One of the newer scary things for today's old fogies is that baby boomers are starting to talk about the good old days. How can this be? Only yesterday we were bouncing them on our knees and now they are fogies too. They are even telling their kids about rotary dial phones, and how they needed a crane to lift the phone booth before they could carry it to school in a truck. "Sneaking that lot through the metal detector was not easy," they boast.

The funny thing is that we call them the good old days then we go on about walking to school through 20-foot snowdrifts, when they were actually only 15 feet in Florida. It's all a matter of perspective. Fogies who were born in Siberia call Buffalo a tropical paradise, right?

I mean it's pretty clear that there were no snowdrifts in Hawaii when we paid the fare and had a month in a luxury hotel, and still had enough change left from a nickel to finance a presidential candidate.

Elvis Presley would have been an old fogy like me if he had been just as unsuccessful, and yet, for me, he is still one of the new guys. When my friends and I first heard "Heartbreak Hotel," we thought it was a load of junk. What's more, in 1958, when I was in Germany working closely with American Service families, I showed Elvis a picture of my then-teenage sister. He wanted me to introduce her but I told him she wouldn't be interested.

Well, my sister has still not forgiven me, even though she is now herself a grandmother old fogy, and now knows that I never did show him her picture anyway.

Elvis was the first white, truck-driving Sammy Davis Jr. and could easily have become president if his legs didn't shake so much when he was giving a speech.

Baby boomers talk about those tough old times when they had to drink tap water instead of today's "Crystal Springs," which comes from the local abandoned toxic waste dump. They call it Crystal Springs because someone has to spring for the price of draining out the crystals and burying them in the spinach field before anyone analyzes them and starts a stupid panic.

Well, in my younger days, we didn't have taps in the house, so we would wait a long time before saying, "Hey, Mom. I'm thirsty." This was because thirsty and dirty kids were thrown into the local pond for their monthly shower, scattering ducks and tadpoles all over the place.

"Well, you've had your monthly shower now, so drink enough to last until Christmas," was the cry, as they held your head under to help you swallow, followed by, "you get thirsty before that, you drink from the puddles outside the cow shed."

"But why, Mom?"

"Too many showers are unhealthy, but wipe your lips before drinking from the puddles."

"But why, Mom?"

"Well, you know cows don't like to walk through contaminated water."

"Oh, yes, sorry Mom."

Kids were so compliant in those days, little angels really, as I'm sure you've heard.

You will be surprised -- or alarmed -- to learn that our president, George Bush, is a boomer. To George, the good old days were when Saddam was killing the insurgents for us, before we hanged him for it.

I mean if we had a beef with Saddam, wouldn't it have been easier to send him hunting with Dick Cheney and a bunch of Exxon Mobile executives? It couldn't fail, especially if Saddam carried a sign which said, "Go green with ethanol." OK, that was careless, so if you don't hear from me for a month or two, try writing to me at Guantanomo and mark it "Private, for you eye only." The singular noun will probably be correct by then.

Even more alarming is that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are boomers. Maybe later, Hillary will remember the good old days when Bill yelled, "Hey, Hillary is the first, female black, white woman and first, female black John Kennedy and George Washington, and female Susan B. Anthony and Mother Theresa, to run for president."

Oh, sure, we all know what Bill's good old days were. One of them was when the first white female ... anyway, the thing is there are now more boomers in the world than old-timers.

Boomers include people like Gore and Rove and John Edwards and many more politicians and famous movie stars. Even Michael Jackson is a boomer, which means his long-suffering dad is an old fogy. The poor guy is still waiting for the DNA tests to confirm his suspicions that Michael was replaced by a visitor from outer space -- no, strike that -- not outer space, Norway.

OK, now where did I park my Studebaker President, or was it a Rambler Nash, or ... oh, never mind, I'll use my walker.

Anthony Cicale is a Lemoore resident. His column appears weekly in The Sentinel. Readers can write him at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232 or e-mail anthonycicale@hotmail.com.

(Feb. 10, 2008)