I see that a new movie has opened about Woodstock. I'm not sure the cartoon bird from "Peanuts" who speaks in apostrophes can carry his own film, but the soundtrack must surely feature a lot of Vince Guaraldi on the piano.

I'm being intentionally dense, of course. Usually, I do that without even trying.

Unlike most of the people in the film, I was actually alive during the summer of 1969. I was not at the Woodstock music festival whose continued passage into quaint ancient history we mark this year. While I would have absolutely loved the mud and nudity, most of the rest of it would have been lost on me.

As it may well have been on many of those who actually attended, from what I've heard.

I was more into Snoopy's feathered sidekick that summer, and if I wanted to get dizzy and buzzed, I would spin around until I fell down. As altered states go, that went pretty quickly, but it was cheap and so far has not been proven to cause any harmful long-term effects -- if you can avoid staggering into the merry-go-round on your way down.

I don't remember what music I was into. Definitely more Old McDonald than Country Joe McDonald.

Still, that wasn't the only thing that happened 40 years ago, nor even the only thing worth commemorating. I mean, hello: moon landing. Look at the way that giant leap changed history. Space exploration. Shuttles and stations. Missions to Mars and Jupiter. Pens that write upside down. Tang.

Momentous year, 1969. I may have been considerably too young for Woodstock and had only a rudimentary grasp of rocket science, but I was the perfect age for another milestone of popular culture: the debut of "Sesame Street."

I've written about the Street before, and it would be hard to exaggerate its influence on my generation. Before Sesame, we were oppressed and straitjacketed by ignorance, but that show came into our homes and taught us that puppets of all colors could live together in harmony, that it's OK for two guys to share a basement apartment, that people who live in trash receptacles may be grumpy and abusive but generally are harmless.

Hey: One of these things is not like the others, but these are the people in your neighborhood.

And the music was unforgettable. How many artists have covered "[It's Not Easy] Bein' Green" -- and none as soulfully as Kermit the Frog. We had no way of knowing, in our childish optimism, that compact fluorescent bulbs would be so expensive, or that composting would be difficult in the city, or that phone books would be so damned inconvenient to recycle.

Who can forget the infectious joy of "Rubber Duckie" and the way it archly foretold our substitution of idealized synthetic companions for real human relationships? "When I squeeze you, you make noise" -- there's an app for that.

The Wikipedia article about "Sesame Street" cites Educational Testing Service research that reported, after the show's first season in 1969-1970, that those of us who watched it increased our cognitive skills dramatically. "They found that children who viewed the show the most often did 62 percent better at correctly recognizing a rectangle than less frequent viewers."

We were in danger of becoming smarter than our parents, as in that commercial where the baby is a day-trader. Today a rectangle, tomorrow global climate change.

Another thing that happened 40 years ago drastically changed our lives: the first ATM.

As we grow up, we like to think we hold on to our soft spot for peace and love, music and mud pies. And we wish we weren't quite so good at retaining our affection for cookies. But we've all developed a deep appreciation for the ATM.

Not to mention the way it spits out those rectangles.