When the subject of age comes up in a discussion, a former Clarksdale newspaper colleague who now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. to be close to her eldest son is quick to point out: “ Age is a number” which is to say we’re as old as we feel.
   That’s all relative. One of my best friends who turned 90 last September has slowed down some – but can still work rings around some of these “whippersnappers” he kindly refers to those in my generation thirty years his junior.
   Random House defines a whippersnapper as an “unimportant, but offensively presumptuous person – especially a young one.”
  Aw. I wouldn’t go as far as to call most young people “offensively presumptuous.”
  Each generation rests on the shoulders of those that came before it. That was the byword that one of my favorite college teachers, Katherine Hardy, used to tell us in anthropology eons ago.
   She lived and breathed sociology. Wished I had taken more of her classes – particularly North American Indians.
   It’s not that I feel decrepit (worn out or broken down by old, illness or hard use), but experience teaches us senior citizens to find other ways to get the job done at a different pace, as we grew older.
   Breaking into the field of education at this time of my life brought about mixed feelings. Working with young people is both interesting and challenging.
   They have energy to burn. They’re part of a restless generation that is convinced they can improve on what others before them did.
   These young people leave and breathe technology. It’s as if they were joined at the hip with their computer. Depriving them of being able to get on a computer for a day or week would be like getting a caffeine addict to go cold turkey and do without their soft drinks.
    A priest friend of mine who know lives at Starkville, Miss. was conducting a seminar recently when he noticed one of the female attendees talking on a cell phone.
   “Those cell phones are an addiction,” he said. Try to take a cell phone away from someone and that person could become outright violent.
   There are things we become so attached to that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.
   We’re so ingrained with computer technology that it creates a major paralysis without some inventions.
   Bar codes have long since replaced manual price labeling. That works fine if the proper procedure is carried out so that the actual costs coincide with the prices on the shelves.
   Have you ever gone up a checkout counter and watched the merchandise being scanned only to discover that the price was higher than the price in the shelves?
   Be careful, too, to notice if a checker happens to wave a bit of merchandise under the scanner more than once.
   Older folks believe or not can spot an honest – or dishonest – mistake in a hurry. Too often some young person might be talking on a cell phone, fumbling through a purse or billfold for a checkbook or credit card and didn’t notice the pricing mistake.
   It’s a little too late to check your receipt against the merchandise once you have left the store.