Last modified: Tuesday, April 8, 2008 1:30 AM EDT REILLY: That '60s show wasn't so groovy Attention old people (and by "old" I mean anyone who remembers the first Bush administration): Want to feel really old? Then try helping your children with their homework. I don't mean just the humiliation you encounter when you sit down together to do a math assignment and while you are trying to remember the multiplication tables that were beaten into your 8-year-old noggin (and I use the word "beat" advisedly here) by Sister Louis Bertrand in the third grade, your child is already figuring out the cosine on her calculator. Nor do I refer to the revelation of geezerhood that overwhelms you when your child asks you for a definition of "antidisestablishmentarianism" and, while you are still fumbling with Webster's New World, she has googled the word and not only found the meaning, etymology, and synonyms and antonyms but also how it's likely to be used on the SATs. I am talking about not so much aiding in finding historical resources as becoming a historical resource. Let me explain. For a history paper, my older daughter has decided to explore a period in the remote past, an epoch so far removed from our present-day life as to be almost unimaginable: the 1960s. This is pretty much how the people of her generation view the historical timeline: The continents split apart, the Civil War, the 1960s. Anyway, leaving aside Timothy Leary's remark about how anyone who can remember the '60s wasn't really there, I have to admit that I'm a little embarrassed when my daughter asks if I was part of the "counterculture." How do I explain that I was more part of the "culture." Like most of us who lived through the decade, I was just as amazed as everyone else at the pageant of wackiness that was on display, first in San Francisco and then, gradually spreading across the country like a tie-dyed rash. In our little corner of New England, there was not much in the way of love-ins, be-ins or acid trips. My hometown didn't seem just isolated from the 1960s as still insulated in the 1940s. And then, kids a little older than I was started going off to war and coming back, sometimes not quite whole. Maybe the worst thing about looking back at the decade, actually reading some of the research material my daughter picked up, was seeing just how much the decade really - and I'm going to use a technical historical term here - blew chunks. Never mind the gauzy memories of "The Summer of Love" and replays of "In A Gadda Da Vida." There was a bitter, unwinnable war, with the opposition Democratic party unable to stop it because it was coming apart at the seams, acrid partisan politics, and ugly intergenerational conflict. But, hey, at least now we all know what a 1960s flashback looks like. TOM REILLY is a Sun Chronicle news editor who can use the word "groovy" without irony. He can be reached at 508-236-0332 or at treilly@thesunchronicle.com.