All of this is my way of introducing you to Timo, a hipster millennial on my bowling team. I call him a hipster millennial because . . . he’s a hipster millennial.

A few months back, Timo was telling me about The Good Fight, a roughly six-year-old TV show that he and his girlfriend were enjoying. He told me,

It’s about a fictitious law firm in Chicago. And it stars Delroy Lindo. And—oh, just watch it, Benny, you’ll love it.

So I gave it a shot. And Timo’s right. My wife and I are hooked. We’re plowing our way through episode by episode. But it’s funny that a millennial recommended it because . . .

It’s just about the Baby Boomer-est TV show you can imagine. It reminds me of Perry Mason. Lotsa courtroom drama. No fist fights. No weaponry. No shoot-outs. Or sex scenes. 

Just witty dialogue exchanged by great actors, many of whom are Broadway stars. Like Christine Baranski, Audra McDonald, Bernadette Peters, Brian Stokes Mitchell, etc. I half-expect them to break into a Stephen Sondheim number at any moment.

Like I said: Boomer City. But, wait, there’s more . . .

It streams on Paramount, a streaming service I don’t subscribe to, and have no intentions of subscribing to, as I’m already bankrolling too many tech tycoons with the many streaming services I already subscribe to.

I mentioned this to Timo and he said, “No problem. What you do is, you check out the DVDs from the library.”

So that’s what I’m doing. I order them and when they arrive at my local branch, I get a notice and I walk over and pick them up. 

I think it’s great that a millennial—hipster or not—is using the library. I worry about libraries. I’m afraid that my aging generation will be the last to use them and that eventually they will fade out of existence.

I worry that whoever gets elected mayor will try to cut their hours. Like Mayor Rahm tried to do and Mayor Adams is doing in NYC. 

I worry that MAGA will continue to wage its cultural war against librarians and censor the collection. 

So it’s encouraging to meet a millennial, like Timo, who uses them.

One last thing . . . when I recently returned a disc of The Good Fight, the library computer spit out a request form. Meaning someone was waiting for me to return it so they could watch it. In conclusion . . .

I’m years behind on a show that was old news during the Trump administration. And I’m watching it on DVDs checked out from the public library. To paraphrase the Stones, I’m out of time. Just like Timo.

But—as that spitted-out request reveals—we’re not alone.