Sometimes we old ladies in the senior citizen seats chat on the bus, often about what it’s like getting around on the bus in the city.

Yesterday, a lady sat next to me and we agreed that the summer festivities in the city (Fourth of July, FIFA World Cup) are rerouting the buses drastically. I said comfortably that I was glad my husband wasn’t alive, because he hated that kind of thing and he would be complaining. She said that SEPTA, our regional transportation authority, had sent someone to her apartment building to talk about the ways in which the buses are going to be reorganized going forward. And she confided that getting around by bus was pretty good, except in the afternoons when the kids get out of school. “We didn’t behave like that in the old days,” she said firmly.

I can never let things like that pass, which is a flaw I have had all my life and is absolutely not because I’m an opinionated old woman. “I taught middle school,” I said. “The kids have always behaved like that.” She looked unconvinced, but I wasn’t there to convince her, any more than I am put on the bus to settle down teenagers.

It’s the second time this month an older woman has said that kind of nonsense to me about the old days. I was there in the old days, even if they feel like yesterday, and some of those old days were pretty damn weird. I myself was not well behaved, and I won’t go into detail even though most of my transgressions were furtive and unnoticed. Well, some of them. A few, maybe. Okay, let me put it this way: I wasn’t quite as badly behaved as some of my friends, mostly because I was terrified of getting caught.

There are definitely some bad things about the present day. Global warming, for example, or the fact that uninformed idiots managed to elect the worst President in US history. But we had the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction back in my day, plus everyone smoked and the city smelled like leaded gasoline all the time. Don’t even mention how bad the food was, either. But although perhaps children didn’t have thousand-dollar computers the size of a deck of playing cards back then, they were able to get in plenty of trouble, because there is a reason why many cultures have sent their young members off into the wilderness, the army, or college: Teenagers are (on the whole) excitable, badly motivated, and chaotic.

Oh, I’m no Pollyanna. Things aren’t necessarily great. I’m just saying that you cannot bludgeon me into thinking that there were any hypothetical “good old days.” If you’re going to sit down next to me on the bus with your shopping bag at your feet, be specific and current in your complaints, that’s all I ask.

For example, during yesterday’s conversation, I cheerfully mentioned the time recently when a man got on my bus covered in fleas. He went and sat in the back. Everyone else on the bus crowded toward the front, and eventually the bus driver pulled over and put us all off to go wait for a replacement bus.

That silenced the nice old lady, let me tell you. Yeah, kids getting out of school are rowdy and noisy, but most of the time you don’t have to check yourself for fleas if you get off the bus to avoid them, that’s all I’m saying.