I’m a Millennial by the skin of my teeth. That is, an Elder Millennial, born in 1984, a year heavy with portent that lay at the fuzzy edge of “the mid 1980s,” which by vague consensus demarcates the beginning of the generation.
Elder Millennials are to be distinguished from Young Millennials by a number of behaviors and characteristics. We are so-called digital natives, but we were there when the grade-school librarians burned the card catalogues; we remember computers before the Internet, and the Internet before Google; and we spent our early, sweaty-palmed adolescence as archaeologists of our uncles’ buried Playboys. When the Twin Towers fell, I watched the black plume from a hill near my high school in New Jersey, where I was president of the senior class. So I cringed when Ian Tuttle — whose byline serially graces the cover of this periodical — told a few of us over drinks that the teachers in his school had let the fifth-graders watch the news that day, but not his cohort in grade four.
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