Last night I convinced my husband to watch Thirty Day Princess with Sylvia Sidney and Cary Grant (1932). As I age, I find it comforting to know that are a couple of dozen movies made before I was born. It makes me feel young. Though Sylvia Sidney looked so much like Drew Barrymore it was a bit confusing, and it was set in a depression - this depression or another? It gets so disorienting, the way history repeats itself but with a new cast. My parents were children when this movie was made, and they've been dead now about 24 years. My youngest kid doesn't have any memories of them, as she was three when they died. I realize that could happen to me, too, as my first grandchild is 21 months, and if we disappeared now she would never know us, though at the moment she thinks we're fun. You gotta love grandchildren - they think you're interesting and want to spend time with you - unlike the rest of the world. I also have a foster grandchild who is 4 1/2. She will, I believe, remember me. But her father died when she was 15 months old, so she will not remember him, and he was such an amazing, loving, funny young man. Life is not fair. Not at all. Do we ever get reconciled to it? I doubt it.

Memories are precious, and they slip through our fingers like sand. There is no container sturdy enough to hold them, and they float around drifting in and out of the atmosphere searching for homes. I think us older folk try to hold on a minute when they float by. We're like the volunteers in the baby ward of a hospital - holding the little fellow tenderly so he can know he's welcomed in this world - messengers for all the emotions and wishes and dreams of our race.

What else can we do - us old folks? I believe we are the masters of the incidental encounter with a stranger. That moment when you share an interaction with the lady in the volvo waiting room tapping her foot as she waits for her car to be ready. She turns out to be from southern India and you've been there eight years ago and it's a small world and there you go. Life has happened in the midst of old Newsweeks and car brochures. A body clearing it's throat becomes a woman who lives in the next town and makes her own puris. Without us - the old people who notice humanity and have time to spare - life would be a lot of dead air.

We wink at children a lot. Their mothers aren't noticing, being on the cell phone and holding the kid's collar with the other hand, and the kid wants to be SEEN. The wink tells her - yes, it's a drag to be held back from running through the store like a banchee and what's the point of a perfectly good slippery floor, if you can't try sliding across it? We're old enough to know the best use of our feet at that moment would be something that delightfully reckless, and if we were her mother we would take off her shoes and let her skate for the olympics. If we were her grandparent, we would pull up the rugs in our front hall and let her rip.