It happened that, as a child, I preferred hanging around my parents' generation of people to my own (as I then thought) miserable age group. I liked their style, the cantankerous bits as well as the glorious. But I particularly liked their way of looking at the world, or, how I can put it, the tone with which they carried themselves.   The only real drawback to this experience was the fact that they are now all dead and gone -- the last of those I really knew died a week ago. He was a soldier in WWII, like so many of that generation, and smoked into his eighties, and to his death had a little of what my mother used to call that "Clark Gable in 'It Happened One Night'" feel about him. People have gone on and on about that generation, so you would think it was captured pretty completely. But what sobers me is that, in spite of all the books and movies, there is nevertheless something intangible about the way he and they lived that is gone, and that cannot be recovered. There must have been a point in their lives when the same thing happened to them -- some tone to life that their parents' generation had that has disappeared. We cannot really know what it was like to have been an Edwardian. But I think I have some slight feel for what it was like to be part of the generation that flourished after about 1925. I suppose part of my homage to my parents' generation is to remember that way of living as best I can; that it was a privilege to know them; and also to keep in mind as I read the histories of many other different pasts further back that the essential part -- the feel of how they lived -- is not available to me, and to respect that, too.