Time flies like an arrow.

I've been a fan of Car and Driver magazine for years and years. I think I started buying them on the regular in the mid-'80s and even then I was reading every old back issue I could find at garage sales and suchlike. Even though my interest in cars has waned somewhat from its peak, I've continued to buy the magazine because I still like cars and driving them but, more importantly, it's just really a good magazine. (It's on the pages of C/D that I first encountered Jean Shepherd and P.J. O'Rourke, for instance.)

Anyhow, I'm on one of my occasional subscribing jags, and the latest issue just hit my mailbox: Car and Driver's sixtieth anniversary issue.

After the usual front-of the-magazine stuff, what we call "Columns" and "Features" at S.W.A.T., the bulk of the magazine is a chronological retrospective, divided by decade. Each decade features a period vehicle in a "comparison test" against its modern equivalent and then a bunch of period nostalgia: old covers, road test data, pictures, et cetera.

What caught me off guard is that, while the Fifties and Sixties have always been "way back in the Before Times" for me, and the Seventies and Eighties have been the subject of nostalgia for most of my adult life, I found myself not quite ready for a reminiscent look back at the distant past of the Nineties and Aughties.
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