I frequently hear people, some of them here, decry the fact that men and boys no longer carry knives, while in "the good old days" all men and boys and many women and girls carried them.

I understand that dismay, and share it. I remember some years ago reading a news story about a woman who fell on an escalator and got her clothing caught in the machinery somehow. Horrified spectators tried to free her, but she was fatally strangled because not one person in the crowd had a knife.

But to a degree I understand why carrying knives is relatively rare, and it's not entirely a PC thing. We have made life too damn convenient and "advanced".

When did you last see someone sharpen a pencil with a knife, or even use a pencil? When did you last come home from the grocery with two kinds of unsliced cheese, and bacon and hamburger, wrapped in butcher paper tied with string? When did you last whittle a toothpick from a twig, or see old and some not so old guys sitting around and making fine wood shavings as they shot the bull about their "good old days"? How often do most most people buy bread that isn't sliced, or bake their own?

Too convenient, although the way some merchandise is bubble-packed today either demands a good sharp knife or bolt cutters. Too sanitary to have meat or cheese handled by humans and wrapped to order in paper. I have to admit that although I would never be without at least one pocketknife, my occasions to use one are fewer than they used to be.

I believe a great many people alive today, including many of my younger sister's Boomer generation, simply grew up not being taught the value and importance of a good knife on one's person. Certainly a lot of the next generation didn't pass the lesson along to their kids. No need, we're too advanced and sanitary.

Ah, progress.

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Oh well, what the hell.