“While I accept that everyone has a right to wear whatever they choose,” I told my grandson the other day while seated in Starbucks, my home away from home, “I don't this I'd hire anyone with a ring in her nose or one showing from her belly button.”

I was referring to a young woman at the next table who also wears a rhinestone ring in her lower lip, another from an eyebrow, and if I understood my grandson correctly, several more that are not immediately visible without an X-ray machine.

“Grandpa,” quoth my grandson, “you're prejudiced. I bet you don't even approve of my long hair, baggy pants or the graffiti printed on the back of my Raiders jacket.”

I thought that a cutting remark for a young man to make to his elder who has always considered himself a champion of tolerance: supporting equal pay for women, racial and religious equality, a woman's right to choose, gay marriage, the spotted owl, the endangered horny toad and the vanishing yellow bellied sapsucker. And as painful as I find it to be, have even defended the right of free speech to Russ Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.

“What's that sir? Oh, you want to know what I think of cross-dressers.”

Well, I stand on my rights under the Constitution not to answer; but I must admit being abashed by lewd slogans and depraved illustrations printed across men's chests. Indeed, some of these are so explosive that if I attempted to set them on my computer it would go up in smoke.

In the ancient era in which I was reared, the expression “cross dresser” was not even in the dictionary. As a matter of fact, there are many other words in common usage today that were not yet in the dictionary back then, I mean we did not even use them behind the barn for fear they were so hot they would set the hay on fire.

But returning to the practice of young people wearing rings on various parts of the body, I turned to a young man seated at the next table who wore 27 visible, and I assume that many more that weren't, and inquired about the process.

“Doesn't it hurt to have holes bored into you to insert the rings?” I asked.

Of course,” he said, “especially if the point of the ice pick is dull, the pain is excruciating. I all but passed out when I put one on my doohickey. Like pain man, it was the most!”

“Wow!” I replied “I bet that did smart. But if it hurts so bad, why do you do it to yourself?”

He looked at me in disbelief.

“What was that you said, old man? Better run that by me again because I don't think what you said was what I thought you said.”

I swallowed a couple of times and repeated my self: “If it hurts so bad why do you do it to yourself?”

“Man!” he said, “why do you think we do it! You old farts just don't get it, do you?”

“Yeah,” agreed my grandson, “you just don't get it, do you grandpa?”

Luckily, from the hostile look the young man who said “I just don't get it” was giving me, I was glad to be seated near the entrance which enabled me to make a fast getaway into the waning afternoon.

But I had to admit that he was right. I just don't get it.

(Comments to the writer: vallefox@accessbee.com)