiologists.

Nowadays I conduct a quick nutritional analysis of everything I put into my mouth. It doesn't mean I won't eat it, just that I make sure to feel really guilty about it if it's anything other than spinach or blueberries or something.

I think I liked it better when I didn't know I was poisoning myself.