ARRIVING AT ANTI-COOL: This morning I'm walking my dog and I see this couple we know and we like. They're a cool couple, hip even, and they're standing in the alley behind their garage, loading their kid into their...minivan. And I look at this minivan, this terribly uncool vehicle, a dirty, white, boxy, lumbering heap of metal and glass just sitting there in their garage. And I look at this couple, their smiles, their collective happy-go-luckiness and I think, wow, you know, this minivan is just a car, it's not inherently uncool, and in fact if you stuff this couple and their kid in it -- I think this as they pull out right past me, smiling, radiant -- if you stuff this family in it, well, the minivan almost seems cool now.

And then I think how, ever since we had our kid, there's this sense that nothing other than the kid and our family and just making the day somehow work and pass by with everyone healthy and unhurt, that nothing else really matters, and that that in and of itself is not only enough, but it's everything. Right? So that all the trivial years -- of the right hair gel and the on-trend jacket and the art-house movies, that these years were sort of silly, because here we are anyway at the mini-van and suburb stage (even if we never have a mini-van or move to the suburbs, we actually get why people do both) and it feels so perfect and complete, and not just in spite of its dorkiness, but as if somehow the dorkiness has lifted like it was never here, has revealed itself to be only a loitering vapor easily burned off by a blast of sun. We parents, I think, we've got it sussed, and we don't care anymore. Or maybe we know what it is to care now, and so we no longer care about things not worth caring about. (We have this new vision that enables us to delineate better between trivia and its opposite.)

Which brings me to: Maybe senior citizens aren't doddering so much as swaggering. Maybe senior citizens sit serenely on benches or careen into traffic with barely a sidelong glance...because they've passed on into yet another realm of enlightened non-caring. Maybe they eat early and wear tattered blue blazers and silly hats with military pins on them because they've entered a higher state of apathy. Picture an army of sans-a-belted seniors slow-stepping their way around the mall, a vaccuum of anti-cool preceding their every footfall. Cue the music now, a string arrangement of the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," with a world-weary Bobby Short intoning the most important couplet of all: "We know....and we don't care!"