Yes, it is Christmas at Bronner’s year round. It is very cool and will cater to all your Festive Tree decoration needs.
And there is always a chicken dinner waiting for you at Zehnders. The price is near extortion-but there are always coupons.You will come away bloated. And the waitresses dress in embarrassing costumes.
Bronner’s , zehnder’s
Bavarian Inn
Frankenmuth Kite and Toy Store
I return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
Just wait until you get your first letter from the AARP.
My daugher graduated high school last weekend, and starts as a college freshman in a little over two months.
Gray chest hairs (had them for a while)
Gray moustache hairs (crowding out the red) – recent. Ugh.
My father’s funeral in January – we are now the older generation. All the parents, aunts and uncles are gone.
Making the joke about Paul McCartney’s band before Wings, to someone who had never heard of Wings.
Wanna feel old? Go to a record store. The first clue to your advancing age is the fact that you think of it as a record store. I did this several years ago, searching for something my baby brother wanted for Christmas.
Upon entering the store, I’m greeted by Young Thing, with rainbow colored hair, and various pieces of metal protuding through parts of her face–eyebrow, nose, lip, maybe another in her cheek. I didn’t say anything about it, thinking perhaps the child had been in some horrible accident at a wire factory or something. There is no one else in the store old enough to have voted more than once. I’m wandering around, struggling to think through the boom-boom bass of whatever the store music was, peering at my carefully transcribed list, looking for an album (another sign of age) by some band called Smashing Vegetables or some such. Young thing sees my plight, and helpfully offers “Sir, we have Sinatra and classical music in the back.”…I’m 35 at the time. Fortunately, Young Thing took pity on poor befuddled Oakie, and led me to the section I needed.
After completeing the purchase, kinda felt like I needed to apply for social security.
Sheesh, Shirley, you are old 
I was going to challenge you on that one, but did a lil’ research first and found out that the UP was indeed 616 until 1961, at which point it turned to 906. So I guess it’s plausible you might remember that.
Still, I can one up you: when I was a kid, local numbers were 5 digits. They all started with “22”, and you didn’t have to dial that.
'round about 1980, they changed it. Local numbers still all start with “22” but you have to dial it. And we’re far from running out - the metro area still only uses “225”, “226”, “227”, and “228”.
When they make us start dialing the area code, I’m moving to American Samoa or some such place where I can go back to only using 4 or 5 digits.
There are too many to count, but my favorite is young men calling me “Sir” and looking like they’re ready to pick me up off the ground when I fall over (I’m 56, by the way, and in better shape than most of them).
On the other hand, relating to 5que’s post, as long as my father is still alive and kicking I can’t be too old.
I have to tell this story: my father, who is 84, went out and bought a Segway last week. Now he is happily tooling around town on it when he needs to run errands. Two years ago he had an operation on his spine and afterwards had to learn how to walk again, and now he’s balancing down the street on one of these things. I am so proud of him, and if he’s not “old”, then I’m sure not going to count myself as old.
Roddy
For me, it was when I got gray nose hairs.
And of course that I’ve got a number of co-workers who don’t remember when Reagan was shot because, well, they weren’t born yet. They don’t really remember the Cold War, that fixture of the first three and a half decades of my life, because they were in first or second grade when the Berlin Wall came down.
I’m 36. My life is half over.
(On the other hand, given how much I’ve learned, and realizing looking back how much time I’ve wasted, I expect the second half of my life to be way better than the first half.)
High school?? I was in my second year of grad school! I remember consoling myself by thinking “by the time they get around to reinstituting the draft, I’ll be too old for it.”
I’m glad my parents’ generation are still around. My mother saw Singin’ in the Rain on its first run when she was 12, and my uncle still has his first-edition copy of Kind of Blue. So I’ve got miles to go.
(On preview…I have 2 years on Cervaise, share his general outlook, and hope I can achieve his level of optimism.)
Girlfriend yesterday didn’t know what Fragglerock was.
Are you sure?
I remember my grandmother’s number from when she lived in Marquette… and this would have been back in the 1970s… was 906.
I even remember her address. Cherry Creek road. Probably a whole housing development up where her house was.
Anyway – were you just giving example area codes, or do you pre-date 906 in da UP?
Er… ah… maybe I should have read a bit more of the thread.
::embarrassed shuffle away::
So I’m out of college, cut my hair(shoulder length, up from ass-length), living in the suburbs, career been going well for a few years, getting into routines for workouts, starting to watch what I eat, etc. It’s like that Huey Lewis song “Hip to be Square”.
And then it hits me. My life is described by a song most people around me don’t know, have never heard, and which is terribly dated(really, who says “hip” or “square” anymore?). The ultimate irony is the song was designed to be a pick-me-up for people in my position and all it is doing is making me feel my age even more.
I’ve exiled my Huey Lewis and the News CD to the back of the shelf.
Enjoy,
Steven
What the christ? That was BARELY twenty years ago. I LOVED fraggle rock.
I can’t think of anything that made me feel old. But, I’m only 53, so I guess it will happen sooner or later.
I love being able to talk about esoteric historical knowledge (area codes? I remember when there weren’t any. Or Zip Codes, for that matter. No cable TV. Records. Great stuff.).
They don’t make those anymore? 
I got mine last month! I’m 34…
The other day LouisB in the Summer of Love thread was talking about being a gen-u-ine flower child. I had always thought of Louis as one of the “more senior” dopers. Now I realize we are contemporaries. :o
No no, we remember when they first came out, they were all the rage…waaaay back in the early 1980s.
The first, most traumatic moment that I realized how old I was getting was about ten years ago (and realizing it was that long ago makes me feel ancient.) I was entering a bar with a bunch of friends, the bouncer was asking for I.D. When it came my turn, he didn’t even bother to look at my license - took one look at me and waved me right in. 