About 10 years ago, I was in a sports memorabilia store looking at autographed baseballs.

I was more of a collector then than I am now -- my remaining collection is in a case that holds 12 balls -- and I was considering purchasing balls signed by Frank Robinson and Johnny Bench.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/0606johnny_bench.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-216" title="0606johnny_bench" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/0606johnny_bench-300x239.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="239" /></a>"Oh, you like the old timers," the attractive young sales clerk said to me.

Old timers? I almost screamed. Bench didn't reach the majors until after I graduated from high school. Had I really lived that long as an adult, that a great player reached the big leagues, had his entire career and been retired long enough to be an "old timer?"

It's the same thing with movies, television and music. "Star Wars" and "Jaws" aren't old-time classics to me, and neither are "Happy Days" and "Welcome Back Kotter." Bob Seger and Journey aren't old-time rockers.

Are they?

If those are the old timers now, then where does that leave Joe Dimaggio (whose autograph I<em> do</em> have), "Casablanca," "I Love Lucy" and Elvis Presley? Prehistoric? From a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth?

In recent years I've been collecting DVDs of some of the classic sci-fi films of the '50s -- movies like "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and numerous others. I'm sure kids look at those movies now and laugh because the special effects are so cheesy, but I wonder if they're looking at movies like the newest "Star Trek" -- which I enjoyed -- and laughing because they know the special effects are all done by computers and blue screens.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/star_wars_iv.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-217" title="star_wars_iv" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/star_wars_iv-215x300.jpg" alt="" width="215" height="300" /></a>My good friend Mike Haskins wishes we could return to a day when baseball players had to get jobs in the off-season. I'm not sure we were better off then, but at least when ballplayers made $8,000 a year, they seemed more human to us.

There's a certain unreality to life as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. It used to be that we could look at a family on television -- be they Bradys, Cleavers or Cunninghams -- and recognize only a slightly idealized version of families we actually knew. But now everything is so exaggerated that we can't see ourselves in the picture at all.

Probably the last <em>real</em> family on television was the Conner family -- Dan, Roseanne and their kids, who lived real lives, who fought with each other and ragged each other and still managed to love each other.

How did we go from Laverne &amp; Shirley, working-class girls who lived in a crummy basement apartment in Milwaukee, to the six "Friends" with New York apartments anyone not named Trump would have had trouble affording.

Maybe it's that movies and television used to turn a mirror on our lives and now they try and help us escape our lives.

Yeah, I guess I am an old timer.