Every now and then, when a certain fad becomes popular, I find my wondering if I’m as cool and hip as I like to pretend to be. It’s happening again as I see more and more people who feel the overwhelming need to back their vehicles into a parking space.

Smile and the world smiles with you.

I vividly remember that Sunday night, 50 years ago Saturday. It was well past a young boy’s bedtime. But my parents, realizing the significance of what was about to happen 250,000 miles from our living room, woke me up.

Can it really have been 25 years ago? It sometimes seems like yesterday when the Great Flood of 1994 swallowed a large swatch of Georgia, including Macon, where I lived at the time.

Quite by accident this week, I learned that my childhood Saturday mornings, sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, were a lie. Coyotes, it turns out, are faster than roadrunners.

My grandmother used to always laugh when we went to a restaurant that had one of those signs on the door that said, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

I ran into a young woman at lunch the other day who had been a student in one of my journalism classes a year ago. Fortunately, she had made an A, so she seemed genuinely happy to see me.

When I was a kid, I loved watching “The Jetsons,” a cartoon about a family set in the space-age future.