When you get older, it's real easy to get grouchy about how much better everything used to be when you were younger.

My friend Mick is perhaps the best example I know of that. Rarely does a week go by that I don't get an e-mail from him extolling all the wonders of the '50s and '60s, when we baby boomers were kids.

[caption id="attachment_1385" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Pauline and Maddie"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Pauline.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1385" title="Pauline" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Pauline-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

It's one thing when he sings the praises of the crummy little baseball field where we played in the summertime. Eaton Field, which we called "Eats-it Field" at the time, has now grown to rival Wrigley Field and Fenway Park for sheer nostalgia. That's bearable, but when I get the e-mails calling "Gilligan's Island" and "Leave it to Beaver" as some sort of Golden Age of television, hey, we didn't even take those shows seriously<em> then</em>.

Sure, some things were better. We could go out and play without being kidnapped, molested or murdered three times before lunch, and comic books were only 10 cents. But the only form of portable music was the transistor radio -- which only got AM -- and no one I knew actually had sex until about 1970.

Things definitely have changed, and not always for the worst. I'm not a huge fan of cell phones, but there's a huge difference between free long distance and the previous "Talk fast, the charges are piling up" approach to calls from more than 10 miles away.

As recently as 1979, I remember paying $10 a minute for a long-distance call between McLean, Va., and Beijing, China. In 2008-09, when my daughter was stationed there in her job as a foreign service officer, Skype made the cost of the calls slightly less than nominal. And those were <em>video</em> calls.

The saddest thing about my life right now is how little I see my two wonderful children. With Pauline and her family in Indonesia and Virgile and his wife in Greece, the world seems very large to me. I haven't seen Pauline -- except through Skype -- in more than 20 months, although the plan right now is to spend three weeks with the Kastners later this year in Seattle after Pauline gives us our second grandchild.

We saw Virgile and Sterling for two weeks in June when we went to Europe, and that was nice too, but it will be nearly a year before they return to the U.S., and we don't have a Skype relationship with them.

Still, it's there and I am confident that at some point we'll be talking regularly.

So the world may be going straight to hell in some ways, and it may be hard for me to find a movie made after 1979 I can bear to watch, but the improvement in communications makes up for a lot of it.

I may miss my kids a lot, but at least we can stay in touch.

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