who is john kerry?

I was thinking about John Kerry the other day, and it made me feel very old. I suppose it's nothing specific to him. It's everything that has been in the news while I've been alive to remember it.

When I was little, I would watch Jeopardy with my mom and think she must be about the smartest person in the world, aside from my dad, who was a scientist. She knew all the answers, even when those silly people on the program didn't know them. I was awed by her knowledge of history in particular, and her ability to remember a bunch of obscure names that were the headings of only one-column entries in the encyclopedia.

But then I was thinking about John Kerry, and about how in 30 years or so, he will come up on Jeopardy as one of the harder questions. By then, he'll be a mostly-forgotten senator who ran for president and lost. The clue will probably mention that he was a Vietnam veteran. And then I'll know the answer, because I remember old John Kerry, and my children will be agog. They will think that I am the smartest mother ever. And it won't be because I'm smart, just that I'm old
enough to have been there and remember it. They'll ask me how I knew it, and I could try and explain about the good ole days back in the early 2000s, but they'll have stopped listening by then, the rotten ingrates.

I don't wish to say that my mother was never smart and only incredibly old. She's still really smart and only kinda old.