Lieutenant Columbo could be an excellent teacher. In his classroom, you could learn never to underestimate rumpled detectives in beat-up jalopies. You could learn that it never hurts to ask one more question. You could even learn that a sense of humor goes well with any job you do.

But I learned something unexpected when I was bored enough to watch a rerun of a rerun a couple of weeks ago. Lieutenant Columbo solved a crime when he examined a photograph taken of the suspect during the Korean Conflict. Fifteen years earlier.

Fifteen years? My goodness, try almost fifty. If it were not for M*A*S*H, it¹s unlikely that any of us would give veterans who fought there a second thought.

Yet when I entered high school, the Korean Conflict had indeed ended a mere fifteen years earlier. And the United States was still fully embroiled in the so-called police action in Vietnam.

I remember when we called it quits in Vietnam, and I remember it clearly. One of my college suitemates was a Vietnamese national, and I heard the news through her eyes, saw the mixed emotions with my own ears. For me, that was not history. It was this young, scared nursing major worrying about her family, her village, her future.

To put things in perspective, the Challenger disaster is to current high school freshmen what the Korean Conflict was to me: an event they cannot remember. And incoming college freshmen see the police action in Vietnam as I saw the Shoah.

Extrapolating this timeline a bit further, I understand that the Class of 2001 grasps the slaughter of six million Jews equally as badly as I "get" the trench warfare of Doughboys in World War I, the "great war." That war, and the Great Depression that followed, are well outside my knowledge base. I studied both events in history classes, but nothing connects me to either calamity.

We baby boomers do however have a connection to the Shoah and subsequent wars and police actions. Our parents, aunts and uncles, and family friends have shared their World War II experiences with us. And except for those years, when as teenagers we knew our parents knew nothing, we listened and imagined the stories we heard.

From Vietnam on, it was our friends, our brothers and sisters, our classmates, and eventually our children who made history. Who fought wars, ran for political office, took charge of life and things that make the evening news. We know the nuances of the recent historical record, we comprehend and relate to the ambiguities, the evil, the good, the scapegoats, the flag burners.

But just because we are the invincible baby boomers, time will not stand still for us, no matter what we think. One day we watch a familiar Columbo television show, and that "fifteen years earlier" hits us between the eyes and reminds us that fifteen plus thirty equals forty-five.

We can take that new-found perspective, and refill our arthritis prescription. Or we can take note of the wisdom of our tradition, that teaches us to teach our children to remember. Not to remember so they grow up to be hate-filled racists, out to avenge every wrong. But to remember so they can do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

That is a concept that will still be valid hundreds of years from now, when M*A*S*H and Lieutenant Columbo are long forgotten.