Overheard from a 12-year-old girl at a yard sale in Eastgate last weekend: “Hey, Dad! Come look at this thing! It looks really old! You’d love it!”

The thing was a VHS cassette player – a gadget so antiquated that the 12-year-old had never seen one before.

And so it is in these times of texting, iPods, Blackberries, Facebooking and Tweeting – even Beavis and Butthead have been relegated to the dustbin of history. For that matter, so has the dustbin.

For the most part, kids today have no idea what a rotary phone, mimeograph or even a pager is. My Grandpa would have been startled to see that even phone booths are disappearing. (Superman’s been forced to change clothes behind the dumpster.)

I remember two things about Grandpa. One, he could take his teeth in and out – I couldn’t imagine how. I couldn’t do it.

And, two, he had an old Underwood typewriter that he would use to write poetry. My mom said his “poetry” was mostly nasty limericks.

I thought of Grandpa last week when something called the Beloit College Mindset List was released. It’s designed to advise teachers that cultural references familiar to them might simply cause head scratching among today’s college freshman.

The fact is, someone born in 1992 has probably never had a phone that wasn’t cordless, any idea what a Rolodex is – and has never looked something up in a phone book. (If phone books ultimately become extinct, what are guys with big muscles going to rip in half to impress girls?)

The Mindset List points out that even though a Timex can “take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’” – 18 year-olds couldn’t care less, because they don’t wear them. Some fashion experts think wristwatches could make a retro return someday. But don’t look for the sundial to make a comeback anytime soon, until they make them more portable.

For today’s incoming freshmen – if they had to guess – a floppy disc might have something to do with the spine; a Walkman is a dude who prefers not to jog – and a Polaroid is something you treat with a medicated cream.

I remember just a few years ago that all my tech-savvy friends were carrying PDA’s (palm pilots) around. But by the time I finally got one, they were already old hat. It’s hard to tell when something is new hat – or if new hats are even hauté couture anymore.

Somebody was selling a palm pilot at that yard sale I mentioned earlier – and it wasn’t getting any more interest than the old VHS machine. There was also an 8-track tape player, a FAX machine – and a stack of road maps. One was so ancient, it showed old town Bellevue as just plain Bellevue.

For that matter, yard sales are themselves becoming obsolete – slowly being done in by on-line phenomena like Craig’s List. Oh sure, Craig’s riding high now, but it’s just a matter of time until someone named Cicero or Hortense comes along with a better list.

I still have my grandpa’s old typewriter sitting on a shelf in my office. Every once in a while, I’ll tickle the QWERTY keys to see if any nasty limericks might magically appear on the page.

The clackety-clickety noise of those old keys would be unknown to a college freshman today, but it’s a sound from the past that fondly reminds me of my grandpa crafting his “poetry.”

Actually, it’s not a lot different from the sound his teeth made coming in and out.

Pat Cashman can be reached at pat@patcashman.com.