Your Know You’re Old When…

  
Today while Russ was at his Georgetown office working during his vacation, Carter and I were doing tourist things. After having lunch with friends who had been looking at schools this week too and comparing notes, Carter and I went off to the Smithsonian. We had already done art this trip, and since Russ was not with us we did not have to go to Air and Space so we went to the museum that makes Carter and I happiest…American History.
Carter wanted to see the Julia Child’s kitchen exhibit and true to our luck it was closed so that the walls around it could be repainted. So instead we went to the war section where we relived all the wars America ever fought in. This was a very useful review for AP US History for Carter. As we neared the end of the exhibit with Vietnam and the World Trade Center attacks I recognized many of the famous photographs in the exhibit as ones I had seen in real time as a child and adult.
After finishing wars we went to see the First Ladies dress collection. Donating your inaugural dress to the Smithsonian is a relatively new concept for First Ladies. Of course the museum did not exist during many of the first ladies’ lifetimes so they did not have a place to donate the dress to and second most First Ladies probably wore their inaugural dress more than once since those things were expensive. But as we looked at the dresses on display I realized that I had lived through quite a few First Ladies. I recognized everyone since Pat Nixon as a personal memory and that was at least eight. 
When Carter and I were thirsty we went to the basement cafe that had a display case of lunch boxes and although I remembered many of them from my childhood I was most shocked to see a Partridge Family lunch box that was the exact model I took to school everyday in fifth grade.  
It was one thing to look at famous photos I had seen as a child in an exhibit, or the actual gowns I had seen First Ladies where on TV, but to see my exact same lunch box in a Smithsonian exhibit really made me feel old. To me the American History museum was full of old stuff from days of yore, not from days of me. How could stuff of my generation be worthy of a museum? I wish I had held onto that lunchbox now, as well as my Monkey’s one and all the others. They might be worth something, more than just the memory of loving David Cassidy and Davey Jones.