When I was in my prime and raising my kids the world around me was different, or was it? My daughter and her husband have taken a long awaited, long deserved, one-month's vacation. We, my wife and I have taken over their house and their children until they return. Two weeks into being their proxies in all functions of their lives, including honoring their pre-planned social engagements have left us in awe.

Check out these for instances:

• Both of our grandchildren's parents combined make over $250,000 and yet according to the bills they had left us to pay, the house upkeep, the therapist for the dog plus his visits to the bakery that caters only to his species, and the bills coming in, I don't know how they make ends meet and still be able to afford a house.
  
  
• At the PTA meeting, we were shocked at two people carrying on the same conversation in English! In our own daily lives, multiple languages going on at the same time is the norm.
  
  
• Your grandchild calls his 3rd grade teacher, "Breeze". She has purple hair and a nose ring.
  
  
• On the playground, when we picked up the children at school, most of them were busy with their cell phones or pagers making pickup contact.
  
  
• In honoring one of their social engagements, a baby shower, there were two mothers-to-be among the guests. Proudly they told every one that the fathers of their children were unknown to them as anonymous sperm donors impregnated them each.
  
  
• Among the people who visited the house, for one reason or another, was a strapping looking plumber, who was gay and snaked out the clogged main drain in no time, the post woman who was into BDSM and the Mary Kay rep, a guy in drag, who delivered an order of product.
  
  
• By bedtime the children listen and identify with oldies music, the Beatles, Classic rock, and Disco, and they remember the words better we do.
  
  

EDITOR'S NOTE:
More and more, I see a repopulation of America's middle class. But, alas, I also see that it takes two people's incomes to live within that niche. They live with abandon, living every month day-by-day, hanging on to their jobs by their teeth for fear of financial collapse.