Gathered with family and friends last weekend, I and my guests indulged in the most miserable habit of people whose years are slipping urgently from them: We talked about the old days.

As a kid, I hated this sort of talk. Of course, at that time I possessed a kid's natural-born inclination to disregard any time except the present. No youngster has a past to speak of, and the future seems to them alien, inconceivable.

And when parents would sit around the kitchen table at some family gathering, they would recite anecdotes and history that might as well have been from King Arthur's day, at least as filtered through a child's ears.

These days, prerogative sustains in me this same routine, rattling on with people of like age about the way things were in younger times. The eye-rolling of my offspring is palpable.

During this most recent encounter, we produced a grand and comic evening by recalling life without cable, the first time we saw a color television and the nonchalance of mothers on the amount of fried substances families consumed. (This is how you know the malaise of baby boomers is complete, when a party disintegrates into a lingering conversation about the reading of nutritional labels.)

In my day, I informed any young person within earshot and who hadn't dozed off, we actually had to dial telephone numbers. Anyone born in pre-ESPN America was probably dumbfounded at the notion. (Thank goodness we still have Aerosmith to link the generations.)

This amusement lacks nostalgic standing in the realm of other recent discussions, particularly those centered on the celebration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

Fifty years ago Monday, U.S. troops and their Allied brethren stormed the beaches of France in an attempt to extricate Europe from Adolf Hitler. By the end of June 1942, nearly one million American fighting men were on the European continent.

Most approached the invasion recognizing the long odds for their survival. The odds proved true for thousands.

Standing in the front of landing craft that advanced on the Normandy beaches, or in the doorway of massive planes that dumped paratroopers behind enemy lines, were many men who had yet to see two decades of life. I have a son as old.

In interviews on television today, these men show the wear of five decades but still seem lucid, vital ... reflective of how young they must have been that day in 1942 when it seemed the whole of German tyranny was raining down upon them.

One soldier was an intelligence officer who helped prepare the French Resistance for its role in the invasion and aftermath. His appearance on my television was that of an old man, speaking with an old man's voice and relating an old man's memories. But the report segued to a photograph of him in 1942, and the man, relieved of the extra half-century, was nothing short of matinee-idol dashing.

These were kids dispatched to points farther than many would ever again go from home, whose mistakes were punished with death on foreign soil and whose bravery was often rewarded the same way.

And on their shoulders was borne the security of our planet. If they failed, if they were pushed back into the sea on D-Day or if they succumbed in the eventual effort to reclaim Europe, the world we know today would be much different, a more frayed place.

And if you further wonder why such a stir has been created about a battle fought 50 years ago in France, of all places, you might ponder the events that galvanize a subsequent generation. Woodstock? Watergate? Disco? They don't measure up.

A nation wept on V-E Day. The heirs of that generation remember where they were when Elvis died.

It is not my suggestion that world conflict serve as antidote for a general softening of Americans. We need not see the like of World War II again.

But it wouldn't pain us to give history its due and reflect on the stunning courage that played itself out on beaches named Omaha and Utah and Juno.

A half-century supplies a substantial margin for amnesia. In an age when detouring around road work is considered sacrifice, the 50th anniversary of D-Day seems a healthy thing for this nation to remember.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.