This is How you Know You've Become Old, Part 1

Lately, I have been missing one of my favorite movies of all time. "Four Seasons," starring Alan Alda and Carol Burnett, is a flick I've watched as a young adult, a medium adult, and an almost 20 year married adult. Plus, add that Bess Armstrong, whose younger sister Carrie I grew up with, made this film so personally powerful. Stay with me. I own the movie on DVD but kind of gave up on DVD when streaming became a thing. The downside: the film is not available, at my convenience, to watch on any streaming channel. I did find a loophole -- the UK version of Netflix offers it up for purchase, but it didn't accept my credit card's US address.

So I did the next best thing. We have a bunch of DVD players, none of which are of course connected to our Smart TVs because we stream everything. At our local Ace hardware store, I wandered up to the counter and asked the young man for advice: I want to connect my DVD player to my Smart TV, what do we need to do?

I laughed out loud when he told me that he has no knowledge of how to connect a DVD as he, being "young," has only ever live-streamed anything he wants to watch (aside from Four Seasons, clearly), and he needed to do some research. Says me, amused and yet also horrified, "Is there an older adult here who can help?"

Ultimately and to his credit, he figured out a solution. I bought the $25 cord and bore it home quite proudly. Even better, it's a lot easier today to hook up a television with a DVD than it used to be. Alas, foiled in the end: The DVD case for Four Seasons ... was empty. No idea where the disc has gone. At least now we can watch DVDs if we choose to.

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