One of the tendencies of the elderly is to savage the new, which they either can't understand or staunchly refuse to understand. In my gloomy days, I tend to oscillate between the two. I often wish I could be planted as a young adult in a particular year: 1925, when Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby (which at first sold so poorly that I fancy I could go to Scribner's offices on Fifth Avenue, congratulate Scott on a fabulous novel, and buy a hundred copies or so, then save them all until the reversal of critical opinion began to see it as the masterpiece it is until each first edition was worth a semi-fortune); 1941, so I could call up Franklin Roosevelt and warn him of the up-coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and thus be a national hero; 1945, so I could gather in Times Square, together with half a million or so other iron-lunged Americans and kiss every pretty young girl in celebration of VJ Day. Am I the only person who has such fantasies? If you think that's bad, you should hear some of the others.

Although I was alive and kicking in 1945, I sometimes wonder what life in the United States must have been like immediately following the Second World War. Was life entirely different back then, or was I just different from the adult I would turn out to be? Or was it a combination of the two?

For one thing, and most important to me as a diabetic, I'd have had to strictly modify my food-intake, since insulin hadn't been invented until 1921, and in 1945 care for diabetics was still iffy at best.

As a person who lived nearly all his life under the threat of nuclear attack by the Russians, I wonder what the general atmosphere was right after the War. The Russians were no longer our wartime allies; they had the atomic bomb, too. And that scared everyone. I can remember my first grade class scurrying downstairs to the basement of Henry Barnard School when the emergency bell rang. We six-year-olds hadn't seen enough TV to be as scared of nuclear war as our parents were. A couple of years later, passing with my father by a Macy's show window, in New York City, I remember seeing Nelson Rockefeller, a power in New York state politics even then, sitting cross-legged in a mock bomb shelter, and I didn't know whether to laugh out loud or look serious.

Even after the war was officially over, it stayed in people's minds and memories. On July 4, there was a small but spirited parade through the little town of Larchmont, where my family lived. On a grassy knoll, construction had begun on a memorial to the young fellows from Larchmont who had given their lives for their country in America's most recent wars.

A friend of my Aunt Ruth had a son, John Mitchell, returning from service overseas, when his plane crashed and he was killed. I may remember incorrectly, but the July 4 parade tradition lasted only a couple of years before being discontinued.

I wondered why: Could it have had anything to do with the Russians, who had been our wartime allies but who were now our cold-war enemies? I tried to wrap my 5-year-old mind around that enigma, but couldn't. It took me about 20 years to figure it out, and even then it remained an enigma.

In 1945, the jet was still a relatively undeveloped mode of civil transportation. The plane you boarded at New York's Laguardia when visiting friends and relatives in other cities in other states was the 2-engine DC-3, the most reliable and loveliest of aircraft.

And it remains one of my most treasured memories, walking out the terminal door at Laguardia, across the tarmac, then climbing up the rolling aluminum staircase, through the plane's side door, and buckling up in one of the seats near the back of the little cabin (Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, when we saw him on one particular flight, advised that these were the safest seats in the whole fuselage.), listening for the engines to start and warm up--a truly sweet and unthreatening sound--the taxiing down the runway, the liftoff, and the gradual climb to the altitude where it steadied itself, and where passengers could still see farmers' fields laid out like a patchwork quilt. I can still hear that sweet sound on the second CD of Richard Rodgers's magnificent soundtrack for the CBS documentary Victory at Sea. As a youngster, I was invited to come see the two pilots in their cabin. In 1945, the airplane clientele was white middle-class Americans, so there was no suspicion of any dark- hued passenger hijacking the plane or slitting the pilot's throat with a box cutter if he refused to pilot the plane to Iraq.

Back home in Larchmont, when aviation was still a novelty, I watched from our front porch the sonorously droning of the glinting DC-3's and DC-6's and DC-8's as they flew over our house toward Laguardia or Idlewild (to be renamed Kennedy International after JFK's assassination in 1963).

At age 10 or so, in roughly 1950, I got interested in model planes. Just as today, models in the late-1940's came in different categories of difficulty. One of my father's Texas friends came out to Larchmont one afternoon bearing a truly difficult balsa model plane, and late that night, primed by a mess of drinks, they took it to the workbench in the basement and began constructing it.

* the morning, I went down and discovered the incredibly involved balsa stick fuselage. (I thought for a while that I'd stay away from that kind of model.)

At the local stationery store in Larchmont, Mr. Henry Linden stocked Monogram-brand balsa planes, including many models of World War Two fighter planes and bombers. I tried several, but settled finally on the F4U Corsair, the beautiful aircraft carrier fighter with the gull wings.

Once my model was completed -- and it didn't take more than two days -- I opened my second-story bedroom window and, having wound up the single propellor, sent the aircraft flying into the Bellamys' back yard. If the Corsair crashed, another cost only 85 cents. Today, something comparable costs close to $20 ($19.95, in fact).

In 1945, rail transportation was cheap and readily available. When I was 16 years old, in 1956, I had a summer job at the American Oil Company (AMOCO) at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street in Manhattan. For $33 a month, I could buy a ticket that would get me from the Larchmont station, which I could reach each morning by walking, to Grand Central Terminal (on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue), then walk from there to the corner of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street, where the office was located where I worked on the fifth floor. In those days, my most reliable form of transportation were my own two legs. But even the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad cost only about one dollar a day, which struck me even then as a fairly reasonable rate. Travel immediately after the War was easy, and there was no chance that an irate Iraqi or Iranian would take out a Manhattan office building.

We suspected the U.S. had enemies, but they were safely hidden away in some remote corner of the globe.

In 1945, I was five years old, lived happily in Pelham Manor, a suburb of New York City, with my mother and father (my sister Beverly would be born the following year), and thought that Pelham Manor was the center of the world.

Only by scanning the newspaper daily and Life Magazine weekly could I have learned that my country was currently putting the finishing touches on the eradication of the warring Japanese enemy.

As long as my mother and father protected me, nothing bad could happen to me.

Only much later did I learn that my parents were, from the moment they married, at each other's throats, that they should never have married each other.

I count it a blessing that we humans are not gifted with foresight.