SALEM, N.J.

I GREW UP here in Salem. We had lots of faults. Lots of economic inequality too, if that’s a fault. But strangely enough for an age in which smoking was rampant and dumplings were ubiquitous, we also had a bunch of old men.

They mostly worked behind the scenes. They corrected the preacher when his sermons weren’t helpful. They barked at young men who needed barking at. Occasionally, under extreme duress, the old men would come out from behind the shadows. You’d see them stagger off a porch to confront some young hood a third their age and twice their size. They always prevailed. Because they had right on their side.

Hard to believe now, but there was a day when being current didn’t matter at all. When the old men reminded you of the verities that had put the creases in their brows, all the youngsters knew they had no case.

But it’s all changing too fast now. The kids think they know everything because most everything is about 25 minutes old. The people who are supposed to be grownups think they’re helplessly behind the times because they remember last year. So they defer to the idiot children who know absolutely nothing about anything but buttons on microprocessor-controlled devices.

Where does that leave the old men? Damaged, obviously. Too many of us smoke and drink and eat non-tofu comestibles. The children and grandchildren think that the lines in our faces are merely the proof of our immoral chemical choices rather than the spoor of life’s losses and responsibilities.

Nevertheless. When we rouse ourselves . . . when we leap out of the Barcalounger onto the front porch and declaim our outrage about the callowness that surrounds us, we’re not automatically perceived as doddering old men. Deep down, the kids do expect us to know something, to possess some wisdom. I suspect one of their biggest disappointments in life is that we don’t roar off that couch more often.

The youngsters I know seem to like me. And I don’t even pretend to be nice. I think that they like that I’m keeping track of a continuum they have no idea about. They really don’t like being marooned in historical limbo. They just don’t know what to do about it.

All you superannuated Boomers who have fought like hell not to get old: Consider the possibility that being old isn’t such a bad thing, if, somehow, you can cull some wisdom from your many years on Earth, and find a way to share it.

Robert Laird is proprietor of instapunk.com and author of The Boomer Bible ( sigman@comcast.net).