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I work with a bunch of kids. That is, the four people I share an office with are somewhere between 20 and 30 years old.

To a baby boomer, that's young.

This isn't a new development. It's been the case for the past eight years because changeover isn't rare when most of our reporters are working their first jobs after graduating from college. In the office, it seems I'm the only one aging.

This regularly brings home to me the not-so-profound realization that we view the world based on our experience.

It being an office, we talk about usual things - politics, music and sports. I work with young men who can rattle of the names and merits of contemporary ballplayers I've never heard of but who have no memory of the Kansas City Royals being anything other than hapless bottom feeders. It's beyond their conception that the organization was once one of the most respected in Major League Baseball.

But the generation gap is more than just remembered. It is also about sensibilities.

We have two conceptions of the past. One is of those years we lived and another is of the years before our births or, at least, the onslaught of memory. There is a curtain between the past of memory, which seem real and substantial, and that of our personal prehistory.

The remembered past is enriched with so many experienced smells, sounds, sights, joys, disappointments that it produces, in me an at least, an emotional response that could be defined in the same terms as happy or sad. I suppose it could nostalgia, but without longing, melancholy or romanticism work implies. It's an encompassing feeling, or sensibility, with variations associated with different times in my past that wash over me when I hear music from the 1960s or pictures from the 1950s.

By contrast, I can't know my personal prehistory in that way, although I accept it occurred. It's like a foreign country I haven't visited. It's a foggier, less defined past.

That's how I view the 1930s and 40s, decades of far more consequence than those that followed.

It's difficult for me to accept those years are less remote to my birth than the 1970s are to my young co-workers. Most of my life exists to them only as some amorphous prehistory.

That, I don't think, can be shared. It's internal to all of us. I can answer "Cookie Rojas," to who was a good Royals' second baseman other than Frank White, but I know saying a name doesn't begin to relate all that I experience when I think of that former Royals all star.